Yep.  No fan of Ellen Pao, but it seems obvious HR did her no favors over at Kleiner Perkins.

This is true, but I should point out that an organization with foresight would not permit harassment of employees, because the long-term cost of the lawsuits and bad publicity will be bad for the organization.

Working for the organization should also mean avoiding potential lawsuits

HR works for the organisation. It&#x27;s not there to protect you. Source: work in the HR industry.

There are huge professional and personal costs to suing. She has done more by most to protect others by going public. Isn&#x27;t her job to fix Uber via lawsuit.

Second. The writer and the others should sue, not only to be compensated for their own injuries but to protect others who might be harassed as well.

Does Uber require employees to sign an arbitration agreement when they join?

Companies such as Uber will continue these destructive behaviors until they face genuine consequences that impact their bottom line.You have summarized a number of reasons why I would never ask anyone to volunteer to be the one to accomplish this.This entire episode will hopefully shine some light on the true difficulties that need to be overcome to promote STEM diversity.

If this article catches public attention, Uber will attempt to bring these canons to bear anyway.

Suing would have lots of negative consequences, and few upsides. It would take up months of time, be immensely frustrating, stressful and lead other employers to be wary of you in future (even if most wouldn&#x27;t admit it). Your name would be dragged through the mud by Uber in an attempt to derail the case, and you&#x27;d become an online target for haters (as with Ellen Pao). All for some uncertain monetary reward. Who needs that kind of stress and hassle?Writing this article (which was superb in its incredulous anger) is a better way to get closure IMO, but this should be her decision alone.

Or report the incident to your state labour commission.

So when you sue them, you also get fired, if you hadn&#x27;t quit already. I am pretty confident you&#x27;d find a similar clause in any company&#x27;s employment contract, but even if it wasn&#x27;t there it would be a safe assumption that any lawsuit brought against a current employer would result in termination.

 Wild guess says that companies can&#x27;t opt themselves  out of sexual harassment laws with a simple clause in their contract.

Uber&#x27;s employment contract includes an agreement that you won&#x27;t take them to court.

Lawsuits cost enormous amounts of time and effort.  A rich company has way more of both than you do.

For once, I appear to have guessed correctly :)Enough impact that Uber is now hiring Eric Holder as a lead investigator.

Her choice to write about it might end up being a bigger incentive for change there than a lawsuit.She tells the story quite well. Probably an ideal story for some journalist(s) to pick up and expand on.

Everyone is talking about why she didn&#x27;t sue. Given the way the courts have ruled recently on binding arbitration, is it possible that she has no recourse to actual courts, just to arbiters? (She never says if such a clause was included in her employment contract, but I know that it has been included in the last two contracts that I signed.) Wouldn&#x27;t that foreclose her opportunity to sue, and just to go into the much less favorable (for her) arbitration process?

Suing is great and all, but do you have any idea how hard it is? How much work it is, and how financially and emotionally draining it is? You can&#x27;t just call up a lawyer, tell them your story, and expect magic justice sprinkles to do the rest. There are retainers to pay, depositions to do, discovery... and the whole process is adversarial _by design_. It&#x27;s a nightmare. Anyone who&#x27;s willing to go through it is a goddamn superhero in my book.

If you are sexually harassed, and HR doesn&#x27;t do anything about it, you should sue. Don&#x27;t expect HR to change.If the stories in this article are true, and if the evidence is as strong as the article says it is, this is a slam-dunk case for sexual harassment, hostile work environment, retaliation, etc.

IANAL, but this screams &quot;you will win a lawsuit, and Uber is such a terrible company it&#x27;s worth the considerable personal inconvenience to you that you should file the lawsuit&quot;.

Just to add to what others have said... sue. Sue, and then don&#x27;t be shocked when you end up as the primary plaintiff in a class action.

