The Holder Report on Uber | Hacker News Reader

The Holder Report on Uber

nytimes.com

294 pointssunils34213 comments

This is not the Holder (well, Covington would be more accurate) Report. The Introduction to this document makes reference to report Covington prepared for and presented to the Special Committee of Uber's board, and to the fact that the full board adopted all of the recommendations in that report.

Beyond the Introduction, this seems to just be the recommendations from the Covington report; the full report (per the Introduction ) was to cover “(1) Uber’s workplace environment as it related to the allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in Ms. Fowler’s post; (2) whether the company’s policies and practices were sufficient to prevent and properly address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in the workplace; and (3) what steps Uber could take to ensure that its commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace was reflected not only in the company’s policies but made real in the experiences of each of Uber’s employees.”

This document only includes the part addressing (3), which implicitly indicates that the bottom line conclusion on (2) was “no”, but doesn't really provide any clear information on (1).

So is the report available anywhere? (I guess not, or you'd link it.) However, if it's internal, then what happened - just the recommendations were leaked to the Times?

Also, for the moderators: you may want to update the title to "Holder Recommendations on Uber".

They were always planning to release the recommendations, at least according to the article I read on Saturday before this board meeting.

The recommendations weren't leaked. It was made publicly available by Uber. It is even on their website:

https://newsroom.uber.com/covington-recommendations/

OK. I should have used the word "shared". So it sounds like they are not going to share the full report, just the recommendations.

Every new grad: read this. Then file it away and review it as soon as you have people reporting to you. This should be required reading for every start-up founder and every manager at every mid-size and large org, and every person who criticizes the decisions of those people or hopes to be in those positions. Which means every creative, every knowledge worker, engineer, designer, lawyer, physician, all of them. And therefore, almost without exception, everyone reading this comment.

Edit: This is the executive symmary. It contains a lot of what to do. Going forward, you don't need to know so much how Uber got into the mess they're in. You need to know how to stay out of similar messes. This is a good plan for how to stay out of such messes.

Well, not this one. If we see the actual Holder report, that one maybe. This one .. just looks like a lot of frivolous non-sense bullshit.

This is the recommendations of that report.

Yeah, this is some free management consulting. While it's tailored to a very specific problem at Uber, it's still a set of good best practices to consider.

> free management consulting

For additional context, I'm certain Holder's hourly rate would wreck most any start-up's budget! This is free good consulting.

It's also interesting for those looking for startup ideas. The procedures and practices recommended here are ways to reduce institutional maladies based mostly on human activity, but it's probable that many of them could be be achieved, or augmented, through technological solutions.

Think about it: If you can build an innovative piece of tech that genuinely helps implement these policies, or achieve the same outcome in a different way, then you've got a huge market of large, rich organisations who'll be interested. Worth considering.

Kapor Capital, investors in Uber, apparently also invest in "People Ops" startups. They're actively trying to feed a problem child into their own opportunities. Smart.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/13/kapor-uber/

Is there a tl;dr?

13 pages is the tl;dr

The meat of the document is missing. It states the situation that triggered the investigation, describes the process followed, and gives the recommendations.

But it doesn't tell us what they learned through the process.

I agree. The thing everyone wants to know is (stuff like), how did it get to the point that HR employees believed:

1) They should lie about "oh it was this guys first offense".

2) A bad performance review for reporting someone's sexual advances "isn't retaliation because we said you could transfer".

3) It's better to just buy jackets for the men than to buy no jackets or to pay more for the women's.

I mean, you can kind of loosely guess at it from the recommendations, but nothing direct.

> They should lie about "oh it was this guys first offense".

There's some implied reasons in the language, though we can't tell whether that was a direct consequence.

> Human Resources Record Keeping > Uber should ensure it has appropriate tools, including complaint tracking software, to keep better track of complaints, personnel records, and employee data. > For example, if a complaint is substantiated but results in discipline other than termination of employment, relevant stakeholders should be able to easily identify whether prior complaints have been lodged to ensure that appropriate action is taken with respect to repeat offenders. Likewise, senior managers should be able to track whether certain organizations or managers give rise to multiple complaints such that intervention with the manager is needed. Uber should also emphasize the importance of recordkeeping to all Human Resources staff, and impose consequences for failure to adhere to recordkeeping requirements.

Seems unlikely, given that Uber released it themselves, that the report would provide any sort of self-incriminating evidence. So all we can really do is read between the lines and #deleteuber.

There's some stuff that is interesting in that the recommendations indicate what wasn't done. In addition to what jldugger pointed out, for example, they apparently were not doing any training for:

1. HR about how to handle complaints.

2. Managers about... well, anything? But particularly, they did not include any policies on harassment.

3. Employees in general for how to interview candidates.

EDIT: And reading through:

On harassment policies: "Human Resources should emphasize the importance of adhering to the existing policies and codes of conduct for work events such as offsite conferences and meetings, including those held at hotels and resorts. It should not be necessary to draft separate policies for these events. Policies should be applied consistently throughout the organization. No special treatment should be given to any employee, regardless of level, tenure, or past performance." Seems to jibe pretty well with Fowler's story and others. EDIT 2: And they even emphasized it in a separate bullet point! "Policies and practices should be applied consistently throughout the organization. No special treatment should be given to any employee, regardless of level, tenure, or past performance."

On substances: "With respect to alcohol consumption at after-hours work events and at other work-sponsored events, Uber should consider limiting the budget available to managers for alcohol purchases, restrict reimbursement for alcohol-related events, and include training for managers on appropriate events for retreats and out-of-work events."

