[lovealmond]

I joined Uber as an engineer last year. For me the deciding factor was they have really interesting problems to work on, wonderful team, impact that i can have from my work & they move fast(minimal bureaucracy). Pay was the last thing on my mind (they pay decently). My team mates are very accommodating, they taught me lots of good stuff. Professionally this has been amazing for me. Speaking for myself, I haven't had much stress than what i had in my previous companies. For me stress used to come from bureaucracy, which TK does a good job of keeping it to minimum.

You speak of ethics & morality, let me ask you about a cause which is very close to my heart. How do you feel about tech in general where diversity is big issue. Black & Hispanic engineers are in low single digit percentage (ex: FB/Google 1-3% [1][2])? Can i call someone not ethical for working in such tech companies, which does not provide equal opportunity in the name of meritocracy? I think issues should not be treated in complete black & white. HR messed up in doing the right thing, that does not mean everyone working there does not condone this and support such abhorrent behavior. [1] https://www.google.com/diversity/ [2] http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/06/driving-diversity-at-fac...

[tedivm]

You act as if it's this one thing that has people upset about Uber. Uber has actually done a lot of sketchy things-

* Threatening to dig up on dirt on journalists who aren't nice to them.

* Having a "god mode" available to all of their staff to see who drives where, which was only restricted after it became public.

* Creating a blog post about how they can figure out who is having one night stands (or, as they called it, "rides of glory").

* Blatant and repeated sexism. Anyone who lives in the bay area knows people who have worked at Uber and have heard the stories.

* Encouraging drivers to sign up for subprime auto loans.

* Tracking users locations even after they get finish their ride (even more ominous when combined with their "rides of glory" privacy invasions)

* Hiring a firm comprised of ex CIA agents to pry into the lives of people who screwed with them.

All of that can be confirmed with multiple news sources by a quick google search. It's not just their lack of diversity that makes them a cringeworthy company, it's the fact that they repeatedly and regularly go out of their way to disrespect privacy and generally act super sketchy. They're practically comic book villain level at this point.

[penguinfeet]

I think half of these were done out of incompetence, not maliciousness:

* Threatening to dig up dirt: You try working hard on a product and listening to reporters bash you every day of the week, sometimes blatantly making things up. I don't condone the exec's actions, but Sarah Lacy doesn't exactly have the greatest reputation.

* God mode - it's arguably what made Uber. There was initially a lack of restraint on its use, but I've heard of people getting fired for its misuse well before it was public.

* The blog post was very stupid.

* The sexism is quite rampant across all of SV.

* The subprime loans were pure incompetence: it got fixed. Nowadays it's easier to walk away from the loan than at any other dealership.

* The user tracking I heard was to prevent fraud - there's close to $1 million being taken by fraudsters per week. Fraudsters have also physically assaulted employees.

* They investigated a lawsuit being filed because it was targeted specifically at Kalanick, and their security team deemed it a possible threat. The guy happened to be ex-CIA in his previous career.

[TwoBit]

I have never in 30 years in the Bay Area seen the kind of sexism reported recently about Uber. The fact that your only response to it is to claim everybody does it just reinforces the allegations against Uber.

[inimino]

For a company with a billion-dollar valuation, incompetence of that magnitude has a quality all its own. These sound like pretty flimsy excuses for a company that has enough cash on hand to buy competence in all these areas.

[penguinfeet]

Exactly - which is what they did

[lovealmond]

You are right, they have fucked up in the past. There will be some more fuck ups going forward. What i have seen is employees fiercely question each & everything in weekly town halls & there are positive steps that have been taken to make things better. I am optimistic that Uber will become much better going forward due to genuine efforts taken, question is can they do it fast enough to overcome the cultural debt they have accumulated during the hyper growth period.

Out of all, below happened after i joined for which i have some info. * Tracking users locations even after they get finish their ride (even more ominous when combined with their "rides of glory" privacy invasions) This is done for 5 minutes after the ride ends. This is required to fight fraud & ensure safety of riders. This can't be opt out because fraudsters will opt out & we still have fraud.

[CaptainZapp]

"This is done for 5 minutes after the ride ends."

First of all: We only have Uber's word about that. A company not known as the most forthcoming when it comes to telling the truth.

"This is required to fight fraud & ensure safety of riders. This can't be opt out because fraudsters will opt out & we still have fraud."

This is about the most ludicrous reasoning I have heard in a long time. Fraud prevention doesn't really require that you spy on your customers. You're not dealing with Random Q Shmoe spontanously jumping into an Uber. All of those users need to create an account and provide a valid credit card in the process. User accounts can be locked immediately if fraud is suspected and even if fraud occurs the amount could be a couple 100 bucks, max.

