Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber | Hacker News Reader

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

susanjfowler.com

4,107 pointsgrey-area1,013 comments

>On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't.

Totally normal behavior! Who hasn't spoken about their sex life the very first day of interactions?

"Welcome to the team, we use Git for source control, all of our company knowledgebase is on Confluence, and I'm in an open sex relationship! See you at lunch!"

I can't fathom what kind of weirdo does something like this, male or female.

I would guess that this happens more often than you imagine. Women often don't share stories like this for fear of retribution at their current company or future companies, or because they think you won't believe them. In addition NDA's are often a condition of receiving severance.

Most women in Silicon Valley have had experiences similar to those mentioned in the article (HR disbelief, multiple women reporting same man to no effect, retaliation, legal threats, &c, &c).

The OP probably declined a severance package to write this.

Unfortunately the 'I am in an open relationship, want to fuck?' line is something that I've seen more than once, initiated by both men and women engineers. At least one of those examples goes to a lot of conferences, and pretty much opens with that line to people in the opposite sex, and has a Twitter following in the 5 digits.

I am also aware of a funded dev tools startup that has a single woman engineer: She happens to share a bed with the CEO every so often. Imagine how comfortable that must be for any other woman that might join the company, or anyone sharing a team with said woman engineer.

So I have seen the kind of weirdos that do something like this. I don't wish them on my worst enemy.

> I can't fathom what kind of weirdo does something like this, male or female.

People who get off on violating other people's boundaries.

Sex addict is the term that comes to mind.

What's with all the 'this is unbelievable' comments here?

This is absolutely believable, Uber has pretty much made it their standard to break the laws where-ever they can, why should work place conduct be any different? In for a penny, in for a pound.

You'd never hear something even close to this from Stripe or some other company run by upstanding folks.

Fish rots from the head.

I fully expected this thread to be a shitshow, but comments here are overwhelmingly supportive of Fowler, and except perhaps for the very bottom of the thread, I don't see much much "this is unbelievable" at all. I'm pleasantly surprised.

If taking a billion dollars from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia says something about a company's stance regarding women's equality, what it says is not terribly inconsistent with Fowler's story.

If anything, OP's subsequent employment by Stripe is a very strong endorsement for the workplace culture of the company.

Learnt that lesson the hard way - as an independent consultant working with local businesses, did some work with a seemingly successful guy who boasted about how he always got a good deal/complained about service and got money back etc. Surprise, surprise, a month later he did that to me too, including stupid petty things like trying to pay the invoice without the VAT.

What goes around comes around.

I still support our local taxi company and talk to the drivers who take me (typically to/from the airport). Many of them have had experiences with Uber and don't have good things to say. However their traditional business is struggling.

The one comment that literally matches "this is unbelievable" isn't saying it literally.

Well said. Those of us who have worked with folks in management at Uber or who have friends who have worked at Uber all know very well what Uber is like. This is no more shocking than discovering that Amazon is a brutal, highly political workplace. People in tech just don't want to admit that their little playground is a cesspool of discrimination, entitlement and bigotry. That's all.

I absolutely believe it but find it astonishing that a company can behave like this.

So, not sure what you're referring to but perhaps people are using unbelievable as a synonym for astonishing. ie. not literally.

I think the "this is unbelievable" comments are coming from people who have worked in the industry for a long time -- but not at Uber -- who are surprised that this sort of thing not only goes on, but that HR appears to be advocating the behavior through inaction.

At least from my anecdotal experience, I've never seen anything like this among the four companies and 20 years I've been in software development and engineering. Granted, the percentage of women who were in technical, non-management, positions[0] hovered around 20%. In those cases, the skillsets of the women ranged as much as it did the men and all of the folks I worked with treated each other, regardless of gender, respectfully and professionally.

I wouldn't imagine seeking a date with co-worker. What happens when you break up? Do you want to bring that to work with you ever day? At the companies I've worked for, I know of one incident where a person was let go for "having a crap-ton of porn on his work PC" that someone from security noticed when the proxy logs flagged his workstation. This individual was a VP, a "high performer" and was very well like. He was also out on his hide a few hours after his laptop was seized and inspected. This was with no reports from women even hinting that he'd acted inappropriately on the job. And we had nobody inspecting proxy logs looking for this sort of thing -- that guy in security who happened upon his workstation ended up being there because he was investigating a malfunction, but because of corporate agreements we'd all signed, he was obligated to report what he found[2].

I hate to say it, but this is the kind of behavior I'd expect out of teenagers, not adult men. And it's one of those things you usually don't have to tell people not to do. Though I have no experience with this specific kind of behavior, I've noticed that when people fail on morally obvious things, they're often failing on many other things and I would be worried if I were an investor about having my money tied up in a company that had this kind of a reputation -- what other laws does this corporate culture find acceptable to break? I'd be twice as concerned if this were my employer -- not just out of fear of being harassed, but out of fear that a company with these kinds of ethical lapses is often quickest to screw those who work for them (or take them down with them). No way.

[0] Perhaps my experience is unusual, but for 17 years the VP level individuals in my teams have been women, I've reported to a Director level employee who was a woman and I've had a woman for a manager on more than one occasion.

[1] Thus far, I know only of this account, which without additional data is as anecdotal as my comment, here, but based on others piling on, I am inclined to believe that there's a real problem here.

[2] Paraphrased, we were basically required to report everything even if we were not directly involved, but if I saw something this inappropriate, I wouldn't need a signed agreement to persuade me -- I had full confidence in the HR teams at the places I was at and knew it would be handled appropriately.

Even if this wasn't Uber, it's totally believable.

I am struggling to think of something productive to contribute to this discussion, because this absolutely incensed me.

In lieu of anything else: Susan deserves to be commended for her bravery in writing this.

If an Uber recruiter contacts you, bring this up and tell them their nonfunctioning HR department makes working for their company a non starter.

If you work at Uber, quit, and/or contact the board and tell them that this behavior is unacceptable and the people responsible need to be fired. If the culture won't change, the CEO needs to be fired.

If you work in tech, bring up this article with your manager or CEO and tell them that this behavior is unacceptable, opens the company up to ridiculous amounts of lawsuit risk, will hurt recruiting, depress morale, and that you will quit if harassment complaints aren't taken seriously.

Same here.

And you know; 100% of the women engineers I know have similar stories. 100%. That's insane.

These stories need to come out so the guilty companies and their toxic environments are exposed for all to see.

I'd encourage everyone here to pick up a copy of her O'Reilly book -- it's very good. Hopefully she gets all the income and none of it goes to Uber...

Even I do not have anything productive to contribute to this discussion, but just deleted the Uber app from my phone. Never going to use them again even if that means a lot of inconvenience for me.

No shit. A story like this makes me realize that even with the "problems" I think I have at work, that get me all riled up, I have it made in the shade with lemonade compared to this woman's experience at Uber.

I started reading the article with the view of "If it's really that bad, just quit. Burn that bridge with thermite, and never look back." I finished the article wishing there were more Susan J. Fowlers in the world.

By all indications, Uber has a toxic work culture that costs them both top talent and organizational velocity.

I'm a college senior at a well-regarded engineering school. My CS classmates - especially women - simply do not apply to Uber, in large part because of its reputation for internal misogyny and general assholery. Four classmates interned there last summer, and as far as I know none are interested in returning. A friend of mine was actually warned off by her software engineer father. I've heard stories from friends who've worked there that corroborate Susan's tales of infighting teams and inexplicable reorganizations due to high-level backstabbing. The one woman I know who works there wants out. Susan is a high-profile and credible source; hopefully her post takes Uber's work culture issues from "open secret" to "problem that has public consequences for the company".

The CEO should crack down and take serious steps towards addressing this problem - not just for PR, but because his company is seriously suffering as a result of these issues. Unfortunately for Uber, from what I've heard, Travis is part of the problem as far as Game-of-Thrones internal politics and backstabbing goes. His "move fast and break things" persona sounds like a poor model for subordinates. Between that and the company's relative external success, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for anything internal to get better any time soon.

Until it does, I simply hope that my acquaintances at Uber find somewhere less shitty to work.

Hijacking this top comment to provide some personal experiences.

I started as an engineer in the spring of 2014 and this was definitely the case there.

Top engineers were being poached from Google/FB and these people were trying to carve out territory in a quickly growing engineering team.

The misogynistic culture, in my mind, comes from most of the early employees being former frat bros. Culture was extremely heavy on the drinking; see "Work-cations" where most of the team would go to an exotic location which was half-hackathon/half boozefest. There were happy hours every week with open bar because all new employees would be flown to SF (no matter where home office was) for orientation.

Crazy, most ex-employees (even the early ones) acknowledge that the culture is bad but they got their $$$ so they won't have to work again for a long time, if ever.

The real problem in Uber's engineering orgs is that Uber hired too many people for too few real projects. From what I learned from my friends in Uber, many teams had largely overlapping responsibilities, and therefore created bogus projects to justify their existence. Their standard MO is picking a missing feature in a service, and then creating a new system that implemented that feature.

It might be okay if all the talents that Uber hired could work together to build truly great software, but hell no, their management created this weird cut-throat culture by enforcing stack ranking with forced curve down to each team of first-line managers. It's hard to imagine that a team with fewer than 10 people had to name an engineer who "didn't meet expectation". Yet that was exactly what happened in Uber. They also doted out disproportional amount of bonus to a few top performers. Naturally, people's expectation was distorted, and chaos ensued.

