Uber’s vice president of product and growth Ed Baker has resigned
recode.net
recode.net
This is what a PR tailspin looks like. All your good people will leave, all your bad people will have to be fired, and consumer demand and driver supply will be affected. Perception is reality, and that means Uber are in real trouble here and it's gonna cost them a lot – maybe most of the exec suite – to get out of it.
The key question is: who benefits? This is corporate politics by insurgent means, so I wonder who is emptying their opposition research briefing against Uber and why. Could even be an investor who wants to force leadership out, possibly as a prelude to driving Uber to an exit.
Those tactics don't work unless the dirt exists, so this really, really doesn't excuse anything which Uber may (and, on the balance of probabilities, there's more than likely fire to go with this smoke) have done. And I don't think it's likely the individuals alleging harassment in particular are part of this at all, so anyone coming trying to impugn their motivations can go pound sand; but, as a byproduct of their legit and serious grievances, they created the environment where this kind of power-play can be made.
So who benefits?
Dirt exists, this is obvious and well documented, and Uber does not even denies it. Now the tactics you are talking about are purely hypothetical. There is no need for a Machiavellian plan to exist for all downfalls and catastrophies (although sometime there is one.)
So what exactly is "corporate politics by insurgent means"?
Two groups with incentive to get the composition of the boardroom changed.
Do you mind explaining that? I'm not sure I follow. It's obvious that a lot of dirt is coming out, but it seems to all be sourced internally. Or are you referring to people with media connections pushing the stories for more exposure (which I don't know if is happening or not)? I don't think there needs to be an explanation for why there's a lot of stories beyond it hitting the tipping point for many employees, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.
This is obviously highly speculative, but Uber is a really leaky ship right now. This could be solely coincidence, but I am positing that – potentially – someone who wants increased influence at, or to increase pressure on, Uber may see opportunity here. To that end, they might be spinning parts of the narrative through their press relationships.
In other words: never let a crisis go to waste...
Top execs leaving is more easily explained. This is the time if you have skeletons in your closet, assuming the internal investigation is real, before your dirty laundry is aired in the national news. And if you see this as Uber's death knell better to bail before it tarnishes your own rep to have worked there.
Even if it's not Uber's death knell, as top exec it's probably better to bail now.
You can take your "I ran X at Uber" managerial propaganda and cash in on that for a better position. An Uber IPO probably isn't going to be life-changing amounts of money anymore for these levels of people even with the sweet deals that the hoi polloi would never get, so time to move on.
I think both things can be true at once.
But I don't think I'm advancing a conspiracy theory. There's a genuine crisis at Uber, and that's the important issue here; if a hundredth of what's been alleged is true then that's the main event here and all of this is really Valley inside-baseball navel-gazing. Let's not draw moral false equivalences here.
Still, as a student of Valley dynamics, one has to acknowledge that realpolitik exists whenever things go really wrong. Given that, it's worth wondering whether any parties can take advantage of those conditions, especially given the non-existent state of board oversight in tightly-held SV companies. Chris Sacca and Mitch Kapor have already gone to the press on this (publically), so it's not even that much of a reach.
This is, in some really grim ways, an opportunity which doesn't come around very often.
Consider that "conspiracy theorist" is basically a pejorative these days. There are indeed some tinfoil hat wearers, but there are also a lot of people whose paranoia has been earned through experience and is more justified than it may appear at first glance.
I think the pendulum has definitely swung to the complacent side of things, and that people are more likely to assume coincidence when conspiracy is the correct explanation. I know the impulsive response here is "Hanlon's Razor!" and all that, but I feel that's better applied to keeping interpersonal relations friendly rather than explaining significant closely-timed organizational or social changes.
My experience with such changes at the organizational level has been that there are some key people who are very interested in ensuring that the people in the org believe an organic, coincidental, or otherwise autonomous change occurred, but they've actually spent months coordinating efforts to ensure that the desired changes occur. Politics is an inevitability any time you get more than 5 people in the same room.
We'd do well to hesitate and think before we laugh at the people who put forth "unofficial" narratives.
Of course there are competent people. I know I am, and so are most of the people I know.
The folk who conspired to cheat the emissions tests at VW are competent and organised; the folk at Uber who built the system to track cops are competent and organised; the folk at the NSA etc etc are competent and organised.
The employees because they'll have to pay more for talent?
