Uber executive, who obtained medical records of customer rape victim, is fired
recode.net
recode.net
These records were then used by Alexander, Travis Kalanick, and Emil Michael to dispute (internally) the woman's account of the story. They claimed that a local competitor was trying to sabotage them by planting this story, which again, involves an Uber customer being raped by a driver facing multiple (other) criminal accusations. Needless to say they lack the training necessary to decipher a medical record, a rape may or may not have left evidence present in that record, and it's a gross violation of customer privacy, business ethics, and (probably) the law.
This is repulsive conduct and it's unbelievable any of these people are still attached to the company.
I realize that leaving a job isn't easy but an engineer that makes it to Uber is probably more than capable jumping ship.
Who knows how long that will be the case. Nowadays, I imagine a prolonged employment at Uber is a serious black mark on a resume.
Since I joined, Uber has been behaving very ethically. Yes, there have been problems, which are mainly with unchecked culture in some groups, but I think things have turned around for the entire company. There have been major issues with a very aggressive culture but unlike most other companies, the management is really trying to change things. We will see if any differences are really made but I'm optimistic.
All you hear about from the media is the shitty things from the past, but if you had visibility into the great things that uber does that I see every day, you would think differently. Case in point, the new exec from Apple and the Harvard business professor who both joined this week. They have complete clarity into what kind of company Uber is right now, and they both joined.
Yes, Uber has made mistakes in the past, but since 2015 I think it has really grown up. It has issues just like any other large company but unlike other companies, they have aired their dirty laundry and is at least trying to change. I have no qualms with working for Uber and i have no trouble with my ethics or morals working here.
If someone has a bigoted view on Uber or Uber employees without knowing all the facts, then I have no issues never working for or with them, because they probably have other unchecked bigoted views as well, and would probably be terrible to work with.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/world/asia/uber-driver-in...
I imagine you're a lower-to-mid-level employee and don't have knowledge of this incident firsthand.
In case anyone missed it, employee8000 said something like "on the behalf of Uber employees, I take great pleasure in telling Mike Isaac to fuck himself"
The lie to this statement is that all of Uber's actions to fix their problems (fire people, outside investigation, hire new HR heads) have come in response to bad PR, not an internal recognition that things weren't OK. Travis Kalanick, who was 37 years old when he sanctioned all of this behavior, is still the head of the company. I am sure many of the people who turned a blind eye when star performers were protected, or women were leaving the company in droves, are still there.
This story is a case in point: Alexander wasn't fired, even after half of the executive team knew what he did, and the legal team ordered him to destroy the documents, until Recode started asking about the incident. If the company had really "grown up" as you suggest he would have been gone before the reporters started asking about him. If the company had "grown up" then one of the many people Susan Fowler talked to (in 2016) would have sounded alarms, before she wrote her blog post about it.
> unlike other companies, they have aired their dirty laundry
It's a well known phenomenon that people tend to overestimate the extent to which their habits and behaviors are shared by others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect. A simpler explanation for the series of bad headlines attributable to Uber and not other companies is that Uber was involved in worse behavior than those other companies.
"Women leaving in droves" is a lie. The recent demographics report shows that, although we could do better, the female ratio is about equivalent to other tech companies. And there is a concerted effort to change our processes and training to reduce or remove unconscious bias in our hiring process to make it even better.
And powerful women are joining as well. We just had two major female execs with a huge list of accomplishments join. They know full well the company as it is today and wouldn't join if it was a piece of shit like many of you think it is.
I can't speak of the Alexander case because I know nothing of it. But it's still in that 2014 era that I was talking about. That would not fly now, and I think his firing is in line with how the company is today in 2017.
Since Susan Fowler, I think there has been a major change in company culture. Travis revealed in an allhands that he himself needs to change. He had strong opinions on what he wanted the company culture to be but he finally understood that he was wrong. He wanted a hard-driving, ultra-logical company that squeezed the best out of every single employee but rewarded them well with stock. But after seeing the unintended consequences, that it didn't work. It worked well when you have a handful of employees that love doing this, but it doesn't scale at 10,000+ employees and he finally admitted that. As well, the qualities that made him a great startup CEO do not translate to a 10,000 person company and he finally realized that in March. These are all things he admitted in the all hands, and it seems like The company is rapidly changing to becoming much more empathetic. He is giving full reins to the New SVP HR and she is doing a great job in my opinions. I really do believe that the changes will be transformational.