I think it's worth pointing out that this kind of male dominated culture doesn't just put off female engineers but male engineers too. As a male I've worked in environments with a high male to female ratio and it makes for a stifling homogeneous type of culture. I've never experienced the kind of sexist culture described at Uber but I imagine that must feel even worse as a male employee. I definitely see few women as a warning sign when interviewing.

Usually in these cases, these kind of company politics trickle down from the top, so it's unlikely the CEO does not know or has any interest in intervening. All the companies I worked at that had weird or toxic environments showed that kind of environment throughout most of their structure. A single arsehole in an otherwise great company is usually pushed out sooner than later. If however you notice there are mostly arseholes in your management structure, chances are this goes all the way to the top...

Anecdotally speaking, I've noticed that Uber has become a dirty word among my friends. For example, someone using Uber will generally just say that they're calling a car rather than naming the service. Lyft doesn't have the same stigma. It should be concerning to management that the company's ethos is repelling customers.

Edit: Management should be far more concerned that Uber is allegedly an environment that systematically enables sexual harassment and discrimination against women.

> My CS classmates - especially women - simply do not apply to Uber,

The sad thing is why do men want to apply there after what is know about it? I wouldn't want to be near any company that treats any of their employees like that.

ditto, Uber's job postings on our internal school board are avoided like the plague.

The CEO is the problem. The fish stinks from the head.

Uber employee here.

This was a disheartening story to read to say the least. I hope that she sues as her case is abundantly clear and the response by HR and the management chain was absolutely unacceptable. If what happened is true, they should be held accountable.

Unfortunately, from my perspective, Uber has a track record of lack of accountability when it comes to leadership/managers. Pretty much everyone I know at Uber believes that Josh Mohrer [1] and Emil Michael [2] should have been fired. It's probably fair to say both are generally regarded as being high performers, but what they did was extremely damaging to the reputation of the company and the fact they weren't held accountable only worsens that reputation.

I think that generally Uber is a positive influence in the world. It has created work opportunities for millions essentially out of thin air has fundamentally changed how people think about transportation in cities for the better. Uber is certainly disruptive and its methods and behavior have been brash at times which has often resulted in a disproportionate amount of scrutiny, both deserved (comments and actions targeting journalists, sexism) and otherwise ("support" of Trump, #deleteuber, and surge price "gouging"). For me, Uber is still a place filled with many talented people working on interesting, challenging problems. But a story like this is a tough pill to swallow.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-25/colleague...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/uber-said...

I mean this in the nicest way possible, so please don't take this as anything personally directed at you, but: any employee of Uber that feels strongly about this should find another company to work at. If you're working in tech, in the current employment market in the Bay Area, finding another job is not hard. Not easy, both in the sense that leaving a job can be scary, and that interviews can be draining - but doable.

There are other companies out there that solve interesting, challenging problems and don't have this toxic culture. There are other companies with talented people. And if enough of your coworkers disagree with Uber's culture, policies, etc., then the talented, moral people that you work with at Uber may even come with you.

The only way Uber will ever pay attention is if it affects their bottom line. Employees leaving, or people turning down offers is, person-for-person, one of the most impactful ways to do this.

So don't swallow it! Spit it back out at them. Uber is entirely dependent on the goodwill of its engineers. They're irreplaceable. Uber's financial situation is such that they're absolutely required to execute. They cannot afford organized employee protests and will cave to them like an overripe grape trying to hold up a cinderblock. People like you could be running the table there. Why not hold them to account?

What's the worst thing that happens? It doesn't work out and you eventually switch jobs. But the best case outcome? You get to work on exciting, important problems for a company that is accountable to its team and their prevailing beliefs and principles. That sounds pretty awesome to me.

So basically, your price for overlooking systemic misogyny is "working with talented people on interesting problems"? Is uber the only place where you can work with talented people on interesting problems? On ride-sharing?

These assholes can't get rich without you. Someone is going to win in this space. Why would you help it be them?

> I think that generally Uber is a positive influence in the world

I'm pretty sure you can replace Uber in that sentence with "ride sharing".

The personal and professional cost of bringing a lawsuit normally means it makes no sense to bring a case even if you would have a good chance of winning. You really need to be prepared to make personal sacrifice in order to try to change things by the lawsuit for it even to be worth considering.

In case anyone isn't sure why the original interaction is harassment: relationships within a reporting chain are generally prohibited, for both legal, ethical, and practical reasons. Sex becoming part of the effective job description crosses both legal and ethical lines, and team effectiveness is hindered when people wonder whether someone is getting special treatment because they're sleeping with the boss.

A manager propositioned a new employee on her first day on his team -- asking not just for a date but for sex. That's way over the line.

Also, this isn't just a gendered thing -- Google the story of Keith Rabois resigning as COO of Square.

I don't understand how anyone could be unsure about that being harassment. It's about as clear-cut as you can get.

He should have been fired the day that surfaced. If someone who worked for me ever did something like that, they'd be out the door pronto. It speaks volumes that he wasn't, to the point which I am irrationally tempted to doubt the veracity of her claims.

Don't proposition anyone in your reporting chain. Don't flirt with them. Don't do anything with them. It's really not that complicated. If you are attracted to someone who works for you (it happens), do the adult thing and ignore it.

I am shocked, how is possible to get away with this toxic company culture.

> In case anyone isn't sure why the original interaction is harassment

Is there anyone that thought a manager asking their subordinate for sex isn't harassment?

The fact that this harassment came from a reporting chain or not is irrelevant, no employee should have to undergo that kind of behaviour if it wasn't consented to in the first place.

Are people legitimately needing clarification on this?

Tech workers (across all disciplines) need to unionize to combat this kind of thing. As has been pointed out below, HR that is staffed and incentivized by the company management only serves the interests of the management. A union is the only structure that can actually win demands for workers by organizing workers to withhold their labor.

It's not a panacea, and there are several historical examples of union leadership betraying the trust of workers and neglecting the demands of the most marginalized members (such as the UAW in 1941), but a union correctly structured and rooted in worker solidarity is the only proven way to fight management on these kinds of issues.

it is interesting that sex is the hot button. in general we special case sex in the US. While I dont mean to say sexual harrasment isnt a real problem, its interesting to me more philosophically that propositioning for sex is ultra problematic but propostioning for a platonic relationship is less so, or drinking, or anything else beyond strict job fulfillment labor. its obviously a problem when a power dynamic is abused but I would argue there is a weird puritanical nature to seeing a sexual proposition as preposterous but an unwanted platonic advance as largely benign

Not just sex, but sex in an "open relationship," presumably as "backup booty." It's hard for me to understand why she didn't immediately start trying to GTFO, but instead stuck around for a year and tried to make things work. Save transcripts and screenshots, find a new job, then sue at leisure.

> The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that I was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making

That's such a meaningless thing for an HR person to ask someone, that it clearly only serves to be patronising and hopefully stop them bringing problems up. I mean, how could you as an HR staffer possibly justify your inaction with an argument like that?

"We didn't act on any of their complaints, as we noticed that in all the cases of harassment that they reported, they were the victim in all of them!"

HR serves to protect the company, you have to think in HR's shoes. If the complainant goes away and finds another job the problem is solved. Most harassment cases tend not to end up in court, usually the aggrieved party quits.

I complained to HR that it was 16 degrees one day and 26 the next when the air conditioning was being awful and was actually told "first you complain it's too cold, and now you complain it's too hot". Duh, because it was too cold and then it was too hot. You get some classy responses when people don't want to deal with stuff.

I laughed out loud at this one--that's some first-class ass-backwards reasoning...

Is anyone versed enough in common HR practices to actually explain this behavior? It seems much more likely that this is some perverse instantiation of an aggressive incentive to the HR team that actual incompetence. Is Uber rewarding HR for minimizing actions taken?

What do you expect from a company that has been so many times on the wrong side of the law?

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-fine-chicago-idUSKBN1...

http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/14/10772412/uber-fine-califor...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/06/09/uber-fined-...

http://time.com/4632430/taiwan-uber-fines/

http://economia.icaew.com/en/news/january-2017/uber-fined-20...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2464520/rivalry-between-uber-...

...

The parent comment may seem a bit flippant, but the underlying question is a good one - why do talented, non-toxic people seek employment with companies that are well known to have such terrible culture?

I'm not in the Valley, so all the information I have about Uber's culture is through popular media, but ever since I first heart the company's name it was linked to scandal, poor ethics and/or misogyny.

Talented software developers are a privileged bunch, especially on the West Coast U.S. we are sought after and can pick and choose employers. Why would anyone choose Uber, especially a talented woman?

Do SW devs just not realize how much power and choice they have? Or do people really just choose to work for unethical businesses because they expect a good paycheck? If it's the latter, what does that say about their own personal ethics?

To be clear, I don't honestly believe the majority of Uber's staff are bad people. But that leaves me genuinely baffled as to what they are doing there in the first place.

I honestly wonder how people here would react if a blog posts like this came out about a company that hasn’t necessarily been in the news for this many past bad behavior. Would we still condemn that company or would we blame the victim, as is the case usually?

Was the first thing I thought about when I read this article.

I may have experienced a little bit of sexual harassment in my youth when working at a local McDonald's but, being a guy, it was the only time and I was able to put a stop to be rather quickly. However, being in software engineering for the past 12 years, I have seen the sexual harassment of several women all of which never saw a proper resolution.

For instance I worked at a small company that was later bought by a larger company. One of the women I worked with was propositioned by our boss. She reported him to HR and the next day HR scheduled a meeting with her, HR, the CEO and her boss that propositioned her. They told her that her boss denied it then proceeded to ask her for the next half an hour why she was lying and why she wanted to damage his career. She left for the rest of the day in tears.

