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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.
Send those oh-so-fucking-sensitive special snowflakes to someplace nice like Venezuela or Somalia.
Awww, did someone call you a faggot? He's a meanie!
Get the fuck over it, you candy ass.
OK, cut the balls off the guy who actually grabbed a woman's boobs. Then nail is bloody gonads to his forehead.
loses money
sex fueled culture
no definitive product
"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.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
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.
The four unwritten core values.
Where I work we all absolutely HATE faggots, n1ggers, kikes, dune coons, and beaners. We joke about it and watch youtube videos about the rapefugee and n1gger problems for half the day here sometimes.
Lol. If you're not a fascist/National Socialist and you're white then you are a not a man. You're probably a faggot.
BTW, FUCK the lameness filter.
Are there any quality general tech sites out there these days? So many OG sites have jumped the shark ... Dropped ars awhile ago, and now Slashdot is just insufferable.
Thanks in advance.
How does a company that doesn't have employees have a workplace culture at all?
I can't wait to read stories about the shenanigans going on at these companies.
"Another manager threatened to beat an underperforming employee's head in with a baseball bat. "
That's it, I'm sending them a resume and github link
And my ex-manager (woman) was at a poker game at my house, raving drunk and after losing a hand to me, threw a handful of ceramic poker chips in my face as hard as she could. Not that it surprised anyone because she occasionally comes to work drunk. Not that anyone will do anything about it because she's a she.
And then there's the manager of our finance department (black woman) who doesn't feel unprofessional screaming at me on the phone and calling me names - while I'm on speaker phone with her - while people in other offices come to listen in amazement. She developed a billing workflow for our entire business unit, and after deploying it at the END OF THE QUARTER with no testing - which caused no end of headaches - I dug through to figure out the errors, drafted a corrective action plan to fix it and sent it to her - which culminated in this legendary phone conversation where she was screaming at me on the phone about how I was too stupid to figure out how to use the workflow...
I documented all of this, got supporting statements from my colleagues, and went to HR - who basically said that she's untouchable because she's a minority and a woman. I work for GE; not exactly a small-time company. We have all the expected training, HR-enforced compliance...hell, when someone does something that grabs the attention of a regulatory body in a bad way, people get fired. The people involved get fired. The people who weren't involved but heard about it punitive career action for not proactively taking steps to report it up the chain of command. The people who weren't involved and didn't hear about it, but were in a position that they theoretically SHOULD have heard or known about it get formally reprimanded.
But God help that there be a woman, or for double damage a minority woman...and rules go out the window.
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.
If people find this shocking God knows what they'd think if they went onto a school playing field. You'd be called a faggot ten times per day and physical threats are the norm.
Of course, children have the common sense to brush off such language as banter with no real meaning. Sadly, many adults are lacking in common sense and appear to suffer a break down if called a nasty name.
I'm honestly despairing for humanity when people can't brush off a simple insult. The snowflake generation really are utterly worthless. They can't get any work done because they're too busy being offended and outraged.
beat an underperforming employee's head in with a baseball bat
Everyone knows that only liberal protesters at places like Berkeley and anti-Trump events are allowed to talk about and do that sort of thing.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So jealous. Absolutely love talking shit and "offending" people. Some of my fondest memories at my old job involve shouting matches, threats of death and dismemberment, "slurs" of all stripes, escalating dares between coworkers to say things so outrageous they would offend the other. Open warfare to get your way where having the loudest voice was only slightly less important than having the most creative and offensive retort... sign me and your mom up for this shit.
Offended? Can't take the heat? Don't let the doorknob get stuck in your vagina on the way out.
Between the bad Uber drivers assaulting passengers, non-bad Uber drivers getting screwed over, and now reports like this, I think we can all safely say that Uber is CANCEROUS as a company and as a 'service' and as such should be avoided. Bye-bye Uber, and nothing of value was lost.
This kind of behavior isn't all that uncommon. While I haven't been physically threatened or called homophobic slurs, I've seen all kinds of inappropriate aggressive behavior and unwarranted yelling from upper management. I've seen this behavior in small start ups and in large Fortune 500 companies. I've seen people go to HR in tears about how poorly they're being treated and of course nothing ever happens because HR is powerless/indifferent. Its like managers get all of their training from Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross and can't function on any human level.
His plan is to sexually harass staff until he determines who is sexually harassing the staff!
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
If this story is really true, there is a huge lawsuit in Uber's future... Given that there really hasn't been such a lawsuit yet, I'm a bit hesitant to just accept all this at face value.
