https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/20...e-year-at-uber

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick released the following statement to The Huffington Post web site after he read Ms. Fowler's blog post.

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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 FOR EVERYONE 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.

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Interesting how CEO Kalanick refers to Liane Hornsey as Uber's "new" Chief Human Resources Officer. (Looks like the "old" HR Chief was the first one to be fired as a result of Ms. Fowler's blog post.)

This confirms something I have long suspected about HR departments. Their primary function is to look out for the company's interest - and not necessarily the interests of the company's employees - when those "interests" collide. (If you work in a company where this kind of thing goes on and it's blatant, you might as well not bother reporting it (or complaining about it) to HR. You'll be wasting your time - at best.

You've only suspected it? Of course that is the case, and it's been the case since the idea of HR first came about.

The weird thing is that in this case HR, in their interest to protect the company, should have been immediately aligned with Susan Fowler.

Read that blog yesterday from a twitter link. She seems credible (engineer with an advanced degree in philosophy) and the CEO has already said they're undertaking an urgent review and will be firing people. That said, Uber seems like a toxic culture, which is not surprising in that its business model is more or less based on ignoring the law and seeing what happens.

HR departments are part of the business just like any other employee and they aren't evaluated by the employees. What's written in that article is scandalous and probably only true in a very small % of companies, but I think it's a missconception that HR looks out for the employees. There isn't anything that guarantees that.

The HR department is there to control the human resources/human capital of the company in the way that best serves the company's interests. If you're lucky you might work in a company where the management believes that the company's best interest is for employees to be as happy as possible, but I think that's quite rare.

There's nothing in that blog that could reasonably be construed as HR working in the company's best interest. The three main points were:

-They protected a single high-performing employee at the cost of opening themselves up to lawsuits and losing what appears to be dozens of female employees.
-Employees openly sabotaged projects in order to undermine their superiors at the company's expense.
-They protected a manager who falsified performance reviews and threatened a high performing female employee to keep her from transferring to a team where she would likely be even more productive.

The idea that this is all HR working for the company's interests is a tacit denial of the pervasive sexism alleged here. This is the company being utterly incompetent and justifying it with lazy sexist tropes.

Why wouldn't Uber maker her sign an NDA?

I saw it as the company protecting one of the higher-up managers at the expense of one of the lower level employees.

NDAs are not common in tech afaik. Most employment is at-will and there is no contract signed.

Except this low level employee has already published books in her field (microservices and site reliability engineering). This is going to end very badly for Uber.

Not being a lawyer or an employment law expert, I'm certainly not qualified to predict how this is going to play out, but it would appear that by fostering an atmosphere of blatant and rampant sexism; CEO Kalanick exposed himself and his company to legal jeopardy.

If Ms. Fowler and other female Uber employees do indeed have documented proof of being "propositioned" by higher-level Uber managers - along with documented proof that HR acted to protect these "high performing" managers - it could be argued [in court] that by fostering such an atmosphere within the company, Mr. Kalanick himself was complicit in the resulting hostile work environment. (It's hard to believe that a supervising manager would be stupid enough to put incriminating stuff like that in an email. I suppose this is an example of what a lady friend told me happens when all the blood in a man's upper head rushes down to his lower head ...)

Kalanick is claiming shock and ignorance, asserting that he had no idea all this was going on in his company. That may (or may not) be true, but the fish rots from the head. I've worked for companies, mostly Government contractors, where mandatory sexual harassment training was part of the new-employee orientation process. All employees, male and female, going to work for the company had to undergo this mandatory training. Maybe things have changed in the 10+ years since I've been out of the professional work force, but Government contractors who allow what Kalanick claims to have been blissfully ignorant of could lose their contracts and be permanently banned from doing business with the Government if they fail to institute proactive measures discouraging this kind of behavior. "Proactive measures" consist of a formal training program, administered by the HR Department, which includes video scenarios of hostile workplace behavior as well as written documentation spelling out what behaviors will - and will not - be tolerated. As part of this training, new employees are required to sign a form acknowledging that they have received - and understand - this mandatory training. Most companies comply with this training since it provides them with a degree of legal immunity and protection from lawsuits.

