No. Uber didn't use to have lone rogue sales people that were immediately fired when the company learned about it.

Take this source from 2014 as you decide, but there have been mainstream news articles in the past stating contrary:

http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/uber-fake-ride-re...

You and others missed parent's dry humor.

FTA: > it's not just a rogue employee or two

Sarcasm and dry humor do not befit the internet

Thank you, inetknight, brave Knight of the Internet.

guelo's point is that Uber's actions were institutional, and the organization didn't even make appearances to do anything about it

Yeah, but this could break some restaraunts. OpenTable should be compensating those restaraunts affected, at the very least. And this is different in that it didn’t just affect OpenTable’s rivals, affected the third party business directly.

If it was not sanctioned by OpenTable, why should they compensate? If a government employee does this, should the government compensate?

It was not sanctioned by them, but they're still responsible for the actions of their employee.

What if it was a customer trolling a restaurant they didn’t like?

Do you routinely interview, hire, and give responsibility to your customers?

Then the employer doesn't compensate in this case.

I mean, Chicago pays something like 100 million dollars a year in police misconduct settlements...

You mean such as in the case of e.g. police brutality or mishandled prosecution? The government is indeed on the hook. It is OpenTable's responsibility to ensure that it hires ethical people and that it encourages them to behave ethically and verifies they are doing so. Anything else would be insanity.

Yes, the government pays out settlements due to employee misconduct too.

Yes, it is the kind of move Uber has been alleged to do. I give OpenTable props for just firing the person responsible.

Why do people always believe the story that there was a solo perpetrator who acted alone and without the consent of the organization? Most likely they were nothing more than a sacrificial pawn in this scheme.

Are you saying that you think that I believe the story of a solo perpetrator? My only comment was that I gave Open Table props for firing the employee. Whether or not the company was complicit it is pretty clear to other employees that 'losing your job' is a very real possibility here. And that, in my experience, reinforces 'rule following' and 'ethical' behavior on the part of employees.

If the company was complicit or directed the behavior, firing an employee over it for PR sake makes their actions worse not better. That's what I read when I read "sacrificial pawn".

I agree with you that if the company did this to "get away with it" that it would be reprehensible. That said, by actually firing people it makes it hard for the company to do this again in the future, even if it wants to, because employees who remain are more careful about being compliant with activities.

In my experience watching company cultures, companies that fire employees for bad behavior (as opposed to reassigning or sending them for additional training) are less likely to be complicit in that behavior. And when this sort of behavior is uncovered at a higher level, more likely to fire the senior leader as well.

How do you know that they actually fired anyone?

It's irrelevant whether anyone was actually fired - there's now a news article saying that someone was fired over this, which is the same (if not wider reaching).

If they didn't actually fire anyone, you don't think word would get around a 625-person company that the PR statement that a rogue employee was fired was BS?

OT only deserves props if they paid compensation for the damage they did. The employee represents the company.

I was not stating what you believed. Your comment set off a knee jerk reaction to this narrative that is all too common in today's media coverage of corporate malfeasance. It seems, to me, that the PR play book is to blame a single individual and then fire them.

Fair enough. As you can read, I am (gently?) pushing back against the narrative that all corporations are evil. :-)

I find I too have a knee jerk reaction to narrative arguments which seek to assert a generalization (as most of them do) against their enemy target. We are flooded with them these days pretty much everywhere we look.

I observe that a simple statement, "I give credit to companies that fire employees they discover have engaged in actions which violate their stated values.", is pretty standalone without narrative. And yet, it is contextualized by the reader into the narratives they either endorse or oppose.

And since narratives are crafted from a curated set of truths, things that would either disprove or dismiss the conclusions of a narrative are most vigorously opposed or pushed back upon.

It almost seems to me that the reality of a more nuanced and textured reality where many things are true, corporations can be both good and evil, and everything is evolving through experience and time, is the most frightening place of all.

That brought to mind Sunday's Dilbert comic. http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-03-04

Correct. They have a pattern of this behavior IMO. See my Medium post on this subject, linked in the Eater article.

Which brings up the topic of responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities and leaked credentials.

I'm just surprised they admitted it was an employee and not an 'intern' or 'third-party contractor'.

Even if you're right, it's the kind of stunt the company can only pull once. No employee in their right mind would be the fall guy for this scheme again once they've shown that they'll throw someone under the bus.

Screwed over a rival, and got to fire that dude who's a bad cultural fit.

So they believe the employee acted alone eh? His name wasn't Oswald by any chance? Well I'm glad they got rid of the only dishonest person in the company. Phew!

If true, I don't see the equivalence. If we take OT's response as credible, then it'd be the product of one rogue employee whereas you're claiming Uber did this as company strategy. Time will tell if this was one OT employee's doing or if it was a don't tell and we won't ask policy that accounted for these actions.

Likely not credible.

Uber and Lyft both did it to each other during the early days.