In all honesty if I were you I would sue them plain and simple.  Partially to discourage this company behavior for the other employees remaining who Im sure continue to endure it. And partially as compensation for having to endure a lot of unethical and illegal work environment behaviors being endorsed by the company on the low.  You really should seek being compensated for this for the good of everyone involved.

HR&#x27;s failing pretty hard at protecting the company here, though.

I am removing Uber app from my phone forever. I guess HR did not do a great job there.

I&#x27;ve seen HR departments give severance in scenarios like this in exchange for legal gag order. It may not be ethical, but it is legal in many states and does happen. There is Karma, but that is another story.

HR&#x27;s job is to ensure that conflict gets resolved internally so it stays an HR problem and doesn&#x27;t escalate to a legal or PR problem.  HR has failed miserably in this instance, regardless of whose side you think they should be on.

HR doesn&#x27;t work for you, it works for the company.

<pre><code> &quot;HR serves to protect the company&quot;
</code></pre>
That point comes up every time a bad-HR related post is placed here. However, isn&#x27;t it very short sighted to consider silencing&#x2F;removing the accusers a protection of the company. This results in a bad culture and bad PR about that culture in developer circles.
Won&#x27;t the reduced diversity and all that comes with it have bad effect on the company long term?

The best thing HR can do to protect the company is to take prompt, effective action in cases of sexual harassment. If they fail to do that they expose the company to lawsuits. In this case Uber would clearly lose. Sometimes companies need to be taken to court to be reminded of their obligations. For the sake of the women still there and any women who may be considering going there, I sincerely hope this goes to court. I expect the punitive damages to be in the tens of millions of dollars, perhaps that would be a sufficient reminder.

&gt; HR serves to protect the company, you have to think in HR&#x27;s shoes. If the complainant goes away and finds another job the problem is solved.While it&#x27;s true HR is there for protect the company it&#x27;s false to say that if a complainant just &quot;goes away&quot; that the problem is solved. HR also has to ensure the company keeps a good culture, avoids lawsuits and stays a great place to work for the majority to ensure talent is not only attracted but kept.Thinking about ignoring or making complaints just go away isn&#x27;t protecting the company. It&#x27;s literally harming the company and its employees.

&gt; HR serves to protect the company, you have to think in HR&#x27;s shoes. If the complainant goes away and finds another job the problem is solved.Not if they go on to write a blog post that reaches the top of HN.

HR serves to protect the company, you have to think in HR&#x27;s shoes.HR, done ethically and applied consistently, protects both the company and the employees. It makes clear what is acceptable, and what isn&#x27;t. And it makes clear what is expected of each employee in general.

HR serves to protect the company, you have to think in HR&#x27;s shoes. If the complainant goes away and finds another job the problem is solved. Most harassment cases tend not to end up in court, usually the aggrieved party quits.

I laughed out loud at this one--that&#x27;s some first-class ass-backwards reasoning...

Is anyone versed enough in common HR practices to actually explain this behavior? It seems much more likely that this is some perverse instantiation of an aggressive incentive to the HR team that actual incompetence. Is Uber rewarding HR for minimizing actions taken?

I complained to HR that it was 16 degrees one day and 26 the next when the air conditioning was being awful and was actually told &quot;first you complain it&#x27;s too cold, and now you complain it&#x27;s too hot&quot;.  Duh, because it was too cold and then it was too hot.  You get some classy responses when people don&#x27;t want to deal with stuff.

&gt; The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that I was the common theme in all of the reports I had been makingThat&#x27;s such a meaningless thing for an HR person to ask someone, that it clearly only serves to be patronising and hopefully stop them bringing problems up. I mean, how could you as an HR staffer possibly justify your inaction with an argument like that?&quot;We didn&#x27;t act on any of their complaints, as we noticed that in all the cases of harassment that they reported, they were the victim in all of them!&quot;

Because they&#x27;re &quot;high performers&quot;.Screw Uber. Just delete that app and never use it.

They are used to break the laws, it&#x27;s called disruption, I think.

