
The Holder Report on Uber - sunils34
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/13/technology/document-The-Holder-Report-on-Uber.html
======
dragonwriter
This is not the Holder (well, Covington would be more accurate) Report. The
Introduction to this document makes reference to report Covington prepared for
and presented to the Special Committee of Uber's board, and to the fact that
the full board adopted all of the recommendations in that report.

Beyond the Introduction, this seems to just be the recommendations from the
Covington report; the full report (per the Introduction ) was to cover “(1)
Uber’s workplace environment as it related to the allegations of
discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in Ms. Fowler’s post; (2) whether
the company’s policies and practices were sufficient to prevent and properly
address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in the workplace; and (3)
what steps Uber could take to ensure that its commitment to a diverse and
inclusive workplace was reflected not only in the company’s policies but made
real in the experiences of each of Uber’s employees.”

This document only includes the part addressing (3), which implicitly
indicates that the bottom line conclusion on (2) was “no”, but doesn't really
provide any clear information on (1).

~~~
logicallee
So is the report available anywhere? (I guess not, or you'd link it.) However,
if it's internal, then what happened - just the recommendations were leaked to
the Times?

Also, for the moderators: you may want to update the title to "Holder
Recommendations on Uber".

~~~
theCricketer
The recommendations weren't leaked. It was made publicly available by Uber. It
is even on their website:

[https://newsroom.uber.com/covington-
recommendations/](https://newsroom.uber.com/covington-recommendations/)

~~~
logicallee
OK. I should have used the word "shared". So it sounds like they are not going
to share the full report, just the recommendations.

------
killjoywashere
Every new grad: read this. Then file it away and review it as soon as you have
people reporting to you. This should be required reading for every start-up
founder and every manager at every mid-size and large org, and every person
who criticizes the decisions of those people or hopes to be in those
positions. Which means every creative, every knowledge worker, engineer,
designer, lawyer, physician, all of them. And therefore, almost without
exception, everyone reading this comment.

Edit: This is the executive symmary. It contains a lot of _what to do_. Going
forward, you don't need to know so much how Uber got into the mess they're in.
You need to know how to stay out of similar messes. This is a good plan for
how to stay out of such messes.

~~~
stupidcar
It's also interesting for those looking for startup ideas. The procedures and
practices recommended here are ways to reduce institutional maladies based
mostly on human activity, but it's probable that many of them could be be
achieved, or augmented, through technological solutions.

Think about it: If you can build an innovative piece of tech that genuinely
helps implement these policies, or achieve the same outcome in a different
way, then you've got a huge market of large, rich organisations who'll be
interested. Worth considering.

~~~
hallmark
Kapor Capital, investors in Uber, apparently also invest in "People Ops"
startups. They're actively trying to feed a problem child into their own
opportunities. Smart.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/13/kapor-
uber/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/13/kapor-uber/)

------
paulsutter
The meat of the document is missing. It states the situation that triggered
the investigation, describes the process followed, and gives the
recommendations.

But it doesn't tell us what they learned through the process.

~~~
SilasX
I agree. The thing everyone wants to know is (stuff like), how did it get to
the point that HR employees believed:

1) They should lie about "oh it was this guys first offense".

2) A bad performance review for reporting someone's sexual advances "isn't
retaliation because we said you could transfer".

3) It's better to just buy jackets for the men than to buy no jackets or to
pay more for the women's.

I mean, you can kind of loosely guess at it from the recommendations, but
nothing direct.

~~~
jldugger
> They should lie about "oh it was this guys first offense".

There's some implied reasons in the language, though we can't tell whether
that was a direct consequence.

> Human Resources Record Keeping > Uber should ensure it has appropriate
> tools, including complaint tracking software, to keep better track of
> complaints, personnel records, and employee data. > For example, if a
> complaint is substantiated but results in discipline other than termination
> of employment, relevant stakeholders should be able to easily identify
> whether prior complaints have been lodged to ensure that appropriate action
> is taken with respect to repeat offenders. Likewise, senior managers should
> be able to track whether certain organizations or managers give rise to
> multiple complaints such that intervention with the manager is needed. Uber
> should also emphasize the importance of recordkeeping to all Human Resources
> staff, and impose consequences for failure to adhere to recordkeeping
> requirements.

Seems unlikely, given that Uber released it themselves, that the report would
provide any sort of self-incriminating evidence. So all we can really do is
read between the lines and #deleteuber.

------
terryjsmith
While there are some concrete next steps in here (hire a COO, management
training, HR training, the "Rooney Rule"), what is the goal and how do these
steps connect to it? As far as the harassment stuff, I think the solution is
clear: have a zero tolerance policy and enforce it. But it otherwise says the
words "inclusion" and "diversity" a lot, but never really connects those words
to achievable outcomes and seems superficial. Maybe the end result is to
restore Uber's image - in which case doing those things makes sense - but
without any goal posts or authority, many of these recommendations seem to
fall short.

