[BinaryIdiot]

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.

[uberthrowaway1]

Using a throwaway for obvious reasons.

>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.

Happy to see I'm not the only angry employee.

[alphonsegaston]

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).

[ZeroCool2u]

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?

[watwut]

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.

[mcguire]

In a venture capital-funded world, the primary marketable skill is capturing venture capital. Follow the money.

[beaconstudios]

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.

[jordigh]

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.

[beaconstudios]

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.

[jordigh]

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.

[beaconstudios]

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.

[mcguire]

Are you aware of Ms Fowler's allegations?

https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

Nothing to do (directly) with underrepresentation or "hiring lower-performing females".

[beaconstudios]

I'm not suggesting it is. This discussion has kind of branched out from the issues Ms Fowler faced into a general one around diversity.

[toyg]

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.

[tn13]

True. In most such cases there is always an another side that we totally forget when looking at the victim's story.

I would give Uber a fair 50% chance unless there is strong evidence on the table.