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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
It probably doesn't get highlighted in the hiring process. Most people don't brag about that in interviews - the misbehavior comes out later.
In most companies, someone pulls a stunt like any of the ones listed here, and they're quickly smacked down, or fired outright (depending on the incident). Judging by the rumors and reports of incidents at Uber, that wasn't the case there. Instead, HR seems to have been told to ignore and protect "high performers" in a penny-wise/pound-foolish policy that leads to the sort of culture like you see described. 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 you get a workplace culture where all sorts of stuff is tolerated, and you wind up with a toxic work environment.
"The beatings will continue until morale improves!"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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
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.
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."
... make believe that you're some sort of Milo-like entity. And look where his big mouth got him.
A date to the junior high prom?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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'.