| > since 2015 I think it has really grown up The lie to this statement is that all of Uber's actions to fix their problems (fire people, outside investigation, hire new HR heads) have come in response to bad PR, not an internal recognition that things weren't OK. Travis Kalanick, who was 37 years old when he sanctioned all of this behavior, is still the head of the company. I am sure many of the people who turned a blind eye when star performers were protected, or women were leaving the company in droves, are still there. This story is a case in point: Alexander wasn't fired, even after half of the executive team knew what he did, and the legal team ordered him to destroy the documents, until Recode started asking about the incident. If the company had really "grown up" as you suggest he would have been gone before the reporters started asking about him. If the company had "grown up" then one of the many people Susan Fowler talked to (in 2016) would have sounded alarms, before she wrote her blog post about it. > unlike other companies, they have aired their dirty laundry It's a well known phenomenon that people tend to overestimate the extent to which their habits and behaviors are shared by others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect. A simpler explanation for the series of bad headlines attributable to Uber and not other companies is that Uber was involved in worse behavior than those other companies. |
"Women leaving in droves" is a lie. The recent demographics report shows that, although we could do better, the female ratio is about equivalent to other tech companies. And there is a concerted effort to change our processes and training to reduce or remove unconscious bias in our hiring process to make it even better.
And powerful women are joining as well. We just had two major female execs with a huge list of accomplishments join. They know full well the company as it is today and wouldn't join if it was a piece of shit like many of you think it is.
I can't speak of the Alexander case because I know nothing of it. But it's still in that 2014 era that I was talking about. That would not fly now, and I think his firing is in line with how the company is today in 2017.
Since Susan Fowler, I think there has been a major change in company culture. Travis revealed in an allhands that he himself needs to change. He had strong opinions on what he wanted the company culture to be but he finally understood that he was wrong. He wanted a hard-driving, ultra-logical company that squeezed the best out of every single employee but rewarded them well with stock. But after seeing the unintended consequences, that it didn't work. It worked well when you have a handful of employees that love doing this, but it doesn't scale at 10,000+ employees and he finally admitted that. As well, the qualities that made him a great startup CEO do not translate to a 10,000 person company and he finally realized that in March. These are all things he admitted in the all hands, and it seems like The company is rapidly changing to becoming much more empathetic. He is giving full reins to the New SVP HR and she is doing a great job in my opinions. I really do believe that the changes will be transformational.