It sounds like the abuse is pretty universal, from the article: "It was normal for guys to refer to other guys as fags when they didn't participate in private parties where sex and drugs were involved."

The 20 other men on her team were probably as concerned with keeping their job and not being abused. The big difference is that they can appear to fit in because they're men; women have a much more difficult job of it. But whenever everyone is keeping their head down, it's hard to notice that other people's issues.

The whole psychology of bullying comes into play and that is pretty complex. Yes, if everyone stood up against the bully they would win but how often does that happen in real life? Most people in this situation would likely just quit than put up with that environment so you're already left with those who can't or won't.

I'd like to think I wouldn't let that stuff happen around me but honestly I'm pretty unlikely to work in that environment in the first place. Where I do work, the culture is great and we are near 30-40% women in IT/Dev without even trying to hire for diversity.

Full disclosure, I work at Uber.

I have been staying out of this until now, but this point particularly grinds my gears.

If I heard anything remotely like what was discussed in this article you bet your ass I'm going to speak up. I know people do not speak of me, but watching my entire company be vilified is a bit difficult and hard to not take personally. I work with a lot of fantastic engineers that would not tolerate anything remotely like the behavior outlined in this article for a second. That's the problem with gigantic companies though, things often happen in dark corners that aren't apparent to the rest of the organization. People want to conflate specific incidents with the state of the entire company.

I had one opportunity to speak up when my female teammate was being discriminated against, and I took it. It wasn't even blatant either, the guy could easily defend himself and say it's not a sexism thing, but that's what it was. He's a massive jackass too, but you can't fire people on the spot for being a massive jackass without a lot of evidence to back it up. I did my part.

I cannot speak for anybody else, but I can tell you in my corner of the Uber world I take this shit very seriously, and so does everybody else I work with. The bullshit that is going on is not representative of my team, and it's very very hard to not take this personally.

The problem I have is that everybody wants to chime in with how awful Uber is like they know something I don't. Now I'll admit, there's a lot I don't know about working at Uber, as I only know my corner of the company. If I'm saying that what does that say about everybody else? Do these people think for a second that I would have stuck around and stuck it out if I saw this bullshit going on first hand?

I'm not going to be the one that stands up and defends leadership, or HR, or whomever else, they can speak for themselves just as I speak for myself.

Well, as it turns out, they weren't. A female engineer I knew in passing wound up writing an essay similar to this one describing her horrible treatment at the hands of one of her coworkers and HR. I was shocked, but I also knew her well enough to know that she wouldn't make up something like that. She shared that story as her goodbye email from the company.

Even now, I'm baffled and angry about the response the company made. I don't know why it was handled that way, and I don't know why her coworker acted so wretchedly. It boils my blood, and mixed in with that and the bewilderment is a certain sense of shame that I had misplaced my trust so badly.

Anyways, I guess all of that is just a long way of saying that I hear where you're coming from and hope your experience ends better than mine did.

Uber clearly does a lot of things very well, and although I posted in a different comment that perhaps Travis should go I think that the best outcome would be that the company can learn from these events and become better as a result.

What? No it's not. If it was like that on every team, you would basically be describing hell. "Better than absolute hell" is nothing to celebrate.

Well I think that it's useful in the midst of stories like this to realize that yes, most people are nice, kind, etc. Perhaps most Uber employees are like that. It should give hope to anyone who is working somewhere that should be better who is inclined simply to quit vs trying to make it better.

For people dealing directly with harassment it's a pointless distraction. Of course there are good people. Anyone who is dealing with harassment knows their are good people, because shitty people are harassing them. The difference is not an academic one for them, it's a material one.

For you, the scariest thing about this thread is apparently that someone might think everyone on earth is bad? No that can't be. Your priority is ensuring we all remember not all Uber employees are bad? You're worried about the reputations of non-harassing Uber employees?

Sorry, I'm struggling here. What's useful about reminding people amidst a harassment crisis that not everyone ja bad?