Over half of his team, including me, left within the month. It was disgusting. During my exit interview I made sure to cite it along with his frequent trips to our area where, when she wasn't there, would pick up her photo of her and her boyfriend and just stare at it along with his fraudulent billing of clients. Nothing ever happened to him, he just got moved into another group because his team got too small.

It's really disheartening to hear story after story about this and even witnessing it yourself. I can't imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end. I worry about this not only because of it being a bad thing but I also have two daughters and it fills me with dread, after what I've seen, what they may go through.

What can be done to stop such toxicity? Do we need stronger laws? Are there groups for women who can turn to?

We have very strong laws about these things; if her report is accurate (which I have no reason to doubt), Susan has strong standing to sue.

It seems like she has chosen not to sue Uber, which is also a legitimate choice; she may just want to move on.

Toxicity has to be stopped at every level, in every team where it is found, in this story it sound like the toxicity extends up to the C-suite, so it would seem some changes need to be made there.

We should teach our sons to truly respect women. We should teach our sons to be respectful honest decent human beings. We should teach our sons to not be assholes who think they are entitled to a woman’s body. We should teach our sons to be humans with emotions and empathy for others. We should teach our sons to not be toxic despicable entitled pathetic beings. It’s on us (men). If we behave badly, it’s squarely on us. No external factor (law, regulation, social status, etc) would have any effect if we don’t know how (or don’t want) to be good.

Maybe we as men got to let the women know we have their back?

Defend them when they are not around?

Don't stay silent?

I don't know for certain either.

No offence intended, and I realise the detail at the end about picking up the photo seals it for you, but you do realise that sometimes women lie, right? Unless there was written evidence or some other mitigating detail that was unmentioned, it sounds like you wanted the boss to be automatically fired based on nothing more than an accusation from a woman.

I've been in your bosses position, though not in a sex-related situation. A woman accused me of something in a private meeting with me and our manager. It was quite trivial and I can't even remember exactly what it was (this happened years ago), but it was work related - I was her tech lead but not her direct reporting manager and she was accusing me of undermining her, and gave an example of a specific incident that would indeed have been rather bad: if it were true. Which it wasn't.

Fortunately, this woman was an exceptionally bad liar (she lied repeatedly and frequently and had been caught many times but was mysteriously never let go). The conversation she was referring to had happened over email. So our boss asked her to bring it up so he could read it for himself. She proceeded to open her laptop, load the email and read it with the boss sitting next to her. It completely contradicted her account, and the only thing she could find to say was "oh". I remember me and my manager looking at each other with wtf type expressions on our faces.

That woman was eventually promoted into management.

What you described is a classic he-said/she-said situation. Perhaps he did have a crush on her and was a bit creepy, and the girl decided she didn't like that, but he never propositioned her. It sounds like you nor your team really knew the truth, but assumed you did. So why is it surprising to you that nothing happened? You want guilty until proven innocent to apply to you, if one day the tables are turned?

> sexual women

Unfortunate typo there.

In São Paulo, where I live, taxi apps appeared a couple of years before Uber entering the market. It took the market by storm, so every single cab had to be in at least one the two major apps (Easytaxi and 99taxi). It was easy, fast and safe to call a cab anytime. But it was still expensive.

Uber came with its black cars. No one bothered. But Uber came with UberX and then Uber pool. It was a revolution, 50% cheaper. It exploded. The taxi market was/is dominated by corruption, with its medallions monopoly. Capitalism worked.

But capitalism dont stop working when Uber is winning. Now the taxi apps, specially the rebranded 99, that was the clear winner in the taxi apps fight raised hundreds of millions with the chinese and is ready to fight Uber. They now have regular taxi, a 30% discount taxi (that usually matches Uber price) and a Uber-like service with common people cars, all in the same app.

My social network mostly went back to using taxi, now that the price matches, because SP is not an easy city to transit. Uber drivers rely 100% on Waze/Google Maps. This ofyen leads to errors. Taxi drivers who drive around for years, sometimes decades are more reliable.

My point being: I dont believe in karma, but capitalism is a bitch. If you are that arrogant to mismanage that bad your resources when you are winning, when the market forces strike back, you wont be strong enough to stand on your feet.

We are seeing the exact same thing here in Australia. An app called GoCatch which was a taxis-only app for around 5 years but moved into the ride share market last year. It used to be very difficult to get one of their cars in Sydney, but now I can get one most times I try. Many people seem to like the idea of a locally-owned company versus the tax-dodging (in their eyes) juggernaut from overseas.

Ignoring all the bad press they've gotten lately, this is a major issue in their business model.

I just don't see why the cab business should present an opportunity that requires a landgrab on a global scale.

Something like Facebook, sure. You need to be the social network with everyone on it.

A cab company? It doesn't sound like it matters whether it's Uber or some local competitor. Internet is going to be cheap most places, so anyone arriving anywhere can just download the local app as needed.

Using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I started as an engineer at Uber about 7 months ago and sadly none of this surprises me. I feel for Ms. Fowler and seeing this gives me even greater motivation to leave. I can't speak for the rest of the organization but can say that Uber's engineering org has a lot of assholes like the ones Ms. Fowler describes.

My negative experience doesn't compare to Ms. Fowler's, but what I've seen basically boils down to:

1) Senior engineers and managers who lack anything approaching maturity. A lot of toxic personalities have been promoted into positions of seniority because they were at some point considered high performers. Many managers and senior engineers are concerned mainly with expanding their influence over improving the organization, helping those with less experience or — god forbid — actually getting anything done.

2) Diseased work culture. 60-hour work weeks seen as normal and encouraged as an enactment of Uber's "Always Be Hustling" cultural value. Tons of drinking, sometimes forced on you by your manager or your manager's manager. Too many unhappy, burnt out people fearful of negative performance reviews.

3) A lot of this stems from our CEO, Travis Kalanick, being profoundly out of touch. He's constitutionally incapable of acknowledging the company's real problems (toxic culture, massive unprofitability, drivers who hate us to name a few).

There are some fantastic engineers and plenty of good people at Uber, but the company rewards the bad eggs far too often and it's killing us from within.

If you are sexually harassed, and HR doesn't do anything about it, you should sue. Don't expect HR to change.

If the stories in this article are true, and if the evidence is as strong as the article says it is, this is a slam-dunk case for sexual harassment, hostile work environment, retaliation, etc.

Suing would have lots of negative consequences, and few upsides. It would take up months of time, be immensely frustrating, stressful and lead other employers to be wary of you in future (even if most wouldn't admit it). Your name would be dragged through the mud by Uber in an attempt to derail the case, and you'd become an online target for haters (as with Ellen Pao). All for some uncertain monetary reward. Who needs that kind of stress and hassle?

Writing this article (which was superb in its incredulous anger) is a better way to get closure IMO, but this should be her decision alone.

HR works for the organisation. It's not there to protect you. Source: work in the HR industry.

Second. The writer and the others should sue, not only to be compensated for their own injuries but to protect others who might be harassed as well.

Everyone is talking about why she didn't sue. Given the way the courts have ruled recently on binding arbitration, is it possible that she has no recourse to actual courts, just to arbiters? (She never says if such a clause was included in her employment contract, but I know that it has been included in the last two contracts that I signed.) Wouldn't that foreclose her opportunity to sue, and just to go into the much less favorable (for her) arbitration process?

Her choice to write about it might end up being a bigger incentive for change there than a lawsuit.

She tells the story quite well. Probably an ideal story for some journalist(s) to pick up and expand on.

Uber's employment contract includes an agreement that you won't take them to court.

Suing is great and all, but do you have any idea how hard it is? How much work it is, and how financially and emotionally draining it is? You can't just call up a lawyer, tell them your story, and expect magic justice sprinkles to do the rest. There are retainers to pay, depositions to do, discovery... and the whole process is adversarial _by design_. It's a nightmare. Anyone who's willing to go through it is a goddamn superhero in my book.

Does Uber require employees to sign an arbitration agreement when they join?

Lawsuits cost enormous amounts of time and effort. A rich company has way more of both than you do.

Or report the incident to your state labour commission.

Travis Kalanick's response: https://twitter.com/travisk/status/833480964315557888

> 1/ What's described here is abhorrent & against everything we believe in. Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired.

> 2/ I've instructed our CHRO Liane to conduct an urgent investigation. There can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber.

HR already investigated. Putting the Chief Human Resource Officer in charge implies what the investigation will conclude: rouge employees. Because if it was institutional, the CHRO would be responsible.

Then again, it isn't a commitment to cleaning out HR beyond anyone there who says, 'Oh I think it is ok.' And the whole 'thinking' thing is a way of backing off under the cover of 'We don't want to be thought police.'

There's no taking of responsibility for what happened on his watch. No personal commitment to action. No promise of full disclosure. This is damage control and the fact that HR is in charge of investigating allegations against it suggests that the plan is cover up. The CEO sets the culture.

It's a shame that he condones harassment until it reaches the top of hacker news.

Please note that Kalanick didn't take responsibility for this or said that the buck stops with him, but rather instructed the head of HR to investigate something that systematically took place in the organization for years: protecting high output engineers for the sake of valuations and their IPO. If that doesn't reek of rotten culture, what does?

How about independent investigation?

Just to be another anecdotal data point, I am a white male iOS engineer with tons of experience on top-grossing apps. I live a few miles from Uber's new building in Oakland. But I would never consider working for them because of stories like this and others. This kind of behavior doesn't just cost them good hires among women and minorities. Having a toxic culture makes it hard to hire any decent people, and if only toxic people will agree to work there, it will just perpetuate things.

