Susan Fowler worked at Uber for a year. She wrote up the saga, and why she left.
After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.
Oh, that sounds familiar. Open relationships are fine, but some of the people in them seem to be using it more as an excuse to harass.
Take a guess what happened after that. Go on, try.
Nothing happened, of course, other than denial, excuse-making, and lying. I bet none of you are even surprised. Fowler did transfer to another group, though, but the problems persisted. I get the impression that Human Resources ought to change its name to Man Resources.
When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25% women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another eng organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6%. Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn’t transfer were quitting or preparing to quit. There were two major reasons for this: there was the organizational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organization. When I asked our director at an org all-hands about what was being done about the dwindling numbers of women in the org compared to the rest of the company, his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers.
She finally had enough.
On my last day at Uber, I calculated the percentage of women who were still in the org. Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3% were women.
Good to know, for next time someone tries to claim it’s all the women’s fault for not being good enough.
“all-hands” Hah ! I bet they were !
Most women I know including myself would look at that percentage and decide to pursue other options. Even for a male dominated field that’s low. You might not be certain there’s a problem there, but why risk it unless you have to?
I just wish she didn’t end the story with her pride in helping to destroy the working class. I was already pissed off with the way she was treated by the company, but when I got to the pride in the work she did for them that came like a slap in the face.
Tabby, seriously, go fuck yourself.
You’ve got someone who’s proud she wrote a book and improved the state of practice in her technical field, despite being burdened by a deeply sexist organization.
And you take that to be a slap in the face because you disagree with the upper management’s business ethics.
No, numerobis. You go fuck yourself. It’s possible to be horrified at the treatment this woman received in that company and still be pissed off at her pride for the work she did for that company in the first place. Uber is everything that’s wrong with capitalism today, and she went to work for them willingly. It’s okay to be disgusted by her choice to work with them, and it’s possible to still be disgusted by what she went through there.
Disagree with upper management’s business ethics? The entire fucking company is built on a lack of ethics. I’m not going to pretend she’s a good person just because something very fucked up and wrong happened to her. I’m sorry this happened to her and would love to see justice served, but that doesn’t mean I have to have any regard for anyone who decides to work for a company like Uber that is built on destroying the working class.
I can’t go back and delete my posts, so I’ll just say I’m sorry. My disgust with Uber (and every other company in the “sharing economy”) and the people who choose to work for them are one thing, but this wasn’t the place to air that. It’s distracting from the problem that’s being brought up here with the sexism that dominates not just Uber but so much of the corporate world and is complicit in holding back so many women.
It’s derailing, and I apologize. I’m also sorry for snapping at you, numerobis.
It’s the sharing economy, not the caring economy.
It’s not a sharing economy. Uber isn’t sharing anything. Uber’s drivers aren’t sharing anything. Uber is just a dispatch service for freelance taxi drivers.
True sharing doesn’t result in one party becoming valued at $70B.
Tabby Lavalamp #6:
Good. You weren’t entirely wrong though. Uber is evil indeed.
Apparently the CEO has posted that he was unaware of the situation, that it’s unacceptable and that HR’s response to her should have been the end of that HR person’s job. He followed it up with a request for anyone to message him directly, so maybe he’ll start addressing the corporate culture.
Is this the same executive who wanted to dig up dirt on journalist critical of Uber? Or the one that had a promotional stunt whereby ‘hot chicks’ would be your driver.
Well, neither of those were the CEO. From my startup experiences, I’d doubt that the CEO was familiar with the Lyon office’s ad strategy. The other case is less excusable (although I’m sure that doing ‘opposition research’ is pretty much SOP in most corporations). We’ll see; proof’s in the pudding.
I understand that she wanted to make her situation work until nearly the very end, and then she was just ready to be gone and move one, but she had more than enough evidence gathered to file a complaint with the EEOC (even if she didn’t want to hire a lawyer and pursue a private lawsuit), who would have filed a lawsuit against Uber based on the abundance of evidence she had (I’m pretty sure about this). She might have been able to help any female engineers that remained at Uber and forced actual changes there if she had done so. Legal discovery brings a lot of things to light, like how many actual complaint had been filed with HR.
…and what the CEO did or didn’t actually know.
Tabby, thanks.
