I'm not optimistic, but then again we seem to be living in quite the era for black swans.
The board will never kick them out pre IPO if the company is growing. They might go for a coup post exit though.
If travis is the hero of Uber who employees rejoice then him stepping down would be a death blow to the Company.
At this point Uber has got fuck you money to keep on burning employees. Employees have golden handcuffs that don't come off until IPO.
The best people can do is not get a job at Uber. The existing employees start quitting en-masse or a major internal data leak. The revolution needs to come within Uber.
I feel bad for Susan and Amy; I also feel for the good employees at Uber. It would be good to get a little more context from Susan and Amy to see how systemic this harassment really is/was. Some of it reads like lots of people were complicit, but I have to imagine there are/were a good portion of good people there who were not. As a man I embarrassingly feel like I am completely oblivious to harassment of women in the workplace, because I'm not complicit in it, and I don't have close enough relationships with woman colleagues for them to divulge this kind of personal information. I would hope there are a lot of people that were innocuously oblivious to it... if not that would be sickening.
There's no suggestion that he believes it will. But in the event that somebody withheld information about the reason for their dismissal or exit from a previous role, he's within his rights to terminate their employment. (And probably correct to do so IMO.)
I mean, he's the CEO. He's probably going to be the one common thread between _everything_ that happens at Uber.
Not to say that he isn't at fault for anything, but it seems disingenuous to try and make this connection.
I think he probably should resign anyway just as a good faith gesture, but I'm curious how culpable he is personally.
If the the descriptions we've read so far about Uber HR's response to sexual harassment and discrimination claims as well as Travis's role in them are corroborated, the board needs to do a major housecleaning at Uber starting from the CEO, many people in HR and many of these managers who were directly carrying out these actions. Anything short of that sends the signal that women are indeed considered second class citizens in the tech ecosystem.
Anything short of this would leave Uber as a silicon valley pariah. Top engineers and managers would be reluctant to join the company. Those who stay in Uber long term will have their brands tarnished. If we, as a group (silicon valley startup ecosystem) fail to respond in this manner, the entire industry's brand will be tarnished forever.
We claim to be a meritocratic and progressive bunch. It pains me to say this as a guy in this industry, I had never imagined how serious and ugly the sexism in some parts of the industry is. Yes I had known at a surface level that women have more obstacles to overcome to make it in this industry. But still Susan Fowler's blog was shocking to me. This new blogpost has doubled the shock. I hope my actions from this point on will be guided by this knowledge.
"Claim", yes.
It sure is odd that, over the span of my career, observed incidence of workplace bullying and harassment has shown a strong positive correlation with the frequency of such claims as those you describe; by comparison, at those places I've worked which have no such attachment to one specific end of the political spectrum, the worst I've seen is thoughtlessness. That's bad too, to be sure, but those who've engaged in it have mostly been mortified when called on it and tried hard to avoid it in future - which is the correct, and honorable, response. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley...
Well, I was going to make a reference to the emperor having no clothes, but that's not really apropos, is it? After all, he had his dick hanging out by accident.
"which have no such attachment to one specific end of the political spectrum, the worst I've seen is thoughtlessness."
My comment was not to start a partisan political thread but your anecdotal claims hold no merit here since CEO of Uber is known to spout Ayn Rand bullshit in public and is known as a Trump supporter.
I was not calling Uber's culture progressive and meritocratic. It's clearly not. I was challenging the rest of the community to treat Uber in a way that was appropriate for a meritocratic and progressive community.
Then again, even if they were acting illegally, they have a lot of experience with that.
We need to go back to those days.
I'm not saying we shouldn't solve the problem at hand. Just that maybe corporate governance isn't the root cause. At the end of the day, Uber's fighting an important war that we only watch through headlines, but is still pretty important. The founder is the keeper of that vision, the champion of that fight. There's no way Uber would be able to stay lean and mean and fight against local governmental intransigence if it had "adult supervision".
In the era of alt-right ascendence and president trump? That would be nice...
The HR team was known to be deftly afraid of Travis’s tendency to blame and ridicule the women and yell at HR whenever they went in with complaints of abuse. I heard about Travis personally congratulating Mike#2 for meeting strict deadlines months after I complained to HR about my abuse. It was clear to me that the regressive and abusive attitude towards female employees was trickling down from the top.
https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-ub...
The more we hear about Uber the less I can believe that its CEO isn't responsible. Perhaps he is not the root of the problem, but when issues are this widespread, and this well known, lack of action from the top is inexcusable.
This news of harassment comes not from Google, but from several anonymous sources. Google declined to comment, and the man himself said that the story wasn't true.
If there was no definitive proof, and the openly stated reason is that he wanted to retire, why would you fire somebody who was merely accused of being a harasser? That makes you a larger coward than somebody who keeps somebody who's under fire.
Even if the claims were substantiated, people do change, and I don't think that one sexual harassment claim should be sufficient to torpedo your entire career. What's next, putting them on a registry and making them wear a scarlet letter on their chest?
This whole thing is a witch hunt.
Yeah, if someone left a company because of a harassment complaint, I think there's a much better than even chance that they actually did harass someone. I believe that fabricated complaints comprise a very small minority of all such complaints. I would not want my employees being harassed. So there is no way I would hire someone who I knew had departed their previous company due to a harassment complaint, since that's equivalent to accepting a high likelihood that one is hiring a harasser. I might give someone a chance if they had one way back in their past and had otherwise apparently cleaned up their act/showed contrition.
> That makes you a larger coward
Sorry, not clear on how it makes me cowardly to put the safety and security of my employees before the interests of likely harassers seeking a job at my company.
> make them wear a scarlet letter on their chest . . .
You seem a lot more concerned for the harassers' well-being than the people being harassed. I don't share this ordering of priorities with you.
The main, and most important point. Nothing has been proven. An unsubstantiated, unrelated leak has gone out and you're already assuming that something bad has occurred. If you replace "harasser" with "communist", you get the McCarthy trials. If you replace "harasser" with "witch" you go all the way back to Salem.
You should share the ordering of priorities that you're innocent until proven guilty.
> As far as I can tell, he says that the harassment wasn't harassment
You're already making a value judgement here. He completely denies that anything untoward happened.
> Yeah, if someone left a company because of a harassment complaint
He also said that he left on his own free will, and Google threw him a retirement/departure party.
> Sorry, not clear on how it makes me cowardly
By dropping somebody who hasn't been proven to do anything wrong at another job because it looks bad for PR means you're a coward. Being swayed by public opinion on unsubstantiated charges makes you a coward, instead of standing up for your own employees.
I mean, everyone does this all the time anyway. When was the last time you thought someone was guilty of something (speaking about you behind your back for instance) and you waited until they were proved guilty until you changed you behavior towards them? Innocent until proven guilty is for the courts only, people should and do act on reasonable evidence.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape
That sounds completely unbelievable.
The people mentioned in the allegations have not been named and have not had their identities revealed, and also have not had any evidence presented, except for two unsubstantiated accounts. It's probably not even the same people in Fowler's article and this most recent anonymous one.
Instead, somebody got information leaked (information that Google refuses to confirm) about something that happened in the past, at another company, gets fired because any appearance of impropriety must be squashed, and his name and career gets dragged through the mud for real evidence at all. Isn't that a witch hunt?