If Kalanick begins firing some of these "high performing" manager(s?) over this imbroglio, he'll be in a Catch-22 dilemma. If some of these manager(s?) believe they are being scapegoated and fired while the "Big Boss" winked and looked the other way; they may sue claiming Kalanick [implicitly] condoned this behavior. (In the absence of a formal anti-harassment/anti hostile workplace environment training program, it could be argued that Mr. Kalanick implicitly condoned this behavior by his managers. Ignorance of the law is no defense, (as judges like to point out), so it's debatable as to whether or not Travis can get away with the "I didn't know!" defense. Whatever the case, Mr. Kalanick is ultimately responsible for what goes on in his company. In the Navy, when an aircraft carrier runs aground, it's not the lower-level ship's officers who are relieved of command - it's the Captain. The lower-level officers get a formal reprimand placed in their personnel record. Realizing that their Navy career is probably finished, most of them resign.)

I suspect there will be numerous out-of-court settlements to try and prevent all this "dirty laundry" from being aired in public. Uber will probably institute a mandatory sexual harassment training program as well as setting up an "anonymous employee hotline" where employees can report managers and co-workers who they believe are violating anti-harassment company policy. Mr. Kalanick may not like paying millions to make this debacle go away, but - as a good lawyer friend once told me - "You may not be able to make them change their behavior, but you sure as hell can make them pay."

My wife worked in tech in SFO for less than a year before going back into finance.

She always discussed the completely toxic environment of the start-up she worked at (people constantly back stabbing each other and trying to climb the ladder) coupled with a visceral sense of misogyny. In addition, the employees were encouraged to work 10-12 hours a day minimum and also only socialize with people within the company. It was cult-like.

After she quit her job, the company she worked for made her sign all these NDAs and whatnot, non-compete clauses, etc...

She said it was the most unprofessional and uncomfortable environment she ever worked in and this particular startup was given almost $100 million in investment money.

Nevertheless it has since gone nearly belly up. The company isn't worth **** now. None of the people she worked with are there, and they're trying to sell what's left to get a "soft landing" and cash out whatever remains value wise. Such a ****ing scam.

That manager probably left Uber because their were so few women left to harass.

A lot of bay-area tech firms (outside of the mega giants like Oracle and VMware etc) have extremely stunted HR departments. Startups in particular are likely to have no full-time HR people at all (I know several, even up to 200 employees or more, where HR functions are a side-job for the in-house recruiters).

Couple that with an engineering force where freshly-minted college grads are way overrepresented, you have a recipe for this sort of baloney.

Anecdotal but I think my employer (tech startup, joined ~2 years ago at around ~80 employees) has had a full-time HR person the whole time I've been there.

I also think our company has much nicer people than all these other startups I read about all the time, so maybe we're atypical.

An article has been posted on Slashdot concerning the goings-on at Uber - and specifically [former employee] Susan Fowler's allegations of sexual harassment.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/0...-investigation

There are well over 700 comments to the posting. While I haven't read all 700+ comments, I did come across this interesting reply.


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Making a sexual advance to a subordinate right off the bat is just plain stupid. You don't know each other, and anyone in her position would feel uncomfortable. It's an office, not a bar. People are there to work, and what's more they can't avoid each other. That's why you need professionalism in your job conduct.

HR's response was also stupid. In business you often get into trouble by saying too much, and that's exactly what they did. They could have said, "We've issued a verbal and written reprimand and will be watching this situation closely; let us know if more this kind of thing happens." Instead they had to bring in the fact that this guy was a "high performer", implying at least that this gives him a license ordinary managers don't have. Now I think we can all assume that on some level high performers get leeway that low performers don't. But saying so is stupid. It's pretty much tantamount to a confession that you don't take this seriously.

Then they compound the stupidity by telling her to expect a bad review from this guy because she brought this up. This pretty much is an admission that HR and management countenance unprofessionalism, allowing managers to use employee reviews to pursue personal issues rather than evaluating the employee's contribution to the company.

That's just asinine. If it's false you're undermining employee confidence in the review and performance reward system for no reason. If it's true you should be fixing it, an in the interim keeping your mouth shut.

Now I'd say you should keep your work and personal (e.g. sex) life separate, but I know some companies don't give employees time to have a personal life. If a company does that you're absolutely right, your HR people are going to have a tough time navigating the line between advances and harassment. All the more reason not to be sloppy. If someone in such an environment can't broach the subject with tact, he'd better be prepared to be celibate.

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Just as was the case with the Fox News Channel, any lawsuits coming out of this imbroglio will be settled in short order (out of court) for substantial sums of money. If Ms. Fowler has the "proof" she is claiming, CEO Kalanick will pay through the nose rather than having all his dirty laundry aired in open court.

Eric Holder is on the jerb