~~~
xapata
What measurements do you propose?

~~~
terryjsmith
That's the issue, right? Everyone wants "diversity", but no one wants quotas
or hard lines that could discriminate against other groups. I think you need
to do your best to root out any biases in your hiring process or people. At
Uber's size there is also an evangelism role that can be played to reach out
and encourage a more diverse applicant pool to apply for roles. But this
report falls flat on how you could possibly measure whether your team is
"diverse" or "inclusive" enough and also fails to call out any existing
practices, processes or people that would've gotten them there in the first
place, opting instead to use those principles as PR tools.

~~~
pyre
I don't know things like "we only bought jackets for the men, because it would
be more expensive to buy jackets to the women... so they just don't get
jackets" seems pretty divisive to me. You're trying to split hairs, but things
like that are so blatant that they are screaming right in your face. If such
things were _really_ happening at Uber, then I don't think that your quibbling
about "how diverse is diverse" makes any sense. They obviously have issues
that need to be addressed, no?

~~~
xapata
So you're in the "I know it when I see it" camp?

There's the aphorism that what's measured gets improved (and what isn't
measured gets worse). If you're trying to improve diversity/inclusion, how do
you know you've done a good job unless you can measure it?

~~~
pyre
It also depends on _how_ and _what_ you're measuring. If you are (e.g.)
measuring diversity, but measuring it in the "wrong way" you could be setting
up perverse incentives to game the metrics while not truly achieving the goal.

------
wonder_bread
My eyes are bleeding from all the bureaucratic jargon. "Special Committee",
"Oversight Committee", "Independent Committee" for the promotions process,
checklists for alcohol consumption, human resources training, etc. I dearly
hope it doesn't take this many layers of control within a company to ensure a
livable atmosphere for its employees.

~~~
stupidcar
You're just demonstrating the same facile mindset that plagues experts of
every discipline, so convinced that the problems of every other field -- of
which they are largely ignorant -- are obviously trivial, and could be solved
with a bit of common sense.

This XKCD cartoon, basically: [https://xkcd.com/1831/](https://xkcd.com/1831/)

Consider the difficulty most people on this site will have encountered just
getting a handful of software components to cooperate successfully. Now
imagine trying to do the same with an organisation of thousands of human
beings.

Left to their own devices, large groups of human beings easily fall into
horrendous anti-patterns. Avoiding or fixing these anti-patterns is not just
hard, it is probably the hardest problem human beings have ever faced, given
that we have been working on it for the duration of our existence, and we're
still mostly terrible at it. This is not trivial, it is mindbendingly
difficult.

The "bureaucratic jargon" you mention is just the specialist language that the
field of management of human resources has created to talk about the problems
they're trying to solve, and the structures they've designed to solve them.
And really, it's hardly impenetrable in comparison with even a mildly
technical blog post.

When you dismiss problems like this as easily solvable, or the recommendations
of experts as bureaucratic jargon, then you're the pointy-haired boss waving
away technical arguments why something is infeasible. You're the politician
saying ISPs need to put more filters on the tubes to censor the internet.
You're the cable host smugly dismissing climatology as fake news.

~~~
im3w1l
The very idea of startup culture and arguably hacker culture was that that
beaurocracy was unneeded cargo cult, and parasites making up justifications
for their power.

Should your ideas prevail, then certainly we will see big, big changes in
Silicon Valley over the coming years.

 _Going out on more of a limb_ and making more specific, but less certain
prediction: There will be a balooning managererial and adminisitrative class
sucking up most of the surplus that tech is generating. The workers, i.e.
software engineers and artists and sales, will see lowered wages, less perks,
less autonomy. They will be commodified.

But in a free market, wont small lean companies outcompete companies with
inefficient management sprawl? No, because the manager class will use their
political connections to crush anyone that wants to try such a feat.