There is no pressure to change when they can continue to get billion-dollar handouts from Saudi billionaires no matter what happens.

probably because &quot;Brilliant Jerks&quot; are tolerated

I am shocked, how is possible to get away with this toxic company culture.

You really can&#x27;t think of a reason why someone would want to stay at a company like Uber? Salary? Stock options? Career path? Career security? Coworkers? The early belief that HR would help correct this? She did end up leaving the company after trying to fix it. Your not understanding why she stayed for so long is part of the problem.

&gt; It&#x27;s hard for me to understand why she didn&#x27;t immediately start trying to GTFO, but instead stuck around for a year and tried to make things work.Some possibilities:- Because she&#x27;s loyal to her co-workers- Maybe still not jaded enough to jump ship at the first reason- quite possibly didn&#x27;t have another job lined up to jump ship toA year isn&#x27;t all that long, and if things had been turned around who knows she might still be working there today. Obviously they have not, things have gone rapidly downhill so she made the right choice in abandoning Uber but you really can&#x27;t fault someone for trying to fix things before they give up.

From TFA: &quot;I was enrolled in a Stanford CS graduate program, sponsored by Uber, and Uber only sponsored employees who had high performance scores.&quot;

Much though the dude was a terrible person (and fireable for doing that at work) please don&#x27;t assume that all open relationships are similarly unethical. It doesn&#x27;t need scare quotes any more than being gay does.

&gt; I was enrolled in a Stanford CS graduate program, sponsored by Uber, and Uber only sponsored employees who had high performance scores. Under both of my official performance reviews and scores, I qualified for the program, but after this sneaky new negative score I was no longer eligible.She had sponsorship in a graduate program at a great school. Eventually this was allegedly ruined in a retroactive performance review change. It seems like it was roughly a few weeks after that when she left.

Not just sex, but sex in an &quot;open relationship,&quot; presumably as &quot;backup booty.&quot;  It&#x27;s hard for me to understand why she didn&#x27;t immediately start trying to GTFO, but instead stuck around for a year and tried to make things work.  Save transcripts and screenshots, find a new job, then sue at leisure.

The problem is that workers don&#x27;t have leverage like they used to due to globalization and a general labor surplus. We need to think of something that would work better than a union.

That speaks to me. After salary negotiations, HR within companies has never done anything for me when I approached them.They seemed to be there only to defend the boss and register me as a complainer. It took me several jobs and this post to learn that.

Are there any real efforts around this? A quick Google search doesn&#x27;t show anything obvious.I&#x27;m also curious if there are any historical examples of &quot;white collar&quot; workers unionizing.

I&#x27;m of the opinion that the average software engineer in the USA is already overpaid and underworked with excellent benefits and low incentive to unionize.I&#x27;m simplifying it a bit but if you don&#x27;t like your job, just grab a copy of Cracking the Coding Interview and apply to big companies. The big companies pay very well, have good benefits and interview everyone because of the need for a high head count

Right on brother (sister?)!  Most in the industry are believing the management story and working their asses off for a dream that&#x27;s rarely realized.  And when it is, they don&#x27;t see nearly the payout their more business savvy peers do.  The model might be closer to doctors and lawyers than auto workers, but it&#x27;s clear to me that industry wide solidarity could result in great standard of living and working condition improvements.

I think if this post teaches us anything, it&#x27;s that the system works very well, at least for well-performing software engineers. In this case, Susan found a better job with a different company where she presumably won&#x27;t have to face the same levels of confusion and mistreatment. Unionization seems to come with its own cultural (and procedural) baggage, so I&#x27;m wary of invoking needlessly.

I am utterly persuaded at this point that the software industry workers need a union.Software engineering hiring practices are profoundly flawed; this is something a union could address at an industry level. It&#x27;s also deeply problematic for me to take home $fat_paycheck when, say, $sales_guy two tables over is paid minimum wage + commission (disclaimer: I have no knowledge of this occurring at my current company; it happened to a sales guy I know, however). A company of people work together, and should share in the returns as they cover each other&#x27;s deficiencies.I&#x27;m comfortable asserting that while there are issues with traditional unions, it&#x27;s possible to improve and make better organizations.

