
Silicon Valley programmers pressure friends to quit working at Uber - prostoalex
http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-programmers-pressure-friends-to-quit-working-at-uber-2017-3?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Falleyinsider%2Fsilicon_alley_insider+%28Silicon+Alley+Insider%29&utm_content=FaceBook
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z4chj
The tweets at the end really damage this article's reputation as a reasonable
piece of journalism (if that's how you choose to label Business Insider). It
is absurd to claim that ones reputation is irreparably damaged by not having
left the company yet. People have jobs because they need income and to support
their lives and families. Even when a company is clearly screwing up (looking
right at Uber here), employees can't just leave with out any consequence to
their personal life or their ability to afford to live

~~~
remarkEon
I genuinely don't understand why news outlets do this unless it's critical to
the story. I've seen good examples of Tweet integration in places like The
Intercept, for example, but usually they involve some other facet of the story
where the _Tweets themselves are consequential to the reporting._ It just
seems like useless noise when done like this article.

~~~
bmpafa
The worst thing to happen to journalism in the past decade is that, somehow,
"some random strangers on Twitter said a thing" became an acceptable news
story. I think it's worse than useless noise--it almost inevitably implies a
broader trend/opinion than the author has the evidence to support.

------
uberino
I'm an Uber engineer. I've been here several years. I'm not going to comment
on any recent news, but I do have something very important to say that I've
yet to see anyone else voice.

What frustrates me most about people are hell bent on painting a wildly
successful company in the worst light possible is that doing so has very
serious negative implications for equality and opportunity for women and other
groups that are under-represented in tech. Let me explain why.

Spending several years at a unicorn startup opens up so many opportunities.
Look at early employees from Fairchild, Paypal, Facebook, Google, Microsoft,
etc. These companies minted many many millionaires and gave them tons of
valuable experience to go out and start their own companies after they left.
When you so aggressively bad mouth the culture of a rising unicorn such that
you discourage certain groups from even applying to work there, _you_ have
deprived those people of an opportunity to be on a rocket ship. You're
perpetuating the very problem you're railing against.

My colleagues in the LadyEng group here at Uber have on many occasions
lamented how hard a time they have recruiting other women to join the company
because of the reputation in the media. The company culture has been so
maligned by those with an agenda that even the women engineers here have a
difficult time convincing other women to join.

If you really want people who are under-represented in tech to succeed, you
should encourage them and support them in joining every rising unicorn that
exists and will ever exist regardless of how that culture is perceived,
because four years after joining they will have the money, experience and
connections to create their own companies and perpetuate a virtuous cycle.

If you agree with this message please spread it because so few people realize
how they are contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy that hurts the cause
they claim to champion.

~~~
aasseer
I don't think it's about opportunities, it's about what impact it's making to
this world, is Uber worth existing? Is it really making the world any better?
Is it even irreplaceable? Or it's just a toxic company trying to suck every
bit from the world with a fake mask of "sharing economy"? With racism and
sexism?

~~~
gizmodo59
> Is it really making the world any better?

Does this mean no one should work in many companies that do not make the world
any better than what it is now? One could easily argue that most of the
companies, though they claim to make the world a better place, they honestly
do not.

~~~
uberino
Institutions are generally necessary for a society to function. The only
alternative that omits institutions is homesteading, and with 7+ billion
people on this planet, that isn't really an option anymore.

Talking in absolutes doesn't actually aid the discussion.

Few institutions are purely good or purely evil. They are made of people, who
themselves are not purely good or purely evil, who have their own motivations,
some altruistic and some selfish.

We live in dynamic systems, in which institutions and individuals play a role.
As a general rule all make things better in some ways and worse in others.

Transportation network companies (TNC) have produced economic winners and
losers. Many people have access to more job options with less friction. Taxi
drivers have seen their income shrink. The laws of supply and demand both with
the network of one TNC and between the networks of multiple TNCs in
competition with one another drive prices down. Driving the prices down makes
transportation accessible to more people (both the more privileged and the
less privileged), but it also drives down the income of those driving.
Eventually self driving cars will drive down the costs further, democratizing
convenient transportation further and eliminating many jobs.

Due to path dependency, humanity is heading down this path one way or another.
If one institution doesn't take us in this direction, another will.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/02/space_stasis.html)

It's not going to be easy. It will be fraught with challenges, technical and
social. The human and social problems will likely eclipse the technological
problems in both scope and magnitude, but we're going to face them either way.
We've been through this before during the industrial revolution. Life is
recursive. It was a painful transition, but we came out the other side with a
society that was more prosperous and had more opportunities for more people to
live a life free of suffering than ever before. We can either claim the sky is
falling, or we can put our heads down and work on figuring out how to solve
the biggest challenges of our day. No solution we come up with will be
perfect. We're going to have to cooperate in the form of institutions to
tackle such large problems. No institution we come up with will purely make
the world a better place because there are no silver bullets.

------
popopobobobo
Friends, it is insensible to ask me to quit without giving me a better offer
elsewhere.