That whole section on the internal transfer process ("Remove Transfer Barriers") speaks to a lot of issues Fowler brought up, e.g. "An individual evaluator can determine whether the employee is requesting a transfer for reasons relating to a difficult or divisive work environment, or if a supervisor is attempting to block a transfer for improper purposes."

Etc. etc.

They always intended to only release the recommendations. This isn't a public trial with only non confidential witnesses. The only way that kind of stuff comes out is through the text of depositions (which tends to have its own issues, like people not wanting to be involved because it won't be confidential)

That seems to be very much intentional

While there are some concrete next steps in here (hire a COO, management training, HR training, the "Rooney Rule"), what is the goal and how do these steps connect to it? As far as the harassment stuff, I think the solution is clear: have a zero tolerance policy and enforce it. But it otherwise says the words "inclusion" and "diversity" a lot, but never really connects those words to achievable outcomes and seems superficial. Maybe the end result is to restore Uber's image - in which case doing those things makes sense - but without any goal posts or authority, many of these recommendations seem to fall short.

What measurements do you propose?

Less sexual harassment by at least... half!

Well, it's the responsibility of the special committee to determine that.

You don't "measure" zero tolerance. And there's no success here--that is, there's no point at which you say "this problem is solved." You commit to throwing out the bad apples, you throw out the bad apples, and promise to throw out any bad apples as you find them in the future.

Claiming zero tolerance is a desire to stay ignorant of your measuring precision. You need to know how accurate your tools are before you can estimate how many incidents occur.

Let me rephrase less aggressively:

If you pick a "zero" tolerance, that's saying your measurement can actually be zero and there's no need to improve from that point. If you pick a measurement that can only asymptotically approach zero, then you are recognizing that improvement is always possible.

But if you're able to measure a problem, that means you've identified a violation of your zero tolerance policy. Which begs the question, why is your measurement more effective at finding the problem than the enforcers of the policy?

If you're not half-assing your zero tolerance policy, measuring it is immaterial. Find an offender, fire them. The number of firings in hindsight isn't a factor towards your future, since those people are gone. There's not a meaningful measurement that you can make, because after you fire someone, they don't impact your numbers anymore. You assume the problem is ongoing and will continue to be ongoing, you immediately and harshly deal with the problem when you encounter it, and you move on to finding more problems. There is no gray area.

> after you fire someone, they don't impact your numbers anymore

They would if your measurement is incidences per month. Otherwise you could fire someone every day and think you're doing a good job at office culture. I'd rather not have any harassment. Of course, you'd need to be careful not to discourage reporting of incidences. Measuring things is tricky.

> Find an offender, fire them

What's your technique of "finding" problems? Could it be improved? How would you know?

> no gray area

Of course there is. How do you know when someone accidentally insinuated sex versus intended a salacious proposal? Or accidentally touched someone's rear while passing by? Because it happened 6 times in 2 days? What about 2 times in 6 months?

That's the issue, right? Everyone wants "diversity", but no one wants quotas or hard lines that could discriminate against other groups. I think you need to do your best to root out any biases in your hiring process or people. At Uber's size there is also an evangelism role that can be played to reach out and encourage a more diverse applicant pool to apply for roles. But this report falls flat on how you could possibly measure whether your team is "diverse" or "inclusive" enough and also fails to call out any existing practices, processes or people that would've gotten them there in the first place, opting instead to use those principles as PR tools.

I don't know things like "we only bought jackets for the men, because it would be more expensive to buy jackets to the women... so they just don't get jackets" seems pretty divisive to me. You're trying to split hairs, but things like that are so blatant that they are screaming right in your face. If such things were really happening at Uber, then I don't think that your quibbling about "how diverse is diverse" makes any sense. They obviously have issues that need to be addressed, no?

So you're in the "I know it when I see it" camp?

There's the aphorism that what's measured gets improved (and what isn't measured gets worse). If you're trying to improve diversity/inclusion, how do you know you've done a good job unless you can measure it?

It also depends on how and what you're measuring. If you are (e.g.) measuring diversity, but measuring it in the "wrong way" you could be setting up perverse incentives to game the metrics while not truly achieving the goal.

I feel like the rule should be fairly simple: your organization should match the ethnic and gender breakdown of the area it's offices are in.

So, for example, if Silicon Valley is 10% African Americans (I have no idea if that # if true, just using it for argument's sake), then your organization should be 10% African American. This also means your organization should be 50% women, since they are ~50% of the population. How you manage that (blind hiring, quota hiring, etc) is up to the company, and is difficult. But measuring proper diversity is really easy: you should reflect the local city's diversity. If you don't, you need to have a really good reason (and "we don't think we can be drinking buddies with them" is a really shitty reason).

Can you control for education? Why is it a company's responsibility to counteract society's bias? Even if one company could succeed at that excellent goal, it'd be impossible for all companies in an area to follow that rule. Unless many people were unemployed.

> what is the goal

The goal the recommendations address is stated in the Introduction: “to ensure that its commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace was reflected not only in the company’s policies but made real in the experiences of each of Uber’s employees.”

I've got to agree with you. The whole thing is vague, boilerplate corporate speak. Half of it could've been copied-and-pasted from any large company's press release about their new diversity initiative.

You can't enforce zero tolerance without good policies and accountability, which appears to have been sorely lacking. See recommendations III.C, HR Record Keeping; III.D, Track Agreements with Employees; IV.B, Mandatory HR Training; and all of section VI (especially "An Owner of Resources-Related Policies Should Be Identified or Hired").

I am repulsed by Uber's culture (and have stopped using them since the Susan Fowler story), but I don't think "zero tolerance" is the answer. "Zero tolerance" is basically committing to overreacting. It leads to absurd outcomes like students being suspending for having "weapons" like nail clippers and rubber bands, or "drugs" like cough drops or mouthwash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_tolerance_(schools)#Criti...