Those predictions are uncertain, but probable enough that I'd more cautious
about going into the field if I still had my career choice ahead of me.

~~~
johan_larson
_Should your ideas prevail, then certainly we will see big, big changes in
Silicon Valley over the coming years. ... Going out on more of a limb and
making more specific, but less certain prediction: There will be a balooning
managererial and adminisitrative class sucking up most of the surplus that
tech is generating._

This has already happened. All those tiny fierce startups, they're not
planning to stay tiny startups forever. They are trying to get a foothold and
grow into big successful companies that can pursue big opportunities. And big
companies inevitably have hierarchies of managers and directors and analysts
and whatnot. Even great companies do this. Google has one VP for every 200
people. They're not needed in small firms, because coordinating the work of
ten people who serve a couple of hundred customers isn't that hard. But
coordinating the work of 10,000 people who serve millions, definitely is.

------
cozzyd
I especially like:

"Uber should consider moving the catered dinner it offers to a time when this
benefit can be utilized by a broader group of employees, including employees
who have spouses or families waiting for them at home, and that signals an
earlier end to the work day."

Note to Linux users: this PDF looks terrible without msttcorefonts installed.
I guess MS Word neglects to embed fonts? Also, as someone who is not used to
seeing documents generated by MS Word, I'm surprised at how bad the typography
is in general (although maybe this due to user error...for example it looks
like hyphenation might be disabled.)

~~~
BadassFractal
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".

~~~
ryanbrunner
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.

~~~
patorjk
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.

~~~
gertef
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.

~~~
ryanbrunner
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.

------
aemachado94
Feels like Uber just paid a load of money to get patronized by a well-
respected official. Nothing(as far as this public version suggests) in this
document should be surprising to a growing company. "You mean if we create a
patriarchal company culture that preys on personal weaknesses and demeans
women and minorities we're going to have a bad public image? Gee, who would've
thought!"

~~~
davidbrent
Unfortunate as it may be, sometimes in large corporations, it takes paying an
outsider to identify and document something, before anything will be done
about it.

~~~
beager
Not sure who said it first, but "a consultant is someone you pay to take your
watch and tell you what time it is"

------
sjbase
Link to the report itself:
[https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3863782/The-
Holde...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3863782/The-Holder-
Report-on-Uber.pdf)

------
mandevil
According to [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2017/06/13...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2017/06/13/a-top-uber-board-member-just-cracked-a-joke-about-women-
at-the-worst-possible-time/?hpid=hp_rhp-more-top-stories_no-
name%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.5480b857d3c7) One of the Uber board members
made a misogynist joke _during the company-wide meeting explaining how Uber
was going to fix its culture_. This is... special.

~~~
mandevil
Oh God, it gets worse: he _interrupted the only female board member_ to make
this ?joke?.

His apology has already been emailed to the entire company. This isn't quite a
defenestratable offense, but does illustrate the scale of the challenge ahead
of Uber.

~~~
c3534l
Did you just use question marks as quotation marks?

~~~
coffeevradar
What's wrong with doing that"

~~~
c3534l
I've never seen it before.

------
boxcardavin
I think this whole Uber situation is a good reminder to the valley that the
"No Assholes" rule is still a good policy.

~~~
pyrophane
I dunno. Uber's "mostly assholes" approach seems to have gotten them pretty
far. Perhaps the message is rather that you can be as awful and unscrupulous
as you like because by the time it bites you you you'll either be long gone or
far enough along to bring on Eric Holder and Arianna Huffington to
rehabilitate your image.

~~~
boxcardavin
We'll see, Kalanick has said that without self-driving in Uber's future they
are dead.

~~~
dekhn
that's the sort of statement that bay area CEOs say when they want something
to happen. It doesn't mean it's necessarily true.

------
favorited
According to Yahoo reporting[1], a board member made a sexist joke _at their
all-hands meeting to address this report_ today.

Huffington: There’s a lot of data that shows when there’s one woman on the
board, it’s much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board

Bonderman: Actually what it shows is it’s much likely to be more talking

What a garbage fire.

[1][https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inside-ubers-hands-meeting-
tr...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inside-ubers-hands-meeting-
travis-194232221.html)

------
sywan
While some of the points in the report are legit, I feel most of the content
is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any
other tech firms and it will probably still work.

I genuinely believe that people work hard because they believe what they do
has a meaning, not because the company serves free dinner/beer/water at 7pm or
8:15pm. I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup like a non-
profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have
catered anything, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during
weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year
engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture"
recommendations. I am so lost.

