Surveillance company harassed female employees using its own facial recognition
theverge.com
theverge.com
The company is just acting shocked about the gambling to appease the public. Everyone knew something like this was bound to happen eventually. The cultures just aren't compatible.
In a blue collar work place welders are dumb, electricians are gay, jokes about wives and girlfriends are fair game and a suction cup didlo is a tool of endless comedic potential, not a HR disaster waiting to happen. And the overwhelming majority of the time nobody takes any of that seriously or gets offended by any of it. It's just how the culture is.
Dunno what kind of lousy shops you worked at but nobody ever did anything like that at the granite shop I worked at for 5 years, nobody did that kind of stuff in the landscaping crews I worked on.
And even though I felt my coworkers were somewhat OK, they would still make remarks (especially homophobic & racist ones) that would be at least grounds for disciplinary action in most white collar fields.
That (along with RSI and the pay) was one of the reasons I left the trade. I enjoyed the job, it is really satisfying to have that sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, but I was frankly tired of having to be around/associated with crappy people.
those guys smoke, sit in the sun all day, work with all kinds of toxic shit, can fall, and don't have huge career growth potential.
they have nothing to lose and the humor shows it
I realized later I was just not seeing the people who felt excluded by this type of humor.
We'd always play a game where you'd throw a golf ball at the shop floor, trying to bounce it into the nuts of your coworker. I'd never even think of playing something like that in an office.
You're missing the point. I'd rather not be shot or hit by my coworkers at all, anywhere.
They're both examples of inappropriate workplace behavior.
It seems like, if all restaurant workers put up with the culture, it might be because those who won't never joined in the first place.
It is not applicable here though.
I wouldn't cringe if I heard off-color jokes at an auto repair garage.
I think I'd call the police if I saw a bunch of dipshits sitting around a workstation, targeting random women from the other room with facial recognition software to share degrading posts about them being receptacles for their own sexual gratification.
Aside from TV sitcoms and online forum caricatures, I haven't a clue what that kind of sociopathy has to do with blue collar workers.
By no means is it everyone but the percentage that could be categorized as such per 100 persons is definitely higher.
If you want to see it taken to an extreme go spend some time with Alberta oil/mining/gas industry workers.
Source: several friends (mostly female, some male) who are nurses. Their environments sound deeply toxic, and super political.
I would daresay out of line for all business environments. Blue collar doesn't mean one must suffer boorishness.
But it isn't a masculinity problem, it is just plain dominance behavior. That can have different manifestations. Some use drastic expressions, some try to shield women from the barbaric hordes.
Professional distance has its place in business of course.
I always look at it as the customer has my money in his or her pocket. As I'm not, myself, ever going to risk getting that money by calling that guy's daughter ugly. I'm not even going to consider putting anyone in front of that guy if there's even the slightest chance that he or she might call that guy's daughter ugly.
A lot of business success and failure is just common sense stuff like this. That's probably at least a part of what gave rise to that blue/white division in the first place. The guys at the top simply don't want to lose money over something stupid.
No it's not free, because it bleeds. It bleeds into interactions where it's completely inappropriate. You want to be uncouth, do it at home in places where there is no possible connection to me or my business. You're at this business, then you're on your P's and Q's or you're out. Simple as that. Times are already hard enough without throwing nuggetheadedness on top of everything else that's losing businesses money and putting employee livelihoods at risk.
But the million dollar question is how much it bleeds and whether that is worse than the trade-offs you get from telling people not to joke around. (obviously it's a scale not a binary choice)
Listen, i won't argue about "too PC", but in my experience, if a workplace have a not PC culture and the target of discrimination start shooting back harder than the bully, it always end poorly for everyone.
I'm a decent person and I treat people with respect. The reality is this isn't the goal of PC, I have to be socially submissive to the trend of the month.
I'm not trying to apologize for ultra-masculine culture, but this epistemic argument about the presence or absence of emotions boils down to "their culture is not my culture" and just increases the divisions between those cultures and accelerates the culture war.
In the end - if what you actually cared about was people being uncomfortable you'd think through the economic, social and technical structures that make them feel uncomfortable. IMO, it has overwhelmingly to do with naive adoption of technology, with PC culture being a way for those who benefit from this adoption to cope with the negative results of that adoption.
Don’t tell me I’m wrong for being offended because it’s your “workplace culture”.
Which doesn’t alter your point at all.
I find this slightly worrying. We use the free tier of slack (which in itself is a bone of contention), one of the big problems being that there's only a 10,000 message history available to users so useful information quite often drops out of view.
That said, Slack have specific admin tools to deal with harassment and bullying. Even on the free tier it's possible to contact them and ask for this history, even if it's been deleted by a user and even if it's past the 10,000 limit. The fact they can't get the chat log strikes me as suspicious.