Just because Uber is under-reacting now doesn't mean that "zero tolerance" is the answer. Incidents should be dealt with in a proportionate way.

There are definitely valid criticisms on the application of zero tolerance policies; I agree that bullying in school is a go to for overreaching. But sexual harassment and harassment in general have pretty rigorous tests (repeated, stated to be unwanted, etc.) and a good HR organization will vet complaints and sort out the frivolous or vindictive or whatever from the serious allegations. The latter is where zero tolerance applies.

There was an engineer (I think she was the woman at Google who started the spreadsheet about comparing salaries, but not sure) who said something along the lines of "If you have a 'Chief Diversity Officer', you're doing it wrong." Basically the argument was that it's should be everyone's responsibility, from CEO on down, to ensure that you're recruiting people from varied backgrounds, and that everyone is treated with respect. A Chief Diversity Officer basically seems more like a PR job than something that will actually change internal culture.

Now, granted, Uber obviously was failing on their own in terms of having a respectful culture, so not sure what else to recommend, but I agree, the recommendations in this report seem a lot more to do with optics than anything else.

The Chief Diversity Officer often operates in a silo and doesn't have the ability to impact things like hiring so yes, it can be a vanity/PR role if not implemented well.

D&I is trendy in the bay area these days. For diversity, the recommendation is to provide a monetary incentive with regards to diversity metrics, i.e. use discrimination in an effort to have a more diverse employee pool. Why this is seen as okay is beyond me.

It's not about diversity in general. The software industry is plenty diverse. It's about achieving equitable treatment for historically mistreated groups, in particular blacks and women. There are some who would be willing to take very strong measures to get there, including outright hiring and promotion quotas, justifying them on the basis of compensation for past wrongs and countervailing preferences in a racist and sexist society.

But American society has a pretty strong streak of individualism, so these sorts of group-based measures are politically unpopular or even illegal, which means the folks trying to improve the lot of blacks and women have to find softer, fuzzier measures and justifications.

That's why there's all this talk about "diversity" and "inclusion". The words aren't quite wrong; they're more like understatements of larger goals to make them as presentable as possible. But ultimately this whole issue wouldn't even exist if we were 12% black and 50% female. Heck, it might not even exist if we were 6% black and 25% female. But we're closer to 1%/15%, and quite a few people think that's a real problem.

Zero tolerance is not a plan; it is a goal. That is far less concrete than the plans listed in this report.

My eyes are bleeding from all the bureaucratic jargon. "Special Committee", "Oversight Committee", "Independent Committee" for the promotions process, checklists for alcohol consumption, human resources training, etc. I dearly hope it doesn't take this many layers of control within a company to ensure a livable atmosphere for its employees.

According to Wikipedia, Uber has about 12,000 employees. Especially given how bad things apparently got, it seems reasonable to require a few layers of oversight to achieve lasting positive change.

You can have controls, or you can work in a frathouse. So far, they've opted for option #2.

Or you can start from day 1 with a culture that doesn't need that level of oversight to keep people from acting indecently.

I see all this oversight as something that a company like Uber needs to clean up it's toxic culture, but if the pool is kept clean from day one, you don't need nearly as much chlorine...

It's much easier to keep a group of 12 people clean.

It's much harder to keep a group of 12,000 clean.

You're just demonstrating the same facile mindset that plagues experts of every discipline, so convinced that the problems of every other field -- of which they are largely ignorant -- are obviously trivial, and could be solved with a bit of common sense.

This XKCD cartoon, basically: https://xkcd.com/1831/

Consider the difficulty most people on this site will have encountered just getting a handful of software components to cooperate successfully. Now imagine trying to do the same with an organisation of thousands of human beings.

Left to their own devices, large groups of human beings easily fall into horrendous anti-patterns. Avoiding or fixing these anti-patterns is not just hard, it is probably the hardest problem human beings have ever faced, given that we have been working on it for the duration of our existence, and we're still mostly terrible at it. This is not trivial, it is mindbendingly difficult.

The "bureaucratic jargon" you mention is just the specialist language that the field of management of human resources has created to talk about the problems they're trying to solve, and the structures they've designed to solve them. And really, it's hardly impenetrable in comparison with even a mildly technical blog post.

When you dismiss problems like this as easily solvable, or the recommendations of experts as bureaucratic jargon, then you're the pointy-haired boss waving away technical arguments why something is infeasible. You're the politician saying ISPs need to put more filters on the tubes to censor the internet. You're the cable host smugly dismissing climatology as fake news.

> This XKCD cartoon, basically: https://xkcd.com/1831/

It's the software engineer version of Donald Trump's "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated."

The very idea of startup culture and arguably hacker culture was that that beaurocracy was unneeded cargo cult, and parasites making up justifications for their power.

Should your ideas prevail, then certainly we will see big, big changes in Silicon Valley over the coming years.

Going out on more of a limb and making more specific, but less certain prediction: There will be a balooning managererial and adminisitrative class sucking up most of the surplus that tech is generating. The workers, i.e. software engineers and artists and sales, will see lowered wages, less perks, less autonomy. They will be commodified.

But in a free market, wont small lean companies outcompete companies with inefficient management sprawl? No, because the manager class will use their political connections to crush anyone that wants to try such a feat.

Those predictions are uncertain, but probable enough that I'd more cautious about going into the field if I still had my career choice ahead of me.

Should your ideas prevail, then certainly we will see big, big changes in Silicon Valley over the coming years. ... Going out on more of a limb and making more specific, but less certain prediction: There will be a balooning managererial and adminisitrative class sucking up most of the surplus that tech is generating.

