>Travis is well known to protect high performing team leaders no matter how abusive they are towards their employees. The HR team was known to be deftly[sic] afraid of Travis’s tendency to blame and ridicule the women and yell at HR whenever they went in with complaints of abuse. I heard about Travis personally congratulating Mike#2 for meeting strict deadlines months after I complained to HR about my abuse.
This is why I'm skeptical of Uber's promise to investigate these allegations. When I heard that they had retained Eric Holder to investigate, my knee-jerk reaction was petty and cynical: "Great, retain a Chicago politician so you know you'll get the answer you're paying for."
I was a little disappointed in myself at the time, but damn. With this company, I'm starting to think that impression might have been on the money.
Maybe I've watched too much Suits and The Good Wife, but it just seems that it's all futile. They're a huge corp, if you file suit against them they'll hit back harder with bigger and badder lawyers, and you either settle out of court, or play the lotto with the court system and try your hand at a judgement with whatever lawyers you can afford. It's really sad how stacked the odds seem.
Why is this being modded down? It's the truth. Big companies almost always come out on top in trials because they can afford the best lawyers, and they can afford to game the system to bankrupt their opponents by filing never-ending motions to delay and other tactics which increase the legal costs to the opponent. You're almost never going to get a positive result if you're a rank-and-file employee; your best course of action is to leave the company and find something better.
I personally know someone who went through this (related to IP, not sexual harassment). I understand the lawsuit dragged on for about seven years. He finally got awarded about eight million dollars in damages but hasn't been able to collect a single cent of it.
When Peter Thiel says "single digit millionaires have no effective access to the legal system" [1] on the surface that sounds laughable and out-of-touch but I think there's a lot more truth to this than most people would like to admit.
Between appeals and that verdicts won't normally contain anything about how promptly payments must be made, things can drag on a while, then there's the simple honest stuff like, "the whole board must meet to approve expenditures over $X" and the settlement will be over that $X.
That's completely typical in the US court system. Winning a judgment is completely separate from actually collecting that judgment, and entails extra legal work to go after the assets of someone who refuses to pay the judgment.
"Why is this being modded down? It's the truth. Big companies almost always come out on top in trials because they can afford the best lawyers, and they can afford to game the system to bankrupt their opponents by filing never-ending motions to delay and other tactics which increase the legal costs to the opponent. You're almost never going to get a positive result if you're a rank-and-file employee; your best course of action is to leave the company and find something better.
"
You claim this is the truth.
On what do you base any of this, other than TV?
It probably is quite different in the States but in my country, this is very true. If you are a lone individual fighting a legal case against a large organization, chances are you will be worn down by years of litigation that often appears endless. To dissuade litigants even further, cases are filed in far-off remote outposts that make such endeavors cost-prohibitive even further [1, for e.g.].
Add on top of this how easy it is to buy law enforcements here (including judges). It's like a very fair and open market. Whoever pays more gets the favour. That's exactly how he got that order passed in a district court (which is not even a high court - apex court of a state, let alone the Supreme Court - nation's apex court) by a judge who probably heard the word Internet for the sixth time in his entire life and the term "webpage" I am sure for the first time and was paid well for issuing the order.
How can you be so sure it was Uber? Susan's tweet was intentionally vague [0].
You are forgetting that some past and present employees that could be directly implicated by Susan's evidence may also choose the smear campaign route to save their hide.
This could range from the women in HR* who might get thrown under the bus by Uber for aiding and abetting, to the men that perpetrated the actual harassment.
*Of course this scenario playing out is highly unlikely given Uber's history.
Isn't uber known for this? I remember them responding to a lawsuit or something by hiring PIs to get dirt on people - stuff beyond the merits of the case.
>Uber have already started contacting anyone who knows Susan Fowler, digging for dirt on her.
What a fantastic opportunity to send those assholes on a wild goose chase. Even better if they can somehow feed Uber bullshit that they later end up hanging themselves with.
Uber is sitting on billions of dollars of VC money. I'm sure that there are some very high-powered law firms out there salivating at the chance to represent these women in a class-action lawsuit.
Maybe the victims won't get as much recompense as they deserve (because so much of the judgement will go to attorneys), but I would not be so sure that Uber will have them outgunned in court. At the very least, it could teach Uber a lesson by putting an expensive crater in their VC runway.
I'm afraid you have a poor idea of what makes high-powered law firms salivate. When they see someone sitting on a pile of billions of dollars, they don't think "how can I piss that person and all his friends off?" They think "how can become that person's best buddy?"
Costs and expenses (including experts) are typically only a few percent of recoveries. Unless recovery ended up being much smaller than expected, anyway. Fees over 20% require substantive justification.[0]
As others have pointed on, on top of all that, even if you win, you're going to have a very hard time getting a job in the same field because of the law suit.
At this scale of awfulness and given how much cash Uber has, I imagine some very good employment lawyers are going to be shaking the bushes looking for as many plaintiffs as they can find, and wouldn't think of charging them to participate.
I've never seen a movie or television show that portrayed something I knew well, where it was accurate.