~~~
bendoernberg
The entire black population of Montgomery Alabama gave up taking the bus for
over a year during the boycott because they cared enough to make that
sacrifice. People who care enough sometimes go on hunger strike, lie down in
front of tanks, and risk arrest for what they believe in. If you need a
"better offer" than what I assume is your current 6-figure salary to change
jobs, then Uber's sexist, anti-worker, sociopathic ethos and the message their
practices send to the world are apparently not all that important to you.
There's nothing insensible about expecting incredibly mild amounts of empathy
and moral courage from some of the most economically secure workers in the
world.

If you're a janitor or food service worker at Uber, then I apologize for
making incorrect assumptions and my thoughts for you would be different.

~~~
remarkEon
I don't understand this sentiment. Whoever you're responding to could have
other responsibilities, family or otherwise, where his or her decision to
leave could adversely affect _other people_ \- not just them. I also don't
quite think it's appropriate to invoke one of the seminal events of the Civil
Rights movements in this country as a way to try to shame someone into
quitting a job at a company you don't like, exogenous of all the nefarious
claims made against them. Let's hold off on grabbing pitch forks for the time
being.

~~~
bendoernberg
You're right that leaving a job can affect _other people_...but so does
staying! By continuing to work there, Uber employees are facilitating a sexist
environment, the exploitation of the drivers who (if things go according to
plan) will soon be discarded and left with car loans they can't pay back, and
a general disregard for the wellbeing of anyone who is not an Uber shareholder
or executive.

I agree with you that the Uber situation is far from the civil rights era, but
I wanted to pick an example of regular people (almost certainly in a much
worse situation than OP) making a sacrifice that impacted their finances and
quality of life. Those people had family members depending them too; the
difference is they had a cause they cared enough about to make sacrifices. I
believe that people should either be willing to make sacrifices for things
they care about, or admit that they don't care enough. OP was instead treating
the suggestion that people make a sacrifice as a prima facie absurd
suggestion, and I find that troubling.

------
charles-salvia
The sheer number of "scandals" coming out of Uber raise the probability that
something isn't Kosher to nearly 0.99. That said, I find it deeply disturbing
that _anyone_ expressing _any_ form of skepticism of any individual claim is
downvoted.

For anyone doing the downvoting, can you elaborate please on what sort of
system you have in place that decides whether we _can_ or _can 't_ be
skeptical of a claim without corroborating evidence (apart from personal
testimony)? It's true that in this case the preponderance of testimony is
pretty strong against Uber, but I wouldn't hold it against someone who, say,
assigned something like a ~0.50 probability value to the anonymous harassment
claim.

I'll also say that I've worked at a tech company before that went through some
bad PR issues. As an insider, it was obvious that, while there definitely were
issues that needed fixing, the media exaggerated them or invented entirely new
issues out of nothing. When the media senses a PR catastrophe, they'll jump at
any tidbit of information that even remotely seems "scandalous".

Now, in the case of Uber, I'm not an insider, and my own estimate as an
outsider is that there is something like a 99% chance that serious misconduct
is going on at the highest levels of the company. But regardless, it is really
absurd, and in fact quite disturbing, to see any degree of skepticism
expressed over any of this to be so harshly resisted. It is perfectly
reasonable to believe that _some_ of the reported scandals may have a < 0.50
probability value of being true, while others are more probably true, etc.

------
synicalx
What even goes through these people's heads when they post crap like this? Do
they really, genuinely, expect people to quit what is probably a secure and
well paying job, because they've decided they don't like Uber any more? Have
we really reached this level of arrogance?

Financial and family responsibilities be damned! I read a news article that
said Uber didn't give everyone participation awards and gold stars!

What next, we ask kids to stop working at McDonalds because it's making
everyone fat? Or maybe tobacco companies, because they're making everyone
sick? Or BP, because they're BP? No no, just Uber because there's a trending
hashtag and it's pretty hip not to like Uber now.

------
redthrowaway
So, progressives in SV have moved from trying to get you fired if you say
something they don't like on twitter, to pressuring you to quit your job if an
accusation is made against somebody at your company.

Great. This couldn't possibly end poorly.

~~~
cjensen
This isn't about saying something someone doesn't like.

This is about unlawful behavior which, from the outside, appears to pervade
the entirety of Uber.

~~~
synicalx
If they've been behaving unlawfully then let the people who enforce the law
deal with them. Suspicion of unlawful behaviour absolutely does not give
people the right to demand that people quit their job.

~~~
cjensen
> does not give people the right to demand...

People always have the right to demand things. That's literally what Free
Speech is.

~~~
synicalx
I mean 'right' in a social sense, you can demand whatever the hell you want
but it doesn't mean it's socially acceptable to do so.

Also not everyone lives in America, and many countries don't have any
constitutional protection for Freedom of Speech - my country Australia being a
good example of this.

~~~
cjensen
Yes it is socially acceptable to call on people with moral failings to work on
fixing them.

Also, Free Speech is a human right acknowledged in sensible parts of the
global like Australia. It's not just a law in a particular fiefdom.