Good luck. I&#x27;ll never join. I know what you guys want (because enough of you have stated it on HN): no more H1Bs and to make sure I never find a job again because I&#x27;m a foreigner. I&#x27;ll scab that union till kingdom come.

&gt; It&#x27;s not a panacea, and there are several historical examples of union leadership betraying the trust of workers and neglecting the demands of the most marginalized members (such as the UAW in 1941), but a union correctly structured and rooted in worker solidarity is the only proven way to fight management on these kinds of issues.Thats why the IWW exists, and they desperately need members. They refuse to cooperate with big business and government, and are based on decentralized worker solidarity and principles of direct action, not the capture of state power. If a union derives its power from the state, it is easily corrupted and subverted.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iww.org&#x2F;unions&#x2F;dept500&#x2F;iu560" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iww.org&#x2F;unions&#x2F;dept500&#x2F;iu560</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;01&#x2F;want-to-unionize-developers-focus-on-workplace-democracy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;01&#x2F;want-to-unionize-developer...</a>

Tech workers (across all disciplines) need to unionize to combat this kind of thing.First they need articulable set of goals, based on a sound principled base. With such a base, to unionize or not is an implementation detail. But a union without guiding principles would be exactly the morally bankrupt negotiation tool unions are often accused of being. A union should never be more important to the unionized than the ideals it implements. Because if it ever is, the workers no longer control the union, the union controls the workers.To that point, I have yet to see &quot;tech&quot; at large, or even software engineers seriously discuss principles for the purpose of a principled professional life. I hear complaints about individual things that are negative on the face have moralistic reasoning applied after the fact. But no guiding vision.Just like we assume the people in movies poop [0] even though we never see it, an &quot;obviously&quot; unacceptable thing happening leads to have conversations resting on unspoken assumptions that someone solved what a professional environment is off-screen. If we want demands for what a work environment should be like to be taken seriously, we have to figure it out. Upfront, on-screen, and to create something people can believe in.to combat this kind of thingfight management on these kinds of issues.Can you articulate what the KIND of issues are? The category can easily be labeled with synonyms for &quot;bad&quot; and easily have things like a misogynistic work environment placed within the category, but WHAT IS the category. What are the defining lines?If every developer took the time to figure out what they believe in, or adopted the (e.g.) ACM Code to their professional life, it might not even take a union.[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;NobodyPoops" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;NobodyPoops</a>

Tech workers (across all disciplines) need to unionize to combat this kind of thing. As has been pointed out below, HR that is staffed and incentivized by the company management only serves the interests of the management. A union is the only structure that can actually win demands for workers by organizing workers to withhold their labor.It&#x27;s not a panacea, and there are several historical examples of union leadership betraying the trust of workers and neglecting the demands of the most marginalized members (such as the UAW in 1941), but a union correctly structured and rooted in worker solidarity is the only proven way to fight management on these kinds of issues.

Strictly speaking asking a subordinate for sex is not always a harassment (but very frequently is).

&gt; In case anyone isn&#x27;t sure why the original interaction is harassmentIs there anyone that thought a manager asking their subordinate for sex isn&#x27;t harassment?

It&#x27;s hard to just ignore feelings. You&#x27;ll have biases. It&#x27;ll show. (Eventually.)Talk to HR (or your boss), get them (or you) a new team&#x2F;manager.Or if the feelings go away, then great, crisis averted, but it&#x27;s rarely that simple.

<pre><code> &gt; do the adult thing and ignore it.
</code></pre>
While it probably the best advice it does sound a bit like pope&#x27;s advice for the gay people: it is ok, if you do not act on it.
Being unhappy is just an adult thing, I guess.