Maybe they don't care now, they're growing, they're sitting on big piles of cash, they can afford to be assholes if they want. Our culture regrettably gives them that option, even rewards for it sometimes. But companies ossify as they grow, disruptors become entrenched and it takes a long, long time to shake a reputation like this. They've created a new market but they're not entitled to it forever.

It's quite unfortunate that it requires someone to take a huge public risk to bring attention to this, despite the fact we all live around it every day.

Many companies have this problem. Everyday we can make it better, make it less prevalent, and change how management, engineering, designing, hiring, recruiting, and socialization are done.

Nothing is going to change if all that comes of this is folks hemming and hawing on chat forums. Not much will even change if you decide that this is the final straw to delete Uber. What will make a change is if you go to work on Tuesday and ask your HR rep, "What is the protocol for this?" Make sure they have it in writing. At a small company? Ask the founder to make sure this is covered. Make sure that everyone agrees that these actions cannot go unpunished because people are "high" performers.

I work at Lyft, and although I'm in different shoes (SW male), I really can't see this happening and HR/management stonewalling the complaints. We don't tolerate harassment, and we stand up for each other. I know I try to. [1]

I honestly don't understand how Uber attracts talent. Lyft and Uber both work on really interesting problems. [2] The difference is that Uber are, well, the sort of people Travis Kalanick would hire. [3] Lyft is smaller, sure, but we're growing at a very rapid tick (and smaller means there's more for each engineer to do). And though people generally view Lyft as being undifferentiated from Uber, I think we can positively say that we provide a better user experience in many ways, in spite of being a much smaller outfit. And again: we're growing. Fast.

Bottom line: if you're looking at a job at Uber, consider applying to Lyft :) It'll be worth your time.

[1] "Uplift others" and "Be yourself" are two of our four core values. [2] I joined Lyft after leaving a job at Google and rejecting offers from AirBnB and Dropbox, and I'm 100% confident I would do the same thing over again. Working at Lyft is fun—and impactful. [3] Not to say that they're all bad people; I have lots of friends that work there. But there's a dramatic cultural difference between the two companies, and that culture is driven by the leadership. So the "median" employee at Lyft will be very different from the median at Uber.

P.S. So clearly I'm a little biased on this subject :) Take with a grain of salt.

A thread about workplace sexual harassment is hardly an appropriate place to plug your company.

Can I ask why you believe sexual harassment is an appropriate platform for self-advertisement?

As someone who is Australian and not American, if anything like this happened and HR failed in the trainwreck like manner that they did in this story, we have a government organisation that oversees and enforces workplace legislation.

It seems insane to me that the only recourse you have after HR is basically "gather evidence and sue" which seems to be common advice in this thread.

True, as much as I sometimes hate the extra 'red tape' that the Australian Government puts upon businesses here, they do offer a pretty fair level of protection against employers abusing or unfairly treating employees.

It is pretty hard for a business here to dismiss an employee without reasonable grounds that would stand up in court - which of course, if it got to that level, means that the whole story would have to come out, so a situation like the one in this thread would have meant Uber being in a world of hurt while all their dirty laundry was aired in a court.

As a fellow Australian I must add that in three separate occasions, at two distinct tech companies, I have seen people be terminated immediatelly following a complaint of this nature to HR.

These were men and women in high management positions and by immediately I mean within 48 hours or a fortnight or so in a bullying case.

You can't sue, there is likely a mandatory arbitration clause in the employment contract (because why not, it's free) and it applies to everything.

Also Australian, and this entire story seems absurd to me. I guess I've never worked in an office with more than 50 people, so don't get the full gamut of human interactions.

Mike Isaac (reporter for the New York Times) is collecting more stories of harassment & toxic work environment at Uber: https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/833445850130944000

One of the things that this article got me thinking about is how much less effective that model is. Sure, some Sunday from now, maybe there's a NYT expose that reaches a national audience. Before that happens, the NYT reporters will reach out to Uber senior management for comment and give it time to compose some hollow PR about how seriously it takes the matter and that will run alongside the actual stories of problems.

Here we get the raw unvarnished story of someone effected and people can make their own conclusions. There's no middle man trying to make a buck and the making a buck is why NYT it's 'maybe there's an NYT expose.' Lawyers, advertisers, and other more important news all are considerations at editorial board meetings. Lots of stories get spiked.

Hopefully he can turn the story around fast enough to get in while public attention is focused here.

Everything I've heard about Uber from people who have joined is terrible. Train wreck of Human Resources, unprofessional conduct as par the course, terrible pay locked up in a nowhere in sight IPO. I honestly don't understand why people keep joining them.

Where did you hear the pay is terrible? From what I've heard, it seems pretty normal for the industry, at least for software engineers.

OK, so I had no clue who Susan Fowler was.

And now I am impressed:

https://fledglingphysicist.com/2013/12/12/if-susan-can-learn...

https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2016/8/13/so-you-want-to-l...

Stories like this are so enraging, and yet far too common today. My partner went through a somewhat similar experience at a Big 4 accounting firm a while back. She tried to request an internal transfer to get away from a sexist, toxic environment only to have her managers destroy her credibility in the organization and ruin her career chances there.

Sure, suing is an option here, but one that Uber calculates is absolutely worth the risk. Lawsuits like this aren't punishment to billion-dollar companies, they're factored into the cost of doing business. It can take years to sue a company under these circumstances, and depending on the situation, it could do more harm to one's reputation and career down the road. Most lack the energy to relive those experiences in a law office or courtroom while trying to move on with their lives.

Lawsuits may provide financial compensation to those who've had to deal with these atrocious situations, but it's not going to solve the underlying problem.

When they come with court orders and injunctions mandating changes of behavior (and not just financial compensation) they can indeed solve the underlying problems.

While I agree with the statements that HR works for the company, when things are working the interests of the company and employees should align. I appreciate that too often this isn't how HR operates, but I don’t think anyone wants to be misconstrued as implying that Ms. Fowler didn't understand how HR works or that she didn't take all appropriate actions.

> I wanted to stay on the team

...

> it was genuinely in the company's best interest to have me on that team

I read this and the rest of the article as a testiment to Ms. Fowler's work ethic and commitment to her employer and fellow employees.

> I was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making

This is the most disgusting abuse described in the article. Not only did the organization completely fail Ms. Fowler and all employees, but the HR professionals participated in the physiological abuse.

My thoughts exactly. Thank you for your comment, I really enjoyed it.

This is the third most popular story in Hacker News of all time [1], and I couldn't be happier. This can't have been easy to write but the more posts like this, the more likely people who suffer the same issues at their workplace will share their experiences.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...

Yet in under a day it's off the front page despite >900 comments and >3700 points. The post was interesting and shocking ... and I have (anecdotal) memories of less-popular stories sticking around far longer. Weird

Wow, this is unreal. I could expect mistreatment at various companies, but something so overt?

Thank you Susan for writing this.

> "performance problems aren't always something that has to do with work, but sometimes can be about things outside of work or your personal life."

Also, this seems many species of wrong. I don't really see why your personal life should have any relevance to a performance review.

I read it as "outside of your work" and also "outside of your personal life". Which is even more perplexing.

What a strange company all around.

Susan is ~an industry veteran~ a somewhat experienced engineer and her interactions with HR are typical of what I've seen so I would have expected her to know how things would play out. In my experience HR is never there to protect the employees. HR is there to make sure the company doesn't get into any hot legal waters.

Most of the time the easiest way to do that is to just suppress any wrongdoing and sideline whoever is being wronged. That's exactly how things played out in her story. Once again solidifying my opinion of HR being a company instead of an employee protector. If you see any wrongdoing then just get a lawyer. Never go to HR.

Edit: Folks are right. She is not an industry veteran. Incorrect assumption on my part.

I'm as horrified by the story as anyone, but I don't think the author can be considered an industry veteran. I just looked at her LinkedIn profile and she graduated from undergrad in 2014 and held two <=6 month jobs before joining Uber.

> Susan is an industry veteran and her interactions with HR are typical of what I've seen so I would have expected her to know how things would play out

Here's what she says she expected:

> Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on

Which sounds about right...

I wouldn't qualify her as an industry veteran. This is not how things would have played out at a lot of the risk-adverse companies I have worked for. I'm sure it does at some places and it's no surprise to hear this about Uber TBH. Being just a couple years out of college, I'm not sure why you would expect her to understand all the shity ways the world can work.

> HR is there to make sure the company doesn't get into any hot legal waters.

Yes, this I totally agree with. In these situations, HR is there to minimize risk for the company.

> Most of the time the easiest way to do that is to just suppress any wrongdoing and sideline whoever is being wronged.

This, however, I totally disagree with. I see a lot of comments saying that you can't trust HR because they are only there to protect the company, but that's why in cases like this you usually can trust HR, because their incentives (which are "don't expose the company to lawsuits") line up with yours.

I'm sure other HR people are reading this blog post in complete horror, because Uber's HR org did basically everything you DON'T do in a professional HR org, and in the process have exposed the company to what could be a slam dunk lawsuit, not to mention horrible press. If even an iota of what Susan Fowler described was accurate, everyone up the chain in the HR org should be fired.

I had a couple of job offers, one was for Uber. I was super excited about the opportunity but I spoke with one of their engineers (former) and he warned me off accepting the offer - said it was a toxic, sexist workplace and said he would not recommend women to work there. Needless to say I declined.

Not to derail the whole premise of this article, but Susan's book looks great! Just bought it and can't wait to start reading it.

I'm going to look into it. I was shocked to see that Susan was a research assistant at UP until 2015 and now has a book out about production microservices. That's some carrier trajectory in two years.

