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.

Comments

I was raped there

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a woman, and I went there to try and sell my company's product. The devs and managers, they were all bros, and they held me down and took turns raping me, saying "dude" and "bro" and they gave each other lots of high fives. It lasted 5 hours.

I told their HR person after and she said it was a first time offense for all of them.

Re:I was raped there

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds legit

Re:motivation

[ScentCone]

What happens is that when people don't get punished for the first few things, they start to realize that the normal limits don't apply, and the bad sorts start pushing the envelope. Eventually ...

... eventually you get Hillary Clinton in control of the Democrat party and being presumed to be the next president. But pendulum does always swing the other way. This sort of thing could easily damage Uber's reputation and user base, in a significant way, at the retail level. Just like with the election, people vote with their feet, especially when it's so easy to just go somewhere else (Lyft, etc).

Re:Goes both ways

[AmiMoJo]

Ah, unsubstantiated anecdotes, those will do in place of actual data. No no, don't worry about naming the company or anything that might let someone verify or refute your claims, we will just take your word for it.

FWIW the one time I've personally known anyone to get fired for being drunk it was a black guy. I don't read anything at all into that, it's just a meaningless data point. It does cancel out your anecdote though, so at least we are at neutral buoyancy again.