Silicon Valley programmers pressure friends to quit working at Uber
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
What frustrates me most about people are hell bent on painting a wildly successful company in the worst light possible is that doing so has very serious negative implications for equality and opportunity for women and other groups that are under-represented in tech. Let me explain why.
Spending several years at a unicorn startup opens up so many opportunities. Look at early employees from Fairchild, Paypal, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. These companies minted many many millionaires and gave them tons of valuable experience to go out and start their own companies after they left. When you so aggressively bad mouth the culture of a rising unicorn such that you discourage certain groups from even applying to work there, you have deprived those people of an opportunity to be on a rocket ship. You're perpetuating the very problem you're railing against.
My colleagues in the LadyEng group here at Uber have on many occasions lamented how hard a time they have recruiting other women to join the company because of the reputation in the media. The company culture has been so maligned by those with an agenda that even the women engineers here have a difficult time convincing other women to join.
If you really want people who are under-represented in tech to succeed, you should encourage them and support them in joining every rising unicorn that exists and will ever exist regardless of how that culture is perceived, because four years after joining they will have the money, experience and connections to create their own companies and perpetuate a virtuous cycle.
If you agree with this message please spread it because so few people realize how they are contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy that hurts the cause they claim to champion.
Your logic seems to say, back in 2008, we shouldn't have badmouthed Big Banks, because they were paying above-market rates to their employees, and these salaries would have trickled down back to the society and solved the subprime mortgage crisis.
In the event the institution fails, everything is reset to zero and the talent and resources are redistributed in the World. Value is destroyed, but undesirable aspects are too. You can judge if that is a net positive or net negative outcome.
The other outcome is that the institution weathers a storm and succeeds either way. Under this scenario, there are two new scenarios: (a) the institution survives with all the good, well meaning people you agree with on board, helping steer it into the future; or (b) those encouraging the good, well-meaning people to abandon the institution, leaving those that remain to steer that institution into the future.
Ignore what you want to happen for a moment. If the likelihood of survival despite current events is sufficiently high, then encouraging those with whom you agree to abandon the institution is contrary to your best interests. This is a game theoretic scenario, which I encourage you to explore on your own.
Remember that the banks survived.
That all said, I'm not discouraging you from challenging institutions that may have aspects to correct. I'm encouraging you to reconsider how you challenge those institutions to determine all the consequences, intended and unintended. Personally, I think it's best to challenge them to be better in the ways I think is better.
Does this mean no one should work in many companies that do not make the world any better than what it is now? One could easily argue that most of the companies, though they claim to make the world a better place, they honestly do not.
Talking in absolutes doesn't actually aid the discussion.
Few institutions are purely good or purely evil. They are made of people, who themselves are not purely good or purely evil, who have their own motivations, some altruistic and some selfish.
We live in dynamic systems, in which institutions and individuals play a role. As a general rule all make things better in some ways and worse in others.
Transportation network companies (TNC) have produced economic winners and losers. Many people have access to more job options with less friction. Taxi drivers have seen their income shrink. The laws of supply and demand both with the network of one TNC and between the networks of multiple TNCs in competition with one another drive prices down. Driving the prices down makes transportation accessible to more people (both the more privileged and the less privileged), but it also drives down the income of those driving. Eventually self driving cars will drive down the costs further, democratizing convenient transportation further and eliminating many jobs.
Due to path dependency, humanity is heading down this path one way or another. If one institution doesn't take us in this direction, another will.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...
It's not going to be easy. It will be fraught with challenges, technical and social. The human and social problems will likely eclipse the technological problems in both scope and magnitude, but we're going to face them either way. We've been through this before during the industrial revolution. Life is recursive. It was a painful transition, but we came out the other side with a society that was more prosperous and had more opportunities for more people to live a life free of suffering than ever before. We can either claim the sky is falling, or we can put our heads down and work on figuring out how to solve the biggest challenges of our day. No solution we come up with will be perfect. We're going to have to cooperate in the form of institutions to tackle such large problems. No institution we come up with will purely make the world a better place because there are no silver bullets.
An honest inquiry into what things are like anywhere would involve actively taking in a balance of viewpoints through sampling that tries to avoid sampling bias and correct for agendas.
Anecdotally, my personal experience does not at all represent what I've seen reported in the media throughout the entire time I've worked here. Then again, I'm only relying on my own personal experience. It's anecdata and should be treated with skepticism. Based on my past experience at more than a half dozen different jobs, this workplace is better in many ways. It's also worse in some ways.
That said, I and everyone else (inside the company and outside the company) suffer from sampling bias. I'm only relying on my personal experience and if I care about the truth it would be wrong to accept that as a conclusion. It would be wrong to represent to you that my experience is representative for the whole company, because I don't have enough information. I haven't worked on all teams with all managers and all peers.
