This is very much like a sign that Uber again takes an old path of silencing people and problems instead of fixing toxic culture. Makes me think that they also prepare to blackmail Fowler.
This seems to be Uber's modus operandi every single time they're in trouble and it almost always seems to backfire on them, PR wise.
I'm curious though, what tipped her off? While I've worked at tech start-ups before and can believe all the behavior she outlined (because I've seen similar things myself, it's very believable) it still bothers me to continue to take someone's word at face value. I mean I do, I would trust what she says over Uber any day, but I wish more of this type of information was verifiable.
>This seems to be Uber's modus operandi every single time they're in trouble and it almost always seems to backfire on them, PR wise.
From attending all hands meetings I get the sense TK has a victim mentality and sees himself doing no wrong or Uber doing no wrong.
Since we're clearly not wrong, it has to be the critic, right? /S
To be fair, we do get some BS scandals related to surge (they turned off surge for natural disasters! They're profiting off us! They left it on, they're profiting off our misery!) but almost all of our scandals are self inflicted.
>I'm curious though, what tipped her off?
I'd wager an employee.
Employees are very angry now at leadership, and in our last few all hands / CTO speaking to everyone (something they put together just for this week I think) people questioned publicly what's been questioned in the shadows for a while.
For instance, Uber has a list of stupid "cultural values" that include values like "always be hustling" (yes, it's a direct quote) and I've been in private conversations with people who find these values obnoxious and poorly written. Never raised to management though.
But this all hands people threw these bullshit values at TK and Thuan and pointed out how bad they are, including this specific "always be hustling" value. The questioner even referenced Zootopia ("It's called a hustle, sweetheart") to skewer it.
Also it was pointed out how our perf review process doesn't reward collaboration between teams at all (hence the politicking).
Felt almost like a press conference with ace reporters fighting against an unprepared, incompetent politician. Our CTO even cried, which was a little dramatic for me.
Thanks for the insights. Question about the inside view - do people really buy Kalanick's fake apologies/victim act at this point? We've gone through this ruse so many times, from the outside it just seems like a laughable caricature of malignant narcissism. From your comments about the CTO, I'm guessing he surrounds himself with "empathizable cover" after the classic abusive pattern (if you come after me, think about the damage it will do to the nice people around me).
Wait, your CTO cried at the all hands? Like publicly burst into tears in front of the entire meeting? I'm just curious, what did someone say to them that had that effect?
I find it fascinating that on one hand many people call what she described as standard and on the other people still call SV meritocracy. Even if you ignore sexism, the environment seemed to favor political maneuvring over skill and achievement.
I don't think a whole region can really be called a meritocracy - that strikes me as a pervasive myth. It would seem that meritocracy is something that a lot of SV companies strive for, but you'll always get companies that operate like Uber where meritocracy takes a back seat to politics and posturing.
While in principle being judged by nothing by your actions is a great, well, principle, in practice "meritocracy" ends up favouring people who were already socially advantaged in some way or another (e.g. male) to elicit the actions that the meritocratic judge is looking for.
The idea sounds nice, but it ends up just reinforcing cronyism. If you belong to the right in-group, usually stratified along some social injustice, you'll display the merits that in-group wants.
the point of a meritocracy is to produce the best possible work and reward good performance, not to right real or perceived injustices. Statistically speaking, if the majority of developers are male then a majority of high-performing developers will also be male. Hiring lower-performing females to attempt to achieve balance does not fix the original issue, and it serves to harm the hiring company by choosing people based on social group rather than skill.
Solving underrepresentation issues is, in my opinion, more about changing the perception of the industry for those poorly represented groups and performing outreach at younger ages, rather than having companies hire disproportionately more women or people of colour so that their employees look more diverse. That doesn't really solve anything.
Okay, so when I object and say "cronyism" you hear "let's hire idiots just because they're women". It doesn't have to be either of these.
A simple thing you can do is publicly state, "we encourage women and other minorities to apply". And that's all. You encourage them. You don't have to give them any preferential treatment to pad your numbers (and I don't think anyone ever really does that, but a lot of people seem to be afraid that it happens). You just have to explicitly direct your invitation to them. That's enough to increase your hiring pool and give your company culture a nudge in the right direction. If you object to the alleged benefits of having a diverse staff, I can't imagine you would object to attracting more people to apply who otherwise wouldn't.
A further point I want to emphasise: what is merit? Who decides what is merit? If you think being nice to others has no merit (or is not "good performance"), then you may end up hiring toxic employees like Fowler's sexual harasser and then keep him around because of your merit metric. This will end up costing you good employees like Fowler.
I wasn't suggesting you were saying "let's hire idiots just because they're women", I was pointing out a hypothetical scenario in which meritocracy plays second fiddle. There's no need to get defensive.
I agree with your suggestion that encouraging women and minorities to apply, and ensuring that one's company culture is inclusive, is a good start. However, this doesn't really help with the core issue, which is that the number of women and minorities getting into the field in the first place is disproportionately low to their demographic representation. I'm not well-positioned to suggest why that is, being a white man myself, but until the underlying issues are solved, decrying meritocracy as promoting white men over other candidates is not a valid criticism.