This has already happened. All those tiny fierce startups, they're not planning to stay tiny startups forever. They are trying to get a foothold and grow into big successful companies that can pursue big opportunities. And big companies inevitably have hierarchies of managers and directors and analysts and whatnot. Even great companies do this. Google has one VP for every 200 people. They're not needed in small firms, because coordinating the work of ten people who serve a couple of hundred customers isn't that hard. But coordinating the work of 10,000 people who serve millions, definitely is.

> The very idea of startup culture and arguably hacker culture was that that beaurocracy was unneeded cargo cult, and parasites making up justifications for their power.

It's ridiculous to consider Uber a startup in 2017. They are not. They are a corporate behemoth that cannot function without a sizeable bureaucracy.

I especially like:

"Uber should consider moving the catered dinner it offers to a time when this benefit can be utilized by a broader group of employees, including employees who have spouses or families waiting for them at home, and that signals an earlier end to the work day."

Note to Linux users: this PDF looks terrible without msttcorefonts installed. I guess MS Word neglects to embed fonts? Also, as someone who is not used to seeing documents generated by MS Word, I'm surprised at how bad the typography is in general (although maybe this due to user error...for example it looks like hyphenation might be disabled.)

Font rights are ridiculously complicated. Word probably plays it safe and never embeds, because it's so easy to break a copyright.

MS fonts have the embedding permission bit set, IIRC.

If msttcorefonts solves it, then it'll just be relying on the fact that historically the PDF format guaranteed access to 14 basic fonts. The guarantee was that Helvetica, Courier, Times and a few others were always available, or metric-equivalent alternatives were provided, and almost any OS today meets that requirement.

  [cozzyd@cosmogenic]$ pdffonts The-Holder-Report-on-Uber.pdf 
  name                                 type              encoding         emb sub uni object ID
  ------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
  TimesNewRomanPSMT                    TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no     272  0
  Georgia                              TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no     274  0
  Georgia-Bold                         TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no     276  0
  Georgia-Italic                       TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no     278  0
  TimesNewRomanPSMT                    TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no      48  0
  Georgia-Bold                         TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no      49  0
  Georgia                              TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no      47  0
  Arial-BoldMT                         TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no      46  0
  Georgia-Italic                       TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no      53  0

What time is the dinner served?

8:15

wow! It was 6:30 iirc @ Google, which I already thought was just a ploy to keep employees there later. Breakfast ended at I believe 9:30.

I think it's 8:30 to 10 at my office.

Depends on the Google cafe.

A few started dinner at 6:00. I think most started at 6:30 but I wouldn't be surprised if a couple didn't start until as late as 7.

Breakfast ended at 10 but often it didn't actually close until food ran out. I think some had late breakfast going until 11.

Charlie's would close the doors, hard stop, at 10:00. I remember having to be let out by the back route, through the kitchen, a couple times because I was still in line for food when the doors closed.

This was Google NYC btw.

Such a weird recommendation. It's so variable. 8:15 would be perfect for me (2 year old and 2 month old at home). 8:15pm is after bed time. If the dinner started at 5pm, it wouldn't work for some parents, and for others 5pm might be way too early.

You can't please everyone, and sometimes trying to is worse.

8:15 is after my kids go to sleep, too, but I'd rather not commute home to spend time with them, and then commute back to eat dinner.

Would be easy if you live at Nema

Lil bit of an in joke. NEMA is a condo building sandwiched between the Uber and Twitter main offices.

I'm fairly certain that significant portion of their staff does live within a short Uber ride back to the office. Even those with families.

Besides, what are your kids going to eat?

I'm not understanding what you are saying. Are you saying working until after 8:15 is perfect for you so that you'll never see your family? Or that you'll go back to work to eat after your kids go to bed?

Both sound bad

So I guess I understood these dinners wrong. It's not like a social dinner? Or does this mean like company supplied dinner starts at 8:15pm?

I interpreted it as (non mandatory) social dinner's hosted by the company would start at 8:15pm.

I interpreted it as the dinner they provide for people working late.

No, this is a dinner they provide every day for people who are still in the office, presumably because they're working.

Your interpretation is wrong, I've been to Uber's office in SF and its dinners are big trays of catered food brought in late in the evening. They're dumped in the kitchens and employees who are still working can come by to get whatever they want.

Apologies if I'm naïve, but why are people still working so late? Are they working overtime or on call?

So they can get a free dinner? Or maybe they're just happy to work a bit late, avoid peak-hour traffic, and then head home?

I work 6am-10pm one day a week voluntarily, though I work for myself. I avoid traffic, parking is easier, and I get the office to myself without distractions for about 6 hours.

From what I saw it's part of the company culture. Managers were there late so of course their subordinates didn't want to leave and be seen as not working as hard.

Also there's no concept of overtime with salaried fulltime employees. You might work 100 hours in a week and you're still taking home the same paycheck as if you worked 40 hours. That's just the way corporate America works.

They're working late so that they'll still be at the office when the free food comes. That's the point of the late free food.

Isn't it fair to say that it would be easier to have the dinner before people go home from work? Not saying the recommendation is wise entirely, but I'd be shocked if 6:30 didn't work better for the vast majority of parents.

There is no office dinner time that is compatible with employees going home _to have dinner with their families_.

The point of an office dinner is to replace any alternative dinner.

When I worked in SF I was just glad to see my family before my daughter went to bed, let alone having dinner with them.

So is that a good thing? Did it make you a better employee, or increased your efficiency, or gave you room to think so you could make better decisions?

SV is so misguided in equating working hard and being at work, it is crazy. Perhaps just me, but I can get 10-times more done when I know that my daughter is happy (having played together), than when I am stuck working while she is spending time with a nanny instead.

