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employee8000 | 8 years ago

Yes, star performers were protected in the past. Not anymore. Many top performers were fired due to this recent investigation. Hopefully more are fired after the Holder report.

"Women leaving in droves" is a lie. The recent demographics report shows that, although we could do better, the female ratio is about equivalent to other tech companies. And there is a concerted effort to change our processes and training to reduce or remove unconscious bias in our hiring process to make it even better.

And powerful women are joining as well. We just had two major female execs with a huge list of accomplishments join. They know full well the company as it is today and wouldn't join if it was a piece of shit like many of you think it is.

I can't speak of the Alexander case because I know nothing of it. But it's still in that 2014 era that I was talking about. That would not fly now, and I think his firing is in line with how the company is today in 2017.

Since Susan Fowler, I think there has been a major change in company culture. Travis revealed in an allhands that he himself needs to change. He had strong opinions on what he wanted the company culture to be but he finally understood that he was wrong. He wanted a hard-driving, ultra-logical company that squeezed the best out of every single employee but rewarded them well with stock. But after seeing the unintended consequences, that it didn't work. It worked well when you have a handful of employees that love doing this, but it doesn't scale at 10,000+ employees and he finally admitted that. As well, the qualities that made him a great startup CEO do not translate to a 10,000 person company and he finally realized that in March. These are all things he admitted in the all hands, and it seems like The company is rapidly changing to becoming much more empathetic. He is giving full reins to the New SVP HR and she is doing a great job in my opinions. I really do believe that the changes will be transformational.

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kevinburke|8 years ago

Travis is 40 years old, I'm really not going to believe "he's going to change" when he is still the CEO and all we've seen is that really bad PR can force him into taking small actions to mitigate it. Last week the head of HR was talking about how there's no systemic harassment and how "the biggest problem is morale" and yesterday we read that 215 different people were under investigation for harassment, and it required the involvement of an outside legal firm. Susan Fowler mentioned that Uber had investigators digging into her personal life and her past, after her blog post; it's 2017.

I think it's unethical to continue to work for a person like that, and to help them make more money. I think it's unethical to continue to work with and for people that have turned a blind eye to harassment and blatantly unethical behavior in the past, no matter what tune they are singing now. In particular one way we as employees can signal to management that their actions are unacceptable (and signal to outsiders that we find them unacceptable) is by quitting.

In particular the actions of Uber employees who have continued to stay despite clear and ongoing evidence of unethical behavior (going back to the Beyonce/ex-girlfriend stalking reports, which are several years old), signal that they'd turn a blind eye, or ignore misbehavior, at your company as well.

employee8000|8 years ago

Thats your prerogative. I choose to give him the benefit of the doubt. After seeing him speak and seeing the changes that have started to roll out, I believe he is sincere.

215 were investigated and 20 people fired. There are ~15000 employees globally. It's not systemic and most people at Uber would agree. The outside firm was hired specifically to show that they are independent with no bias. If they didn't hire outside firm, you probably would accuse them of bias, so there's no way to win.

They were not digging up her past. They were investigating her claims. She was incorrect in assuming that Uber was "out to get her". But I understand why she is feeling that way, I would probably react the same way. But Uber was in direct communications with her lawyers when they conducted these investigations so it was a miscommunication.

Everything you think you know about Uber is based on headlines, tweets, or biased reporting. If you saw the work that Uber does behind the scenes you would have a completely different opinion. The Harvard professor said the same thing. She said she would probably have been someone who would have supported the #deleteuber campaign based on the media reports, but because she had a view on the inside, she felt completely different about it. The same goes for our new CMO from Apple.

Clearly, Uber did some things in the past that deserve the reputation that it has now. But those are largely in the past. If anyone does something equally wrong these days, they will get fired. The company is expending a lot of energy trying to be more empathic. You don't have to believe it if you don't want to, but that would be hiding your head in the sand and not wanting to seek the truth.

s73ver|8 years ago

Uber can claim to have grown up when they fire people for that conduct WITHOUT having to have the press come to them first.