ANY attorney who can pass the bar could win a civil judgment of epic proportions if there is *any* evidence to substantiate that this kind of harassment is a regular happening and the company isn't doing anything to curb it. Now I'm not saying that it's not happening, only that I'm a bit skeptical about such stories coming from people who are not availing themselves of the legal protections they have. Especially when it would literally cost them nothing to get a lawyer to take this on contingency. It's not like lawyers are hard to find... (Yes, honest ones are rare, but you don't need an honest one here..)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The boob-grabber got fired, as CNBC fails to note (but BusinessInsider does)
The baseball bat thing is probably a reference to Scarface. Whether a manager actually was referencing the movie when making the "threat" or the person talking to the reporter was using it for inspiration for making shit up, I couldn't say.
"Coffee's for closers only."
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Reading Slashdot and interacting with so many engineers on various project, the impression gained consistently is that high tech people tend to be assholes.
Comparing my experiences to those people describe in Uber I would say that Uber slipped on discipline to an extent. The muddies are watered however because a lot of people have unreasonably high standards which can be for a number of reasons. However in any companies or large group of people you have incidents like this. It makes it hard to really measure the problem and if it's really that big. I would say however the reported response to serious incidents looks insufficient to me.
> workers are sometimes pitted against one another and where
I've seen this in some places where I work. Give two people the same task and see who finishes first. I've also seen this happen where multiple companies working together on projects are all given the same task by a client (either abusively or out of lack of coordination) who thinks its clever but the end result is loads of pointless work and a massive tangle of stepping on toes. It can become extremely demoralising and sabotages everyone. It's artificial competition and doesn't reap the benefits people think it might. I have seen companies destroyed by their client like that. You need to have division of responsibilities and not a free for all like feeding pidgeons. The problem manifests in a lot of ways. I hate when I have a list of ten tasks on my list, I am working on the first one and others try to steal one or might of the pending nine even though they either have other things to do or aren't suited to do those tasks properly.
I've also seen hire to try where two candidates will be hired, given tasks and then the one that appears to hit the deck running (more likely crawls a bit faster) will be kept and the other fired a few weeks later usually because of rush hiring and a desperation to fill a seat rather than fill a position with someone actually qualified for the job. You then get stuck with such people that can really not always work out well. Something like one in five or one in ten might work out as productive and talented but by their the seat is filled and after a certain period of employment laws make it hard to fire people (not that the law is at fault, you see people who shouldn't have been hired at all).
> a blind eye is turned to infractions from top performers
This is normal and it's not always bad. Some people earn their tenure, salt, prove their worth, loyalty, etc and in certain areas strict rules aren't particularly helpful. That can't be anything goes however. The infractions have to be things that don't really matter. In my experience this has for example been an issue with dress code. It gets to a point where the things you're doing are so important that arbitrary restraints become just stupid. Ultimately like a lot of things, it has to be taken on a case by case basis.
The reports seem to lump things together. I consider only these serious offences:
> One Uber manager groped female co-workers' breasts at a company retreat in Las Vegas.
> Another manager threatened to beat an underperforming employee's head in with a baseball bat.
> Uber employees did cocaine in the bathrooms at private parties
Unfortunately cocaine use by employees seems endemic among "high performing" industries. I've seen a lot of personal use although it wont normally be brought into the work. It's not always a problem but the complete apathy does raise concern. Groping should be a zero-tolerance matter as should be issuing genuine and precise threats of violence.
Debatable offence:
> A director shouted a homophobic slur at a subordinate during a heated confrontation in a meeting.
I wouldn't care about that too much unless there were more to the situation. It seems possibly more of a problem that it got that heated. If it were under my watch I might mention informally to an employee that did that to have more control. It would be a serious issue if the subordinate were actually gay and being bullied or ragged on for it or if prospective investors for ex
In general I would frown on any employees, but in particular a manager, getting into a shouting match, homophobic slur or otherwise. In a manager I would find this particularly disturbing, because you should really be promoting managers based on leadership qualities, and shouting at your subordinates doesn't display leadership, it displays bullying. As to a specifically homophobic slur, like it or not, we live in a litigatory age, and, as you point out, if the staff member being yelled at were gay, then your manager has crossed a realm into pain. As others have pointed out, this kind of culture comes down from the top. Good sound senior management would not allow the workplace to behave this way.
The fact is that in any workplace, but particularly a large one, you're going to have conflicts, and on occasion they may get out of hand. I agree that the homophobic slur is the least serious of them, but it still isn't something that should be tolerated. An off the record warning would be exactly how I'd deal with that as well, but if the employee persisted in that sort of conduct, then it would have to move on to a more formal disciplinary process.
Oh, and to all those brave alt-right haters, want to end up in court, go tell a subordinate who complains they were threatened or abused to suck it up.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I documented all of this, got supporting statements from my colleagues, and went to HR
Aha, I see your mistake.
