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Comment by ziszis | Hacker News Reader

This is a classic halo effect [1]. A positive halo was "Google is making lots of money and they have 20% time. So, smart companies should do this." This is a negative halo "Uber is experiencing lots of bad PR and hustling is part of their culture. So, smart companies should stop being scrappy."

The problem isn't scrappiness. It is when you push far past scrappiness and start breaking the law.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

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Uber is not the first (or the last) company to get in trouble for too much "hustling"[0].

It is not just the "hustle" people don't like. People view their employees as sexist bigots. All the smart companies don't want people from that culture.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/zenefits-under-investigati...

It's not about scrappy vs not scrappy.

It's about putting a "merit"ocracy in place that encourages people to backstab and generally act like jerks in order to get ahead.

It's about priorities. I'd rather work in a slightly less-profitable company if it didn't have a toxic work environment.

It's about putting a "merit"ocracy in place that encourages people to backstab and generally act like jerks in order to get ahead.

I don't know why you put meritocracy in quotes, because that's what it is. The merits that are rewarded just so happen to be acting like jerks. In general society that is not a merit; but in the company it is a merit therefore Uber is a meritocracy.

If keeping important business information for yourself so colleagues fail counts as merit, then yeah, uber is meritocracy. Simultaneously, the word merit lost all meaning.

The example is from original article by susan who started current backslash.

I prefer to call this act "The Meritocrats!" as a way to highlight that it's likely to be obscene and out of line with what people think of as "merits".

A meritocracy is, by definition, a system where participants succeed based on relevant ability and talent. Meritocracies do not involve pushing others down, only pushing yourself up. Backstabbing is a textbook "down" action.

A system that encourages people to backstab to get ahead is effectively just a medeival court, in which employees act as petty nobles jostling for the king/boss's approval.

I put it in quotes because in my view it's not merit that gets you ahead in such an -ocracy.

Merit implies a quality of being good, or otherwise praiseworthy. Being a backstabbing misogynist dickbag gets you ahead at Uber but I would not describe you as worthy of merit.

Won't go too far to say all Uber employees are sexist bigots, but I do, after all these media exposure, now have a images they have a strong feel-good bro culture

I think a company with a strong and directed culture will even absorb former "bro dudes" successfully and de-bro them. (Meaning, they will learn empathy and stop behaving in a way that hurts others)

Doubt it. Mainly because if a company has a strong and directed culture they would bounce-back every bro-dudes already in the interview phase for "not a culture fit"

There's a spectrum of bro-ness, and I've seen pretty hardcore stereotypical "frat guys" at 22 mature into "normal" adult human beings on a regular basis.

If you can keep your bro-ness under wraps for 4 hours for the interview, you can get hired at a company with a reasonable culture and that will continue to mold and shape you, just like any other community influence to which you are consistently exposed.

Why is it someone else's job to "un-bro" them? Why can't it be their job to do it for themselves, and just have them find out they're unemployable in their desired job unless/until they do? Companies insist they won't hire people who'd need to learn other fundamental skills of the job (and that if you want the job, learn that stuff first), so why not this?

It is/ought to be, but the stark reality is that you can hide it and appear "normal enough" for 4 hours of interviews.

I'm not making a judgment about "ought to be" just "is".

It is not just the "hustle" people don't like. People view their employees as sexist bigots. All the smart companies don't want people from that culture.

As much as that makes sense, it's also interesting considering that TFA makes it sound like people are leaving because of their dislike of that culture. And having trouble because they're being associated to the thing their fleeing.

They were ok with the culture until the culture became public.

So then they'll be absorbed by wall street.

And notably, a lot of what Uber has done wrong doesn't even read as "scrappiness gone too far". Retroactively changing performance reviews isn't "too scrappy", it's just malicious.

Let's take all of this with a grain of salt. It wouldn't be the first time a journalist with a preconceived notion went out and solicited quotes until she found some that supported her position. We don't know how many people she talked to along the way.

Is this really a thing?

If I had "Low Level Enron Employee" on my resume would the top executives' misconduct be a black mark I had to explain to future interviewers?

  Is this really a thing?

If you were in the Hitler Youth in 1941, and you were 14, and it was mandatory, people will still bring it up 72 years later when you are literally the Pope [1]

Is it fair? No. Will some people do it anyway? Absolutely.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/International/pope-benedict-dogged-naz...

Didn’t help Ratzinger that he spent his whole career being the inquisitor attack dog of the Church’s right wing.

My Mexican Jesuit friends called him “Nazinger” for his political actions as an adult, not for his past. German Catholics called him the “Panzerkardinal”.

If you were a low level Wells Fargo employee, that could be something you had to explain in an interview. According to NPR, Wells Fargo employees have found they can't get another job in the banking industry:

http://www.npr.org/2016/10/21/498804659/former-wells-fargo-e...

That's not the same at all, these employeees were fired and officially blacklisted for doing what is right, not marked as guilty by association.

There's also an additional difference in the industry which is explained in the article:

It turns out Wells Fargo had written on Jeremy's U5 report card that he admitted to opening accounts for customers without their authorization. A bank is required to report wrongdoing on a U5. But Jeremy says in his case it just wasn't true. "The second I found out about the U5 information I was appalled," he says. "And now it all made sense." That is, all the times he'd get so close to getting a job only to have it get yanked away after a background check.

Employment lawyers say getting a negative mark on your U5 is like getting the mark of Cain in the world of bankers and brokers. The U5 database is maintained by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, which is an industry self-regulatory organization. The goal of the U5 system is to hold financial advisers, brokers and bankers who sell securities accountable for wrongdoing.

Some major banks have a flat-out "zero-tolerance policy," says attorney Scott Matasar with the firm Matasar Jacobs. "They just flat out will not hire" anyone with an entry on their U5 that even suggests a sales practice violation or unethical behavior, he says.

I'm shocked that Wells Fargo would screw up the ex-employee blacklisting process too.

what do you even mean by "scrappiness"?

This isn't halo effect. When hiring someone from a company that has a certain culture, you expect people to share some of that culture. With more severely negative points of Uber's culture coming to light, companies are wondering how much of that culture the current employees share.

And there's a difference between being scrappy and hustling.

Could you describe the difference? Other than the less common definition of "fraud or swindle", I think the common definition of hustle and scrappy have a heavy overlap.

There is a heavy overlap between the two, but my impression is that being scrappy has a side that hustling doesn't: finding ways to do things with far less resources that it would be normally required.

Essentially, scrappy is, IMHO, finding shortcuts and detours to avoid an obstacle. Hustling feels more like beating down that obstacle until it gets out of the way.

But that's all semantics, and therefore my personal opinion. I've always heard "scrappy" as a positive thing, and "hustling" as something either ambiguous or just plain bad.

One of them means you didn't get caught. Not sure which, though.

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