Hacker News Reader

Comment by WisNorCan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder when Dara (CEO) will start being held accountable for Uber. So far his message has been, "That was them, not me". If he is sincere, he should ask the managers of Uber to share all the dirty laundry that they know. Then, he should disclose it publicly and get ahead of it. That for me would qualify as "that was them, not me".

He has been there 3 months, but there are 8 years of scandals built into Uber's culture before he joined. I expect Uber to be on the front page of HN for years to come. That can't be the right PR strategy.

He has to get ahead of it or he will lose credibility with the drip, drip, drip of bad news.

View on HN

He released the information about the security failure (which occurred a year before he was hired) and fired 3 security managers because of it.

He just issued a new company culture statement (with massive employee participation) that eliminates the prior version's language that encouraged jerks, and includes the statement "We do the right thing".

He's been there 3 months. What else do you expect him to do? It takes time to acclimate to a new company. A CEO really needs to learn the staff, meet as many employees and customers as possible, and soak all this in before they start making big decisions. Being a CEO is never a "shoot first, aim later" type of job.

Maybe we have different expectations of what CEOs should do. Writing culture statements is not hard. Adding "We do the right thing" is not hard. That initiative also started before he joined.

Identifying and owning up to the 8 years of toxic behavior is hard. That’s what would stop the negative news cycle. It is definitely hard, but he gets paid enough for us to have high expectations.

Showing real leadership is hard, harder than worrying about the news cycle. Real leadership is not about flash, not about showing dominance, and definitely not about looking the part publicly.

Who knows what he needs to work on in his first 3 months? Perhaps it is important to listen and understand everything before making decisions, rather than jumping to react so it looks good from a PR perspective.

Writing any culture statement is not hard, but running a process to understand the organization, set a clear direction for the future, and then solidifying values so that everyone in the organization knows is not. Writing a culture statement is also not the only thing he's done, just something that is public.

On a side note, the second you say "lavishly paid CEOs" and "he gets paid enough", you bring a level of disdain into the conversation that makes it hard to continue. We should absolutely hold CEOs of large companies to a high standard, not because of their pay, but because of their position and the responsibility they hold.

Writing concise, useful culture statements is hard.

I had an accounting professor who liked to say “If you become an accountant at a company or CEO, you have 3 weeks to find the dirty laundry. After that it becomes your responsibility, and your problem.”

Methinks your accounting professor never was a CEO. It took me a lot longer than 3 weeks at my new job to understand the key structures in the application I work on.

Your anecdotal evidence beats out a professor, sure.

A professor speaking anecdotally, sure.

That's a pretty safe supposition no matter what he said. Risk preference is real. There is very little overlap between the set of CEOs and the set of accounting professors.

And yet problems that appeared were yours, no?

Yep, like a company culture they weren’t fixable in a couple months.

He didn't fire 3 security managers. They resigned. That may seem academic, but I'm sure it wasn't for the people involved. If they want good publicity from firing people... fire them. If people resign I just assume it was because they got a better job (I've had a coworker pushed out this way -- the CEO just got another company to give him a better offer).

If you want to avoid bad publicity from 'fired' being in the headline, you also avoid the good publicity.

Did either of you read the story?

Uber last week said it fired its chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, over his role in the 2016 data breach, which compromised data belonging to 57 million customers and about 600,000 drivers. The resignations Friday came amid mounting frustration within Uber’s security team over Sullivan’s dismissal and the company’s handling of the public disclosure of the breach.

So he fired the CSO, and then those reporting to Sullivan resigned (The departures include most of Sullivan’s direct reports.).

>"So he fired the CSO, and then those reporting to Sullivan resigned "

Which is not the same thing as actually firing 4 people.

Did you read the parents comment?

Yeah, but it is pretty important given the context. He did fire the person directly responsible.

They were clearly allowed to resign. Three employees responsible for a major screwup don’t all suddenly get new Jobs at the same time.

"He just issued a new company culture statement." That's the funniest thing I've read all day.

Company culture (at least the previous, step-on-toes one) at Uber was heavily enforced; company culture as it is written down is also heavily enforced at Facebook (where Sullivan was before) and Google and most engineers at Uber come from either. Not sure what is Goldman Sacks (where a lot of Uber managers came from) written company culture, but there is a practiced version of it that is quite distinct (think Uber’s toe-stepping).

Dara did change the cultre at his previous company, starting by drafting a written document there too. Of course, enforcement is key and a longer process than publishing anything but firing a large number of managers will effectively change the culture. I can see how it sounds ridiculous for someone working at 99% of the companies where “company culture” is a cumbersome joke, but not in that context.

Company culture is not a joke at my company. Suggesting the CEO will start to change the culture with a memo would be. But, when your employees can’t afford to buy their options and have golden handcuffs I suppose you make the koolaid taste yummy.

> If he is sincere, he should ask the managers of Uber to share all the dirty laundry that they know.

Right. They'll just hand it over if he asks nicely. It's not like they've done anything illegal/unethical.

The uber culture has been built up over 8 years, and you expect a new CEO to clean it up spick and span in 3 months? Seriously?

How on earth this got upvoted to the top of the page is beyond me.

Exactly, it's not like he can walk in and just let everyone go.

He has personal credibility, but do you think he has any credibility with relation to Uber? At best I think the view is that he doesn't know about all of the likely scandals, so that he's being surprised along with us. That doesn't exactly breed credibility in his role at Uber, it just cushions his eventual exist when he realizes that he ran into a burning barn.

No, before you take over CEO of a company with a 8 year track record of being a pretty horrific company, coming off the CEO before forced out due to yet another scandal you get all the dirt before you sign on the dotted line. He knew about this before he took the role. It's all about in how he handles it.

This is the key point. It’s too soon, the jury is still out on the new ceo... but these are encouraging signs. We’ll see in time, because at the end of the day the only real thing that matters is that the culture actually does reform, all while not wrecking the business (ideally actually improving it). That’s a result that will always take longer than 21 short days...

It’s such a difficult challenge to change a company culture at a whale of a company like this one.

Thought experiment: if you inherit a spaghetti codebase with 10 million plus lines of code, how long do you have to find and communicate all the bad surprises?

There's no objective answer, but 6-12 months seems reasonable to me for a new CEO.

I agree, i'm not fan of Uber but a CEO simply can't learn all the ins and outs in a week. More so, i'd imagine that if the stories here are all true, there's all sorts of cover ups that have been happening and in many ways he's having to figure out whom he can trust, let alone how to find the skeletons. I'd imagine he got a pretty substantial incentive for coming on board.

> I wonder when Dara (CEO) will start being held accountable for Uber.

Held accountable... how? for what? You want Dara in jail for Travis's crimes or something? Are you sure you're not running low on sleep?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com