When your "I went to..." statement does not end with "the troublesome's persons direct supervisor", then you have done nothing except cause grief for yourself.
Companies don't change in response to HR reported threats. They clam up and protect the status quo. Hint: you reporting a problem is not the status quo...
If instead you report to a manager above the troubled employee, well now you are giving the company a chance to quietly sweep a problem under the rug... there is nothing large companies and high level executives like more than some good rug sweeping. Heck, they might even lay off her whole division just to be sure!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're just disrupting the paradigm of HR and workforce relations! It'll be great, honest, and will save you a lot of money! You'll like it!
>A director shouted a homophobic slur at a subordinate during a heated confrontation in a meeting.
If this is such a major sin by Uber's standards that it's worth mentioning in a slam piece, then Uber must be far cleaner than their business practices would suggest. It's not like undercutting established taxi service with VC money is in any way "innovation", or "disruption" except in the sense of what George Soros likes to do.
In a manager I would find this particularly disturbing, because you should really be promoting managers based on leadership qualities, and shouting at your subordinates doesn't display leadership, it displays bullying.
Shouty managers were common for Baby Boomers and earlier. There's still a bit of that culture around, and I've had a few shouty managers over the years (mostly guys born before 1960, one born in the 60s). It's an effective way to deliver the emotional message that someone is underperforming and needs to change, when sometimes trying to connect rationally doesn't work. I'm glad it's now mostly faded from current management, but it's a valid approach for leadership (there's a reason drill sergeants and marine DIs shout a lot - it works).
The better criticism is that it's unprofessional. We should all be fighting to increase the perceived professionalism of software development. I've seen so much dignity stripped from developers over the past 25 years, and it's bullshit and needs to reverse. We're professionals like doctors and lawyers (and in some countries, better paid than doctors or lawyers). Can you imagine a doctor or lawyer, past the early career years, who doesn't have an office? Who doesn't have assistants to do the shit work?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
If people find this shocking God knows what they'd think if they went onto a school playing field. You'd be called a faggot ten times per day and physical threats are the norm.
I would consider that unacceptable behavior on a school playing field. This is what bullies do.
Of course, children have the common sense to brush off such language as banter with no real meaning.
Children learn very quickly that when a kid threatens in public to beat other children in the head with a baseball bat and the adults say "it's just banter," that kid is the one who will actually beat them up when the adults aren't watching.
That kid who threatens other kids on the school playing field is a psychopath.
A lot if business culture was borrowed from the military and there were a lot of vets from WW2, so a military style tongue-lashing made more sense then.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Uh, the post is made up by somebody trying to be funny by echoing the Rolling Stone story.
Of course there has been in a lot of research on management styles, some of it predating WWII which suggested that bullying management style may bring about short-term gains, but usually at the cost of a paranoid and low-morale organization which can negatively effect long term performance.
I've only been yelled at once in my working life, and while it scared the shit out of me to be sure, the only take-away I had was that my boss was a fucking asshole. I could only work as fast as I was going, and because he was a cheap asshole, he wouldn't hire someone else to take over some of my sysadmin role so I could more coding.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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'.
Posting anonymously as I am a stockholder and a former employee. I absolutely believe Susan Fowler, and in my years at the company I saw very egregious behavior from some senior managers. They acted invincible, and largely, they were. There are lots of great people at Uber, but there are also some very powerful sociopaths. If they had fixed that before I quit, I probably would have stayed. Hopefully they fix it now, but I'm not optimistic.
Yeah I can't imagine working like this either. I've always been lucky enough to have managers that you could rate 'passable' or better.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I personally find this whole wordcrime stuff a disturbing side of out society. Whether an anti-homosexual slur is bad or not is subjective and I will be loath to support the people who want to make a huge thing out of something based on superstition or because they can. It's deeply disturbing that our society is so childish and the solution often seems to be more childishness. There's an amusing snag. Millions of people, even homosexual people use anti-homosexual slurs. For me it's part of my language and while it might be within other people's belief system that to use some words is the worst thing they shouldn't have the authority to impose it on others.
Same as when on a social I drink around some of the Muslims I work with, they aren't petty and don't make a fuss about it. They'll happily sell me bacon at their store. I don't make a fuss about their rituals or impose my own personal standards on them either when there's no real problem or need. This whole word crime thing is a social construct.
It's still a concern in terms of setting an example but being insensitive shouldn't necessarily be a crime especially when the fault tends to really lie in others being over sensitive. Ultimately people are responsible for their own internal states and if they get upset too easily... You might say well technically in some way these words are homophobic based on some research, guilt by association and desire to project some kind of control but in reality it's an invented problem, there's nothing strictly wrong with the usage in and of itself. Half the people are only really worried that someone else's usage will somehow get them into trouble as a collective. It's a fault (one of many to this effect) in human social instinct and ironically a form of phobia that allows these little taboos to propagate so easily.