Jeez this sucks. Everything that happened was so completely unacceptable. I really hope people are held accountable for this stuff. This kind of behavior isn't new and shouldn't be normal. The Infrastructure group specifically has is known for this politicking and bad culture. I work elsewhere, and though it isn't as bad, agree there is a big management problem at play. I'm sorry you couldn't find a team that supported you. Thank you Susan for writing all this.

The saddest thing about this to me is that she decided to stay for so long, and let the incidents stack up. I'm not sure if that's indicative of her personality, or what women in the industry have come to expect, and thus have a much higher tolerance for bullshit of this caliber. Unfortunately, from the repeated stories we hear I suspect it's the latter, and that's fucking tragic.

The older we get the less we put up with bullshit, the more we trust our own intuition about when it's time to get out. Unfortunately this only comes (at least for me) after many painful experiences. (Nothing like what OP has had to endure tho.)

For all the people saying 'HR works for the company' and 'She should have sued!', I think you're underestimating how difficult that is to do. You're reading the account of a person who was clearly perfectly aware of her rights and how corporate workspaces operate.

What would you actually do in their position? You leave work one evening, go home and google 'lawyer that will get me lots of money from my company and work for free while I'm out of a job using nothing but my certitude I will prevail to pay rent'? Nobody (statistically) does that. In the 99% case, you'd try to make it work and then you'd find another job. As it turned out.

No - employee lawsuits are not that uncommon. The vast majority are settled before they see the inside of courtroom. The majority that do go to a courtroom go the employees way unfortunately for employers in frivolous cases. Talking to a labour law attorney to consult about your case is not that expensive - if you have an open and shut case most lawyers will want to work on a contingency fee anyways.

Engineers, especially the ones at Susan's level, are pretty well paid. Suing would have definitely been an option for her.

I wish I could say this isn't happening all the time at many more companies in a less obvious way. Other than being straight up propositioned for sex, most of this other stuff has happened to me too. And I don't work at Uber.

I think this proves that HR should be fundamentally separate from a company. The incentives are setup for a company's HR division to try and maximize success for the company.

Just like the NFL and NBA have player's associations, HR should be managed by external companies, or at least separated by function (supporting employees vs management). Companies would still be paying the HR teams, so incentives wouldn't be optimal, but seems like it would be a step in the right direction.

Player's associations aren't companies, they're unions. They do union things in the unioniest way and do a pretty alright job.

By ensuring unethical/illegal behavior doesn't go unaddressed, HR is working to maximize success for the company.

With that in mind, it's in the company's best interest to have HR be a core department with proper training, funding and oversight.

The arguments frequently rehashed on HN about "HR is not there to help" only make sense in dysfunctional companies (which there's a lot of, unfortunately). Moving HR to a separate organization, outside the company, won't help with that.

"The ramifications of these political games were significant: projects were abandoned left and right, OKRs were changed multiple times each quarter, nobody knew what our organizational priorities would be one day to the next, and very little ever got done. We all lived under fear that our teams would be dissolved, there would be another re-org, and we'd have to start on yet another new project with an impossible deadline. It was an organization in complete, unrelenting chaos."

With the exception of a startup that was on the verge of failing, this is every organisation I've ever worked for. Including two of the big silicon valley giants (one who got cut down to size after 2000, one that's still big). I wonder if the underlying reason is the same.

I must say I've also reported people to HR, and I have regretted EVERY interaction with HR I've ever had. Initiated by me or otherwise. My attitude to meeting HR now is that there's 2 options: schmooze and snooze (as in have "a good meeting in which there is one and only one accomplishment: agreement between both parties that no other meetings are necessary"), or please contact my lawyer at ...

(And I do wonder if women's experiences are the same. WTF)

Interesting to note that Uber has scheduled an "Uber Women in Engineering & Leadership Conference". I noticed this last year, and it was supposed to happen in November 2016. They bumped it to February 2017, before bumping it again to December 2017. Coincidence?

https://www.meetup.com/UberEvents/events/230301225/

Uber CEO responded in this article[0]:

> I have just read Susan Fowler's blog. What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in. It's the first time this has come to my attention so I have instructed Liane Hornsey our new Chief Human Resources Officer to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations. We seek to make Uber a just workplace and there can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber -- and anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/19/14664474/uber-sexism-alleg...

> It's the first time this has come to my attention

the guy must be asleep at the wheel.

> I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that.

Holy shit. There are terrible people who make into positions of power and then abuse it. But it is whole other layer of horribleness when there is institutional corruption and evil which encourages and protects that. With a nice little bonus of blackmail on the top -- "you'll get bad reviews if you stay, be careful".

It is humiliating to have that happen to someone, then the humiliation and hurt triples when you realize the system that you hoped is there to fix the problem and stand behind you is helping the perpetrator.

I have seen some really good programmers, if the 10x myth was true, it certainly was true for them. But I wouldn't bat an eye kicking them out in cases like this.

I'm curious if it's actually worth keeping high performing people on your company if they create a lot of internal conflict and employee turnover. Have there been studies that have looked into this? Are there HR tools that track this?

This situation reminds me of the Jeremy Clarkson Effect (https://blog.vanillaforums.com/help/how-to/dealing-with-toxi...) where you keep people on board because they are high performers/popular until the point where the amount of damage they cause versus value they provide is too high and must let them go. If, for example, you lose 5 good tech people because of one amazing tech person, is it still worth to have that one amazing person? I feel like if you could quantify something like this, it would be easier to get rid of toxic people.

maybe not an exact match, but the "dark triad" traits are shown to be effective for individual career progress, but negatively correlated to organizational performance. Harvard Business Review did an article ("Why Bad Guys Win at Work") about a few relevant pieces of research in this vein: https://hbr.org/2015/11/why-bad-guys-win-at-work

It's absolutely not worth it. The 10x engineer is an engineer who helps make everyone around them better. A toxic employee is not that person.

I am really, really happy to see this as the top story on the front page of HN and to see the top comments currently here. It speaks well of HN.

There aren't enough upvotes in the world for writing this.

Susan, you're a hero.

reader note: Susan is pretty famous in SRE circles: it's doubly gutsy for her to write this.

PS I'm a guy and a valley veteran.

Geez, and here I was considering working at Uber.

Thanks for posts like these.

The very first thing that occurred to me upon reading this account of harassment is that the "high performer" deflection is complete and utter bullshit, and should be called out loudly for what it is.

I don't care of you're Thomas Edison, James Watson, or Nikola Tesla. Sending sexually-oriented messages to women in your workplace ever, let alone the first day that person is on board, is completely unacceptable and any "bro" who thinks it's OK ought to be subject to a zero-tolerance policy.

Bald-faced lying seems to be the name of the game in HR. My first significant encounter with any HR organization ended up with me catching them in a lie trying to manipulate me into signing something (I never did sign it). I was astonished by how ready and willing they apparently were to try this strategy on me. It was a good learning experience, in retrospect, and I'm glad that I did not fall for it.

This was at a company that generally treated me alright and was staffed with generally reasonable people, so I can't imagine the Kafkaesque nightmare that it must be to work at a notoriously chaotic, evil company like Uber, especially as a woman (which I am not).

The lesson, as so many other people in this thread have already said, is that HR is not looking out for you. Keep your own counsel and get everything in writing, and prepare for their attempts to bully and gaslight you into a marginalized position.

Sue. Sue them for all they're worth. I was at Uber for six months, and I had enough - Mostly because of the blatant backstabbing and shell games managers were trying to play, rating their worst performers highly just long enough to get them transferred out, pointing out only the negative aspects of what their better workers were doing. There were some good people and some bad, but ultimately the culture was toxic, and the rampant sexism was just one (very large) part of it.

I've always heard HR works for the company's interest first and foremost. Go to a lawyer first and have them communicate with the C-level execs. Although Uber sounds like it has a pretty toxic culture all the way up.

It is my time to thank Hacker News because how many times I read it here rule number one: HR is not there to help you with your issues, but rather to determine how your issues could negatively affect the company PR image and company itself. The don't care about yoy or how to help you out - they care how to make it so that company doesn's suffer because of whatever you going through - weather fair to you or not.

So thank you guys and I'm quite suprised someone like Susan did not know that.

> how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others

What the ever-loving fuck. They're talking about programming computers. HR at the company actually hinted that your ethnic background or gender can make you better at computers?

This sounds like it has all the makings for a successful gender-discrimination class action suit. I would hope she and the rest of these women would consider it.

Uber sounds like a pretty toxic environment.

I hate stories like this, because there's such an easy solution: hire more women.

Nobody should ever have to work with a single-gender reporting tree; in the five or so steps between each individual contributor and the CTO there should be at least one woman.

It's not an impossible, or even implausible, goal. Throw a little money at it and widen the funnel, and you'll find plenty of absolutely incredible women. It's even self-perpetuating - each woman brings a network of peers to the table and makes further recruiting that much easier.

But that first hire is a doozy... I've turned down jobs in the valley before because I'd be the only woman in my org (it was only a tie-breaking factor, but a big one.)

Given how poorly she was treated by women in HR, and how many women left Uber per her statistics, I don't think "hire more women" sounds like a solution to their ills.

Just to add to what others have said... sue. Sue, and then don't be shocked when you end up as the primary plaintiff in a class action.

Wow this is unbelievable, I know sexism is still very much real in the workplace but I'm floored it's this overt. And the incompetence shown by HR is baffling.

Thanks Susan for writing this.

We should send this link to Uber recruiters every time they approach us.

Thanks to the author for writing this - it'd be so easy just to move on and try to forget about it. And thanks to the other HN readers for their thoughtful comments as well.