Since I accept that I suffer from sampling bias, I've started to reach out to colleagues from under-represented groups to ask them in which they believe our culture and workplace is better, equal to and worse than other places that they've worked. I want to understand how we can protect and reinforce those aspects that are better, how we can improve those that are equal and how we can turn around those that are worse and make them into aspects that are better.
My anecdotal experience is that many of my colleagues are trying to do the same to differing degrees. One thing most of us have in common is that we're generally all people who want to do our best and when we discover ways in which we've been coming up short, we we apply ourselves to try and make it better. We've always done that and we're doing this now with all our current challenges as we have with all other challenges we've encountered in the past.
Assuming a degree of truth that likely falls anywhere along the spectrum between position X and position Y stated above, which would be a more positive outcome from current events?
An institution that has created a lot of value in the world in terms of making transportation cheaper, better and more accessible to more and more people every day:
(a) crashes and burns taking down not only itself, but also damaging economic prospects in technology and Silicon Valley for years?
(b) reforms aspects of itself that are undesirable, turning those aspects into strengths and setting a positive example of how to reform oneself for other institutions that also exhibit the same undesirable traits.
Personally, I always choose B in any scenario because B leverages existing value to address problems (it's always easier to fix things when you have resources to work with). Option A is just a path to destruction of anything of value with no guarantee that what follows next is better in any way.
I won't comment on your last statement since I think I've adequately addressed the value of active sampling and application of the null hypothesis in determining a statistically valid position on how they likely would be treated instead of taking these articles at face value.
Also, this seems like maybe it would be a relevant consideration for joining Uber in 2010 - nobody joining in 2017 is hitting the lottery and contributing to a virtuous cycle.
Again, I'm not going to try and present information contrary to what you know (it would likely just be attacked for being biased), but I would encourage you to ask yourself if you're adequately applied the null hypothesis to any institution on which you have formed a position:
https://byrslf.co/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-and-wants-yo...
I would also encourage you to not consider the ways in which you believe an institution is worse than the status quo, but also consider the ways in which it is better. As an exercise, list out both when considering the relative merit of an institution. How is it better? How is it worse? Eliminate from both lists those aspects that are inevitable (for reasons of path dependency) regardless of which institution is solving the same problem. For those ways in which it is worse than the status quo, consider ways in which those could be corrected.
I won't comment on your last statement because it involves discussion of future growth prospects, which no two people will likely agree on.
This is silly. "I could refute your point of view, but you would just make a baseless character attack against me, so I can't. Your fault really."
Fowler put forth what I and many others have found to be a cool headed, well documented, and credible account of events.
The ball is in Uber's court. So far they hired Eric Holder and there have been some resignations. Too soon to know for sure, but it does seem to lend further credence to Fowler's account.
If Fowler made something up, it will be up to you guys make that point.
I don't find the "I won't provide my version of events because you guys are not discussing this in good faith" very convincing. It's passive aggressive.
If you can't discuss because of legal issues or an agreement with your employer, that's fine. But don't blame us.
If you're a janitor or food service worker at Uber, then I apologize for making incorrect assumptions and my thoughts for you would be different.
I agree with you that the Uber situation is far from the civil rights era, but I wanted to pick an example of regular people (almost certainly in a much worse situation than OP) making a sacrifice that impacted their finances and quality of life. Those people had family members depending them too; the difference is they had a cause they cared enough about to make sacrifices. I believe that people should either be willing to make sacrifices for things they care about, or admit that they don't care enough. OP was instead treating the suggestion that people make a sacrifice as a prima facie absurd suggestion, and I find that troubling.
How about next time you have a problem with the way a company does business, you just don't use that company's services? Or is that not enough for you? You have to march around HN and tell everyone else what they should be doing in order to appease you?
And you're correct, deleting my Uber account (as I've done) is not enough for me, because I am only one person and unless I work together with other people I do not have the resources necessary to cause Uber to change anything. It is only through collective action that an $xx,000,000,000 company can be forced to change anything, and that requires communication. I'm not telling other people what they should do to appease me, I'm asking other people to use their position of power to help those with less power, such as women who are software engineers and Uber drivers.
The thing is, everyone in the world has ties to other people and responsibilities, and they have to decide how to weight these different factors. It seems very clear that Uber is systematically mistreating and exploiting the people in its path. Software engineers as a group are in the best position to convince the company to change course, or to punish it if it does not change course. They have far, far more leverage per person than individual drivers or Uber customers, and they also are risking relatively little; they can reliably expect to find another job that pays six figures in a manner of months, right? I believe that people with that level of economic bargaining power and security are morally obligated to use that power for the benefit of others.
