Behaving unethically often benefits people in the short-term, but in the long-term it usually ends up a net negative, especially if the behavior keeps up. Uber's founders apparently don't understand this, and have imparted to you their misunderstanding.

Uber will have increasing difficulty attracting and retaining talent now that their toxic culture is public. When you're a rocket ship people are willing to gloss over a lot, but Uber no longer has 100x potential returns on options. The liability only gets worse as the stock matures.

Not to mention the wave of lawsuits that is likely coming as Uber employees are emboldened.

True, but for most jobs rewards are also set up in a way that short term benefits heavily outweight long term benefits. And that's not just top management. E.g., many software engineers are respected by their managers and team mates based on how many issues they close every week. Nearly zero reward for creating meaningful issues or solving a problem with a big long termin impact that is not an issue.

while Uber's culture problems are legendary...I've seen this type of complain at every single company I worked for (which is almost 2 dozens at this point), including when it was not true at all and people were just whiny that their idea for office decoration did not get accepted.

So we're starting to suffer from a "boy who cried wolf" syndrome, where when the complain is real, no one cares.

That's a big problem.

> I've seen this type of complain at every single company I worked for

Er, have you? Fowler's post said she was sexually propositioned over Slack, by her manager, on her first day, and that HR did not do anything about it, even though multiple women had complained about the same manager doing the same thing. That's the most egregious story of harassment I've ever heard of, including the made-up scenarios in the "workplace sensitivity" training I had to take last week.

> Ah but did you witness it?

Of course not. The comment I was replying to was saying (paraphrased) that this is typical, every company has these kinds of accusations, and I'm disagreeing and saying no, this isn't typical, either she made all this up out of whole cloth or Uber is an especially bad outlier.

> But is a "claim" evidence and should we assume it is by default "truth"? This is the crux of the issue.

That is emphatically not the issue, no one in this thread suggested that she should be believed (or disbelieved) uncritically. This stuff is murky enough to discuss without strawmen!

No. I was not talking about the sexual harassement stuff.

I was talking about "people make serious complains and get rebukked". Now, whilere there's quite a wide range of what a "serious complain" is, people say that everywhere.

Not all complains are equal. I'm not pretending they are.

I mean, most of her claims she explicitly mentions having a paper trail. There is probably many legal reasons why she couldn't directly posted the private email and Slack conversations to her personal blog. However, no one is stopping Uber from presenting evidence contrary to her narrative.

Really. You don't need to dump all your ammo on the very first day.

She said what needed to be said. If Uber challenges her account, she can post more information, assuming she is telling the truth (which I am for now).

Can you list some specific pieces of evidence that Uber could post (if they existed) which would change your opinion and make you believe she was not telling the truth?

> Ah but did you witness it?

I am curious about your question. I read Fowler's post, and then subsequent posts,articles,tweets,comments by other women and men indicating that the observations approximately matched their experience at Uber as well. Even in this thread, I see: "I've been with uber for nearly 2 yrs and most of the article content are valid. Employees voicing out genuine concerns will be met with severe rebuke. " . The article this thread is about is from Mitch&Freda Kapoor who are also stating the same.

I'm wondering, do you believe that Fowler's claims are faulty or false in some way and that the issues raised about Uber are similarly faulty/false or are you speaking about other cases/companies?

She says she has screenshots of those messages if she was lying Uber would have sued her by now. They know she has enough actual proofs to back her story.

In the article, she explicitly mentions sending screenshots along with thoroughly documenting the incident.

Yeah, I somehow do not understand why she resorted to blog about it and not just file a law suit (I just asked this in a top level comment).

A lawsuit would not really pay out that much. She got another job, so her damages are, what, a few tens of thousands of dollars? And it would mark her, for life, as someone who sues.

A friend has worked on sexual harassment suits and says it's unfortunate that, as far as he's experienced, every single one he's been involved in has been bogus. Meanwhile, he knows there are several people with good cases who don't bring them, because the social penalties are too high.