I don&#x27;t understand how anyone could be unsure about that being harassment. It&#x27;s about as clear-cut as you can get.He should have been fired the day that surfaced. If someone who worked for me ever did something like that, they&#x27;d be out the door pronto. It speaks volumes that he wasn&#x27;t, to the point which I am irrationally tempted to doubt the veracity of her claims.Don&#x27;t proposition anyone in your reporting chain. Don&#x27;t flirt with them. Don&#x27;t do anything with them. It&#x27;s really not that complicated. If you are attracted to someone who works for you (it happens), do the adult thing and ignore it.

I would say that if the manager asked her out on a platonic date on her first week, that would be almost as wildly inappropriate.

it is interesting that sex is the hot button.  in general we special case sex in the US.  While I dont mean to say sexual harrasment isnt a real problem, its interesting to me more philosophically that propositioning for sex is ultra problematic but propostioning for a platonic relationship is less so, or drinking, or anything else beyond strict job fulfillment labor.  its obviously a problem when a power dynamic is abused but I would argue there is a weird puritanical nature to seeing a sexual proposition as preposterous but an unwanted platonic advance as largely benign

Are people legitimately needing clarification on this?

The fact that this harassment came from a reporting chain or not is irrelevant, no employee should have to undergo that kind of behaviour if it wasn&#x27;t consented to in the first place.

In case anyone isn&#x27;t sure why the original interaction is harassment: relationships within a reporting chain are generally prohibited, for both legal, ethical, and practical reasons. Sex becoming part of the effective job description crosses both legal and ethical lines, and team effectiveness is hindered when people wonder whether someone is getting special treatment because they&#x27;re sleeping with the boss.A manager propositioned a new employee on her first day on his team -- asking not just for a date but for sex. That&#x27;s way over the line.Also, this isn&#x27;t just a gendered thing -- Google the story of Keith Rabois resigning as COO of Square.

No shit. A story like this makes me realize that even with the &quot;problems&quot; I think I have at work, that get me all riled up, I have it made in the shade with lemonade compared to this woman&#x27;s experience at Uber.I started reading the article with the view of &quot;If it&#x27;s really that bad, just quit. Burn that bridge with thermite, and never look back.&quot; I finished the article wishing there were more Susan J. Fowlers in the world.

&gt; If an Uber recruiter contacts you, bring this up and tell them their nonfunctioning HR department makes working for their company a non starter.This. Companies don&#x27;t change until there&#x27;s a huge price to be paid for not changing. When top recruits start turning down Uber because of their sexist policies&#x2F;politics, then Uber will be forced to change.

Thinking about the attrition rate of female engineers, I wonder if there&#x27;s a similar rate of male engineers who leave due to how badly their female colleagues are treated in addition to the other factors listed in this thread and Fowler&#x27;s piece.If so, that would imply that the engineering culture is being distilled into an evermore toxic workplace, since those who stay are those who make the place toxic or are simply people who try to work around it.It would take an extremely focused and persistent effort on the part of upper management to change this trajectory before the company implodes, as I suspect is inevitable in the long run should my assumptions prove accurate.

Sure, definitely.Where do I send the bills for my groceries, then? Would you prefer email or snailmail?

If you work at a company that already fires anyone who acts like that, and later use them during the on-boarding given to all new employees as real life examples of how you do NOT run a proper business... well, enjoy your workplace :D

If an Uber recruiter contacts you, bring this up and tell them their nonfunctioning HR department makes working for their company a non starter.If you work at Uber, quit, and&#x2F;or contact the board and tell them that this behavior is unacceptable and the people responsible need to be fired. If the culture won&#x27;t change, the CEO needs to be fired.If you work in tech, bring up this article with your manager or CEO and tell them that this behavior is unacceptable, opens the company up to ridiculous amounts of lawsuit risk, will hurt recruiting, depress morale, and that you will quit if harassment complaints aren&#x27;t taken seriously.