Look, I understand that Uber needs to come up with some excuse to justify spying on their customers. But please tell your communications department they shall try to come up with something more plausible and to stop insulting the intelligence of the general public.

[penguinfeet]

Lol, a couple 100 bucks max

[lovealmond]

1. If they really want to spy on customers why would they do it only for 5 mins after the trip ends? Why not do always like some of the other apps? I remember waze had it like that for a while.

2. Fraud at Uber's scale is not few 100 bucks.

I have decent critical reasoning skills not to agree blindly if the message came from communication department (it did not).

[rimantas]

Those do not look like fuckups to me, i. e. things what happened accidentally. They look like the logical outcome of the very same culture and that thing does not change easily.

[snowwrestler]

How's the diversity at Uber? To the best of my knowledge no one knows, and there is reporting today that it's because Kalanick personally prohibited measuring it.

How is a company going to manage toward improving a metric if they're not even measuring it?

[flukus]

> How is a company going to manage toward improving a metric if they're not even measuring it?

What makes you think they want to improve it? If they're after the best it's probably counter productive.

[alexbeloi]

People are known to have bias in favor of people that resemble themselves, so even if you tell them to just 'hire the best' they won't necessarily control for their biases and more so if that data isn't being collected and reviewed.

So if one wants to actually hire the best, they should measure these things, otherwise you can't correct for things like 'our Cal alum hiring manager keeps passing up a bunch of good Stanford grads' or more serious versions of that.

[epmaybe]

Also, why NOT measure "diversity"? You don't have to act on it, but it sure would be nice to have the metrics for any later analysis. It's not hard and isn't something that takes many resources to compile.

[flukus]

Because if you aren't diverse enough by some arbitrary standard then you've just painted a target on your back.

[snowwrestler]

It's not arbitrary. The gender and ethnic makeup of the tech industry are significantly divergent from the general population, and there is no job-performance reason for it.

It's not like it's the NBA, where you have to be a tall strong man to make the team. Anyone can program, market, manage, etc.

[ygaf]

Fair point and spoils my enjoyment of the parent poster's provocativeness.

[ubernostrum]

Implicit in your statement is a belief on your part that women, black people, etc. are inherently less qualified than white and Asian men. Would you like to back that implication up with evidence?

Would you further like to consider that historical evidence indicates that when an industry claims it has meritocratic processes which naturally produced lopsided hiring with respect to gender and race, that claim has been debunked, often spectacularly, by simple tactics such as blind interviews in which the interviewer cannot discover the gender/race of the candidate?

Perhaps after considering this, you should find some other use for that reflex arc which produces "hire the best" statements whenever you're exposed to the word "diversity".

[flukus]

It's sounds like it's implicit in your belief that women and minorities are inferior and need to be selected for.

Any situation where you have two candidates and hire one because of irrelevant characteristics you won't be hiring the best.

You want sexist and racist hiring policies, but only when it suits the genders and race's you want. Do you here outrage from white people about being under represented compared to Asians?

[ubernostrum]

You want sexist and racist hiring policies

Did I say I did?

I want meritocratic hiring processes. I just happen to suggest -- and I believe evidence is strongly on my side -- that a process which produces lopsided gender/race ratios is extremely unlikely to be meritocratic. I also do not believe many of the other sound bytes people inevitably throw out in this argument (example: "that group just isn't interested in our field" / "they just prefer other things", another classic which will, I'm sure, rear its head in this thread sooner or later).

[umanwizard]

> a process which produces lopsided gender/race ratios is extremely unlikely to be meritocratic.

What is the strong evidence for this statement that you claim exists?

It is very unintuitive to me, as I have always thought the problem existed earlier in the pipeline than the actual interview/hiring process. I am always open to my view being changed, so I would like to see this evidence that is strongly on your side.

[tomp]

> that a process which produces lopsided gender/race ratios is extremely unlikely to be meritocratic

Then you have the wrong process in mind. AFAIK the breakdown of employees is very similar to the breakdown of graduates (and hence applicants). So there's no bias in hiring, all the bias is coming before (socio-economic status? personal choices?).

[exo762]

> Implicit in your statement is a belief on your part that women, black people, etc. are inherently less qualified than white and Asian men. Would you like to back that implication up with evidence?

Principle of charity.

[ubernostrum]

Many people, whenever it is suggested that something is wrong with hiring processes if they produce lopsided gender/race ratios, have a reflex arc which causes them to say something about how changing processes would be bad because you have to be sure to "hire the best". Or, about as commonly, that any change would "lower the bar".

There is no charitable interpretation of this reflex.

