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Comment by BadassFractal | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the whole point of catered dinner to give people an incentive to work longer hours and have them be taken care of if they're staying at work pretty late? It's not a free meal, it's an incentive to work into the night. It's optional, you can go home if you want. What's the issue? Some people make the tradeoff to spend their life at work, others make the tradeoff to have a family and go spend time with their kids. This gets pretty philosophical, but should we be reducing the freedom of choice and mandating what the correct lifestyle should be for people?

When I visited for dinner one time there were barely any people there taking advantage of it, and the food was actually quite good, so it anecdotally didn't even feel like a systemic issue of people "feeling the pressure to stay at work until 9pm".

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It sets an expectation. I've never been in an environment where "optional" late-night things like dinner were truly optional. There's an expectation set that you're working at least as late as the dinner, and probably after, regardless of results or the value you're providing to the company.

People scoff at these types of things, but these kind of expectations put a lot of pressure on people, and they can have real negative effects. My uncle worked at a place where everyone stayed until 9pm. Technically you could leave whenever, but it was frowned upon, and you wouldn't get a good review. Ultimately his wife left him, he got depressed, and then the company laid him off.

Forcing everyone to leave work early in the day puts a lot of pressure on people to come into work early. That's just as bad. The problem is the pressure, not the mealtime.

Or, you know, base your decisions on results and business value rather than which particular hours you want to ensure asses are in seats for.

This must be a Valley thing. My company (in NYC);provides dinner at 8PM Monday - Thursday, but the office is usually a ghost town by 7. Of course, we don't really provide breakfast or lunch either.

> Isn't the whole point of catered dinner to give people an incentive to work longer hours and have them be taken care of if they're staying at work pretty late? It's not a free meal, it's an incentive to work into the night. It's optional, you can go home if you want.

I take it as a signal that you're only perceived by the company to be "working into the night" if you're physically in the office at 8:15 pm. If you're the parent that gets in early or logs back on remotely after putting your kids to bed, you might be working just as much, but your efforts will be less visible to managers who won't see you putting in "face time" by staying for dinner.

Having to be coddled and protected when already having the best compensated and cushiest job on the market. The local tech scene is definitely its own little parallel universe, I'll give you that.

> What's the issue?

The issue is sexual harassment.

We're talking about the dinners here, you're derailing.

I think you're missing the focus. Obviously, catering dinners for employees at 8:15 PM has created an environment that encourages sexual harassment, otherwise this would never have been included in an investigative report. An example, which isn't given in the report, is a male employee taking a female employee to a catered dinner after work hours and making advances.

Regardless of how a company drains the life out of its employees with overtime, if they create 'perks' that married people can also participate in, or a larger bunch, there is less risk of this happening.

The advice about dinner catering is in the context of reducing sexual harassment in the workplace and has nothing to do with anything else.

A male employee can have a pizza delivered too. A catered dinner has nothing to do with harassment, the recommendation was to promote inclusivity, but was tone deaf as to the purpose of the dinners.

Well, isn't it great to have enough capital to hire an attorney general to make flatteringly vague, stupid advice that has nothing to do with the reason he was hired.

Sounds a bit naive to me.

Um no.

> '...to conduct a thorough and objective review regarding “the specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly.”'

Note the bit about "diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly." So you are derailing and it is you who is missing the focus. The report is clearly not just about sexual harassment. You would know that if you read the report.

Don't act oblivious. The impetus for Eric Holder's hiring to investigate Uber's workplace environment was sexual harassment. The wording is intentionally vague to try and soften the allegations which are damning. The fact that Holder is paid by Uber means he won't slam the company, but clearly the advice is meant to prevent them from getting their asses sued in the future.

And to my point "diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly" can directly discourage sexual harassment, which was the critical issue in the investigation.

If you don't give a shit about the allegations, why read the report?

> If you don't give a shit about the allegations, why read the report?

The report had several purposes, and the parts related to addressing specific allegations rather than general culture are not published. So, reading the published part of report has nothing to do with caring about the allegations, since the published part of the report is the recommendations which were specifically called for to address inclusivity generally, rather than the investigation results addressing specific allegations of misconduct.

And if your core complaint is that they should be serving dinner at 8:15 PM, then what should Holder's recommendation be to prevent sexual harassment from occurring in situations like I described?

How do you in your mind divorce advice for "general inclusivity" from specific allegations of misconduct. It sounds like you think the company is just wasting money to be flattered.

Obviously the company has severe issues with its culture.

Reading the report and saying "why should they change anything" sounds like denialism or defense.

These are like conditions of their parole. If they had the responsibility to handle things like late-night catered dinners, they wouldn't need the former attorney general to tell that that it is a "no no."

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