Anyway, to each their own.

No, I don't think that's a good thing at all. Not having dinner with my family was just a foregone conclusion. Even if I show up at 6 AM you're getting dirty looks if you leave at 5, because half of engineering doesn't show up until 10:30.

I'm not saying it's right or good, I'm just saying it's reality.

The implicit pressure is going to be "you have to stay for the team dinner," even if the dinner is "optional." So given that assumption, I would much rather the dinner happen at 6:30 and get home to my family than at 8:30. That way I would at least see my wife before she went to bed (let alone my daughter).

Thanks for the clarification and you're 100% here. I wonder if people realize the kind of environment they are creating using these implicit triggers, or because everyone shows up and seems happy, the issue isn't addressed until it completely blows up, like in Uber's case.

Wouldn't that mean that you wouldn't go home until after your children are in bed?

I was maybe misinterpreting the dinner, but I was thinking go home then come back.

Then why not eat dinner with your family while you're home?

I believe it was interpreted as a non-frequent, social non-mandatory dinner for the company, which is nice to attend so that you stay in touch with the company. And by social dinner I mean a get together event as opposed to just eating food for the sake of quelling hunger.

As a parent (6 year old) I totally see where he's coming from.

Correct.

I'm in a unionized position for a provincial government. Working late is very foreign to me.

In that context, then yeah, I can see that. Given the board, it's usually assumed that people are looking at it from a SV point of view, and so the assumption is that it's the "regular dinner" that gets brought in every night.

Yep. I asked about work life balance when evaluating offers and my future manager told me "Just look at the delta between when breakfast ends and dinner starts. For us, it's 8 hours. For Uber, it's something like 11."

It might be an inconsequential recommendation. But it is representative of the broader culture.

And yes, it's absurd that silicon valley tech companies feed us three meals a day. That HBO show Silicon Valley is a documentary not a comedy.

Isn't the purpose of dinner to "feed" those who stay late knowing there is food and know that they won't have to go hunting outside to see what joint is still open (specially in the suburban campuses) rather than being a venue to feed staff on their way out (home, etc.)?

From that PoV 7-ish makes sense. I know I would not stay around till 7 just for a freebie dinner if I didn't have anything to do.

Well, yes, I think "don't directly reward and incentivize staying too late at work" is the whole point of the recommendation. E.g. "signal the end of the work day."

One option that the company I currently work for does is to provide dinners in to-go that are either cold sandwiches or leftovers from lunch (which is free). That way, if one has to stay late, you aren't forced to have chips for dinner, while avoiding the signaling of having an actual dinner service.

I agree that providing dinners is kind of symbiotic. The worker gets free dinner and in return the employer gets outsized compensation in the form of work (symbiosis is not equal). That said, I never feel obliged to stay just because there is dinner served. I'm quite sure at places I've worked it's not even a tacit thing. I do know people who "hang out" just to get a free dinner and then leave --and again the company knows this and to my knowledge there is no frowning upon that (of course, if everyone did it, I'm sure it would become frowned upon).

This is a great idea. Especially if they're leftovers from lunch, to avoid waste.

At least at Google's NYC office, it was socially acceptable to work until dinner-time, have dinner at work, and then go home. (Or so it was reported to me.)

Isn't the whole point of catered dinner to give people an incentive to work longer hours and have them be taken care of if they're staying at work pretty late? It's not a free meal, it's an incentive to work into the night. It's optional, you can go home if you want. What's the issue? Some people make the tradeoff to spend their life at work, others make the tradeoff to have a family and go spend time with their kids. This gets pretty philosophical, but should we be reducing the freedom of choice and mandating what the correct lifestyle should be for people?

When I visited for dinner one time there were barely any people there taking advantage of it, and the food was actually quite good, so it anecdotally didn't even feel like a systemic issue of people "feeling the pressure to stay at work until 9pm".

> What's the issue?

The issue is sexual harassment.

We're talking about the dinners here, you're derailing.

I think you're missing the focus. Obviously, catering dinners for employees at 8:15 PM has created an environment that encourages sexual harassment, otherwise this would never have been included in an investigative report. An example, which isn't given in the report, is a male employee taking a female employee to a catered dinner after work hours and making advances.

Regardless of how a company drains the life out of its employees with overtime, if they create 'perks' that married people can also participate in, or a larger bunch, there is less risk of this happening.

The advice about dinner catering is in the context of reducing sexual harassment in the workplace and has nothing to do with anything else.

A male employee can have a pizza delivered too. A catered dinner has nothing to do with harassment, the recommendation was to promote inclusivity, but was tone deaf as to the purpose of the dinners.

Well, isn't it great to have enough capital to hire an attorney general to make flatteringly vague, stupid advice that has nothing to do with the reason he was hired.

Sounds a bit naive to me.

Um no.

> '...to conduct a thorough and objective review regarding “the specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly.”'

Note the bit about "diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly." So you are derailing and it is you who is missing the focus. The report is clearly not just about sexual harassment. You would know that if you read the report.

Don't act oblivious. The impetus for Eric Holder's hiring to investigate Uber's workplace environment was sexual harassment. The wording is intentionally vague to try and soften the allegations which are damning. The fact that Holder is paid by Uber means he won't slam the company, but clearly the advice is meant to prevent them from getting their asses sued in the future.

And to my point "diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly" can directly discourage sexual harassment, which was the critical issue in the investigation.

If you don't give a shit about the allegations, why read the report?

> If you don't give a shit about the allegations, why read the report?