I think it's unethical to continue to work for a person like that, and to help them make more money. I think it's unethical to continue to work with and for people that have turned a blind eye to harassment and blatantly unethical behavior in the past, no matter what tune they are singing now. In particular one way we as employees can signal to management that their actions are unacceptable (and signal to outsiders that we find them unacceptable) is by quitting.
In particular the actions of Uber employees who have continued to stay despite clear and ongoing evidence of unethical behavior (going back to the Beyonce/ex-girlfriend stalking reports, which are several years old), signal that they'd turn a blind eye, or ignore misbehavior, at your company as well.
215 were investigated and 20 people fired. There are ~15000 employees globally. It's not systemic and most people at Uber would agree. The outside firm was hired specifically to show that they are independent with no bias. If they didn't hire outside firm, you probably would accuse them of bias, so there's no way to win.
They were not digging up her past. They were investigating her claims. She was incorrect in assuming that Uber was "out to get her". But I understand why she is feeling that way, I would probably react the same way. But Uber was in direct communications with her lawyers when they conducted these investigations so it was a miscommunication.
Everything you think you know about Uber is based on headlines, tweets, or biased reporting. If you saw the work that Uber does behind the scenes you would have a completely different opinion. The Harvard professor said the same thing. She said she would probably have been someone who would have supported the #deleteuber campaign based on the media reports, but because she had a view on the inside, she felt completely different about it. The same goes for our new CMO from Apple.
Clearly, Uber did some things in the past that deserve the reputation that it has now. But those are largely in the past. If anyone does something equally wrong these days, they will get fired. The company is expending a lot of energy trying to be more empathic. You don't have to believe it if you don't want to, but that would be hiding your head in the sand and not wanting to seek the truth.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
After all that he and his company have done? He has long since lost the benefit of the doubt.
Why am I seeing all of the comments employee8000 made down-voted? Again, this is what the world does to Uber -- try to suppress all true and positive facts, and only let media's negative opinions based on 0.001% know-how of the company prevail!
Edit: Just realized you're the same guy that said there were scary warnings in the UI when you touched production data, but didn't have a clue if there were actually logs, if those logs got audited, and if those audits could get the C-level fired. But you were still confident enough to assess Uber as taking security seriously.
Unfortunately, you've broken the HN guidelines repeatedly while doing it. You've also used this account almost exclusively to get involved in flamewars. For those reasons I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe you'll follow the site rules in the future.
From a moderation point of view this has nothing to do with who you happen to work for. It hurts your employer to have you defending it in such uncivil ways in public, though, so they're probably better off with this account banned, too.
You may not agree with what I wrote but I stand by everything I wrote as being respectful. Except to Mike Isaac who has an agenda against Uber with his reporting. Besides that, can you point to a single comment that was "uncivil"?
To call my responses to Uber threads as "flame wars" is a joke. I was giving my insider view on things every single time, in the face of wildly ridiculous statements. If those constitute "flame wars" then your "power" has gone to your head.
And, uh, no, I won't be begging for an unban, that is preposterous. I was the only one giving civil and informative posts about inside Uber but I guess since anyone defending Uber is "flaming", then enjoy your echo chamber of Uber hate and misinformation.
> Right. So I civilly answer allegations that uber employees are somehow unethical or complicit in harassment or unethical behavior, and the perpetrators of this libel are safe, and I'm the one that's banned. Got it.
> You may not agree with what I wrote but I stand by everything I wrote as being respectful. Except to Mike Isaac who has an agenda against Uber with his reporting. Besides that, can you point to a single comment that was "uncivil"?
Reposting because frankly, there hasn't been anything uncivil. Just dang's agenda, as usual.
Edit: We'd be happy to unban you as well if you'd simply promise to be civil in the future. One of the tentacles of my "agenda" is personally unkilling your high-quality technical comments so HN readers can enjoy them. It would be nice if we could just publish them in the first place.
So a person cannot give opinion in a civil way, and highlight information which was not known to others? It is "mandatory" to talk about multiple topics at HN?
How do you define "flamewars"? Just giving your opinion about a topic, discussing, debating is flamewars? Then one could say the entire world of comments on HN is flamewars, since most comments discuss and debate topics.
I believe arguing your opinion civilly, giving reasons etc, should be okay, regardless of whether you talk of only one topic -- or have a particular opinion on one side of the debate. Most users of the site typically have some view which falls on one side on any debate. But they defend it and give their reasons civilly. Thats the whole point, isnt it?
