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Comment by terryjsmith | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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").

> 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.”

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.

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.

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