The report had several purposes, and the parts related to addressing specific allegations rather than general culture are not published. So, reading the published part of report has nothing to do with caring about the allegations, since the published part of the report is the recommendations which were specifically called for to address inclusivity generally, rather than the investigation results addressing specific allegations of misconduct.

And if your core complaint is that they should be serving dinner at 8:15 PM, then what should Holder's recommendation be to prevent sexual harassment from occurring in situations like I described?

How do you in your mind divorce advice for "general inclusivity" from specific allegations of misconduct. It sounds like you think the company is just wasting money to be flattered.

Obviously the company has severe issues with its culture.

Reading the report and saying "why should they change anything" sounds like denialism or defense.

These are like conditions of their parole. If they had the responsibility to handle things like late-night catered dinners, they wouldn't need the former attorney general to tell that that it is a "no no."

> Isn't the whole point of catered dinner to give people an incentive to work longer hours and have them be taken care of if they're staying at work pretty late? It's not a free meal, it's an incentive to work into the night. It's optional, you can go home if you want.

I take it as a signal that you're only perceived by the company to be "working into the night" if you're physically in the office at 8:15 pm. If you're the parent that gets in early or logs back on remotely after putting your kids to bed, you might be working just as much, but your efforts will be less visible to managers who won't see you putting in "face time" by staying for dinner.

Having to be coddled and protected when already having the best compensated and cushiest job on the market. The local tech scene is definitely its own little parallel universe, I'll give you that.

It sets an expectation. I've never been in an environment where "optional" late-night things like dinner were truly optional. There's an expectation set that you're working at least as late as the dinner, and probably after, regardless of results or the value you're providing to the company.

People scoff at these types of things, but these kind of expectations put a lot of pressure on people, and they can have real negative effects. My uncle worked at a place where everyone stayed until 9pm. Technically you could leave whenever, but it was frowned upon, and you wouldn't get a good review. Ultimately his wife left him, he got depressed, and then the company laid him off.

Forcing everyone to leave work early in the day puts a lot of pressure on people to come into work early. That's just as bad. The problem is the pressure, not the mealtime.

Or, you know, base your decisions on results and business value rather than which particular hours you want to ensure asses are in seats for.

This must be a Valley thing. My company (in NYC);provides dinner at 8PM Monday - Thursday, but the office is usually a ghost town by 7. Of course, we don't really provide breakfast or lunch either.

You can click on the "original PDF" link that opens:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3863782/The-Holde...

It looks much better on Linux.

Only if you have the correct (non-embedded) fonts :)

As a family man, I couldn't agree more with this statement!

But if these are the sorts of recommendations in the report, it is a pile of trash. The whole point of the report is to identify and reduce misconduct. This is just irrelevant filler

> The whole point of the report is to identify and reduce misconduct.

No, that's not what Covington was hired by the board to give recommendations on, per the explicit description of the task they were given in the Introduction to the document here.

It was about ways to create an inclusive environment. This was one of many recommendations to do that.

If they move dinner earlier, the IRS may start taxing employees based on the value provided. Right now, these meals aren't taxable because they are for the convience of the employee. Moving them earlier show they are a really just a fringe benefit.

I don't really follow what you are suggesting. What would suddenly make them taxable? And, the IRS would tax employees because their employer pays for dinner? As in, it qualifies as income, somehow?

My former employer reimbursed our lunch as taxable income for this reason.

If your employer gives you goods and services, that may qualify as a taxable benefit. It is basically income. The point being so that the government still gets its share even if the company pays its employees in free stuff instead of money.

Why that would change based on time of day, I don't know, but tax rules are complicated around this sort of stuff.

Feels like Uber just paid a load of money to get patronized by a well-respected official. Nothing(as far as this public version suggests) in this document should be surprising to a growing company. "You mean if we create a patriarchal company culture that preys on personal weaknesses and demeans women and minorities we're going to have a bad public image? Gee, who would've thought!"

Unfortunate as it may be, sometimes in large corporations, it takes paying an outsider to identify and document something, before anything will be done about it.

That's not what it takes: it's what they prefer to be done by the kinds of people who won't disrupt them too much with reforms. There's been many internal assessments in companies that did even better. Usually just have to survey and interview the workers to see what's going on. The supervisors and managers, too, but the big problems usually start from them on up.

Not sure who said it first, but "a consultant is someone you pay to take your watch and tell you what time it is"

I think the point was to have an independent party give the recommendations in order to avoid any bias or partiality in the matter.

How do you define "patriarchal" in the context of that sentence?

Link to the report itself: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3863782/The-Holde...

According to https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/13... One of the Uber board members made a misogynist joke during the company-wide meeting explaining how Uber was going to fix its culture. This is... special.

> fix it's culture

  its*

Thanks! Fixed.

That was fast

You'd almost expect that to happen on an episode of The Office.

Oh God, it gets worse: he interrupted the only female board member to make this ?joke?.

His apology has already been emailed to the entire company. This isn't quite a defenestratable offense, but does illustrate the scale of the challenge ahead of Uber.

Did you just use question marks as quotation marks?

What's wrong with doing that"

I've never seen it before.

Seems a reasonable text symbol for sarcastic air quotes.

Not everyone on the Internet is an Anglophone, nor does every piece of software store and render Unicode correctly.

Many languages use different delimiters, and their keyboards might be set up accordingly.

Eg, in French one uses ‹single› or «double guillemets», and CJK languages use 《more angle brackets》 or 「corner brackets」.

I'm not familiar with question marks being used that way, but let's give people the benefit of the doubt. ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Specific_langua...

Even worse: he interrupted her talking about research results and started with "Actually, what it shows..."

Basically : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyC_NKEz62A

at least they have new limits on the use of alchohol and illegal drugs at company events! (from WAPO article )

To channel Peter Drucker

What you see here is culture eating strategies and tactics for breakfast.

