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.