The only possible way to interpret it is as a naked statement that groups currently disproportionately underrepresented in the industry, or at specific companies, are made up of inherently inferior people. Otherwise, a process which "hires the best" would hire more of them, and hiring more of them would not "lower the bar".

[escape_goat]

With all due respect, that's not the only possible way to interpret it.

The intuition being expressed is as follows: Say you work at a factory, filling boxes of widgets. Widgets of varying quality stream past you, coming out of the widget stamper, such that you only have time to grab, on average, one widget out of every ten. Your job is to grab the best widgets you can spot, and put them into your bin. that's how the factory sorts widgets into different grades of quality. Further down the line, other failed startup founders toil away at other bins, snagging the ones you miss, from best to worst.

Most of the widgets are sort of a greyish mucky colour, but about one out of twelve will display a splash of original colour from the plastic that was recycled into widgets. You think nothing of it, but one day your pointy-haired manager comes and tells you that the "colourful" widgets are extra-popular and people are trading them. The company can sell boxes with at least 1/3 coloured widgets for ten times the price of regular widget boxes. Your job is now to ensure that at least one out of every three widgets that you grab is "colourful."

As a consequence, the average quality of widget in the boxes that you pack declines.

There are a lot of wrong and simplistic assumptions behind this understanding of "changing hiring processes." The knee-jerk assumption that doing that means implementing a naive quota system is not the least of these, but there are many others.

Furthermore, it is much more likely to be put forth by not-very-tactful people who have nothing to gain (and perhaps something to lose) extraneously, from greater workplace diversity; these are the people who are the most likely to both be sympathetic to, and express, views that seem at best borderline-racist.

This does not, however, mean that there is no charitable interpretation to the 'reflex' you are describing. It is not a cunning excuse to perpetuate *-ism in the workplace. It is what they believe to be a serious and valid objection to "changing hiring processes," as they understand it.

[exo762]

I could not word this better than you.

Notion of diversity being a better metric than actual performance is makes sense only if you see companies as a vehicle for hiring, not a tool of delivering value.

[lovealmond]

I would expect the same low single digit percentage for black/hispanic engineers. They measure it, we saw some broad breakdown based on gender (15.1% females in engineering, compared to FB - 16%, Google - 19%). TK said they are going to release full numbers soon.

[edit: sorry, i missed adding details about the low single digit percentage claim, updated that. Thanks zachrose for pointing it out]

[zachrose]

I'm interested in your interpretation of diversity as a single percentage.

[flukus]

I'm interested in yours and where you would stop. Is it only race based is does every group have to be represented? Are you interested in the percentage of people from lower socio-economic groups working there or just the amount of Latinos?

[zachrose]

Note: thanks for clarifying, lovealmond.

"Have to" be represented sounds like it's a chore. There are many ways that people can be diverse, I wouldn't see the need to "stop". But if I had to think of a list I guess it would include:

Age

Race, gender and sexuality*

Nationality and/or experience being the Other

Favorite programming language

Economic background

Religious background

Languages spoken

Regional identity

Personality

Fashion, in a broad non-prescriptive sense

Promises vs. callbacks

I spend way, way, way more time working with my colleagues than I do directly determining the makeup of my firm. But I hold the thesis that diversity and success (particularly creative success) are correlated, and apply that thesis in deciding where to live and work.

* Particularly in the way that everybody forms their own person out of their genetics/biology and the surrounding society.

[Sacho]

> But I hold the thesis that diversity and success (particularly creative success) are correlated, and apply that thesis in deciding where to live and work.

What evidence do you base this thesis on? Do you have examples of say, successful and racially diverse companies?

[lostlogin]

> that does not mean everyone working there does not condone this and support such abhorrent behavior.

I'm guessing that you mean that many don't support the company's behaviour?

There were repeated points at which complaints could have been addressed.

A lack of diversity can be due to poor hiring practices or due to industry shortages. Either of these isn't the same as ignoring direct complaints of harassment. Your post reads like minimising the disgusting actions of Uber.

[rimantas]

  > How do you feel about tech in general where diversity
  > is big issue. 

I do not feel it is an issue at all. Unless you think that there is some deliberate attempt to prevent blacks and hispanics from joining IT.

Why does some field need to mirror racial/whatever composition of the society? Are you concerned that NBA demobraphics does not represent general demographics?

[PaulRobinson]

You're straying onto dangerous territory. Your argument is built on one of meritocracy, but you're implying that non-white and/or non-males are proportionally less able to think analytically than white males. There is no evidence to support that, and in fact such a suggestion is just outright racism.

A field that basically runs society should ideally mirror that society's composition. Diversity is healthy, particularly in an industry that attempts to combine creative and analytical thought inside multiple models of economic and political philosophy.