Recommendations don't change culture, they provide an environment where the cancerous parts of culture can be intentionally removed. Failure to do so just means the cancer comes back as it overwhelms/finds cracks in the recommendations.

for anyone against paywalls: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inside-ubers-hands-meeting-tr...

I think this whole Uber situation is a good reminder to the valley that the "No Assholes" rule is still a good policy.

The rule falls apart when there are assholes at the top of the org chart.

Which is, sadly, almost always the case.

I think it's more that "asshole" is never defined in terms of the behavior of the people at the top of the org chart, unless it's like this case where people at the top start spraying their asshole-ness outside of the company. Absent that, all criticism is chalked up to disgruntlement.

Sadly, that is where they seem to coalesce, in management positions.

I dunno. Uber's "mostly assholes" approach seems to have gotten them pretty far. Perhaps the message is rather that you can be as awful and unscrupulous as you like because by the time it bites you you you'll either be long gone or far enough along to bring on Eric Holder and Arianna Huffington to rehabilitate your image.

We'll see, Kalanick has said that without self-driving in Uber's future they are dead.

that's the sort of statement that bay area CEOs say when they want something to happen. It doesn't mean it's necessarily true.

He did? That's a bold thing to state especially with so many car manufacturers trying to get into the same space who will have a far easier time undercutting Uber considering they own the manufacturing and maintenance on their vehicles (thus they have far more margin to play with).

IMO I think Uber will eventually have to be bought by a car company or they'll have to go for a premium market because GM and others already want to get into the same exact business and owning the manufacturing is going to make it a hell of a lot cheaper for them.

Source?

If he believes that he's an idiot.

Even if you're OK with assholes at work, there's a big difference between assholes who break the law for personal gratification (sexual harassment) vs. assholes who are supposedly advancing business goals (setting overly-aggressive deadlines and overworking employees.)

You don't want the second kind because that's not how you build a sustainable business, but that's still quite different from risking your business so that some person can get personal sexual gratification.

You don't want either kind. Both prevent you from building a sustainable business.

That would be great if the point of a startup was to be a sustainable business.

The former seems obviously true, but the latter not so much. Many ruthless leaders (Gates, Jobs to pull the two obvious tech titans) have built sustainable businesses using these practices. It may not jive with the current narrative around performance espoused by HBR, but I'm not aware of any data around this.

Assuming "overworking employees" qualifies you as an asshole (not sure), it's not clear that a culture like that that pushes people to perform almost to their limit is not sustainable.

Has it? What do they actually have? They are losing money hand over fist. And their autonomous car program is in serious jeopardy.

According to Yahoo reporting[1], a board member made a sexist joke at their all-hands meeting to address this report today.

Huffington: There’s a lot of data that shows when there’s one woman on the board, it’s much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board

Bonderman: Actually what it shows is it’s much likely to be more talking

What a garbage fire.

[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inside-ubers-hands-meeting-tr...

While some of the points in the report are legit, I feel most of the content is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any other tech firms and it will probably still work.

I genuinely believe that people work hard because they believe what they do has a meaning, not because the company serves free dinner/beer/water at 7pm or 8:15pm. I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup like a non-profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered anything, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.

Agreed. These could be the speaker notes for the mandatory "don't be an asshat" training I've taken at three or four different workplaces. Doesn't mean anything in it is wrong.

It's missing the obvious "theory of operation" part though, which could be stated as "don't be an asshat" or "behave like you have to explain your behavior to your mother when she's on her deathbed," or maybe even "what if your sweetheart's sister worked here?"

I'm willing to believe that at a certain point in a startup's life cycle, it is reasonable to expect the early employees to work non-stop. It's also reasonable to sell your product early on at a loss, to garner interest. But at a certain point, if your customers are not willing to pay enough for your product to cover the costs, you've got a problem. Likewise, if your business only works if your employees are working 80+ hours a week, you have to ask yourself if you really have a viable business.

I think this point comes a lot earlier than most people are willing to admit. If your startup needs 10 people to get off the ground and you can only afford 5 who work 'round the clock, that's one thing; if your startup needs 20,000 people and you have 10,000 working 24/7/365, that's another.

I will also concede there are jobs worth devoting every waking moment to, because they are worth doing, because they satisfy you intellectually or emotionally, because they save lives, because you will benefit greatly, personally from the work, materially or in reputation. But a lot of tech and other professional jobs are a lot more predatory than that. You take a lot of young people straight from one environment which lionizes the all-nighter and accomplishing arbitrary assigned goals (college), drag them to a new place where they don't have friends, family, or anything else which either makes demands on their time or gives them meaning and validation, and then encourage them to work non-stop on projects with no clear moral pay-off and a financial payoff that accrues to other people.

> I feel most of the content is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any other tech firms and it will probably still work.

Keep reading. The start of the report is pretty generic, but it gets very specific and pointed around page 10 ("Changes in Employee Policies and Practices").

This smells a lot like a pentesting report: pay people a lot of money to make a report, persevere with current bad practices, then when litigation comes up say "Hey, we took this seriously. Look at all the money we spent on this report!"

Idk, a lot of heads rolled, including the supposed right hand man of the CEO that was supposedly behind some egregious things. What more can we say should have been done without seeing the information behind the report?

This may just be my cynicism creeping in here, but I suspect the head rolling had more to do with quarterly results, and this was just an opportunity to cover those up with "virtue" signaling.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/uber-s-lo...

Cynicism vindicated:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/13...

As long as Kalinick is CEO they haven't done enough.

I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup as a non-profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered dinner, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during the weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.