Part of the reason I believe her is that she isn't bringing suit. She's not trying to make a payday out of this. Further, she has alleged specific acts which can be definitely proven or disproven. If she made it up, it would be trivial for Uber to show she did so.

> So we're starting to suffer from a "boy who cried wolf" syndrome

It seems like you're somewhat sympathizing with Uber HR's decisions regarding this individual on account of the "boy cried wolf" syndrome.

This seems like hardly that at all. The events at Uber read like a systemic failure to deal with problems, and an extreme indifference to sexual harassment for the benefit of retaining "good" engineers.

Fuck this mentality.

edit: Forgive me if I am misunderstanding your comments.

Not the poster, but I think he means that Uber is the very wolf we've become too desensitized to recognize.

But I have not seen the endemic spiteful complaints he has. My impression is this place is full of wolves that are seldom called out.

To take the middle ground - I think there's been a lot of wolves crying wolf - Mostly on sheep, because that provides good cover. Sheep are afraid to cry wolf, even when being attacked, because of fear of ostracization - and unfortunately, we're very bad at telling wolves from sheep in a fight, particularly as a herd.

Yes, you're misunderstanding.

I was not even talking about the Uber case at all.

I'm saying how everyone who works at every company says they make complains about everything and never get heard. That makes it hard to figure out which companies are ACTUALLY bad at dealing with complains BEFORE something like the Uber bullshit actually happens. It prevents us from being proactive.

For anyone reading my above comment and who will not go through the sub threads:

I did not mean that I see sexual harassment claims like this one everywhere.

When I said "Ive seen this type of complain", I was talking about the person I was replying to. Employees who say the company never do anything when they bitch about stuff. Employees bitch a lot, so its hard to tell apart companies like what Uber seems to be, from companies with a lot of whiny employees, without actually working there.

Short of the Apple and Googles of the world, or the little koolaid trendy startups, all companies have a percentage of fussy employees who will say their employers screwed them over, so we have to take what people say with a grain of salt. Because we have to take so much with a grain of salt, we can't proactively find real offenders (as easily).

I mean, it may just be you and/or your close associates. Saying the industry is suffering from false reporting is kinda a stretch, though you do bring up a good point about sites like GlassDoor and all: take everything with not just a grain of salt, but a boulder.

>I've seen this type of complain at every single company I worked for

Wow, I have never encountered that kind of thing (admittedly I've only worked at 3 companies)

Everyone took what I said the wrong way, so Im pretty sure I worded it very poorly. That's on me.

I'm not saying that all companies are bad at dealing with complains.

I'm saying that for every company with a non-trivial amount of employees, there will be a bunch of said employees complaining that they made big complains that were ignored. "Management never listens to my brilliant ideas!" "We're all underpaid!" "People cry under their desk every day!" "The CEO doesn't understand my brilliant idea I figured out in 30 seconds!"

There's always people like that everywhere, and it makes it very hard to distinguish companies that actually take their employees seriously from companies like Uber without actually working there.

That's all I meant.

There must be something wrong with the way you choose companies to work for. My employers were pretty low on this kind of drama.

I deleted the app after the last round of bs and I'm not the only person who did this that I know. Not all customers are amoral wallets.

About $25 of my dollars that would have gone to them went to Lyft instead this week.

Fowler had specific accusations of fact. Either the "got told six times it was a first offense" thing happened or it didn't. Either the leather jacket incident happened or it didn't. Uber can easily claim these things aren't true if they aren't.

I have absolutely no insight into the actual case. If I was into gambling I'd bet that the allegations against uber are true.

But. From experience I can tell you that it is absolutely not trivial for a company to simply claim a given allegation is false. Even if the company is correct and truthful about it. With a tiny kernel of truth to otherwise false allegations, enough bias will give clear answers and the public verdict becomes all the more damning.

So as much as it may be appropriate to damn uber in this case, please don't do so simpy because they didn't go for "a good offense is the best defense" here.