Same here.And you know; 100% of the women engineers I know have similar stories. 100%. That&#x27;s insane.These stories need to come out so the guilty companies and their toxic environments are exposed for all to see.I&#x27;d encourage everyone here to pick up a copy of her O&#x27;Reilly book -- it&#x27;s very good. Hopefully she gets all the income and none of it goes to Uber...

Even I do not have anything productive to contribute to this discussion, but just deleted the Uber app from my phone. Never going to use them again even if that means a lot of inconvenience for me.

I am struggling to think of something productive to contribute to this discussion, because this absolutely incensed me.In lieu of anything else: Susan deserves to be commended for her bravery in writing this.

I&#x27;m going to look into it. I was shocked to see that Susan was a research assistant at UP until 2015 and now has a book out about production microservices. That&#x27;s some carrier trajectory in two years.

Not to derail the whole premise of this article, but Susan&#x27;s book looks great! Just bought it and can&#x27;t wait to start reading it.

Wow this is unbelievable, I know sexism is still very much real in the workplace but I&#x27;m floored it&#x27;s this overt. And the incompetence shown by HR is baffling.

What the hell? Why isn&#x27;t there a lawsuit yet? Everything is documented!

Sue. Sue them for all they&#x27;re worth. I was at Uber for six months, and I had enough - Mostly because of the blatant backstabbing and shell games managers were trying to play, rating their worst performers highly just long enough to get them transferred out, pointing out only the negative aspects of what their better workers were doing. There were some good people and some bad, but ultimately the culture was toxic, and the rampant sexism was just one (very large) part of it.

I&#x27;ve always heard HR works for the company&#x27;s interest first and foremost. Go to a lawyer first and have them communicate with the C-level execs. Although Uber sounds like it has a pretty toxic culture all the way up.

If you dig into the package, a lot of the value is locked up in unsellable shares.  Vs immediately liquid RSUs of any public company.

Where did you hear the pay is terrible? From what I&#x27;ve heard, it seems pretty normal for the industry, at least for software engineers.

Everything I&#x27;ve heard about Uber from people who have joined is terrible.  Train wreck of Human Resources, unprofessional conduct as par the course, terrible pay locked up in a nowhere in sight IPO.  I honestly don&#x27;t understand why people keep joining them.

I read it as &quot;outside of your work&quot; and also &quot;outside of your personal life&quot;. Which is even more perplexing.What a strange company all around.

Wow, this is unreal. I could expect mistreatment at various companies, but something so overt?Thank you Susan for writing this.&gt; &quot;performance problems aren&#x27;t always something that has to do with work, but sometimes can be about things outside of work or your personal life.&quot;Also, this seems many species of wrong. I don&#x27;t really see why your personal life should have any relevance to a performance review.

Geez, and here I was considering working at Uber.Thanks for posts like these.

We&#x27;ve seen that with Github[1]. The debate on HN was much more lively and less one-sided[2], in that there were many more people trying to excuse what Github was doing or bring into question Horvath&#x27;s story. Whether that&#x27;s a good thing or not...[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-exit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;julie-ann-horvath-describe...</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7408055" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7408055</a>

I honestly wonder how people here would react if a blog posts like this came out about a company that hasn’t necessarily been in the news for this many past bad behavior. Would we still condemn that company or would we blame the victim, as is the case usually?

Was the first thing I thought about when I read this article.

I wonder whether it&#x27;s bad everywhere so staying made sense. Also you have to remember that HR don&#x27;t like gaps on the resume or lots of short hops, they also don&#x27;t want a &quot;trouble maker&quot;. I didn&#x27;t know of ubers reputation until late last year, maybe it&#x27;s not as pervasive as it feels to you.

