The real question is: did senior people in HR have to walk? If they did, you can feel reasonably confident their replacements won't repeat their behaviours. I'll remind everyone that we're talking about an HR department that repeatedly lied to its employees and did their damndest to shield bad people. If that isn't fixed, you can be guaranteed it'll happen again, whether or not another Fowler decides to do the world a solid and go public.

You bring an important point which raises another point- who enabled/let HR do this? And what happened to them? HR doesn't exist in isolation and I've known big firms' HRs to be trigger happy as long as they can justify it.

Right. This is the core problem. Most people who wind up in HR are rule-followers who are acutely aware of the legal risks associated with harassment culture.

As many have pointed out: we already know the answer to that question. However, bringing down a founder if the paper trail doesn't lead back to them directly is extremely hard (and I'm only adding that qualification because of GitHub) so he's untouchable. And the culture undoubtedly reflects his desires. However, if senior people in HR know that _doing what the CEO wanted won't save them from being fired for cause_, it'll concentrate minds quite effectively.

"who enabled/let HR do this?"

Typically, CEO or COO.

Fish rots from the head.

So, what I'm saying is, why not cut the head off?

Cut the head off of the human race?

It's not a... perfect metaphor.

No arguments here

>> who enabled HR

please tell me this is a joke right? you can't possibly be asking that question seriously..

HR is a business function, and the business is run by executives, so unless the HR function is run day to day by the CEO then HR needs to be enabled by someone. The HR function in a company the size of Uber is a deliberate structure that is guided by business goals set by the executive team, the executive team gives the HR function the authority within the framework (policy, implicit and explicit direction) provided.

If the story is true that HR dissembled and protected staff who were blatantly breaking the law then it is very reasonable to ask "who enabled HR?"

[EDIT] minor grammar fix

I think the parent was saying that there's no point in really asking this question because the answer is that it obviously came from senior leadership, clearly including but probably not exclusively limited to the CEO.

This isn't the sort of stuff that I could single handedly prove in a court of law, but frankly none of this comes as much of a surprise. Anyone who's come within shouting distance of that company knows how it operates : heavy on kool-aid & low on self-restraint - an MO that comes straight from the very top.

I wasn't the one asked, but I seriously want to know.

Not sure what you mean with your question. Do you think it's obvious what the answer is, or do you mean it's not a question that should be asked?

I read it (correctly or not) as saying: "Travis started and runs the company, and his respect for women is well known and public. Of _course_ the people working in HR know this, and were quite likely selected/employed by him or one of his trusted douche-bros..."

Is it _not_ as obvious to everyone else as it seems to be to me?

It is beside the point whether it's obvious or not; clearly it is not obvious enough. You treat it as if it's some purely academic pursuit, not of interest to anybody. No, the question should be repeated incessantly until the right people go to jail.

Go to jail? I think that is a little bit harsh considering the crimes committed. When will America stop being so damn protestant when it comes to punishment?

> clearly it is not obvious enough

It is very obvious though, if your basic working principle is that your fellow comments aren't sexist monsters.

It's a good principle to work off.

I read that question as implying: "it is HR's job to ensure the company does not get successfully sued over personnel-related matters; since company metrics apparently indicated the harassers were businesswise quite valuable, why did you expect HR to accomplish their objective by ousting the (valuable) harassers instead of running interference for the harassers?"

> The article doesn't discuss the seniority of the fired employees. It's very hard to distinguish between scapegoating and actually working to fix the problem without that information.

It's probably important to consider that even with those numbers, you wouldn't know whether it was scapegoating or not. All they would do would be to allow you to make assumptions, which is more about your preconceptions of what you think they should find than the facts.

> The problem with Uber isn't that some employees engage in sexual harassment. The problem is that there's a culture where sexual harassment isn't taken seriously, is tolerated if the perpetrators are "high performing"...

See, this may be true, but we don't know this. The point of an investigation is to find this out. Since the investigation in question here is internal, and I'd hazard that most of us don't necessarily harbor any hope that an entirely truthful response will come out of it (I for one wouldn't really expect that from a company I thought was more responsible than Uber), but that doesn't mean we should act like probabilities (and probabilities that are rooted in human behavior that is understood to any statistical degree by almost anyone in my opinion), we should be careful about the certainty we represent those outcomes.

In other words, it's all a big swirling mess of hearsay at this point. The problem could be fairly localized but widely publicized, or much more widespread as you state. We don't really know.

Sooner or later you've gotta decide who to believe. The person with nothing to gain by reporting it, or the company with everything to gain by denying it.

Besides, it isn't hearsay, the allegations have been made by some of the victims. Hearsay is something else.