~~~
synicalx
Yes it is acceptable to call people on their moral failings, but their working
at Uber isn't a moral failing - it's a job.

When BP spewed oil all over the ocean, did you track down their employees and
point out what horrible people they were? Or how about Yahoo, when they
acknowledged their breach and admitted doing nothing about it for years, did
you demand that everyone at Yahoo jump ship?

~~~
bendoernberg
People who help BP drill for oil when they could be making a perfectly fine
living doing something else are contributing to, potentially, the end of human
life on this planet. If that is not an immoral act, what is?

~~~
malandrew
Have you ever considered the importance of energy?

It's literally the primary bounding function restricting human activity.
Everything requires energy. It heats our home. It moves our goods. It moves
us. It drives our machinery. Every human activity requires energy.

A higher cost of energy disproportionally hurts the poor. Rising energy prices
plunges millions into poverty.

That said, it sucks that we're currently heavily dependent on oil for energy,
and we should move away from oil for many of our energy needs. Drilling for
oil isn't the problem. Not having an economically competitive alternative is
the problem. The only real solution for moving away from oil is helping make
alternative energy solutions economically competitive with oil.

If you're anti-oil before we have economically competitive solutions, you're
contributing to poverty and suffering for millions upon millions of people all
over the planet. If that is not an immoral act, what is?

------
zxcvvcxz
So much is happening so fast in the name of bad publicity directed at Uber.

Is anyone else cynically suspecting a coordinated hit? I don't doubt there's a
toxic culture with real problems present. But the timing and sustained
pressure of all this media attention seems a little... suspicious.

I also think back to the anonymously written Medium piece after the first one
[1]. There is literally no way to verify this, and it was upvoted a ridiculous
amount (top 10 story on HN of all time or something like that). To a cynic,
this could easily be astroturfing.

To reiterate - I'm not by any means doubting that there are serious
organizational and cultural problems at Uber that need to be addressed. But I
can't help but feeling like something else is going on as well.

Who could stand to benefit from such a public image barrage, by attacking the
ability to hire and retain talent?

[1] - [https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-
ub...](https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-uber-
survivor-c6d6541e632f#.bsjfl2vkp)

~~~
jedberg
I don't think it's a coordinate hit. I think one woman published her story,
and then everyone else started digging deeper, and given their previous
ethical issues, the stories, even the anonymous ones, are fairly easy to
believe.

But to answer your question, Lyft, as well as cab companies all over the
planet, would benefit immensely from people not using Uber.

~~~
FLGMwt
Not to mention the engineers available to SV companies after a mass exodus.

------
eruditely
It's probably just a high energy workplace full of plenty of power moves and
the resulting hit and miss that comes from that. As if sexual relations could
be acted upon as if we had perfect knowledge!

Hell even if we did have perfect knowledge we would know that women find it
attractive in itself if a guy will approach and based on the skill of that
approach yea/nea or w/e happens, so even if we could read each-others minds
there would still be the act of the effectiveness of your tactics and if you
didn't play it right then things could still get awkward.

There's variance to life you know. In before anal-retentive attentiveness to
how I used epistemic randomness.

~~~
snowwrestler
Can't decide if this is satire.

~~~
corndoge
Probably what they meant by "epistemic randomness"

------
jimmywanger
I think it bears repeating that there has been no hard evidence turned up in
any of this. Even the single non-anonymous story doesn't have any
corroborating evidence or records, and the charges of "investigation" and
"harassment" have been only reported by the original reporter of the story.

The fallout has been that somebody has been let go after non-substantiated
rumors about his activities at a previous employer, and now people are being
pressured to leave the company and end all association with the company.

This is definitely an unjustified (based on the revealed evidence) reaction,
and this is how witch hunts start.

Now I have heard second hand that the work and engineering culture at Uber
needs some help - in terms of hours worked and technical discipline. That sort
of thing seems plausible.

However, for anything that implies this level of harassment, there had better
be more hard evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

~~~
goseeastarwar
We need to stop doing this in every thread. These women are taking huge risks
by speaking publicly and asking for proof is insulting to say the least.

~~~
redthrowaway
This is an insane reaction. There is literally no other charge for which "I
would like to see supporting evidence of this claim" is somehow problematic.

~~~
goseeastarwar
It's really not when you realize these aren't extraordinary claims. Those that
wish to distract from the industry's systemic issues insist on evidence.

~~~
flukus
> Those that wish to distract from the industry's systemic issues insist on
> evidence

Yes, because it would be nice to know if it really was a systemic issue before
wasting time and energy fixing it. "It's totally an issue, trust me" isn't
worth acting on.

~~~
goseeastarwar
How many accounts of harassment do you need to believe there's a problem, out
of curiosity?

Nearly every woman in the industry has a story to tell, most say nothing.
You'd know that if you'd bother to speak to any.

~~~
flukus
> How many accounts of harassment do you need to believe there's a problem,
> out of curiosity?

Zero, I'm not taking anecdotal evidence.