Thank you for writing this. I hope that you're happy in your new position. It's important that people speak out against sexism and harassment like this in publicly visible ways.

I look forward to reading your book on microservices.

Never ever take a problem to HR. HR represents the company's viewpoint at all times, not yours ever. You will never get a satisfactory resolution.

HR exists solely to help 'manage' the work force. Most companies that I've worked at it does a very poor job of it. Someday the HR department will get replaced by software, in my opinion the sooner the better.

This is getting fast attention far beyond the tech crowd. There could be some serious fallout for Uber (well-deserved if the story is true).

I'm surprised they kept her around so long. I am wondering why they just didn't bring her in, transfer her to a new team, and tell her she was no longer "a good cultural fit" with the team. In a at will:right to work state that is a totally legal way to fire a high performing employee (I think).

It's almost like they enjoyed watching her complain. Glad she got out.

Uber seems like one of the worst companies to work for right now. I don't understand why there are hordes of Google and Facebook engineers still leaving to work there. Is the pay really that good?

Anecdotally the fact that the office is in SF is a major reason. I also think many later hires at those companies feel like they missed out on the early days and want to go to Uber.

IANAL, but this screams "you will win a lawsuit, and Uber is such a terrible company it's worth the considerable personal inconvenience to you that you should file the lawsuit".

I wish Susan a lot of success at Stripe. Just ordered her book and deleted the Uber app.

People are quick to point the finger at Uber's management, culture, etc.

But after reading through Susan's reflections, the core problem seems to be in the HR department.

Allowing repeat offenses like Susan describes exposes Uber (as well as individual managers) to significant legal liability (in CA and NY, and possibly elsewhere).

Any qualified HR person knows and understands these liabilities and makes a very strong case to top management that proper conduct must be enforced.

Susan, you are probably entitled to legal remedies for what you went through because the offender had already been warned. The manager in question (and his manager) will also be subject to direct penalties under California law.

If you don't do it for yourself, do it for the many other women who will suffer through the same indignities and might not be as empowered as you were to take action.

This is not exclusive to Uber. By now I'd say that most companies with skewed diversity statistics likely are toxic and dysfunctional.

This sounds like such a broken, toxic environment. Although it's painful and the outcome is unclear, I really hope she sues. We have to publicly shame behavior like this and make it known that it's completely unacceptable.

Delete your account: https://help.uber.com/h/24010fe7-7a67-4ee5-9938-c734000b144a

'I pointed out that I was publishing a book with O'Reilly, speaking at major tech conferences, and doing all of the things that you're supposed to do to have an "upward career trajectory", but they said it didn't matter and I needed to prove myself as an engineer.'

Maybe that's why she didn't get a promotion. Personally, I have had colleagues attempt similar things. When they embark on these external endeavors they have significantly reduced quality work in their primary job.

Obviously I don't know this author and I don't work at Uber.

That's a bizarre and backward way to look at it. In a growth company, employees provide value in a lot of indirect, but important, ways. Having employees speak at conferences is a very common recruiting tactic; often, good people are at conferences, and when they hear about a great company to work for with smart people who give good talks, they want to work there, too. Books are similar. Reading Site Reliability Engineering makes me want to work at Google (even though I know I really don't want to work at Google).

Good people bring in more good people, and good people are enthusiastic and do cool things outside of work. The author is probably someone I'd want to work with, based on her enthusiasm for her job and her obviously effective time management (I wrote a technical book once, and it took a year longer than I'd planned). The people who convinced someone like her to leave a place are people I definitely wouldn't want to work with.

Having external recognition including speaking and writing can be part of the promotion requirements. They were certainly in mine when I was at Yahoo.

The hiring process at Uber already raises some red flags - so if you're not blind and totally ignorant you'll get the cue and glimpse of the company culture and your potential future there.

I have generally been skeptical about joining Uber. I was in the job market a couple of months back and was always apprehensive when interacting with their HR. I have received recruiting mails from them indicating that I would be lucky to work at Uber, instead of the opposite tone in general. Uber is probably losing many potential employees due to this.

There is no answer to the retort that Uber is successful. If that was the only guiding light for humanity, then we should just be living as savages surviving on who can punch the hardest.

Susan, thank you for sharing and please accept a virtual hug to help you shake the experience. I'm amazed you were this patient with such ridiculous behavior.

HR doesn't work for you, it works for the company.

HR's job is to ensure that conflict gets resolved internally so it stays an HR problem and doesn't escalate to a legal or PR problem. HR has failed miserably in this instance, regardless of whose side you think they should be on.

I am removing Uber app from my phone forever. I guess HR did not do a great job there.

HR's failing pretty hard at protecting the company here, though.

What the hell? Why isn't there a lawsuit yet? Everything is documented!

An understated issue in this account the role of HR - not only in Uber, but across business in general. For too long they have played the role of employee advocate when in truth they are - and can only ever be - an instrument of the corporation.

A modern reworking of unionisation may be the only answer - a p2p network, focused on employee welfare, independent of company interest.

Uber is such a shit company. My wife is a software engineer and I can't even imagine her having to deal with anything like this.

Hmm. This kind of stuff is not usually isolated. It's clear from Ms. Fowler's article that it wasn't isolated in her case.

It seems likely that a large company that treats trusted headquarters employees like this article described may also have ethical lapses in the way they treat field people. Mistreatment makes people angry.

In the waning days of the late unlamented Eastern Airlines, the airplane mechanics were angry. If you ride in an airplane maintained by angry people, you're placing great trust in their professionalism. You're trusting the line workers to leave their anger in their lockers.

In the same way, if you get into a car driven by an angry person, you're trusting that person to put his anger in the glove box. I'm sure most of Uber's drivers do that.

But isn't worker satisfaction a critical success factor for a business like Ubers?

Another reason not to support Uber. People need to stop using services from companies with behaviour like this.

I wonder if it would be a red flag for an engineer to continue to work at Uber for more than 6 months after this post comes out since it would signal that they either:

1) Approve of the culture there and don't see a reason to leave.

2) Aren't able to find another place to work.

Are you kidding me? Expecting others to hang a huge decision like a job change on a single issue like this and punishing them for not deciding the same way you would is absurd.

Or 3) are waiting for the 1 year vesting cliff.

This is disgusting. I really hope Uber is an outlier, and not the norm, when it comes to this level of sexist elitism. If I had to deal with that kind of harassment and backwards pressure at work as a woman I would probably end most work days trying not to either cry or quit.

That manager should have been fired on the very first offense Susan reported. "Don't proposition your colleagues for sex, especially on company comms, ESPECIALLY on the day she starts her job" is an implicit rule that doesn't need explaining. How isn't this lawsuit material? Are the employment contracts really that binding?

Nothing really surprising here though. Tech (and the world) has always had a problem with sexism. Uber is particularly egregious but given the long history of quotes from the CEO is it any surprise that this is their culture? Writing was on the wall the whole time.

Just to add something to the torrent of links already in these comments http://observer.com/2016/02/ubers-10-worst-actions-threats-l....

I would say this is pretty surprising. Tech may have a problem with representation, but there's a very big difference between something as overt as this, and, for instance, not being able to find candidates from diverse backgrounds. We should never lump the two together.

I guess it's not surprising that this happened at Uber, though.

Never trust HR.

Just another reason to delete uber. I highly encourage victims of sexual harassment who aren't making progress to follow The Intercept's recent article on tweeting anonymously. Out your company and harasser. https://theintercept.com/2017/02/20/how-to-run-a-rogue-gover...

IANAL, but isn't the described behavior by HR and the management very much illegal? I thought there were laws in place to protect workers. I hope Susan Fowler has a wonderful career.

Speeding is illegal too, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

1282 points in 2 hours and it's NOT at the top of Hacker News?

It's probably attracted a lot of flags and set off the overheated discussion detector, both of which will push down a submission.

It was at the top for like 2 hours already. It's at number 2 right now.

I've been questioning the legitimacy of Uber recently, and this cemented my understanding of how they operate. I'm taking my business to Lyft from now on

After 35 years working as an engineer one of the main things I've learned is that HR is there to protect the company from its employees. Sorry if that sounds cynical but it really is the bottom line. Even still, the fact that HR was unable to step in and even mitigate the destructive behavior (let alone doing the right thing) really speaks to the culture and ineptness of Uber's HR.

Mainstream media are picking up this story now:

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/19/uber-ceo-travis-kalanick-says...

What shocks me is the talented engineers still putting in hard work for the benefit of this system that they all hate. Companies blackball employees all the time, but the employees are happy to go the extra mile for an antisocial management structure and a megalomaniac boss? What's wrong with you people?

My guess is that they really do enjoy the other parts of their job and even the company itself, and are really sad about the bad parts that are making life difficult. That coupled with a hope that things might get better.. Everyone has a different breaking point when it comes to these things.

Maybe you just want to stick it out until the first year cliff when it comes to your RSUs so at least you have something to show for the below-market salary you agreed to. It sucks that you have to suffer through this crap but sometimes the potential financial upside you might be able to hold onto is worth a little more pain.

> I pointed out that I was publishing a book with O'Reilly, speaking at major tech conferences, and doing all of the things that you're supposed to do to have an "upward career trajectory", but they said it didn't matter and I needed to prove myself as an engineer"

That's funny bit

Since this is a clear-cut case of sexual harassment by a company with very deep pockets, Ms Fowler must have talked to a lawyer, and the lawyer OK'd the OP.

Does that indicate anything about how the case is going? Such as that the settlement negotiations are at an impasse?

Combining this article and Conway's law[1] makes for some very odd software being developed at Uber.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

Uber team member here.