Merit is for each company to decide for itself. I'm sure there are many companies, Uber included, that consider themselves a meritocracy but the way they measure individual merit just leads to toxic culture. Fowler made mention of a number of bad actors who were not fired because they were high-performers in the company's eyes - and this is a valid concern for companies that aim to be purely numbers-based in their evaluations. Personally, I'd say that there has to be a baseline of decency for an employee to be valuable at all, and that how someone interacts with others should be considered as a metric for their individual merit. Quantifying that, however, is a whole 'nother question.
> I wasn't suggesting you were saying "let's hire idiots just because they're women", I was pointing out a hypothetical scenario in which meritocracy plays second fiddle.
You suggested "if the majority of developers are mal, then a majority of high-performing developers will also be male". So far so good. Then you made the non sequitur jump to "Hiring lower-performing females to attempt to achieve balance does not fix the original issue". That's a straw man, nobody suggests that. You risk being perceived as creating an absurd hypothetical ("let's hire worse people for social justice reasons") just for the sake of winning the argument, or even believing this is the choice that's posited.
I think this is a recurring problem with these kinds of discussions, people tend to put forward very extreme views of reality where what'd be useful is to seek the middle ground, understand the problem, and then nudge a bit in the right direction.
Additionally, even the basic premise that we currently hire for merit is questionable. Of course everyone tries to hover the best and brightest, but it's easy to see see how a very homogeneous group like SV software devs might mistake group conformity for competence.
Not directly, but one of the main attempts to address a lack of diversity in tech seems to be diversity quotas, or companies actively looking to hire more women or POC. Diversity quotas directly cause the exact issue I quoted, where the ratios of allowed hires by social group does not match the ratio of applicants. Statistically speaking, that's equivalent to agreeing to hire less-qualified individuals. Attempts to specifically hire more women or POC through outreach might help an individual company, but it's a zero-sum game of multiple companies competing for the existing small pool of candidates.
> I think this is a recurring problem with these kinds of discussions, people tend to put forward very extreme views of reality where what'd be useful is to seek the middle ground, understand the problem, and then nudge a bit in the right direction.
I think part of the issue is that you immediately devolved into hyperbole about hiring "idiots". Hiring slightly-less-than-the-top-candidate developers is in no way comparable to hiring "idiots" and your suggestion that it is is only muddying the topic further.
> Additionally, even the basic premise that we currently hire for merit is questionable. Of course everyone tries to hover the best and brightest, but it's easy to see see how a very homogeneous group like SV software devs might mistake group conformity for competence.
Of course suggesting that hires are always for merit is questionable - it's more of an ideal to aim for than an actually achievable goal.
> Not directly, but one of the main attempts to address a lack of diversity in tech seems to be diversity quotas, or companies actively looking to hire more women or POC.
[citation required]. I haven't ever seen that.
> I think part of the issue is that you immediately devolved into hyperbole about hiring "idiots".
I did not, please check who you're quoting. Regardless, I think that's overphrasing it, but it's essentially the straw man you put out.
Likely an ex-colleague she kept in touch with, who tipped her that s/he had been tapped. I know I would react that way, if anyone started asking pointed questions about a friend.
She says in her next tweet that she doesn't know who it is or what their aims are. I doubt Uber is attempting to smear her. I don't think the people involved are that evil, but I'm pretty confident they aren't that stupid.
To be clear, in this case I think it's quite unlikely, specifically, that Uber is looking for information with an intent to discredit, disparage, or defame Susan Fowler.
> They previously (and probably illegally) hired a private intelligence firm to dig up dirt on their opponents in a court battle
What was done there seems obviously inappropriate. It's unclear to what degree the intent was (I certainly understand wanting context). The situation was obviously very different.
Why is it unlikely, given that they've done this exact thing in the past? You're entitled to think whatever you want, but you can't in good faith argue that this isn't their pattern of behavior. You're right that the circumstances are different, but the only constant is Uber underhandedly going after anyone who criticizes them.
And an editorial in HuffPo from someone who pals around with the person engaging in the abusive behaviour is a pretty weak defense. Especially since they did a similar thing before:
> Why is it unlikely, given that they've done this exact thing in the past?
They've dug up dirt on ex employees making public accusations like this? I haven't seen any claims to that effect. As I said, I think it's unlikely because I don't think the people involved are that evil, and I am confident that they are not that stupid. If I'm proven wrong, I'll be loud about it and I'll be working some place else.
> And an editorial in HuffPo from someone who pals around with the person engaging in the abusive behaviour is a pretty weak defense.
It's not decisive. I didn't present it as such. It's still the case that even the original source describes someone in a role that doesn't deal with the press ranting about how Uber could do something. Even if we take it on face value that's a far cry from establishing that they did it, as was your assertion.
> Especially since they did a similar thing before:
This is the first I've heard of that event. Obviously, that's an inappropriate use of PII, at least. It's entirely unclear from the article whether the list "sent to make a point" was meant as a threat of disclosure or to point at some specific discrepancy between the data and the reporting. The former would be similar. The latter, a different issue.
-your bar for skepticism/reproach is only cleared with proof that they've done the exact same thing before, telegraphing their intentions along the way?
That article alleges poor controls around customer data, not coordinated action. It seems unrelated to what we were discussing, which was likelihood of Uber to - reusing my earlier phrasing - try to discredit, disparage, or defame Susan Fowler.