Well, for one, Google does offer the catered dinners. If Uber didn't, then the engineers either wouldn't stay late (ideally; workaholism is bad), or they'd go somewhere that does offer that kind of thing.

Very interesting recommendations, but no mention of the CTO, Thuan, who was called out by Fowler herself in her blog post.

> Uber should establish key metrics to which its leaders will be held accountable in the performance review process. This would include, for example, metrics that are tied to improving diversity, responsiveness to employee complaints, employee satisfaction, and compliance.

Every metric has the power for evil. This will be gamed, simply by measuring these things behaviour will be affected in unpredictable ways. I understand the challenge they're up against but I absolutely cringe at turning some of these subjective items into metrics.

Blind Résumé Review stands out.

Don't think for a second that these are isolated incidents. These things happen all the time, it just so happened that people like Susan Fowler fought back. I've seen these things happen constantly.

Random thought: Marissa Mayer (who hacker news informs me, just quit her previous job) could potentially be their COO

The 2 posts do seem serendipitous .

"quit"

I don't understand the scare quotes. The division she was hired to actually lead was sold. There's no reason for her to stay. They can easily find a bean counter type -- and pay them a hell of a lot less -- to manage the remaining investments.

A bean counter can't destroy value nearly as quickly as an experienced CEO

Apparently, they're paying the bean counter twice as much. http://fortune.com/2017/03/13/yahoo-new-ceo-marissa-mayer-ne...

Well that certainly looks like a pretty sweet deal.

I'm mostly unimpressed. Most of the suggestions are just process changes, which often just obfuscate organizational issues and cripple performance. The only value is the signal it sends to employees that affect the culture negatively.

The most substantive recommendation, IMO, is that they suggest a COO that controls most of the day-to-day. It's a clear move to reduce the CEO's power, and most likely a path to remove the CEO in the future unless the CEO regains power, which is unlikely.

I disagree. There are lots of things here that are very widescale, and as the board accepted _all_ of these suggestions, assuming they all happen, I think real change can be realised within Uber.

Bottom line is this...

At some point EARLY on, you're going to want to put some thought into casting a wider net for talent and wrapping your heads around the fact that people from different (age, gender, racial, ability, socioeconomic) backgrounds can be a strategic asset to developing a world class orgs.

Throw away the notion of cultural fit where you assume people have to like what you like and think how you think to "fit in". That's bullshit and extremely limiting.

Build an environment where everyone feels whole and contributes.

You WILL sacrifice some of the benefits of that frat boys club environment a lot of early stage startups have.

You will gain the type of insight that will allow you to navigate an increasingly divese workforce and (US and global) consumer base.

Be willing to make mistakes. It's a clumsy process.

Uber is going to have a hell of a hard time retrofitting a less toxic culture and the numerous leaks we're seeing points to an employee base that's begging for change.

Successful high growth orgs of tomorrow are gonna be the ones stumbling towards getting this shit right today.

So is this the full report, or an abridged version for public consumption (as was indicated might be released a few days ago)?

This is a list of recommendations. Many are stated as blandly as possible. This is definitely not the full report.

It's just the recommendations from the report with an added introduction about the process that motivated the report and what the Board did (accept all the recommendations) with the report. It is not, misleading headline aside, the report itself.

So Mr. Holder, were you able to confirm the veracity of Susan Fowler's descriptions of her experiences at Uber?

Mr. Holder?

Is this thing on?

This wouldn't just be an attempt to bury culpable behavior under a mountain of legalese, would it?

On what planet would any company publicly release a document that creates a slam dunk civil case against them, unless required to do so by law? The goal was for Uber to get the value insight of outside counsel, not for all of us to do so.

Susan Fowler can file a civil case and get a copy of the full report to read to a jury, but Uber's lawyers and outside counsel would have to be incompetent to let them release the full report publicly.

A planet on which a $70 billion company was facing an existential threat which required it to convince the public it was serious about change, which it could do with an acknowledgement, an apology and a settlement of a few million.

Anyone have plain text or HTML of this content? Update: https://pastebin.com/L0Qf7Ddp

I suspect Uber has a Hudsucker Proxy situation going on.

TLDR version. Anyone?

Give more independence to oversight groups and more authority to the board, and institute basic, common HR practices like keeping track of complaints of employees, doing performance reviews of executives, and clarifying how promotions/pay work.

[edit] Oh, and number one: decrease Travis Kalanick's power.

If someone can write 13 pages in bullet forms about things you need to change, you're not doing your job very well...

There are very few companies I have ever worked with that had the majority of these bullets covered, so no, I don't think this particular snark is very biting.

If you can't write 13 pages of bullet pointed recommendations to any client, you aren't going to be successful consultant.

Move the catered dinners to earlier times? Now that's padding.

That's actually a crucial part of the culture to me - my company does dinner at 6PM, which everyone in the company knows is motivation for keeping people at work until then. I'm very thankful it's not 8:15PM. I don't want to be expected to work late daily and then have it disguised as a perk.

6 pm is way too early for dinner. We don't work on farms without electricity.

For the US, 6 PM is a normal dinner time, electricity or not. If you're in Europe, I understand where you're coming from. Mind you, that's the start - you can come and get food as late as 8PM if you please. The point is that for the most part, everyone can get their dinner at the time they want to.

I don't want to eat dinner at 8 because if I eat too close to bedtime I get heartburn and I am in bed at 10.

So long Travis.

Is he firing himself?

Because he still has absolute voting control and at least another $6B in the bank.

You are correct. But this is the start to the end. CEO's rarely bounce back from forced leave of absences and loss of responsibilities... Coupled with the Waymo lawsuit there is a lot of momentum in a less than good direction for him.

Like I said, so long Travis.

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