While I can't speak to OP's post about her particular Org, I can say that the one I'm in (marketing) is very much non-toxic and a wonderful place to work.

I'm profoundly sad she had such a bad experience and hope she is much happier now.

Looks like she is fine with coworkers. Managers(and HR) are the main culprits. I wonder what's the background of these managers? Are they came from Google/FB or other startups? Did they behaved same manner in their previous orgs?

This is yet another reason why I would never work for Uber and will be deleting my Uber account. There's a reason why Uber has one the worst reputations as tech companies go and here we have clear, documented proof of it.

I don't know about you guys, but I've been to sexual harassment training. What Susan documented could be translated to tens of millions in fines and damages.

If it's this egregious, it's could be much, much, higher.

"I went home and cried that day, because even aside from impacts to my salary and bonuses, it did have real-world consequences - significant consequences that my management chain was very well aware of. I was enrolled in a Stanford CS graduate program, sponsored by Uber"

This deserves to be all caps, and in bold.

Ambitious people tend to eat shit sandwiches until they are either immune to them, or realize there's more to life.

She pointed out that the number of women at Uber was dwindling - women are smart, they take the 'more to life' route oftentimes.

It's just life playing itself out - as long as people are willing to eat shit, for money, like Susan did for a whole year - Ubers are going to be around.

No amount of blogging about it is going to help - if you're willing to eat them shit sandwiches, someone out there is going to make em for you :)

Uber CEO: https://twitter.com/felixsalmon/status/833470379154931714

Just deleted Uber from my phone. Is there a good alternative to Ubereats?

What area? Sprig is good in Bay Area.

Eat24 is my favorite. DoorDash is pretty good too, but they're a bit expensive.

Postmates

Grubhub.

This is almost difficult to believe. Almost.

I always really struggle to imagine these sorts of things happening in a large, organised way. Allowing this sort of thing to go on in your business should be an enormous risk. It amounts to a conspiracy, and its hard to believe that any one employee with the interests of the business at heart would allow it to continue, much less that very many people in a group would, and its extremely difficult to swallow that someone on the level of CTO would fob this sort of thing off rather than crapping their pants and lighting fires up under arses to get it investigated and fixed.

The other part I find hard to believe is that anyone, let alone large numbers of people can put up with this sort of treatment at work for so long without taking very serious action. I don't mean going to HR, or reporting it to X, Y or Z organisation or authority - I mean really, seriously decisive action - e.g. force some director/owner to pay attention personally, and provide them evidence, and record how it goes in case they are part of the problem - however that ends you are in a very strong position to proceed, with the wrong outcome quit and /do the right thing/ and continue to pursue it for the sake of others - with the correct outcome the problem is solved. I'll concede that eventually in this retelling there are more serious efforts, but its not far enough, fast enough - and I struggle to believe that "working with smart people" or any other such thing would make up for it.

At the same time its all horribly believable... One reason being that its happening in Silicon Valley, and more generally the USA. Compared to my experiences of the UK and Europe, workers rights in the US are terrible, discrimination is rife and the legal system very strongly favours the privileged and wealthy. Don't get me wrong we have our problems of discrimination and poor workplaces too... but, especially for office workers and professionals, there are lots of incentives for employees and employers to put a stop to it, and they generally carry a very low risk.

Another reason its believable is that when you don't feel safe, have to make expenditure and/or rely on your income for survival I can appreciate not wanting to rock the boat with your employer. I think that is a very selfish and stupid attitude, especially when others will suffer for your inaction, but I can appreciate why people take such positions.

However, all that being said there is something here that really irks me. I've been in situations with horrible employers before and I've blabbed about it to the press, and you know what I did? I had evidence, and I published that evidence with my complaints. The author talks about having evidence in their retelling of events, yet doesn't provide it alongside. I'm not sure I'd ever feel comfortable attacking anyone for anything without some evidence - maybe she just didn't think to keep it personally and left it in a work mailbox (an engineer being /that/ sloppy though? hard to swallow still). Its nice to see other people coming forward and backing the claims up... but I'm still left with a niggling doubt because of this. There is always the possibility that people will try and abuse discrimination claims for financial gain... its not reasonable to discount that possibility without some evidence to the contrary (i.e that the claims are valid) - as much as its more social acceptable to not raise this issue.

Maybe I'm weird, but that first response from HR would have been given a response offering /one/ chance to get it right without any indication that its a single chance (threats are dumb), followed by a notification of my intent to expose their behaviour publically (again no threat, just polite notice). Some copy of the e-mail thread with a select personal details blocked out in black would be posted on the internet that evening... definitely not days, weeks or months later - after the fact.

Still, I'm more inclined to believe it, the way the story is so casually told as if the blog post is to satisfy people asking questions needing the same story to be told, to save time on answering them personally, and not to expose bad behaviour is ... well ... its just sad, but its believable. The impression I get is that the author doesn't really appreciate just how unacceptable this sort of thing is, and is resigned to having to live with it... :(

I've never been so happy to have been rejected by a company before.

Don't ever talk to HR in a situation like this. HR is there for only one reason: to protect the company, NOT to protect you. If anything like this happens to you, lawyer up. Immediately.

I think part of the problem is giving too much power to middle management in tech, which I think is unnecessary and many companies like google have tried to obviate this problem.

Whenever I hear about a case of a woman being harassed at work, I can't help but wonder how I would react in a similar situation. I am male and I have never experienced workplace harrassment, but if a female co-worker started writing things like those in the story I can't imagine that it would annoy me the slightest. If she was attractive, I would probably be flattered. If it _did_ annoy me, I would ask the person to stop and if that didn't help, I might contact her husband as retaliation.

Is it a female-thing to take these sort of situations so seriously, or maybe a personality trait?

Imagine, just for a moment that it was your boss harassing you. They have the power to fire you, or make your life hell.

Now imagine that they are physically stronger than you. There is a high likelihood of them being able to over-power you.

Now imagine you live in a culture where rape cases are rarely prosecuted and, when they are, rarely successful.

Now imagine that you also live in a culture which refuses to condemn the few men which are convicted.

Now imagine that, even if your physically stronger boss is successfully convicted of raping you - there will still be a section of people who think that you were, somehow, asking for it.

Wouldn't you take that seriously?

The stereotypes associated with being a woman in tech trend towards the negative. That means that having other people signal that they see you primarily as a woman first instead of an engineer can be uncomfortable in a professional environment, even when the other person isn't bringing up those negative stereotypes themselves and may even in fact be complimenting your qualities as a woman. Those negative stereotypes exist and people are aware of them, so being signaled that your colleagues are seeing you as a woman first instead of an engineer feels like people are perceiving you in certain ways before they even get to know you and your work.

Basically, if on Day One of a new job your boss says, "I am viewing you as a woman rather than an engineer," given the negative stereotypes about women in tech, it adds a lot more discomfort, anxiety, and frustration about how others are perceiving you in the workplace than an awkward proposition would in a non-professional context.

That said, I think your question implies this is a male/female thing when really it's probably more of a you/me thing. Plenty of guys would also not be okay with being propositioned for sex on the first day by a female manager that they directly report to and who is responsible for their performance reviews.

It _is_ a personality trait that you are talking about alright --- your personality trait, that is. So, thanks for sharing your views, patricius.

Your comment pretty much sums up the prevailing misogynist attitude that gives rise to the kind of workplace culture Susan Fowler is describing.

> if that didn't help, I might contact her husband as a retaliation

I honestly can't believe you wrote that. If it was an exact replica of the scenario with the genders reversed, the husband probably wouldn't mind anyway (well, maybe would be bothered by the inappropriateness of it, but open relationships are open relationships and you can't assume the husband would think that it was a bad thing because you don't know what his idea of relationship ethics is), but your response to workplace harrassment would be to harrass their spouse instead? Not to go through HR? On a purely practical level, can you imagine working on that person's team after you'd done something like that?

> Is it a female-thing to take these sort of situations so seriously, or maybe a personality trait?

Okay. Imagine that you turn up somewhere to work. You've got your tech skills and your experience and you're all ready to go. Then your manager's initial interactions with you makes it quite clear that she views you as a prospective sexual partner. She's not got to know you first, you've not had time to demonstrate your professional capabilities to her, she's just propositioning you out of the blue. Would you really not find this problematic?

Please bear in mind, being female in US and British culture can be pretty unpleasant at times, with a continued attitude held by a lot of men that it's perfectly okay to proposition strangers in the street in loud voices, or shout suggestive comments at them, or demand "just a smile, love" or a conversation like it's their right to have a conversation with you, or that you _owe_ them a conversation. Imagine you're a woman in the tech industry, where women are chronically under-represented.

For you or me, as men, we might find such an incident as this slightly novel and interesting. If we've spent our _entire lives_ dealing with unwanted and unsolicited sexual advances and comments and innuendo, with media representations of our gender as little more than objects of male desire, and then we get such comments, can't you imagine that we might just feel a _little bit fed up_?

FTR I'm a gay white cisgender male living in England, so I'm still doing this on 'easy mode'. I've encountered almost zero homophobic behaviour in the workplace, for which I'm very grateful. But I've also always worked in companies which made explicit statements about supporting equality and diversity, and in a country in which it was made illegal before I started my professional life to discriminate on the grounds of sexuality. I've not had to test that legislation, but at least it is there, and we also don't have at-will employment.

its not a great statement for humanity whatever truth does come out. Why people focus on HR when if this is true then the issue is a failed company culture. No amount of great HR can fix bad culture - thats sits with the founder, board and management - and every other employee who turns a blind eye. if it is true, is the company worth or even possible to save? Changing their name wont fix the culture.