Every time I thought I learned something from a movie or tv show it was because they were portraying something I didn't know a lot about. I would be very slow to say any kind of entertainment like this is educational.
>"Great, retain a Chicago politician so you know you'll get the answer you're paying for."
Normally I don't care, but because I'm from Chicago and am officially very touchy about all the abuse the city catches, I'd like to correct the record as Eric Holder is from New York.
It sounds like they're using 'Chicago politician' as a character description (valid or not). Similar to how people might use Nazi (e.g. Grammar Nazi, or "You're such a Nazi!") etc.
"You think – excuse me – if you’ll pardon me – do you think American Presidents reward virtue?
Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? You know, I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us ? Well, I don’t even trust you to do that."
-Milton Friedman
He does have a credible image, but the announcement sort of co-opted that to make it seem like he might be somehow independent in his thinking. In reality, he's a lawyer being paid by Uber. As such, he isn't really inclined to find all the dirt...Depends on where said dirt is.
Is it just me or are other people also constantly surprised by how many big names have their hands in the 'uber pot'?
It's like there's a massive list of investors and shareholders who are all riding this "sure thing" to big riches. Which makes me wonder two things: 1.) is uber too big too fail? are there so many rich and powerful people invested that they will make uber succeed no matter or 2.) this thing could be the biggest investor flop in recent memory.
I have wondered about this several times. Amidst so many scandals, what would it take for a zenefits-esque meltdown to take place at Uber? The `too big to fail` ethos never works out well for the consumer.
Nothing really surprising. I would imagine with some thinking and maths one could come up with a number e.g 5,000(just a made up number) power elites controlling media, finance, law and business but may not keep public facing roles all the time.
I want them to change instead of ending up like Theranos. If Uber went down, a lot of good people would be out of a job (both employees and drivers) and it would burn a lot investors, thus negatively affecting the funding landscape for years to come.
To reiterate, I wish Uber to change. I don't wish them to fail.
> If Uber went down, a lot of good people would be out of a job (both employees and drivers)
Employees yes, drivers not so much. There's plenty of competitors that would love to fill that hole.
> and it would burn a lot investors, thus negatively affecting the funding landscape for years to come.
Maybe letting investors know that company culture of how people are treated has real negative consequences would signal to them that they should pressure these companies to behave in an appropriate manner. Burning investors for ignoring the writing on the wall about Uber's behavior (there's been indications of problematic behavior of executives for years) is exactly what needs to happen.
It's not so much pressuring founders to behave better, as choosing better founders. The "play hard", "meritocratic", "hashtag winning" douchebag seems to be a good choice because they work hard to appear to be a good choice and seem to have the drive to do big things. But if it all falls apart before they can achieve greatness because of the inherent douchefail, then that's a lesson investors need to learn. Don't bet on douchebags.
i was about to say that these events could make for a great teaching moment, but these are lessons we've been given many many many chances to learn. i'll settle for us once again avoiding eating ourselves alive as a species, and hopefully we avoid eating some scapegoat subset of us alive while we're at it.
But that's because new companies can't compete with the incredible amount of VC funding Uber (and Lyft) have received. Down here in Austin, after Uber and Lyft left, about a half dozen different competitors popped up in about a month. My favorite, Ride Austin, is a non-profit that takes a significantly smaller cut than Uber or Lyft and donates a ton of money to charity.
Nope. Speaking from India it's Ola or "Uber or something else" in big cities and Ola or something else in other cities or towns.
In fact there are many smaller startups that keep coming and going. Bikes, autos, cabs. In fact there was a bus startup too that failed just because it didn't have money to play against the system.
There are rumours of a huge business house (with pretty much endless supply of money and extremely easy access to the central Govt - in fact the PM on a personal level) entering the market.
I think they need to fail because the attitude needs to die. It's easier if they take it with them.
They brought a very Wall Street-esque aggressively cheat your way into becoming too big to fail, at any cost attitude into software. They were chummy with top-dollar lobbyists to get around pesky small-town regulations and unions. Some of those entrenched interests were bad, but even in defeating them, they weren't precisely taking from the rich and giving to the poor either.
The grass is always greener, but they do not resemble software heroes like Carmack or Stallman or (idiosyncratic pick) Newmark at all. When it comes to anti-authoritarianism and civil disobedience, I think Snowden not Kalanick. Even if you want a Randian libertarian, Jimmy Wales over Travis Kalanick.
That's a compelling argument, but I'm not actually sure I want that.
Uber's endgame is self-driving cars, which will put a lot more good people (Uber drivers and non-Uber drivers) out of a job. That's only feasible because of Uber's aggressive attitude to growth and crushing competition in long-term-unsustainable ways in the hope that the technology will materialize soon. If they change enough that this isn't their endgame or they don't pull it off in time, I don't know if they're financially viable.
I think that that goal and that pressure is part of why Uber is as rotten as it is (see how HR repeatedly doesn't want to fire abusive people who are allegedly high performers; even if the rest of their team would do better without them, Uber can't afford to figure that out).
