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Inside Uber's Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture (cnbc.com)
Excerpts from Mike Isaac's report for the New York Times: Interviews with more than 30 current and former Uber employees, as well as reviews of internal emails, chat logs and tape-recorded meetings, paint a picture of an often unrestrained workplace culture. Among the most egregious accusations from employees, who either witnessed or were subject to incidents and who asked to remain anonymous because of confidentiality agreements and fear of retaliation: One Uber manager groped female co-workers' breasts at a company retreat in Las Vegas. A director shouted a homophobic slur at a subordinate during a heated confrontation in a meeting. Another manager threatened to beat an underperforming employee's head in with a baseball bat. Until this week, this culture was only whispered about in Silicon Valley. Then on Sunday, Susan Fowler, an engineer who left Uber in December, published a blog post about her time at the company. [...] One group appeared immune to internal scrutiny, the current and former employees said. Called the A-Team and composed of a small group of executives who were personally close to Mr. Kalanick, its members were shielded from much accountability over their actions. One member of the A-Team was Emil Michael, senior vice president for business, who was caught up in a public scandal over comments he made in 2014 about digging into the private lives of journalists who opposed the company. Mr. Kalanick defended Mr. Michael, saying he believed Mr. Michael could learn from his mistakes.
loses money
sex fueled culture
no definitive product
So you think managers threatening to kill someone or calling them a homosexual slur is just fine? If I was in charge, there would be a whole lot of people being marched out the door. I certainly would never tolerate anything like that (I'm management now). Manager or regular employee, if you cannot behave with a modicum of decency and manners, then you won't long have a job anywhere I manage.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Another manager threatened to beat an underperforming employee's head in with a baseball bat."
Now, that's what must be a highly motivating work environment :/
One must wonder how their hiring process works, i.e. letting such characters through the gates, since recent reports don't paint a pretty picture.
It's not the hiring process that's creating the problem, it's senior management. Management would have heard about the incident (or similar ones), and they had the ability to discipline both the manager to grabbed the baseball bat as well as his manager who didn't do anything about it. Instead they let the incident go, perhaps even laughing about it and treating it as an example of a passionate manager motivating his people.
It's like corruption in Russia, they didn't get that way by hiring corrupt government officials, they got that way by demonstrating, at the very top, that corruption was tolerated. That same baseball bat manager might have been a perfectly decent manager in a different organization, or weeded out if he couldn't play along, but put in an organization that didn't restrain his tendencies he becomes a menace.
I stole this Sig
tech is a small world; make waves and you may not be working in your field again.
we have mostly killed unions and workers refuse to band together because... reasons. (shrug).
and so, there is no one to speak for the regular worker. not really, not anymore.
we need jobs to pay the bills. its pretty powerful to hold that over someone's head.
this is the unwritten rule. complain and you find yourself out of work and unable to GET work (in some extremes). now, if you are a white male and older than that magic number, you will try even HARDER to avoid being fired or making 'trouble' for managers at work.
until we get a proper balance of power, the worker will continue to be abused and have no real recourse. not in the US and CERTAINLY not in trump's US ;(
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I heard a rather heated argument the other day at work. It was heated because the devs were up against a deadline, and the debate was (from what I gathered) whether to push a fix forward or not for the next release. Not once did I hear any rudeness toward other team members by those in the debate. Any swearing and most of the frustration was directed at the code and process, not other people.
More to the point, such a culture is set by the guys at the top. Our boss isn't the type to rant or yell at others, and in turn, everyone understands that such behavior doesn't belong at our company. Simple as that.
It's entirely possible to remain civil with fellow employees at all times, even when you're frustrated or tense. It's not exactly *necessary* for a company to behave that way to be successful, but all in all, I'm going to prefer working at a company in which people are expected to remain civil with each other.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
So you're defending them. Nice...
God dam it. The truth is more important that which side you're on. FFS, this attitude is why American (heck, Western) politics is so toxic.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I had an issue with my manager once (not about sexual harassment, but about an ethic issue since one of the company value is conduct business with uncompromising integrity and professionalism) and I went to the HR. The HR wasn't very helpful and unless I want to make a big issue out of it, there is nothing they are willing to do. The best they could do is if the manager decide to retaliate and there is a paper trail, then they might do something about it. Reading between the line, they infer I should transfer out and that's what I did. I went and talk to other people that dealt with HR before and they schooled me on the true function of HR.
The purpose of HR is not to help you the individual employee. The true purpose is to protect company from liability and any issues that might result in hurting company's profitability. In Uber's case, the HR did exactly that, protect the company from loosing "high performing" manager since Fowler is just another engineer that they could have replaced. In their view, she is nothing special and would only hurt company's profitability while losing a "high performing employee" that would help the company make money. So they would do anything to help sweep the problem under the rug. I'll bet once the investigation has concluded, they would make an example out of that manager and make some cosmetic changes. Once this blows over, everything will back to the same ol' same ol'.