There’s basically two parts of the Uber business plan: one is figuring out how to provide transportation cheaper and better than with private cars + taxis. Basically by making taxis more efficient, and working on self-driving cars. That makes transport more accessible, it reduces the number of cars we need to build (but it wears them out faster so we keep newer, more efficient cars), and it reduces emissions overall. Uber also has better customer service in terms of letting you know that a taxi is actually coming. All good stuff. There’s a significant loser here: “making taxis more efficient” means fewer taxi drivers — down to zero when we get self-driving cars. This is the mission that Uber announced to the world and got people excited about.
The other part is to just completely ignore all the laws and regulations that exist. That part of Uber is unremittingly awful, and clearly from what Fowler wrote it seeps into the entire management chain. That’s what I assume you’re mainly bothered by, Tabby.
You don’t need any technology at all to just not pay your taxes and not buy medallions — quite the opposite, you get to avoid developing the technology to properly track the taxes you owe. So Fowler’s work would have been in support of the publicly stated mission of improving transportation that people were excited about.
In Montreal we have a taxi company that copied the improved dispatching idea from Uber, but still has medallions like they’re supposed to — plus they bought a fleet of electric and plug-in hybrid cars, so they get to be all greenwashed* (they even painted their taxis white with green roofs). With that, and mounting pressure from increasingly large and frequent taxi strikes, there was political room for the government to tell Uber to take a hike with its bullshit, and start paying taxes and following some rules. After all their disingenuous ad buys and Trumpian lies to parliament and media failed to get them pure unfettered laissez-faire, Uber agreed to follow the rules. A big part of the Uber story is that governments and people are just letting them get away with their evil.
* greenwashed to some extent, but they really are running largely on nearly-zero-carbon electricity rather than on gasoline. Their cars really do run more quietly, and don’t emit much pollutants. And they don’t roam the city aimlessly.
Derek Vandivere: indeed, I’m almost certain the CEO is totally unaware.
That’s why he needs to be fired.
[blockquote]In Montreal we have a taxi company that copied the improved dispatching idea from Uber, but still has medallions like they’re supposed to — plus they bought a fleet of electric and plug-in hybrid cars, so they get to be all greenwashed* (they even painted their taxis white with green roofs). With that, and mounting pressure from increasingly large and frequent taxi strikes, there was political room for the government to tell Uber to take a hike with its bullshit, and start paying taxes and following some rules. After all their disingenuous ad buys and Trumpian lies to parliament and media failed to get them pure unfettered laissez-faire, Uber agreed to follow the rules. A big part of the Uber story is that governments and people are just letting them get away with their evil.[/blockquote]
My company partners with this taxi company to get wifi while you’re in the cab. They’re pretty good people. A fair few Tesla’s in their garages, too
Austin, TX demanded that Uber run background checks on their drivers. Uber refused, so Austin kicked them out. The thing that was most surprising to me was there was an immediate backlash from Silicon Valley types, eg, Mark Andreessen and Paul Graham, who said Austin has just killed its chances to be a tech hub. Having spent 20 years in silicon valley myself, long before Uber existed, it was obvious that Uber wasn’t the key to technology innovation. But I think their commentary indicates a certain techbro mindset, and they couldn’t understand why Austin wouldn’t capitulate to Uber.
Increased automation is inevitable, and there will continue to be societal disruptions that governments are not yet taking seriously (eg, Trump’s claim to bring back those good coal mining jobs to WV). But that doesn’t mean that Uber gets to to dictate the terms to the communities it operates in.
Shots fired!
Tashiliciously Shriked: Taillefer looks likely to get a government position next election, the way he’s positioning himself as the éminence grise of the Quebec business world.
I would be somewhat tempted to vote for him, actually (but not over my current MNA).
About the OP: if Uber’s dev team were unionized, Fowler could have either demanded protection by the union, or sued the union for not protecting her, either way with a far lower risk of employer retaliation.
I wonder what horribly illegal things Uber’s directors would do if there were an attempt to unionize.
#16: Well, I wouldn’t expect the CEO of a multinational to be aware of local ad campaigns. I’m guessing you meant that being aware of the cultural problems with brogrammers is an issue. If he actually turns his promise into actual action, then I’d be willing to cut him a bit of moral slack.