I have read employee8000's posts and they all seem civil. Except for the one which was changed. But that particular comment was wrong, his other comments on this thread are very civil IMHO.
Unfortunately it's all too believable.
And the shit keeps coming. At some point hopefully others will make the same realization.
Just read some other links in article and they were also sued for having at least 25 riders be former sex offenders, sexual assault, and murderers just in Cali wtf. I seriously want to see how many sexual assaults have occurred in uber vs taxis. I see one every day from Uber just in Cali. If taxis did that they would lose their 250k-million dollar medallion so that's an incentive I guess to an archaic regulation. I know others disagree with me, but I would not hire any felons to be drivers. You're giving them complete power over any passenger with no witnesses. I'm completely okay with felons working anywhere with people, but I wouldn't hire one to babysit my kid. That's the similar level of power they have in a car at night and honestly most rape assaults I've seen, the perpetrators had priors
Don't see it in the source article.
The last hyperlink has it and this is them paying the fine
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Uber-settles-lawsuit-...
What's odd to me is those 25 apparently were only found because they had been cited by the police. So the 99.9% that weren't cited by the police could have tens of thousands more at least how I understand it
Obviously you do not want to employ people with those kinds of backgrounds in a setting where they could repeat past behaviour, but there is an overwhelming number of felons without violent or sexual records and by denying them employment, you are participating in a system designed to coerce poor, uneducated and misguided individuals into repetitive criminal behavior.
If you already understand this distinction between non-violent and violent federal offenders, please consider reflecting it with your choice of words as to not cause further harm to others caught in this system.
As they say, a fish rots from the head. Until the top person is fired/replaced, it will continue to happen, because that person will just replace the fired person with another like him.
Then today they could say they're Shocked, shocked! At the misconduct of this contractor and they're going to sever all ties and withhold payment until a third party review has taken place. While moving all the actual agents to another third party, repeat.
A great many medical reports are written for the eyes of non-practitioners and don't necessarily need a medical professional to decode the information.
Words such as "injuries are consistent with _____" are typically included, because the intended audience is police, judges, lawyers, and other medical laymen who are more interested in the conclusions than the minutiae.
To me, the most important question here is "was this document legally obtained"? If it was, then my follow up questions would involve why, and for what reason the laws allow that legality to occur.
All I can say now is that publicly Uber acted 'okay' after the fact by immediately adding additional safety features, deeper background checks, and never publicly disparaging the victim or her story.
Before the incident, however, they were terrible in the wrong by not following public safety laws regarding background checks, as these laws were created to help prevent the incident that occurred.
As a matter of nuance, Uber rose to prominence by ignoring certain laws and some cherish them for this, but that does not mean that all regulations should simply be ignored.
At least the article makes it clear who needs to be fired next -- for both not immediately firing Alexander for gross misconduct, and (just as egregiously) not adamantly refusing to even consider looking at a rape victim's private medicate records in the first place.
Nevermind the legal and criminal implications of that latter misstep; this is a matter of pure and simple human dignity.
In short, it's a tone-at-the-top problem, these things are always tone-at-the-top problems. Why is upper leadership still there?
On a side note as well, will the names of the people fired be published? Will these people fired be actually penalized, or would they simply be hired with another company and simply move on from the incident?
Having heard about business in India, bribes and plots to cause harm to your rivals, are the normal course of business.
This is a terrible way of dealing with it, but I absolutely get it.
Uber just doesn't have any finesse about dealing with local politics and PR. They just seem to brute force everything.
The idea and execution with uber has been great. They seem to be terrible with everything else.
Despite that, if you are an American corporation, and your operation in country _____ involve bribes, you have broken the law. More specifically, you have broken American law.
Bribes in india are accepted business practice, in western countries they are not.
In india is fairly common to pay "administration fees" in order expedite documentation, and licences, otherwise it might get "lost".
The kind of corporate culture that encourages and permits this and other scandals, that Uber cannot seem to stop having, is not worth preserving. Let the market fall to its competitors - the entry barrier isn't particularly high at this point anyways.
One thing I find interesting to consider is how "uber" succeeded in becoming a verb in popular language similar to how "google it" is the equivalent of saying perform an Internet search. Once something gets ingrained in language like this I feel like it affects us psychologically - the average Joe can still choose between Uber/Lyft/xyz, but it's so easy to forget the competitors' names when other people are using language like "uber over here and meet me".
Serious question.
Edit: his LinkedIn still says he works there, so whatever change was probably pretty recent.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-uber-sexual-harassm...