~~~
saalweachter
I'm willing to believe that at a certain point in a startup's life cycle, it
is reasonable to expect the early employees to work non-stop. It's also
reasonable to sell your product early on at a loss, to garner interest. But at
a certain point, if your customers are not willing to pay enough for your
product to cover the costs, you've got a problem. Likewise, if your business
only works if your employees are working 80+ hours a week, you have to ask
yourself if you really have a viable business.

I think this point comes a lot earlier than most people are willing to admit.
If your startup needs 10 people to get off the ground and you can only afford
5 who work 'round the clock, that's one thing; if your startup needs 20,000
people and you have 10,000 working 24/7/365, that's another.

I will also concede there are jobs worth devoting every waking moment to,
because they are worth doing, because they satisfy you intellectually or
emotionally, because they save lives, because you will benefit greatly,
personally from the work, materially or in reputation. But a lot of tech and
other professional jobs are a lot more predatory than that. You take a lot of
young people straight from one environment which lionizes the all-nighter and
accomplishing arbitrary assigned goals (college), drag them to a new place
where they don't have friends, family, or anything else which either makes
demands on their time or gives them meaning and validation, and then encourage
them to work non-stop on projects with no clear moral pay-off and a financial
payoff that accrues to other people.

------
jstewartmobile
This smells a lot like a pentesting report: pay people a lot of money to make
a report, persevere with current bad practices, then when litigation comes up
say "Hey, we took this seriously. Look at all the money we spent on this
report!"

~~~
fullshark
Idk, a lot of heads rolled, including the supposed right hand man of the CEO
that was supposedly behind some egregious things. What more can we say should
have been done without seeing the information behind the report?

~~~
jstewartmobile
This may just be my cynicism creeping in here, but I suspect the head rolling
had more to do with quarterly results, and this was just an opportunity to
cover those up with "virtue" signaling.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/uber-s-
lo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/uber-s-loss-
exceeds-800-million-in-third-quarter-on-1-7-billion-in-net-revenue)

~~~
jstewartmobile
Cynicism vindicated:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2017/06/13...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2017/06/13/a-top-uber-board-member-just-cracked-a-joke-about-women-
at-the-worst-possible-time)

------
sywan
While some of the points in the report are legit, I feel most of the content
is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any
other tech firms and it will probably still work.

I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup as a non-profit. As
someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered dinner,
we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during the weekends/holidays so
we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a
law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.

~~~
s73ver
Well, for one, Google does offer the catered dinners. If Uber didn't, then the
engineers either wouldn't stay late (ideally; workaholism is bad), or they'd
go somewhere that does offer that kind of thing.

------
tmh79
Very interesting recommendations, but no mention of the CTO, Thuan, who was
called out by Fowler herself in her blog post.

------
ryanmarsh
> Uber should establish key metrics to which its leaders will be held
> accountable in the performance review process. This would include, for
> example, metrics that are tied to improving diversity, responsiveness to
> employee complaints, employee satisfaction, and compliance.

Every metric has the power for evil. This will be gamed, simply by measuring
these things behaviour will be affected in unpredictable ways. I understand
the challenge they're up against but I absolutely cringe at turning some of
these subjective items into metrics.

------
jonstewart
Blind Résumé Review stands out.

------
Cyclone_
Don't think for a second that these are isolated incidents. These things
happen all the time, it just so happened that people like Susan Fowler fought
back. I've seen these things happen constantly.

------
netvarun
Random thought: Marissa Mayer (who hacker news informs me, just quit her
previous job) could potentially be their COO

~~~
khazhoux
"quit"

~~~
jdmichal
I don't understand the scare quotes. The division she was hired to actually
lead was sold. There's no reason for her to stay. They can easily find a bean
counter type -- and pay them a hell of a lot less -- to manage the remaining
investments.

~~~
yesbabyyes
Apparently, they're paying the bean counter _twice_ as much.
[http://fortune.com/2017/03/13/yahoo-new-ceo-marissa-mayer-
ne...](http://fortune.com/2017/03/13/yahoo-new-ceo-marissa-mayer-net-worth-
salary/)

~~~
jdmichal
Well that certainly looks like a pretty sweet deal.