So, it was investigated by deleting the evidence? Stellar company!
It seems Verkada actually does tolerate sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior.
Literally just one of these transgressions is a fireable offense at most other companies.
hyperbole has the exact extremist effect you're railing against, which is indeed needless.
with that said, a demotion, an unpaid furlough, or pay cut may be part of a more reasonable consequence, giving the offenders a chance to reflect and grow (and eventually return to their prior status), rather than throwing them into a potentially negative cycle.
Why are you sure? Especially given their weak response so far?
But as long the money roles in investors don't give a shit.
Leave the company, or have slightly less of something already worth zero? What a “fuck you” non-response to those women.
But at a startup 10 years later, after interviewing a recent graduate from the local college I asked our VP Engineering if she was a fit. He replied "Did you see the guys around her? If I hired her, we'd get nothing done around here!" I was appalled. He later became an executive at Carbonite.
My aunt once accused me of laughing at my grandmother's funeral. I don't remember, but I certainly meant to only be respectful at the funeral.
Sometimes you need to take a dramatic action to make it clear what your culture is (or what you want it to be).
It’s perhaps unfair to one of those 6 who was hypothetically just being polite and pretending to laugh along. But you can bet the rest of the org got the message loud and clear.
Sadly with entrenched -isms like sexism, it seems to require a drastic action like this to really make a change in org culture. It’s really hard to “make the company less sexist” if there is an entrenched bias among employees. And you may just need to fire a bunch of otherwise good people to get rid of it.
So the argument you're really making is about whether what they did was sufficient to pass the bar for "should be immediately fired". Because it wasn't that bad? Because a little casual comic sexism never hurt anyone?
My point was to fire the offender, and not everyone else who might be involved. Innocent until proven guilty, you know.
For me, I wouldn't want to work for a company that fires with collateral damage.
We're talking about bias here. While I don't disagree that it would get everyone to step in line firing people who did nothing wrong seems like a high level of collateral damage.
I do recommend you pick up the book and give it a read (it's great), as Horowitz does go into a lot of detail on when the "shocking rule" strategy is appropriate and the considerations. I won't do as good a job summarizing here but I'll try.
It's true that this inflicts collateral damage. That's part of the point. The fact that you're willing to inflict collateral damage to preserve/enshrine a norm is shocking, and that demonstrates the commitment to that norm.
You definitely should not play this card often (ideally never, but you should have it in your playbook).
The action is shocking, and you'd expect many employees to be shocked. They will discuss the event because it's shocking, and so your decision will be well-known and the news will be self-perpetuating. (And maybe some will leave who don't think that it's a big deal to call women "bitches"; this is a good thing, you have made your cultural norms clearer, and employees who realize they are not a cultural fit will tend to self-select out at the margin.)
Note you can use the "shocking rule" principle in non-ism enforcement too, e.g. "mishandled customer PII => instant fired", "plane crashed due to failures in the QA process that was your core responsibility => instant fired" or even Bezos's famous "All Amazon internal services will communcate over public APIs, if you don't do this you're fired". Not making any specific claims about whether these are good reasons, but just pointing out that whatever norm you want to enforce that are critical to the company's/org's survival, you can use this principle to fuel a dramatic culture shift. You don't get to play this card often though, so be sure that the shift is worth it.
Not to diminish the fact that even raising it to HR could be challenging in some orgs (e.g. see Susan Fowler's saga at Uber).
And also worth noting that it's easier to find the confidence to report to HR in an org where the line has been clearly drawn by actions such as the dismissals that we're discussing -- that's the point of the "shocking rule" principle.
I'm looking forward to minimum report quotas and "report your coworker" special days.
Safety violations are taken that seriously at some companies, anyone observing one that doesn't report it also gets fired.
It depends on what type of culture of accountability the company wants.
Trying to take it further ("report days"?) seems like a slippery slope fallacy to me.
Advice if you work at a place like that and find you're under a bad boss or your coworkers are assholes you need to transfer out. Otherwise eventually you'll get made redundant with the rest of them.
It doesn't sound like it was even proven that anybody said it. Yikes.
Without more context, it's hard to know if that response was laudable or horrifying. If this was an ongoing pattern of behavior, then it's good they finally did something.
If this was the big boss making a show by firing employees for laughing at their manager's inappropriate joke bu not reporting it to HR by the end of the day, then that's a pretty horrible place to work.
The person who made the joke and his manager need to go, but the rest of the team? That's a harder case to make.
Erm, I actually don't think that's an undue assessment necessarily if the guys really were acting like idiots. Hiring a female employee into that atmosphere would be suicidal. And the candidate is lucky she doesn't work there.