The fact women and non-white people are under-represented in our industry is a major problem for its long-term health.

"Software is eating the World". Put another way, "Ideas created by white men are eating the World, in a way that is fully automated and potentially oppressive." History suggests we should have a rethink before we go much further.

[ganfortran]

> A field that basically runs society

Fact 1: In the House of Representatives, women hold just 83 (19.1%) of the 435 seats. Fact 2: In the Senate, women hold just 21 (21%) of the 100 seats

Politics as a field disagrees. And it has been running like this for a long time, I guess?

One thing I don't get is that, when people talk about NBA, with very little Asian representation, they will gladly accept the fact that Asian men are, physically not as capable as African Americans, but freak out when it comes to the tech sector.

Isn't this hypocritical? Diversity is a good thing to have, but I don't think it is more essential than, software engineering skills, itself, when hiring a software engineer. Companies are not charity, they hire engineers because they need engineers. If the demographics of engineers reflect the overall demographics, diversity will come to companies naturally.

Maybe one should ask the right question how to educate more african/hispanic engineers, and Asian basketball players than trying to find them only when blame comes.

[soundwave106]

Up to 1916, those US government numbers were respectively 0 (0%) and 0 (0%). So there has been a slow adjustment.

The problem here is that it is not necessarily talent / genes / physical characteristics that is the barrier here. I agree it is better to ask questions on what the gaps potentially are (and if they are fixable) rather than assign blame or feign outrage. I would caution in any genetic assumption, though, unless it is backed by really good data. One only has to point to the old discredited eugenics philosophy to show the dangers here.

From looking at the international community's CS graduation rate, there is a high degree of variability. 40% of Mexican CS graduates are women, and 10% of Switzerland CS graduates are women (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/th...). Googling, women as a percentage of graduates is even roughly at parity or even with women as a majority in certain countries (Malaysia and some Arab countries). Based on this, I would consider culture to be more of a dominant factor in explaining the current CS gap rather than anything genetic based.

Some of the issues that create a lack of diversity reflect current norms that, if adjusted, would in my opinion improve everyone's lives. For example, from what I've read, at least some of the gap regarding women achievement in the work force (in general) can be ascribed to a combination of work-family balance concerns, tradition (women "traditionally" run the household), and America's high pressure, "more hours" oriented work culture. This honestly doesn't sound like a bad thing to fix for men in the IT workforce, either.

[ganfortran]

> would in my opinion improve everyone's lives

No doubt. However, the same bar should be applied. What I read from the media seems suggest, companies should follow their command to increase diversity whatever it costs, otherwise it is racist/sexist and prepare to be attacked.

I don't agree with this. Because it makes software engineering as a job look easy. Those non-technical journalists seem to believe, company either intentionally choose not to hire minorities, or engineers can be mass produced in short time.

Neither is true, because if they are, we won't even discuss this problem. Look around, who is talking about Uber drivers' demographics? No one. The media adapts the false philosophy to trying to correct things from top-down, not bottom-up, because the former is an easy target. They have an AGENDA, and it is not really about fairness, it is about attacking others to gain power.

[Khaine]

But then why are 90% of long distance runners or the NBA black, and why is that okay?

I honestly don't think that non-white and/or non-males are proportionally less able to think analytically than white males. I think that on average they have less education, and a culture that does not promote intellectual pursuit. Those are the things that need to change, and if you change that it should then flow through into programming.

[foldr]

>But then why are 90% of long distance runners or the NBA black, and why is that okay?

What makes you so sure it's ok?

It's really for people who are involved with long-distance running and/or the NBA to figure that issue out, since they have the relevant background knowledge.

Programmers often have misconceptions about the level of concern for diversity in other fields. For example, a common trope is that no-one is worried about the fact that most nurses are women. But in fact people in the nursing profession are worried about this, and there are efforts to recruit more men.

I have a feeling that somewhere over on the NBA forum, someone is saying "but then why are 90% of programmers men, and why is that ok?"

[matthewmacleod]

Why does some field need to mirror racial/whatever composition of the society?

If it doesn't, then it's pretty suggestive that there's a wider problem. Why do people from different backgrounds not enter that profession? Are they being discouraged somehow, and how can that be avoided?

Diversity is an self-evident good, in that multiple backgrounds and experiences result in a more well-rounded team. Trying to make sure you have that benefit is good sense.

[kakarot]

No, you can't call them not ethical, because those statistics naturally arise due to a plethora of other problems, whenever the hiring process is not deliberately rigged to provide "fairness". In fact I have trouble accepting that such "equal opportunity" programs aren't discriminatory themselves. There are better ways to solve the problem of disproportionate training among demographics.