Meanwhile, if they fail outright, it seems like basically all Uber drivers also drive for Lyft, and the engineering staff can get good jobs at lots of other places. It'll also be a good precedent for future companies not to try the strategy Uber has, and hopefully prevent more problems along these lines.
>"Great, retain a Chicago politician so you know you'll get the answer you're paying for."
right. regardless of where you stand on his performance as attorney general, hiring eric holder is a political move. if uber actually cared about investigating this, they wouldn't have hired a politician.
Eric Holder was AG. AG is not a political office, and he's not a politician. What you should be concerned with is the fact that he was associated with them previously and is a proponent of theirs.
> AG is not a political office, and he's not a politician.
AG is a Presidential appointment with Congressional confirmation. While those appointed are not necessarily politicians, it is most certainly a political position.
It is most certainly not. By your definition any appointee is a 'political position'. That term has a real meaning in the circles which matter (i.e., politics), and AG is not considered a political position. That's not to say an AG is completely separate from political realities, but the office is (supposed to be) non-partisan.
> By your definition any appointee is a 'political position'.
Direct Presidential appointees are absolutely political; cabinet members more than most.
> That term has a real meaning in the circles which matter (i.e., politics), and AG is not considered a political position.
It actually has a fairly vague and shifting meaning even within politics, but by virtually any of them the Attorney-General is very much a political position.
I'm from DC and used to work in politics. Everyone I know from that realm considers political appointees to be political positions, and call them such. The political positions are rough, because churn is pretty much guaranteed every 4-8 years.
> By your definition any appointee is a 'political position'
Yes, exactly. The appointee is appointed to implement the administration's policies, which are political. During George W. Bush's administration, state Attorneys General were directed to pursue investigations of voter fraud. The eight who did not were fired in 2004 and replaced, which was very unusual.
One doesn't retain Eric Holder to investigate. When a company has a race problem they pay a high profile member of that race some dough to appear to set things right. Does anyone know of such a case in which things were actually set right? I'm willing to believe that I've never heard the story because it's boring news, but still
As skeptical as I am with Uber, I'm still hoping that something will come up with the investigation. It also encourages me that more people are speaking up. The more bad press they get, the more pressure they'll have to have their "investigations" result in some discipline.
I work at Uber. What happened to Susan Fowler and Amy is terrible.
To give another side of the Uber story, I've seen nothing but respect on my team of ~25 engineers. Only a few of us are women, but also only a few of us are the "white male" stereotype that you see in the press. Everyone I've talked to on my team is aware of and upset about the lack of female engineers in tech.
I saw Uber's CTO (Thuan Pham, a Vietnamese refugee) downstairs at Uber the day Susan Fowler posted her article. A woman who works at Uber came up to him, and asked him how he's doing. He said, "It's a tough time, but we'll get through it." She told him, "I'm sorry, I know how much you care", and gave him a hug.
Arianna Huffington is on Uber's board of directors. She's in charge of helping Uber employees "lead healthier lives". In response to Susan Fowler's article, Arianna has been holding personal discussions with employees about what we're going to do to stop this type of thing from ever happening again.
It's easy to stereotype a company, but at the end of the day you're talking about ~12,000 individuals. Many if not most of whom came from Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I'm hopeful that these decisions didn't come from the top. It really may have been just a couple of individuals who did messed up things, and should/will be fired.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, Arianna's former chief of staff and managing editor, Jimmy Soni, was accused of exactly this sort of behavior [1]. In my circle there, those allegations were considered to be highly credible. And given the hush-hush departure, it doesn't seem to me like there was any real accountability.
Thanks for sharing that -- I think it's a good reminder to not stereotype an entire company. Also, it's also a reminder that this scandal is unfortunate for all of those at Uber who aren't like this and still have to deal with the barrage of bad press and accusations from everyone from the media to those around them (friends, neighbors).
It's a tricky problem, but ultimately you rely on the investigators caring more about their reputation than any one contract. If it gets out that firm X doesn't do objective reviews, then future companies in hot water won't hire them.
The real challenge here is that these investigators are not independent. Eric Holder has done prior work on behalf of Uber, which means he could reasonably be biased towards the company.
Yes, the investigator's _reputation_ is put at stake. But, reputation in the eyes of whom?
1. The public at large, who want to see standards of civic probity upheld? Or,
2. Future clients, who will want value for their money?
Delivering #2 requires writing up a designed narrative, in magisterial rhetoric. A narrative that hides all the dirt that isn't likely to come out anyway, and redirects culpability toward low-ranking dispensables, whether guilt or not.
There's a curious parallel with a certain class of business managers who "extract brand value" by slowly debasing quality, then folding up shop. For example, Hollywood movie sequels, or for-profit colleges.
For a big name like Holder, "folding up shop" would mean something like a beachfront retirement, in Malibu.
This is why I'm skeptical of Uber's promise to investigate these allegations. When I heard that they had retained Eric Holder to investigate, my knee-jerk reaction was petty and cynical: "Great, retain a Chicago politician so you know you'll get the answer you're paying for."
I was a little disappointed in myself at the time, but damn. With this company, I'm starting to think that impression might have been on the money.