I didn't say it was hearsay. I didn't say I didn't believe the people reporting the problems. I'm just noting that there's a lot of room between "some employees were harassing others, largely unknown to most management" and "there's a pervasive culture of harassment that goes all the way to the top, and includes much of management".

And I can fully believe everyone reporting problems believes they are right while withholding judgment as to whether their interpretation of their situations, which were generally highly emotional and formed during extreme stress, is entirely consistent with reality once the other side has a chance to state their case. We should always get both sides. Humans aren't very good at representing stressful situations with other humans objectively.

It's hard to maintain credibility when you say things like "I didn't say it was hearsay" when your words are just above and say "it's all a big swirling mess of hearsay at this point"

Fair enough, that's a deserved criticism. I thought I had used slightly different wording, and didn't confirm before responding.

What I was attempting to communicate is that there are a few first hand accounts, and numerous news articles and blogs expounding on what those mean. I didn't mean to imply that those that had those experiences were not referring to their own experiences, or that they were being untruthful, but I understand how either of those might have been interpretations of my words. I'll leave them as they are because I don't believe in whitewashing, and let this stand as the correction.

While I think it's important to get both sides of the story, I don't view both sides with the same level of trust. I think those with the accusations are far more likely to have accounts closer to reality in this case, but closer to reality doesn't mean they are accurate representations of the situation when taken by themselves. Confirmation bias is real, and doesn't have to have such an extreme effect as to change someone's opinion to still have a large effect on how people perceive the situation.

Not really. I can continue living completely agnostic of this drama, it's none of my concern, a belief either way pays no rent. If I wanted to work there, then I'd have to decide, but as a casual user there's no need. Downvoters: do you drink coke products?

It's an internal investigation. The point is to protect the company from lawsuits, bad PR, and future incidents. It'll only be effective at figuring out how to prevent future incidents if leadership values that aspect. From what I can tell, Uber's leadership has a particularly intense and narrow-minded emphasis on Uber's business performance.

I'm not holding out much hope of getting clarity from the investigation.

There are two "parts" of the investigation. More coming at a later date in the near future WRT high level leadership. Other publications like axios state that Emil (BD) and Thuan (CTO) will likely be shown the door.

Says the article: "The company didn’t name the employees who were let go. Some of the people fired were senior executives, according to the person."

Note that firing senior employees also doesn't imply that scapegoating isn't going on. If senior HR executives were perfectly in tune with the will of their bosses and then fell on their swords, there's no reason to suspect that the next crop of HR executives will not get the same cultural messages.

These sort of scandals persist because that 'proving' and then cementing the perception that the problem is solved to outsiders is very difficult.

Um, it's not scapegoating if these people are harassing other employees. Scapegoating is when you hire underlings for projects that senior management was driving. No one forces you to harass another employee.

By "scapegoating", the parent post was proposing that they are poofing up the numbers for a nice press release about their anti-harassment activities by firing underlings, and simultaneously minimizing the probe's negative effect on management. Good press and good for shareholders. Not good for the common good.

Err, what? Scapegoating is blaming and punishing someone in order to falsely claiming that the problem is fixed. Yes, the harassers should be fired for harassing. It doesn't fix the problem of management taking the side of harassers over the harassed.

You're both kinda correct... your original comment was just poorly phrased.

The word "scapegoat" is commonly used to describe someone who gets blamed for something unfairly. Assuming these fired employees were harassing colleagues, then it wasn't "unfair" to fire them.

But you seem to be using it in a manner similar to "fall guy". Where a lower-level wrongdoer ends up shielding higher-level wrongdoers from blame.

Yeah, that's definitely what I'm pointing at. Low-level wrongdoers getting scapegoated for higher-level misdeeds. There's two problems, really - sexual harassment, and a culture that tolerated it. The question is which issue Uber is firing people for, and which problem Uber is getting credit for fixing. I don't think Uber should get credit for fixing the second problem by firing the people contributing to the first problem.

Scapegoating isn't the right word, but ThrustVectoring is right. In 12k employees there will be some dicks who sexually harass. You fire them.

The problem at Uber isn't some line level eng or line level management sexually harassed someone; it's that HR and the VP Eng and the CEO all tolerated it. So unless someone whose name goes in SEC filings gets fired, they aren't taking this seriously.

To be perfectly clear, both of those things are problems. But one is a much bigger problem than he other.

I think people are making the point that if the hierarchy covered the harassment up as suggested by the story so far, they shouldn't get off the hook if they allowed that environment to continue and didn't take appropriate measures as soon as they were notified. At least that's how I understand things.