The problem is the VP of Engineering not trying to fix his employees acting like jerks around a female candidate. Eventually that's going to bite the company in the ass.
Its time to stop excusing guys and blaming the women.
What a horribly toxic environment. I can't imagine any employees slept soundly at night knowing that if they were in the room when someone said a PG-13 word that they'd be fired on the spot.
A comment like that isn't remotely appropriate. If that's what you're willing to say off the cuff, how am I going to expect you to treat the women around you day to day? I don't want that future lawsuit, or at a minimum another complaint to HR to have to navigate.
Bye. The door is likely to hit your sexist ass on the way out.
Things are not always as clear-cut in real-life as they are when contemplating a scenario on the Internet.
The discussion isn't about firing someone who made an inappropriate joke. Why is that not enough example already?
A competent CEO would have fired all of them on the spot once the investigation was completed. You don't let someone who sexually harasses coworkers resign in order to save face. Letting these people off the hook, regardless of how good an employee they were otherwise, perpetuates this behavior. I guarantee you that these men will go on to other companies and continue to do the exact same thing to someone else.
THIS PART IS WRONG, IT'S THE ORIGINAL POST AND I LEFT IT FOR POSTERITY: If in the US, wouldn't this be illegal? Retaliation against employees tends to go poorly for the retaliators.
edit: Just to be clear, that's not an excuse for any of the behaviors discussed
It happened because they're assholes.
Surveillance is not fun, it is serious business and doesn't deserve a "fun" culture. I guess from a surveilor business' point of view it is a rather effective way to numb the inner critic of your employees.
Illegal actions should be dealt with by the police and the courts. Apart from providing evidence, the company should stay out of things.
Company policy violations should be dealt with by the company as they see fit, including no punishment at all, or even a bonus!
In this case, the article criticizes the company for not sufficiently punishing people for their actions, when clearly it's a matter for law enforcement not the company.
Illegal actions often violate company policy. Indeed, there are often legal mandates that company policies must also effectively address illegal conduct or else the company will be liable for the conduct.
The parent wasn't claiming it definitely was, so much as expressing that the police and courts are appropriate parties to determine the legality, beyond what actions the company itself may take for violating internal policies.
Many people see how problematic it is to increase the surface area of police enforcement, which carries the threat of physical violence. Is it really necessary to resolve workplace disputes with armed state agents?
Then too, we must consider the rights of the accused. Simply being arrested can be a huge life-altering event. Being docked pay or fired is more proportional to the size of the infraction. And society needs a gradient of responses: not every offense should consumer the resources of the police and the courts... that simply doesn't scale, and it's not a humane solution.
Generally, illegal things done while on the job or representing the company are also against company policy.
I’m not sure how it could possibly be different. Companies should be able to develop policies about things that affect their business and employees, which obviously includes illegal behavior.
Any surveillance company, scratch that, any company run by Filip Kaliszan should not be in business. Any company with Hans Robertson on the board should be avoided.
They really shouldn't be able to change the company name to hide their guilt. They should be seeking other lines of work, out of the surveillance industry forever.
People worry about a culture that doesn't seem to allow for grace, but this is the sort of case that seems appropriate. There's no real recognition of fault here, and the affected women are still forced to work alongside their harassers. Horrific!
Never. People and organizations that purchase that kind of software just don't give a fuck.
I wonder why they use slack to post images. What went wrong when employees were trained on handling personal data? Would they also post images of clients on a slack channel?
This paints a clear picture. There should not be a place in anything IT that regularly handles confidential information. This might have been the sales team, but especially in their industry it should be dogmatically condemned.
Trust is key in security and sadly the industry has become a shame for anything remotely connected to tech and nobody gets any safer here.
edit: "sales athletes" - talent: talking shit?
I think there is a lot to be said for the business plan concept of intentionally NOT hiring "sales" people who come from a traditional sales/marketing background. Have a compelling product and website marketing material about it that doesn't require outbound sales efforts to go hunt down the customers.
My personal theory is that aggressive outbound sales attracts the sort of personality that may be more likely to engage in many possible manners of outlandish behaviour.
Yes, you might be leaving some money on the table, but you'll also have a better corporate culture as a whole.
Quarter million dollar contracts that promised functionality our system wasn't designed to support? Let's just drop everything for three months and butcher our architecture so that you get your bonus. I'm sure this won't have any negative consequences.
Only the sales team has shown any enthusiasm for participating.
I can't speak to your experience or all organizations, but what you're getting at in my eyes are two things.