------
misterbowfinger
I'm mostly unimpressed. Most of the suggestions are just process changes,
which often just obfuscate organizational issues and cripple performance. The
only value is the signal it sends to employees that affect the culture
negatively.

The most substantive recommendation, IMO, is that they suggest a COO that
controls most of the day-to-day. It's a clear move to reduce the CEO's power,
and most likely a path to remove the CEO in the future unless the CEO regains
power, which is unlikely.

~~~
danpalmer
I disagree. There are lots of things here that are very widescale, and as the
board accepted _all_ of these suggestions, assuming they all happen, I think
real change can be realised within Uber.

------
1dundundun
Bottom line is this...

At some point EARLY on, you're going to want to put some thought into casting
a wider net for talent and wrapping your heads around the fact that people
from different (age, gender, racial, ability, socioeconomic) backgrounds can
be a strategic asset to developing a world class orgs.

Throw away the notion of cultural fit where you assume people have to like
what you like and think how you think to "fit in". That's bullshit and
extremely limiting.

Build an environment where everyone feels whole and contributes.

You WILL sacrifice some of the benefits of that frat boys club environment a
lot of early stage startups have.

You will gain the type of insight that will allow you to navigate an
increasingly divese workforce and (US and global) consumer base.

Be willing to make mistakes. It's a clumsy process.

Uber is going to have a hell of a hard time retrofitting a less toxic culture
and the numerous leaks we're seeing points to an employee base that's begging
for change.

Successful high growth orgs of tomorrow are gonna be the ones stumbling
towards getting this shit right today.

------
sbarre
So is this the full report, or an abridged version for public consumption (as
was indicated might be released a few days ago)?

~~~
dragonwriter
It's just the recommendations from the report with an added introduction about
the process that motivated the report and what the Board did (accept all the
recommendations) with the report. It is not, misleading headline aside, the
report itself.

------
blacksqr
So Mr. Holder, were you able to confirm the veracity of Susan Fowler's
descriptions of her experiences at Uber?

Mr. Holder?

Is this thing on?

~~~
bb611
On what planet would any company publicly release a document that creates a
slam dunk civil case against them, unless required to do so by law? The goal
was for Uber to get the value insight of outside counsel, not for all of us to
do so.

Susan Fowler can file a civil case and get a copy of the full report to read
to a jury, but Uber's lawyers and outside counsel would have to be incompetent
to let them release the full report publicly.

~~~
blacksqr
A planet on which a $70 billion company was facing an existential threat which
required it to convince the public it was serious about change, which it could
do with an acknowledgement, an apology and a settlement of a few million.

------
alanh
Anyone have plain text or HTML of this content?
_Update:[https://pastebin.com/L0Qf7Ddp](https://pastebin.com/L0Qf7Ddp) _

------
Tycho
I suspect Uber has a _Hudsucker Proxy_ situation going on.

------
dingdongding
TLDR version. Anyone?

~~~
spenczar5
Give more independence to oversight groups and more authority to the board,
and institute basic, common HR practices like keeping track of complaints of
employees, doing performance reviews of executives, and clarifying how
promotions/pay work.

[edit] Oh, and number one: decrease Travis Kalanick's power.

------
thogenhaven
If someone can write 13 pages in bullet forms about things you need to change,
you're not doing your job very well...

~~~
valuearb
If you can't write 13 pages of bullet pointed recommendations to any client,
you aren't going to be successful consultant.

Move the catered dinners to earlier times? Now that's padding.

~~~
adjkant
That's actually a crucial part of the culture to me - my company does dinner
at 6PM, which everyone in the company knows is motivation for keeping people
at work until then. I'm very thankful it's not 8:15PM. I don't want to be
expected to work late daily and then have it disguised as a perk.

~~~
devdas
6 pm is way too early for dinner. We don't work on farms without electricity.

~~~
adjkant
For the US, 6 PM is a normal dinner time, electricity or not. If you're in
Europe, I understand where you're coming from. Mind you, that's the start -
you can come and get food as late as 8PM if you please. The point is that for
the most part, everyone can get their dinner at the time they want to.

------
ProAm
So long Travis.

~~~
valuearb
Is he firing himself?

Because he still has absolute voting control and at least another $6B in the
bank.

~~~
ProAm
You are correct. But this is the start to the end. CEO's rarely bounce back
from forced leave of absences and loss of responsibilities... Coupled with the
Waymo lawsuit there is a lot of momentum in a less than good direction for
him.