How can one be so untactful and 'proposition' via text chat? Someone may take screenshots and go to HR... Weird.

In all honesty if I were you I would sue them plain and simple. Partially to discourage this company behavior for the other employees remaining who Im sure continue to endure it. And partially as compensation for having to endure a lot of unethical and illegal work environment behaviors being endorsed by the company on the low. You really should seek being compensated for this for the good of everyone involved.

"When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25% women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another eng organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6%. Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn't transfer were quitting or preparing to quit."

Uber is bleeding engineers to other startups. Will the replacements be of the same calibre?

Now you know why Uber paid so much money for Otto. It's the only way they would ever get that talent.

What a shitty HR. Fire the bastards

There are reasons for hiding this. There are also reasons for lying. When you purport to have a slam dunk case of harassment and retaliation, but wait until you want to get press for your book — you lose some (but not all) credibility. Just know that having investigated a lot of these stories, very few turn up credible.

This is 2017. How bloody hard is it to treat everybody the same and with respect?

https://medium.com/@smsowmya/harassment-at-apple-my-perspect... For all the delete Uber folks do you also throw your iPhones?

Uber is taking action: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/business/uber-sexual-hara...

Is there an official response from Uber on this?

You should name every single person involved

Repeat after me: HR is not on your side

this is fucked up. why not sue? if everything in here is true, this is easy lawsuit money.

Suing would be a great idea but you're ignoring the downsides of a lawsuit. Uber has a lot of money, they could effectively drag it out for a very long time. Even worse, most of her proof is likely on some Uber computers / servers which could go "mysteriously" missing in which case she could be made out to be a liar through a court loss thus possibly making it harder to join another company because she's "that girl".

Even if they can get it rushed through the count payment takes forever by which time she would likely owe a lot of money to a lawyer.

Ideally she would sue, win quickly if the allegations are true, and move on. But when does that ever happen?

> if everything in here is true

Uber would have already sued her if it wasn't. It's almost certainly true.

How much 'easy lawsuit money' have you collected? Or anyone you personally know?

Why would anyone expect Uber to be anything BUT a sexist rathole of a place to work?

Not surprising for a company who's internal motto has been, "drivers get paid, riders get laid."

Ya know, it's not like this was some dude who asked a co-worker out, got turned down, and that was the end of it.

Nope, this is full-on sexual harassment enabled by HR that went so far as to ambiguously punish the victim. Every time I think the 21st century is finally here, $h!+ like this happens.

The guy should have been terminated immediately once she produced the chat logs. The end. Even from a pure cold-blooded business perspective, if he's showing such poor judgment in this area, god only knows what kind of engineering decisions he's making and how they'll come back to haunt down the road.

Also, fire all of Uber's HR implicated in this nonsense. Sure, they're there to protect the company, they failed here, and they'll just fail again.

> I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

Instead of just telling the guy never to make such a proposal again.

> this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me

You might as well call it gang rape. Sure it's one of the most idiotic ways to talk to women, however it's nowhere near a level that deserves to be called harassment, it also only happened once. I remember watching a video where a guy tapped a woman on the shoulder and people will calling it sexual assault.

It's a real shame that everything has to be about sex and race nowadays, I would rather talk about the rest of the article where she talks about corruption inside the company.

Uber is the worst company even to its customers that have the unpleasantries in having to deal with any customer service issue.

My uber got hacked and some jerk took a supposed $1k ride in London on my dime. As soon as I found out I wanted to cancel my account but uber didn't allow users to cancel their accounts. I had to send an email and wait. Also they know about the hack and blamed the users for letting their accounts being hacked via not having a crazy strong password.

They need to burn to the ground .... run by total greedy douchebag pigs!

Why doesn't she sue Uber. By law, emails under litigation are required to be retained, so the evidence must exist.

As a guy, I've faced a different type of harassment, but have made it a point to maintain a clear electronic trail within and outside the company in case the company retaliate if and when I complain

What a despicable company. Change is happening not because a change was needed, but because it's generating negative press. Everyone in HR and management that participated in these lies and behavior needs to be fired. That's how you fix the problem.

Personally, I don't dislike sexual harassment laws as much as employment anti-discrimination laws, but I do question whether they are really needed.

Sounds horrible. I do wonder if this post would have come out if uber was using stripe for payments.

Who here is surprised? The CEO is a proud arrogant son of a b*tch, sexist, supports Trump. His whole team treats drivers like dirt or disposable "resources". The whole attitude then gets adopted by management.

What I find surprising is people being surprised or trying to understand these kind of reports. Or why people try to get a job at Uber. Maybe they want to find a reason why they are still taking Uber. Yes Uber is innovative and cheaper, but you are encouraging a company with exploitative practices.

What is Uber doing with 150 SRE's? Wow talk about bloat.

The rest of the story is horrible to hear, too.

ignoring messages that a database server is nearly out of space. and loosing nearly all database servers after ignoring the message and then telling that the database is bad and they switched to mysql? well it wasn't just that, they also did wierd things with a relation database and they still do with mysql. I'm not sure but actually keeping the database servers happy should be the no 1 job of an SRE team, since the data is the most important thing to any company.

Asking why Twitter is so bloated gets 300 upvotes, but asking why Uber SRE is so bloated gets downvoted? My, what a fickle crowd HN is.

My assumption was that Uber SRE's played roles similar to Google SRE's. If that's not the case, someone can please say so instead of just downvoting? If you lump all ops people (DBA, sysadmin, network, storage) into the SRE term then 150 isn't huge. But if it's mainly sysadmin and devops, that's really high for a company that's mainly in the cloud.

Say this three times in the mirror before you report anything: "HR exists to protect the company". Yes it's shitty and unfortunate, but I wouldn't expect much from them.

Edit: Hit enter too soon, but does anyone have a better solution that going to HR? I've seen it several times that this is the outcome, manager protected, employee shunned or moved. In one case the employee was given 12 months of severance if she agreed not to sue, nothing was done to the manager.

> "or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that."

I fully believe that her manager sexually harassed her and should have faced much harsher consequences, but it's almost inconceivable that HR would frame her options this way. No doubt she feared retribution, but did HR really tell her to expect it? It's hard to know what to make of specifics like these, when words get paraphrased.

In any case, the manager's behavior and HR's response were inexcusable.

Please try to get better at conceiving things, it's important. This is totally plausible given the rest of the extremely credible account.

Part of the problem is that men frequently misconstrue a women's natural instinct for being social and friendly as a sexual overture, usually this is because they're so used to other men being so unfriendly.

Part of the problem is thinking that women have a natural instinct for being social and friendly. Attributing characteristics stereotypically associated with a particular gender to "natural instincts" is part of why women get such a bad rap in technical fields.

That's incredibly sexist.

This blog post has further confirmed something I've thought for a long time.

Avoid working at companies with HR departments. In order to have an HR department a company has to be big enough to support a population of what I like to call "floaters".

No, I'm not referring to those visual artifacts... No, I'm not referring to people who aren't attached to teams...

I am referring to turds, of course.

Furthermore, the larger the HR department the more likely there is to be a turd infestation of horrific proportions.

> When I pointed out how few women were in SRE, she recounted with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others, so I shouldn't be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering

Holy *. How long until Uber reports this as fake news?

Jose Moran, move over. Tech companies have a new scandal.

Edit: Ok ok, HN doesn't like the jab at Tesla..

Clearly there's a problem in that company, but maybe some woman working in the US could answer to me : why isn't just answering to the first mail " sorry, not interested" then keep working there not an option ?

to me, the term "harassment" means repetitive, morally painful actions from a boss to his employee. Obviously the guy has a huge problem with his sex life, but why report to HR instantly , instead of trying to see if the problem is that big and can't be solved by a person to person conversation, like grown up, first ?

EDIT : i'm not trying to be a jerk, and justify the behavior of that guy. I'd just like some woman working in tech in the US to explain to me what's wrong in my scenario.

Under standard American business ethics, and most state laws if I'm not mistaken, such a request from a person with control over your job is an abuse of power and automatically over the harassment line. (This is probably true everywhere in the world but perhaps not recognized as such.) Any American manager would know this and would have no excuse. You don't wave a gun around at work because you're having "a bad day" and you don't write stuff like this. At a company with any ethical backbone, he'd have been pushed out the door so fast they might have forgotten to open it first.

> why isn't just answering to the first mail " sorry, not interested" then keep working there not an option ?

It is an option. In fact, it sounds like that is nearly what Ms. Fowler did -- she reported the interaction to HR (who informed her supervisor but took no action) and then she kept working there.

In my opinion, if the person who has been propositioned by their boss WISHES to just say "No" and let it pass, then they are welcome to do that. Some people are comfortable handling that sort of thing. But I would NEVER want to suggest that a person propositioned by their boss OUGHT to simply say "No" and let it pass. Very few people would be comfortable doing that and everyone should be entitled (are entitled, by law) to be free of requests for sex by the person with the power to promote, demote, or fire them.

That scenario allows someone to get away with making every female employee's first day horribly uncomfortable. The sender has the power to fire the recipient at will without an explanation, which means saying "sorry, not interested" could get you summarily fired with no recourse.

Only a sociopath would actually fire you for turning down a proposition, but this is your first interaction with the guy, so you have to consider the possibility.

I'm not a woman, but seriously : WTF? Your boss has to ask you for sex TWICE before that's a problem?

Reporting it to HR was the right thing to do. This behavior can become a liability for the company, HR should protect the company from employees like this, so it was in the best interest of the company to report this.

Would you be okay with it if you started a new job and your boss instantly propositioned you?

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