>He's a massive jackass too, but you can't fire people on the spot for being a massive jackass without a lot of evidence to back it up.

The implication of this is that you also have experience at Uber working with somebody who is unfireable despite being a "massive jackass" and engaging in sex discrimination against at least one female employee there, while you were around as a witness. It's good that you spoke up when he acted like that, I don't mean this as a personal attack on you or your coworkers specifically. But your anecdote here reads like one more story confirming issues with Uber's management/HR, even though you've intended it otherwise.

In every company there are 'Jackasses' (selfish egotist managers, politically malevolent colleagues etc.) who can never be fired for their specific ways of 'jackassery'. In this Uber narrative it was not anyway implied that this person was always sexist jackass.

I'm just being respectful of the anonymous Uber engineers who are speaking up. This would only lead to goodness for the existing female employees who are there in Uber and other companies.

Here you are perhaps doing the same (vocalizing on behalf of silent majority of good individual engineers at Uber) and the HN crowd is piling on to you; perhaps no different behavior than what they are trying to preach against.

Despite the fact I pretty clearly explained the problem, you still read into it the way you wanted the narrative to be read.

There are more considerations like whether you're willing to pay unemployment, or open yourself up to a lawsuit depending on the circumstances.

Oh yea thats right. As other have discussed, its because Uber is a juggernaut corp who will out-spend the legal competition anyway, so Uber doesn't care.

I appreciate your defense that "it isn't everyone" and "I am an Uber engineer and I stand up for women/gays/minorities", but I'm not sure we are getting at the larger picture here.

Its the movers and shakers at the top who need to start setting the right example instead of protecting their golf buddy who is making 6 figures. You have done your part, but this needs to go all they way up to the top.

You'd think they would at the very least care about the bad press in terms of quarterly/yearly earnings and the potential loss of customers/drivers because of the PR fallout.

I assumed from the phrase "massive jackass" in your post that cruel behavior from him was typical and dramatic enough to be a marked pattern. Most companies /are/ willing to fire people who repeatedly disrespect and are cruel to their coworkers. It's part of a bare baseline that you need to maintain to have a decent work environment for your employees. You and the woman he discriminated against makes at least two separate eye witness reports to an egregious offense (protected class discrimination), and I assumed from your description of him that his cruelty wasn't just exposed to you two.

I understand you're outraged at people for their discriminatory behavior but you need to recognize you don't know the facts.

Practicality aside, how stupid do you think I would have to be to start a massive witchhunt against somebody who has had allegations made against them by an anonymous person?

They weren't talking to you they were talking to the person who asked for the witch hunt.

Although somebody does know exactly who this is and never should have let it slide. Those of you with your head down, it's time to go over your boss's head and say something.

That's the same person I replied to. I think you took my comment to be in reply to another comment of the same depth.

In any case, it is good you took the opportunity to speak up. Even if the company does not change anything, knowing that it is not all colleagues who consider you to be less helps to put things into perspective. For me personally, when something similar happened, it mattered a lot. Not just felt better, but really made difference in how I seen my position, how I was confident afterwards and how I trusted colleagues in general.

I am trying to say that the action like yours may have positive impact on colleges even if you did not seen it.

If you really wouldn't stand for this sort of thing, then quit your job.

You know nothing about what I'm doing, who I am, or anything about working at Uber except the worst of the worst. Yet here you are acting condescending, because you've read a bunch of newspaper articles you're morally superior.

I tremendously resent comments like yours. I hope you consider how offensive your comments are.

Also you are very right it is hard to say for anyone if we would have done what you have, very easy to imagine ourselves doing the right thing but so much harder in the moment.

So, no, I'm not going to suggest you quit your job. Hell, I don't even think you condone the nasty behavior coming out of your employer. But, by working at Uber, you are very directly helping a company that is about as far away from "do no evil" as possible. You're directly contributing to making the world a worse place and that sucks. That's pretty offensive to me. You're aiding and abetting a company that absolutely feeds into the anti-tech narrative in the Bay Area and that is personal. And, yes, I resent that.