If the original poster had said "I don't want to risk leaving my family hungry," that's one thing. Instead they said they couldn't be expected to make any sacrifice unless someone else went to the trouble of getting them a better offer. The idea that the poster has no moral obligation to take action for the good of others unless it will also benefit them is absurd and repugnant to me. If the poster wants to admit they are not bothered by the allegations against Uber or don't care very much, then I will appreciate the honesty, but software engineers (in general) are not in a good position to blame morally suspect positions on necessity or survival.
Perhaps it's self-righteous to argue that nobody should help Palantir provide DHS with a Muslim registry under any circumstances, even if it means negative consequences for them and their family (and for most software engineers it really won't!). But that's what I believe, and I'd like to think it's the choice I would make in that situation, and I'd hope that my family and friends and strangers on the Internet would push me to acknowledge the moral choice I was facing and make the choice that helped others instead of maximizing my own narrow self-interest.
Hmm, I think you don't believe in leadership? Even warlords in the ancient times know they have to risk losing their lives fighting when they recruit an army for themselves.
We Chinese call the people Keyboard Men who ask people to do all kinds of things, behind their keyboards.
I can accept that an employee might want to wait to see if Uber can turn it around. I wouldn't count that against them. But if Uber fails to fix itself, then it's time to leave. If I see a resume showing work at Uber past that, there is zero chance of an interview.
Better to quit without a better offer than to risk your career by staying. It's a hot job market today; might not be hot later.
Sometimes in life you are handed an actual moral decision. Choose wisely.
Like I said, if you are employed there and want to see if management will turn it around, that's fine. But eventually if the policy remains "Women Need Not Apply," you either leave or risk never being hired by a grown up again.
[1] Or in this case, Women
I'd like to see you explain your 'No Interview for Uber Alumni' policy to your boss when you pass over a perfectly qualified candidate purely because you hold a grudge against their ex-employer.
If it gets to the point where I blacklist Uber employees, not only will my boss know it, but I'll probably show him the resume so we can have a laugh. We have company policies about discrimination and would never take a risk on someone who was okay with working at a company that clearly does discriminate.
Excuse me? I spent the first 4 years of my working life doing debt negotiation with banks and other creditors on behalf of people on the verge of bankruptcy. It was my responsibility to negotiated and broker payment arrangements, debt consolidation, and financial plans for probably thousands of people over those years so I've got a pretty bloody good idea of what I'm talking about here.
Suddenly losing all of your income can 100% result in losing your house. To assume otherwise just shows how little you know outside of your own little white collar bubble.
We aren't talking about hypothetical people on the verge of bankruptcy here who we have constructed from first principles. We're talking about people who have somehow managed to buy a house within commute range of Uber SF. If quitting means losing the house, they've done something very very wrong.
1. Everyone at Uber is amazingly qualified and sought after (but you won't hire them of course) 2. Everyone at Uber works in San Fran (my local Uber office must be a scam then!) 3. No one at Uber has any financial issues (company sponsored financial advice maybe?)
Tell me, if an Uber driver spends $97k on a car, and then goes bankrupt, is that his fault or Uber's?
That's not how basic logic and common sense work.
Cheers.
For anyone doing the downvoting, can you elaborate please on what sort of system you have in place that decides whether we can or can't be skeptical of a claim without corroborating evidence (apart from personal testimony)? It's true that in this case the preponderance of testimony is pretty strong against Uber, but I wouldn't hold it against someone who, say, assigned something like a ~0.50 probability value to the anonymous harassment claim.
I'll also say that I've worked at a tech company before that went through some bad PR issues. As an insider, it was obvious that, while there definitely were issues that needed fixing, the media exaggerated them or invented entirely new issues out of nothing. When the media senses a PR catastrophe, they'll jump at any tidbit of information that even remotely seems "scandalous".
Now, in the case of Uber, I'm not an insider, and my own estimate as an outsider is that there is something like a 99% chance that serious misconduct is going on at the highest levels of the company. But regardless, it is really absurd, and in fact quite disturbing, to see any degree of skepticism expressed over any of this to be so harshly resisted. It is perfectly reasonable to believe that some of the reported scandals may have a < 0.50 probability value of being true, while others are more probably true, etc.
Financial and family responsibilities be damned! I read a news article that said Uber didn't give everyone participation awards and gold stars!
What next, we ask kids to stop working at McDonalds because it's making everyone fat? Or maybe tobacco companies, because they're making everyone sick? Or BP, because they're BP? No no, just Uber because there's a trending hashtag and it's pretty hip not to like Uber now.
Great. This couldn't possibly end poorly.
This is about unlawful behavior which, from the outside, appears to pervade the entirety of Uber.
People always have the right to demand things. That's literally what Free Speech is.
Also not everyone lives in America, and many countries don't have any constitutional protection for Freedom of Speech - my country Australia being a good example of this.
