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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting. In a bigger company how much of a responsibility should the CTO have to handle harassment incidents. Imo, as long as he or she hands off to the coo (say), or hr chief, the responsibility is complete. The CTO should not be regularly dealing with these sorts of issues, that's not what they were hired for.... (With understanding that legally that may not be the case)

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There is this famous quote from I think Steve Jobs. It says that once you are VP or CT* there are no excuses for things going wrong in your department. You are the responsible person.

I guess you meant C*O

Sorry I am not good at regex. C.*O

CefiiwefeflndvO then?

I'm terrible at Regex myself but you were probably looking for C.O (which is also bad because it would match things like C<O.)

https://regex101.com/ for the unaware

C[ETFOSC]O perhaps? Executive, Technology, Finance, Operating, Security, Compliance is all that I could think of.

My friend was Chief People Officer so you're missing P.

Cool, but of course the rank Chief Petty Officer has been around a lot longer.

I'd say C[A-Z]O

C\WO

  C[A-Z]O

This is the right attitude. To paraphrase: once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a sign something's wrong in your organization.

The parable of the janitor and the president. http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-...

Does that imply that Kalanick should be fired? Certainly, it is in his department and should be responsible.

Honestly yes. His investors have put money into the company as much because they believe in him as because they believe in the idea but at this point all the evidence is pointing to the idea being sustainable but Travis not being. They're hemorrhaging money fighting a losing war with regulators, Lyft, and the taxi monopoly but if they get self driving cars working (which is no guarantee) they are poised to be something incredible. Given all this it can easily be argued that Kalanick is doing more to harm Uber than to help it. If I'm an investor, or on the board, while I might not be ready to throw him out on his ear quite yet, it's absolutely a conversation I'm having.

Let's use some logic here, instead of quotes. An unqualified HR department that does not have proper procedures in place may not notify or relay all of the facts to other parties.

Using your logic, if I'm in charge of HR and simply sweep complaints under the rug, it's not my fault because other people should know what is going on.

Brilliant.

No, it's your fault for sweeping it under the rug. But it's also the fault of people above you for allowing a culture and an out-of-control department where stuff gets swept under the rug.

Are you implying that the CTO created a culture of harassment and told HR to sweep things under the rug? Based on what? Assumptions?

No. I am saying that the CTO is responsible for knowing what is going on in his/her departments, full stop. "Knew or should have known". If the CTO doesn't know, it's the CTO's fault for not knowing, because it's the CTO's job to know.

Now, if you have one employee go off the rails, it's not the CTO's fault for knowing in advance that the one employee had problems. But a department-wide issue? Yeah, it's the CTO's job.

Having been a CTO I can tell you the only way to be a good one is to accept responsibility for everything under your control. I'd always tell my team my real job was to be the first one to catch bullshit as it rolled downhill and take as much of it as humanly possible (sparing them as much as I could).

You can very easily disrupt and prevent bad cultures by intervening and setting a good example. Once you're a C-level everything is your fault and only your fault because you have the power to stop it. After it being your fault, it's a process problem, only if it's assuredly not a process issue can it then be someone else's fault.

Saying it's the COO or HRs fault is to ignore the problems of culture; ones that YOU allow to exist. Your department/team WILL listen to you and often reflects your ideals and attitudes in the business. By simply being lazy is to create a culture that says it's okay or participate in it (whatever it is). I think this sort of thinking is pretty shameful to be honest and largely why most manager/executives are looked at poorly.

Lead by example and obviously the examples from Uber's executives are to be huge pieces of immoral shit. If you're at the top and you deny your responsibility you're a terrible person.

Sorry if this comes across as harsh, but after having done the job and hopefully done it well (only the teams under me could say for sure)-- this makes my blood boil. Being a CTO, or executive, is a lot harder, different, and complicated than I had ever thought it would be. It's a role that I can hardly recommend to most people who want to do it well.

> as long as he or she hands off to the coo (say), or hr chief, the responsibility is complete.

Especially since, in this case, the problem is happening in the CTO's organization, the hand-off isn't enough. It's definitely the kind of thing you follow up on, and see through to resolution. Out of pure self interest, a CTO would do this to protect the productivity of the org, and maybe also because it's obviously the right thing to do.

If you're in management, you're responsible for these things. You don't get to be "just" a technologist when you're in a leadership position. You're responsible for the well-being of everyone who works for you. That means seeing it through to resolution, not just throwing it over the fence and dusting off your hands.

Doesn't matter because this is a modern version of which hunt; everybody is assuming that the CTO knew about this simply because he is a CTO.

They do not know what it is to be a CTO; pretending does not count

He can't know things that are not reported to him; he can't act on things that 'are beeing taken care of' by so called HR department.

Neither of us knows what happened, but some people tend to like watching individuals burn for entertainment purposes. Throw a fancy title in the mix, and everybody has an opinion all of a sudden.

Did you read the article or Fowler's account?

>In Fowler’s account of her year at Uber, she says that she explicitly reported the incidents of sexual harassment directly to Pham when she ran out of clear remedies. Nothing came of her attempts, she wrote.

Did YOU read THE Fowler's account?

"For example, Fowler wrote that she also spoke to the company’s chief technology officer, Thuan Pham, about a termination threat Fowler’s manager made for reporting his manager. That type of threat is illegal under equal employment laws."

"... he replied that he had been a manager for a long time, he knew what was illegal, and threatening to fire me for reporting things to HR was not illegal. I reported his threat immediately after the meeting to both HR and to the CTO: they both admitted that this was illegal, but none of them did anything."

Or did you read the telephone version of her account that Recode decided to spin and blindly made up your mind?

Which one is it?

> "and threatening to fire me for reporting things to HR was not illegal"

That doesn't sound right to me. While perhaps not illegal, it is certainly unethical and uncaring.

We can all sit in a room and recite things that do not sound right to us in our little high-chairs.

The point is, she did not tell the CTO that she was a victim of sexual harassment. End of story.

Informing the CTO that one of the managers said (verbally) something in regards to the conditions of the employment is an entirely different issue.

The idea that you think both of the issues are even remotely compatible scares me.

Retaliation is illegal under federal law.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/retaliation.cfm

"Participating in a complaint process is protected from retaliation under all circumstances."

If you don't know what happened, all you have to do is read the publically available account of the situation that Susan wrote.

I think you should take your advice here.

Recode's version:

'In Fowler’s account of her year at Uber, she says that she explicitly reported the incidents of sexual harassment directly to Pham when she ran out of clear remedies. Nothing came of her attempts, she wrote.'

Fowler's version:

'For example, Fowler wrote that she also spoke to the company’s chief technology officer, Thuan Pham, about a termination threat Fowler’s manager made for reporting his manager. That type of threat is illegal under equal employment laws. '

Sounds like the age old MBA debate of what makes a leaders versus a manager.

Not sure why you're downvoted for this comment - for those who don't understand it, it is referencing the explicit responsibility about getting the information to the person whose domain it is vs. doing more and making sure that it is resolved properly. The manager does strictly what is the person's responsibility, the leader makes sure that the person under him/her gets a satisfactory resolution - the leader does this because it affects individual & team morale and sets the example that that is what is expected (to a positive end). The leader also employs his/her abilities endowed upon the position to make sure it isn't forgotten, which builds trust, transparency, and fosters an open culture - the one who is purely focused on just managing actively works against all of these points by not exerting leadership.

Lead by example.

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