The crazy part about these stories is not that Uber has a few awful people, and it's not that there aren't people who will speak up and complain. The crazy part about these stories is that HR seems to be systematically supporting the few awful people and antagonizing the people who speak up and complain.

I don't work in Regular Tech (I'm in a teacher-education nonprofit), so I'm not as exposed to the SV bro culture. I'd like to think I'd speak up and fight for people who are marginalized in my workplace. I wonder if I actually would. It's so easy to be quiet, laugh it off, and go back to your daily, if it's not you.

If you want men to do something, just threaten their masculinity. It seems you know the infallible trick of emasculation.

We already know that managers at Uber use reviews to punish those on their team that are at all critical of them (especially for ethic issues). The "20 men on her team", even if they did want to say something, could reasonably expect to have their careers (and potentially a material amount of Uber stock vesting) impacted by standing up.

That's not to say that these men couldn't have or shouldn't have stood up, but they would've had to take some amount of risk to do so. In a company with better controls, these men would've felt comfortable criticizing this manager (and confident that they weren't endangering their careers or financial well-being by doing so).

Yes, there is risk to speaking out. It wouldn't be brave to do so if there were no risk. I do think it takes people who are already in a relative position of power to minorities and women in tech–which includes men at the same level—saying that this will not stand, in order for real change to come about.

The system of control doesn't have to be optimized for good. In a situation like this -- where managers seem to operate without fear of reporting or push back from underlings -- there likely is a lot of control in place already.

> Yes, there is risk to speaking out. It wouldn't be brave to do so if there were no risk.

The same could be said of the victims themselves and highlights the problem with this attitude: betting on bravery is long odds.

If workers are highly dependent on managers' approval -- not of their work, but of their opinions, character, manner -- then they will learn to keep their heads down and go along to get along. It's too late when something like this happens.

I'd really like a culture where this was viable - I'd love for nearly everything to be done in the public sphere, and even 'backstabbing' to be handled in the clear, but since Diffie–Hellman exists, it's not viable.

- Upton Sinclair

Uninstalling the app and simply choosing to use a competitor's services are another option, but sapping the entire organization of revenue seems like it would hurt drivers and developers at least as much as management, if not more so. Do you think this merits organized public protest? Is the average Uber user aware of the issues/incensed enough to actually take to the streets?

Obviously I'd like to see a change, but I'm struggling with how best to actually make this happen.

WRT Uber, their business model is shady to begin with, and that's not the only shady thing about them. Yet, the post is anonymous, and sincere though it sounds, nobody can be sure that the allegations are true. If cost of a lawsuit is the concern, I believe there are many organisations out there who'd help with the case.

Aside: great insights into the victimhood mentality of the free speech zealots.

https://psmag.com/on-the-milo-bus-with-the-lost-boys-of-amer...

(WRT same-sex marriage issue, I believe that civil unions should replace all kinds of marriage we've today and it should be left to the individuals to decide what their partnership(s) mean to them, wrt their philosophical/religious stances.)

- OKCupid blocking a certain browser to access their website means that who uses Firefox to use their service has to either agree the company and boycott Firefox themselves too or not use the service. That is, they forced those users to participate in the boycott.

- OKCupid is a company, so all of its actions are not only in the name of their executives, but also in the name of the users.

- What they did boiled down to a public shaming campaign, hurting, unjustly, not only a person who used their freedom to support a given political quest, but also a huge community around Firefox and Mozilla that had nothing to do with Eich's political tendencies. Free speech is not useful at all if we let the loudest to win.

What OKCupid did is probably defendable in front of law, but is completely unethical and exploitative. They tried to start a lynch to silence someone. It's no different to shaming someone for being homosexual or calling someone with the N word and excluding them. And it was an attempt to suppress freespeech, not an act thereof.