I say bugger a lot or call someone a sod quite often which were also anti-homosexual slurs. I can't imagine that all the horrors and bad things that have ever happened are due to merely that somehow these evil magical words came into the dictionary. I find it religious discrimination because I don't believe in magic. Problems come from underlying beliefs or attitudes in society. When it comes to words such as sod and bugger among many others they lost their magic so to speak as society changed and people become more reasonable. Alternatively from the fact that humans are flawed and some given anything will mess up although you have things like that someone is more likely to mess up with a fork than a spoon but even saying that there are a whole range of words out there that are entirely legitimate that people abuse far more than any of the forbidden words.
The usage would be the biggest genuine problem if as I said it was actually an attack on the individual on account of being gay. For me that's instantly intolerable. There's nothing to indicate that here and you have to be careful with the standards you impose on others especially if you aren't subject to them.
We're on the same page that if the manager did that all the time then it would be an issue but once and in a tense situation? I don't find it disturbing at all. There is indeed a risk that someone really homosexual might get caught in the cross hairs or that someone might overhear it and think that employee is genuinely gay. The problem with insults though is that they aren't meant to be literal. If you call someone a dick doesn't mean that they literally are or that you're against dicks. I know people who love dick, practically worship it but still call people a dick in heated debates. If it makes a whole lot of trouble work in a country with good courts or hire real lawyers and not genuinely be guilty.
The main reason it can make a whole load of trouble is that there are forces that even if wrong you have to abide to. If all the customers want something daft you can't do much about it. Lots of problems like that in society. As I said one way to do it is to joke about the risk in a mocking way to make t
I had just read an article about the planned opening of the new Apple monolith and when I read this I thought it was just reminiscing about Apple in the early days - then the word "Uber" finally sunk in.
You're very right that "they got that way by demonstrating, at the very top, that corruption was tolerated". We almost got that in the USA. I find it horrifying that anybody would vote for an obviously corrupt person.
Awww, did someone call you a faggot? He's a meanie!
There's solid data showing that suicide rate is higher among bi- and homo- sexual youth (teens and young adult) than among their heterosexual peers.
This is believed to be strongly linked to the difficulty of feeling accepted. The more a young individual with an unorthodox sexuality and/or gender identity feels rejected by the surrounding society, the higher the risks of suicide.
Check again the summary, it was not a young internet shouting homophobic slurs at a senior officer, it was the other way around.
By keeping a climate were "being [homophobic slur]" is considered as a bad thing, that senior officer is actively contributing in a small part in the lack of self acceptance and higher suicide rates among non-heterosexual young people.
It's not about being ridiculously excessively nice to people so they feel special snowflake.
It's avoid to keep a general situation were young persons feel so much rejected by the society that suicide seems a better alternative.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
All of this is correct but overlooks when shouty isn't necessarily a bad thing. The world try as hard as you like is not perfect. There are going to sometimes be problems and issues worth getting into a shouting match about. It might be a serious issue like how to avoid laying off staff, keeping the business afloat, etc. You really don't know. You can try to imagine us being Vulcan's but we're not. You know it's also only when people get angry sometimes and disinhibited that something might shake loose.
There's a few different types of shouty. Obviously how dare I not get my own way or irritable over other things in their life types are a problem. Sometimes it can arise from frustration in a situation because something is lost in translation or some other kind of issue of mutual comprehension. This happens a lot. I get shouty a lot when it comes to hard problems with no perfect solution. Dilemmas. Sometimes it is such that the decision might as well be the flip of the coin.
This very well written blog about Uber's culture is not the first, nor the last to come out. The blatant violations of the law, the blatant cover-ups, and the lies cannot go unpunished forever. With so many angry ex-employees, there must be a class-action lawsuit in the works that will (rightfully) ruin that company.
And Uber proves it by their ridiculous culture.
The problem is that it is a shitty manager who insults any subordinate. If you have a problem with a member of your team, you take them aside and try to deal with it. If it rates disciplinary action, then so be it, but that can still be done respectfully. Either we are adults who can behave with some decorum, or we are unruly children. I won't have unruly children as managers, period. Behave appropriately or you will be demoted. Calling anyone a "fag", get into shouting matches with them, and I will be making you apologize to the persons involved and to anyone who overheard them, and do it repeatedly, and you'll be shown the door. A work place should not be a place where people with power feel some right to behave badly to other people.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you look through ScentCone's history you'll find multiple threads of his that boil down to the same theme as this one. The man is stuck in a time loop and we need to help him get out of it.