[citation needed]
The fact that it could be doesn't mean it is. Firms can collapse under the weight of their own bad decisions without any outside engineering, and Uber has pissed off lots of people over a long time.
Maybe it's just the other employees who are (finally) sick of all the shit?
If you're an Uber employee that's been around for a while, you have significant value tied up in Uber stock. The senior management has long indicated little interest in going public, so in theory you have a lot of employees that are being prevented from becoming millionaires by their employer.
Worse, that stock is now decreasing in value (impossible to assess of course, but...) - might it not be better to leak all the things you've seen in the last few years and hurry the departure of the senior staff at Uber? Then you'll get a new set of executives who will be much more open to going public and making you rich. Maybe not as rich as you might have been before all this started, but it's better than terminal decline.
I'm positing that the very real and very awful problems at Uber (again, to reiterate; those are the main issue here, I'm picking at side-issues...) have incidentally created an environment where some parties have powerful incentives to go in on Uber themselves.
The women engineers who won't get harassed at companies that crack down on bad behavior to avoid sharing Uber's fate. It's a massive conspiracy by the Society of Women Engineers to bring down the worst parts of tech culture.
I actually don't believe all these stores are going to affect Ubers customer potential that much. Just like McDonalds aren't being affected despite one of their biggest hurdless is dealing with bad PR.
Most consumers don't care or know about these things.
Where it's really going to affect Uber is with regards to attracting talent.
Is that it? I was expecting something a little more scandalous.
To be clear, the reason it's not OK is that a professional context should not also be a sexual context. It's not about protecting the person you're making out with. It's about everyone else. This is the same reason that excessive PDA in the workplace can be sexual harassment of other employees, even if both parties to the PDA are consenting.
The org chart will tell you the difference.
If I'm wrong, I'd be interested in seeing the relevant laws or cases.
It's not illegal to sleep with your boss.
Unfortunately (For your boss), if you decide to break the relationship off, and are feeling particularly vengeful, you will have a slam-dunk sexual harassment case against them.
Good luck to your boss proving that the bad performance review they gave you was not retaliation for you breaking off the relationship.
Or, likewise, good luck to them proving that the good performance they gave you (But did not give Billy) is not based on you sleeping with them. Billy will also have a pretty good workplace discrimination suit for to bring, there.
That's not entirely true. If the relationship is long-term or it's public knowledge, the risk of this is much lower. Secret affairs? Very risky. Open serious relationships? Not as risky (which is why companies that allow relationships generally require that they are disclosed). But still too risky.
The discrimination suit is more risky in each case, because you'll pretty much end up trying to prove your innocence because you'll look guilty by default.
It's a big risk to take! Especially when the alternative is one of you moving to a different department.
Maybe there are way larger skeletons in his closet. It's unlikely we'll ever know for sure in this instance but I think the general trajectory of Uber has fundamentally shifted in the last month.
You do realize that inter-company relationships and hookups happen all the time right? How is two consenting adults sexual harassment? This is still innocent until proven guilty right? Maybe not.
It says so in the article.
> There was no suggestion of any sexual harassment on his part and the encounter was apparently consensual.
> For example, one person anonymously tipped off board member Arianna Huffington — who is one of the people conducting a wider-ranging investigation into sexism and sexual harassment at the company — via an email that Baker had engaged in a sexual encounter with another employee.
Now office relationships are illegal too? This is ridiculous
This is turning into a witch hunt
Subordinate != someone lower in org chart that does not report to you, so no, its not statistically likely.
I'm not sure what you mean. Which part of my comment did I back down from? "Chances are" means the same thing as "the odds are good"...
> Subordinate != someone lower in org chart that does not report to you, so no, its not statistically likely.
You'll have to forgive me if there is some specific business definition of subordinate I'm missing... my understanding of subordinate is more in line with this one (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/subordinate)
> placed in or occupying a lower class, rank, or position
Just because someone doesn't directly report to you, doesn't mean that the woman's boss can't report to him. A company can have a problem with relationships that aren't between direct reports.
How is consentual making out at a party in Miami can in any way be considered a bad thing? That what those events are made for. I can't believe this is the real motive.
I agree with this in principle, but if it's an official Uber event, HR rules of "appropriateness" would still apply. It probably wouldn't be as big a deal if Uber's HR department wasn't on fire.
I see the board using that statement against him.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/14/technology/uber-corporate-cu...