I work at Uber. I was on the wifi yesterday. I was successfully using blind. If business insider would like video evidence, I'm happy to work with their reporters 1:1.
There's a lot of problems at the company and it's been a difficult week for many of us here. Not having access to blind is not one of them.
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.
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:
It's really not more surprising than the thought there are still new, well-funded and high profile companies that have seriously misguided ways of dealing with sexual harassment complaints.
Yeah, this move is just stupid. It's 2017 California, there are umpteen connectivity options.
It's literally an admission that what is written on Blind is actually true and leadership is in panic mode. The right response was to dismiss it all as gossip and act nonchalant; moving from the "laugh at you" step to the "fight you" step means they're on their way to defeat.
I'm on the Microsoft Blind forum as a former FTE as they don't (yet) revalidate accounts.
MS was amongst the first, or perhaps the first, Blind forum. It started off as a successor to MiniMSFT so people used it to compare comp (salaries, raises, bonuses, stock awards) since then it's massively expanded into other companies all with their own private forums, there are also forums visible to everyone.
The most popular thread in the shared Tech industry forum is "What is your age and base salary?" and it makes for some soul-crushing reading (e.g. late-20s kids at Uber SF with $200k base, $400k stock).
Back on the MS forum, it's usually layoff rumours (one regular poster who comments on layoff rumour threads claims to be in HR), people asking how to get VSA severance, and people complaining about why Skype, OneDrive and SharePoint are so terrible.
> and people complaining about why Skype, OneDrive and SharePoint are so terrible.
I'm glad that people at MS themselves complain about how awful Skype has become. This proves that there are still sane people over there, for a moment I thought that me and my colleagues who still rely on Skype (Slack has never caught on with us) are not paranoid when we complain among ourselves about it.
Pretty much everyone at the IC-level at Microsoft is well-aware of the systemic issues plaguing many products - lower management too - but these issues don't get fixed because of whatever decisions being made at the Director level (mostly of the "evil" kind, like how improving UI responsiveness won't raise profitability but adding video ads will, or how no-one will switch to OneDrive-for-Business simply because the desktop client actually works - it'll be because the sales team drove a hard bargain with an enterprise customer and now their poor users are stuck with it).
I like to think I did my part - I made small UI/UX improvements that I snuck into my official feature work (it all passed peer-review and testing, don't worry) - things like bad margins/padding around controls, something with the wrong color scheme, etc.
Can I somehow register to be an Uber employee on the app without actually being one? Would love to read all the crap employees are going through as lessons learned when I start my own company (one day). Any ideas? The blind app requires an uber.com email address. Any employees want to help out a fellow HN'er?
Yeah, I wondered the same thing. Verification by company email reduces spam/noise, so I understand why it's done. Probably useful to have non-employees filtered out. But there's no way I'd trust the service enough to use it. Not to mention my latent fear of a data breach/leak ruining my career.
Aren't there any company mailing list addresses someone can provide? Someone inside uber needs to have some connections with IT - could be done easily I think. No email will be sent I am assuming? Or is there a verification step where one has to click on a link? Someone who has the app should verify.
Even in 2017, we are still not understanding that if you block something it becomes more exciting just for the fact that it was banned, ignore it and it'll die.
What's "Blind"? Never heard of it. So far I have never encountered anything blocked internally at Uber. Nor is anyone is talking over anything secret at Uber. People normally talk in person, but there isn't even much of that going on.
That's a hard stop for me; no employer may have that degree of control over anything I own. I won't even configure an account with Exchange's protocol, because that enables remote device wipe.
If an employer wants to issue me a company phone, that's fine. If an employer wants to enable IMAP, that's fine. Otherwise, I won't have mobile access to email, because the risk is unacceptable. And if that's not fine - well, it's been great talking with you, and I appreciate your time, but I'm afraid this position doesn't seem like a good fit after all.
I like seeing more awareness of this! It's always depressing to hear people say that they don't care or that it's not a big deal.
There are various third party applications that will allow you to use Exchange protocols without the OS integration: they'll let the Exchange server admins wipe the application's container/data rather than the entire phone. I think it's a much fairer implementation.
The requirement to agree to honor the remote wipe request is optional at the server. That is to say, you can use the EAS protocol and not also require remote wipe, if you want to. In theory you could also interpose an EAS proxy between your device and the server that pretended to honor the remote wipe request but not not pass it on to the device (unless the server is setup to check client certs).
These days the risk of an accidental wipe seems so trivial to me, since every app (photos, music, notes, docs, podcasts etc) I use is of the local-sync-backed-by-cloud variety.
So I guess I can understand not trusting the IT department but I worry very little about losing the data on the device.
Of course if you're not sold on the cloud-backed model because of privacy concerns and you prefer treating your device itself as a source of truth and a secure store then I can understand the attitude.
You don't really have to MITM, you could just check the logs of the DNS server that the network DHCPs to the WiFi clients for queries to Blind's IP addresses.
This doesn't tell you the content but if an employee uses the app. Make of this what you want but given Uber's previous actions I don't think they would just ignore this.
This is hopefully a prelude to a Streisand effect type situation here, but my biggest reaction to this came in the ad below the piece: an "article" describing the reason behind the F and J bumps on any keyboard. Does there really need to be an article about that? It seems like common sense, or something you might learn in any typing exercise ever.
There are probably enough younger people around who've rare even used a physical keyboard, let alone have formal touch-typing training. I imagine mentioning the 'home row' would usually just get you a blank stare.
>And over 2,000 Uber employees in total use Blind, says Blind's head of operations Alex Shin.
Jebediah O. Springfield! As the "head of operations" at an "anonymous chat app" you have ONE JOB, Alex Shin! And you just blew it.
(To be explicit, I am saying Alex is way out of line for disclosing this information. An anonymous app should not have such information revealed even in the aggregrate - you can see what just happened as a result. Instead his public, and private, statements should have been "We do not disclose - confirm or deny - any users who may or may not use Blind, their affiliations or locations.")
In point of fact I do agree with sharing this news, however it should be presented disclosing as little information about employees as possible. Plus the app isn't doing a very good job if its traffic is easily distinguishable from other apps' traffic (technically making it possible for Uber to take the actions we've just read about, or directly monitor based on telephone MAC addresses, the exact employees using the app and the timing of their doing so).
But there's not so much that can be done about that. However, revealing the number of users at a company is not information that should be given out, in my opinion.
This really stood out to me as well. A company that, say, runs a non-anonymous social network for businesses shouldn't give out numbers like that (at least, not without their customers' permission)... a company running a supposedly-anonymous place for employees to chat giving out that info is a serious breach of trust. I was curious about Blind (though certainly not curious enough to give it my LinkedIn credentials), but after reading that line, I wouldn't even remotely consider using this product.
What if Alex was bluffing? An average Uber employee reading this would think that some massive congregation of his/her peers is happening on Blind and would rush to install it.
There's a lot of problems at the company and it's been a difficult week for many of us here. Not having access to blind is not one of them.