Also, Free Speech is a human right acknowledged in sensible parts of the global like Australia. It's not just a law in a particular fiefdom.
When BP spewed oil all over the ocean, did you track down their employees and point out what horrible people they were? Or how about Yahoo, when they acknowledged their breach and admitted doing nothing about it for years, did you demand that everyone at Yahoo jump ship?
It's literally the primary bounding function restricting human activity. Everything requires energy. It heats our home. It moves our goods. It moves us. It drives our machinery. Every human activity requires energy.
A higher cost of energy disproportionally hurts the poor. Rising energy prices plunges millions into poverty.
That said, it sucks that we're currently heavily dependent on oil for energy, and we should move away from oil for many of our energy needs. Drilling for oil isn't the problem. Not having an economically competitive alternative is the problem. The only real solution for moving away from oil is helping make alternative energy solutions economically competitive with oil.
If you're anti-oil before we have economically competitive solutions, you're contributing to poverty and suffering for millions upon millions of people all over the planet. If that is not an immoral act, what is?
Is anyone else cynically suspecting a coordinated hit? I don't doubt there's a toxic culture with real problems present. But the timing and sustained pressure of all this media attention seems a little... suspicious.
I also think back to the anonymously written Medium piece after the first one [1]. There is literally no way to verify this, and it was upvoted a ridiculous amount (top 10 story on HN of all time or something like that). To a cynic, this could easily be astroturfing.
To reiterate - I'm not by any means doubting that there are serious organizational and cultural problems at Uber that need to be addressed. But I can't help but feeling like something else is going on as well.
Who could stand to benefit from such a public image barrage, by attacking the ability to hire and retain talent?
[1] - https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-ub...
But to answer your question, Lyft, as well as cab companies all over the planet, would benefit immensely from people not using Uber.
Or... because of all the bad publicity and Uber being in the limelight, those who were already feel uncomfortable about what they saw finally got the initiative to speak out... and the news media finds the story hot enough to publish because of the #DeleteUber campaign... and throw in some consequential timing at Google.
Or those who saw a cash rich company desperately trying to stop an avalanche of bad publicity felt as though they had a chance to either make some money or get some publicity on the situation by piling on?
I doubt very much that any journalist right now would turn down a story bashing Uber, because they're an easy target and those hit pieces will get eyeballs.
Being subjected to routine attack pieces and soul-less astroturfers (who can just as easily sign up to HN and comment too) is generally a sign that a company or person is doing innovative things.
Hell even if we did have perfect knowledge we would know that women find it attractive in itself if a guy will approach and based on the skill of that approach yea/nea or w/e happens, so even if we could read each-others minds there would still be the act of the effectiveness of your tactics and if you didn't play it right then things could still get awkward.
There's variance to life you know. In before anal-retentive attentiveness to how I used epistemic randomness.
The fallout has been that somebody has been let go after non-substantiated rumors about his activities at a previous employer, and now people are being pressured to leave the company and end all association with the company.
This is definitely an unjustified (based on the revealed evidence) reaction, and this is how witch hunts start.
Now I have heard second hand that the work and engineering culture at Uber needs some help - in terms of hours worked and technical discipline. That sort of thing seems plausible.
However, for anything that implies this level of harassment, there had better be more hard evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Insisting on evidence is verboten. On HN.
I'm quickly growing tired of this place.
* the evidence pedant corrected my spelling
*embellished.
> untrue
We don't know whether the claims are true one way or another. What we do know for certain is that the claim has affected many people's careers and the financial success of a large company.
If these claims are proven true, punish those responsible. If they're not true, punish those who harmed the lives and reputation of others.
Yes, because it would be nice to know if it really was a systemic issue before wasting time and energy fixing it. "It's totally an issue, trust me" isn't worth acting on.
Nearly every woman in the industry has a story to tell, most say nothing. You'd know that if you'd bother to speak to any.
Zero, I'm not taking anecdotal evidence.
How many accounts of the effectiveness of homeopathy do you need to believe that it works, out of curiosity?
So if I was a woman, you'd be ok with me going to the police and saying that you stole my wallet - even though I had zero proof of that ever happening?
If you get around to it, feel free to answer my actual question at any time you like.
However in the context of TFA, the campaign to make Uber employees quit is an _action_, and it still based on accusations (however credible they may sound). This sounds a whole lot like a witch hunt. In enlightened modern-day Silicon Valley, that is.
That phrase was originally invoked to describe telekinesis. I'm not sure 'Silicon Valley company has problem with female employees' falls into that category.
Talking about one particular conversation is one thing, alleging a pattern of sexual abuse and systemic harassment that completely crosses all lines for everybody is something entirely else.
Like the one alleged to have existed at GitHub?
Maybe such a pattern in SV is not so 'extraordinary' after all.