Sales Executives _tend_ to be the most transparently compensated employees. It generally is 60 (base) / 40 (variable) but other ratio exist (70/30 is more common the technical sales side). Since the sales side has explicit KPIs tied to revenue, it's very clear how success can be determined unlike most other roles inside of organizations. In the best case, there's a stock plan but that is only indirectly related to revenue. Moreover, if you don't hit your quota, you are gone. If you're a seasoned sales rep or have personal relationships, you can skate by having a bad quarter / half / year but this is the exception, not the rule. This is a fine-ish solution for compensation for the sales side of the org, right? You have a quota, your success is based on attainment. Easy-peasy. Didn't hit your quota because of a recession? Didn't hit your number because of a global pandemic? Didn't hit your number because of A, B, or C? Tough luck.
For other roles, in my eyes, there does need to be an intrinsic decoupling of current or next quarter / half / year sales objectives and their incentive structure. Refactoring may be important for a code base but fundamentally doesn't bring in revenue. It nets to _hurting_ short-term revenue since the man hours aren't focused on the newest widget the competitors have. Over a longer time horizon, it can fuel revenue indirectly by making it easier to add new features, etc, etc but for someone like me who has a quota, it doesn't _help_ me in any direct manner. I have to build presentations and demos to work around the bugs I know exist, weak spots in the product. I have to explain roadmaps for feature sets while being very transparent that a purchase today does not entail a customer commitment so that we don't have revenue recognition issues in 3 months when a feature slips. If the company doesn't ship features X and Y within 6 months, are engineers fired? Generally not. Will the net effect from a marketplace competition perspective result in sales reps being fired? Generally yes.
Back to the culture issue, yeah, that's present. The boiler room mentality of a lot of sales reps breeds a locker room mentality and the incentive structure formalizes things. Sales reps aren't retained for being a nice gal / guy / whatever. They are retained based on a single figure: revenue. That's the focus and in poor sales orgs that's the only focus.
Will someone make more money, all else being equal, selling something? Yes. Will they have a stable livelihood? Almost assuredly not.
This is true but a company founded to do a sleazy thing like “surveillance” is only going to hire sleazebags anyway. Or turn previously decent people into them.
I understand bro culture through and through, I've got a group of friends and we some of the most vile things to one another after work, in private. The thought that we would turn right around and do the same things we do after work at work is untenable.
Like how can you be so effing stupid for lack of a better term. Some will rightly say that the environment reinforces that behavior but even them I'm at a loss. Out of all my guy friends, not one of us would even think of doing something like this.
The answer is in the article. Nothing of consequence happened to them. They think it's ok to do it, because they want to do it and they won't get in trouble for it.
This right here sums up the entire issue. A workplace will reap what it sows. You want to allow weeds to take over your fields? OK, don't be surprised when there is no crop at harvest time.
Well, note that in this case they didn't get fired. So... that might make them think it's ok to do this.
All of the bro's involved in that Slack chat should have been immediately fired. No form of sexual harassment should be tolerated.
The culture, behaviour etc aside, that's the question I'd be asking this company.
On a similar note, I had a UK credit referencing agency salesman contact me and try to sell me their product; as part of the sales pitch he gave me credentials to their web UI and encouraged me to try it out; on there I saw their other leads' credit reports (including mine, which was empty as expected) and their trial attempts at looking up other companies, and had the possibility to look up any company or individual as long as I pinky-promised I had their consent, and even if I did have their consent, that data would still be exposed to anyone else having access to this demo account.
..and if they where a bioinformatics company, would sales have access to employee health records?
Security cam info is sensitive, I see no reason anyone but security should have access to it.
testing and demos? create purpose-built test data. Even if you need to use real data, the last thing that should be used is that of fellow employees that you actually know, and therefore have greater scope to act on maliciously.
So he can show off a real world use case to people who might buy it.
He obviously can't be showing off client's installations.
$0 in zero-valued stock options? I guess technically that is likely the truthfully largest penalty ever because it's unlikely that they have ever imposed any financial penalty on any employee. Or, they do have a policy of imposing financial penalties on employees ... I don't know which is worse.
That said, the zero tolerance being advocated here is not helpful. Based on the story alone, it's not as if the women involved were directly being harassed/assaulted. This is more a case of locker room banter. It's actually lucky this happened in the way it did (ie, with evidence) so that it could be nipped in the bud before possibly escalating.
OTOH, Verkada could have and should have done much better than what they did. It doesn't even amount to a slap on the wrist. Does anyone even believe that the discipline amounted to more than "don't get caught next time"? Laughable. An event like this, for a company like, isn't simply an internal matter. There are predictable public-facing repercussions. They have a lot more space between "nothing" (their response) and firing.
Well, the CEO has essentially no proper experience in real companies; only the ones he founded. But, he seems like a smart guy and should know better than this.
this isn't a case of props at all. just a case of tier-locked features.
And how could this person have known that "find me a squirt" would return an employee?
What exactly is a squirt?
>RawVerkadawgz