EDIT: Let me also say it like this: who decides which speech is ethical or honest enough to be protected as free speech? You don't have to agree with what OKC did, like them, or even want to do business with them ever again. But you can't deny they're exercising their free speech and free association rights.

Agreed. When I said their actions have nothing to do with free speech, I meant that they weren't confronting a free speech issue. They have the right to do what they did (IANAL, competition laws may apply, though I don't know much about American law).

> Let me also say it like this: who decides which speech is ethical or honest enough to be protected as free speech?

The only one who gets to moderate is the speaker themselves, and the listener. And my view is that OKCupid boggled here.

> You don't have to agree with what OKC did, like them, or even want to do business with them ever again. But you can't deny they're exercising their free speech and free association rights.

Ditto. But I also think that the companies should stay neutral, especially those who serve registered users, for they represent them in that using their service continuously may (and do) cause people to get labeled with the company's tendencies.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Thanks as always for the excellent moderation.

[1] despite gay and lesbian developers coming out and saying that Eich's personal opinions on the issue didn't translate to company culture and they felt a positive atmosphere working there.

When a company is too big to fail it means that if it fails there's a systemic risk for an entire economy. Banks (and it's mostly banks), which are too big to fail are so interewoven with other banks, multinational companies and the economy as a whole that a failure can bring other institutions to the brink of exctinction and by extension wreck havoc on the entire economy.

Thousands of people out of a job does not mean too big to fail. No more being able to hail an Uber may be inconvenient, but it's no systemic risk to the economy.

Look at Enron. They had north of 20'000 employees when they imploded. And they where in a far more critical sector of the economy than Uber can ever dream to be. While it was brutal for the employees (who partially lost their life savings) and while I think there should be a special place in hell for the responsible executives Enron's demise had hardly any effects on the economy as a whole.

I'm not jumping on you personally. It's just that this too-big-to-fail nonsense in combination with Uber is thrown around an awful lot recently.

And it's utter bullshit.

There is no way to change a company's internal culture from outside. The only thing you can do is punish it.

For a lot of reasons participating in lawsuits is challenging for the victims, and I am in no way criticizing any individual for not going through all of that. I just think that really making an impact is going to require more than a few hundred app deletions and some bad PR.

Lois E. Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co.

Jock v. Sterling Jewelers Inc.

Shervin Pishevar, John Gurley, David Bonderman, David Drummond, Arianna Huffington, Garrett Camp, Ryan Graves

some of these people have reputations that are worth more than their stake in uber. the desire to uphold their reputations may be enough to get them to truly act on this matter.

Drivers can easily move to Lyft or other competitors (at least in markets where Lyft is active). In fact, I would venture that most drivers already drive for both Lyft and Uber.

Developers can (and should) look for jobs at other companies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

Frankly I think Uber has long passed the point where I expect to start hearing about leaked recordings and cellphone videos of this kind of thing instead.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-a-champ...

> The picture many current and former employees paint stands in contrast to the blustering controversies prompted by Trump’s comments since he hit the campaign trail. .... Those who have worked for Trump say looks aren’t everything. He is more interested in hiring smart people, regardless of gender, they say, and that has led Trump for decades to rely on strong, assertive women both as gatekeepers and as advisers. Several of Trump’s female employees said he fostered a positive work environment.

Finish the sentence please? Are you suggesting that one cancels the other out? Or that maybe he's just a great guy after all and just the victim of smear campaigns?

You're being surprisingly lenient in your assessment here. I'd argue they need to tell their bosses to fuck off and find another job.

You're asking people to stand up for what's right when it may cost them millions of dollars of incentives and the loss of years of their life in career investment. That doesn't make it right to look the other way when these kind of abuses occur, but is it any wonder that people don't speak up when the incentives are lined up so strongly against doing so?

Perhaps evil triumphs if great men do nothing?

Agreed 100%, but maaaan I have seen it where you would defend someone just so they can turn against you because of the same fear that originally prevented them from speaking out loud. Then they make peace with the abuser and now you are the one left holding the burning candle. It is a very tricky situation.