Wouldn't scapegoats file wrongful termination suits? Seems like a hell of a risk for illegitimate firings.

I think the point OP is making is that you can fire 20 developers who are guilty of sexual harassment in some form but that even though they are guilty of that there should be people above them who essentially permitted their behavior and let it go unchecked who should also be fired. If you believe, like OP does, that the problem at Uber isn't individual cases of sexual harassment but an institutional passivity towards it then someone higher up really needs to be held accountable as well.

The suggestion is not that those who were fired did nothing wrong. It's that they are being made to take the fall to shield higher-ups who also have done things wrong.

The suggestion is actually, just that. That is the literal meaning of "scapegoat" in English: one who is wrongfully taking the blame for another.

The other responder, dopamean, answered the question considering that context.

Yeah, that was my fault for making it unclear.

They're guilty of sexual harassment, but scapegoats for the culture that gave them free reign for so long.

>The problem is that there's a culture where sexual harassment isn't taken seriously

Is there? I've seen people claim this but I haven't seen any evidence for it. I know Susan Fowler's account is used frequently as basis for that statement and though I don't doubt her sincerity and truthfulness, you can't just extrapolate her experience to the entire (global) company.

I mean... a quick google search will get you there.

[0] Travis calls Uber "Boob-er" because it helps him (and other execs) pick up women

[1] Sexual Harassment + Heavy drug use at the global all-hands

[2] Company group, including CEO, visits escort bar in Seoul

[3] More "survivor" stories

-------------------------------------------------

[0] http://www.gq.com/story/uber-cab-confessions?currentPage=1

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace...

[2] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/27/uber-employees-visit-karaoke-...

[3] https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-ub...

> Is there? I've seen people claim this but I haven't seen any evidence for it.

As another point of evidence, they just fired 20 people for sexual harassment to address 215 separate claims before the separate outside report into the amount of sexual harassment in their company. Maybe they don't deserve your skepticism.

It wasn't just for sexual harrassment. It was for an conduct that they deemed inappropriate, like bullying, harrassment, etc.

You stated: I haven't seen any evidence for it.

In the very next sentence you offer one such evidence, and then go on to discredit it with you can't just extrapolate.

The mental gymnastics of motivated reasoning is a wonder to behold.

>In the very next sentence you offer one such evidence, and then go on to discredit it with you can't just extrapolate.

Right. Because in the first case we're talking about a systemic problem applying to a global company of 12,000 possibly spanning all levels of management as well as its polices and mandates. In the second case we're talking about a person's singular experience - which I've never disputed. The former is a much stronger statement than the latter so you cannot use the latter to prove the former.

Were you really not aware of Uber's work culture issues?

Uber's problems with work culture and hostility to women has been an open secret for years. I remember hearing rumors about it since 2014 at least.

None of the recent allegations are surprising to anybody at all who has been aware of what it is like to work there.

In a culture where sexual harassment is taken seriously, the firings happen one-at-a-time as things get reported. It doesn't fester until the media spotlight shines on the company's cultural problems, then result in an investigation as to why things got so bad.

>"Is there? I've seen people claim this but I haven't seen any evidence for it."

Can you explain why you feel that 20 people being fired as a result of a company-wide investigation into to sexual harassment doesn't constitute evidence of a problem?

Because it's 20 people out 12,000 and I (we) have no idea what it is they were fired for exactly. We don't know the context, the exact infraction, and how it was dealt with initially. I can't even tell if that rate is high, average or low when compared with any other company of similar size who would create a special sexual-harassment probe to investigate itself.

>"Because it's 20 people out 12,000"

What are you suggesting by this, that there is an acceptable margin for unacceptable behavior?

>We don't know the context, the exact infraction, and how it was dealt with initially."

We do know the context, the context was an investigation into sexual harassment conducted by an outside law firm.

We know that 31 people are in counseling/training and another 7 were given warning as a result of the investigation. So by comparison the incidents with these 20 were determined to be serious enough that they warranted termination instead of counseling or a warning.

>I can't even tell if that rate is high, average or low when compared with any other company of similar size who would create a special sexual-harassment probe to investigate itself."

I think the fact that 58 people (20 + 31 + 7) needing to be addressed retroactively instead of proactively at the time of the complaint is a pretty good indication there might be a large problem.

> 20 out of only 12,000 is a huge number

12000/20 = 0.001666

.17% is not a huge number.

I suspect that 12k is ubrs world wide FTE these firings are coming from the head office in CA so its actualy a higher %

And in IR 20 serious cases warenting firing Is a lot (I do have hears of dealing with serious cases) I would expect given 20 firings there will be a lot more who are allowed to leave with compromise agreements.