&gt; Do SW devs just not realize how much power and choice they have? Or do people really just choose to work for unethical businesses because they expect a good paycheck?I used to work for a company that mistreated me (no, they didn&#x27;t pay me well either). Getting out felt like getting out of an abusive relationship, and I stayed as long as I did for the same reasons people stay in abusive relationships: I thought I was worthless and that no other company would hire me.Before that company, I had been unemployed for two years thanks to the combination of the financial crisis and my own lack of experience. When I interviewed with them, I was ready to end it if I didn&#x27;t get an offer because my extended unemployment had just run out. Thankfully, I got the offer, and I wound up working there for 2.75 years before I got out.I believed that I had to stick with them because they gave me an offer when I was broke, desperate, and suicidal. As the problems kept piling up and piling up, I stayed because I was too afraid to put myself out there because I felt like I was a worthless person and deserved a company that would treat me like the worthless person I am.Eventually, things got so bad that I applied to several companies at once in a fit of rage, and one of them got back to me with a coding test, then a phone interview, then an in-person interview, and finally an offer, at which point I had the pleasure of putting my notice on my boss&#x27;s desk.It&#x27;s been over two years since I got out, and I&#x27;m glad for it. The company I jumped ship to ended up not working out in the long run -- a little over a year in, I got caught up in a layoff that took out 1&#x2F;3 of the company -- but I eventually landed at my current job, which is by far and above the best company I&#x27;ve worked for, and I&#x27;m really glad I&#x27;m here and not still stuck at that abusive place.

The parent comment may seem a bit flippant, but the underlying question is a good one - why do talented, non-toxic people seek employment with companies that are well known to have such terrible culture?I&#x27;m not in the Valley, so all the information I have about Uber&#x27;s culture is through popular media, but ever since I first heart the company&#x27;s name it was linked to scandal, poor ethics and&#x2F;or misogyny.Talented software developers are a privileged bunch, especially on the West Coast U.S. we are sought after and can pick and choose employers. Why would anyone choose Uber, especially a talented woman?Do SW devs just not realize how much power and choice they have? Or do people really just choose to work for unethical businesses because they expect a good paycheck? If it&#x27;s the latter, what does that say about their own personal ethics?To be clear, I don&#x27;t honestly believe the majority of Uber&#x27;s staff are bad people. But that leaves me genuinely baffled as to what they are doing there in the first place.

What do you expect from a company that has been so many times on the wrong side of the law?<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-uber-fine-chicago-idUSKBN15W03O" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-uber-fine-chicago-idUSKBN1...</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;1&#x2F;14&#x2F;10772412&#x2F;uber-fine-california-utility-driver-data" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;1&#x2F;14&#x2F;10772412&#x2F;uber-fine-califor...</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;09&#x2F;uber-fined-800000-in-france-over-illegal-service&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;09&#x2F;uber-fined-...</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;time.com&#x2F;4632430&#x2F;taiwan-uber-fines&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;time.com&#x2F;4632430&#x2F;taiwan-uber-fines&#x2F;</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economia.icaew.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;january-2017&#x2F;uber-fined-20m-in-the-us-for-claims-of-misleading-drivers-over-earnings" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economia.icaew.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;january-2017&#x2F;uber-fined-20...</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2464520&#x2F;rivalry-between-uber-and-lyft-gets-ugly.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2464520&#x2F;rivalry-between-uber-...</a>...

admittedly, none. but this still seems like an open and shut case.

How much &#x27;easy lawsuit money&#x27; have you collected? Or anyone you personally know?

Suing would be a great idea but you&#x27;re ignoring the downsides of a lawsuit. Uber has a lot of money, they could effectively drag it out for a very long time. Even worse, most of her proof is likely on some Uber computers &#x2F; servers which could go &quot;mysteriously&quot; missing in which case she could be made out to be a liar through a court loss thus possibly making it harder to join another company because she&#x27;s &quot;that girl&quot;.Even if they can get it rushed through the count payment takes forever by which time she would likely owe a lot of money to a lawyer.Ideally she would sue, win quickly if the allegations are true, and move on. But when does that ever happen?

&gt; if everything in here is trueUber would have already sued her if it wasn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s almost certainly true.

this is fucked up. why not sue? if everything in here is true, this is easy lawsuit money.

Anecdotally the fact that the office is in SF is a major reason. I also think many later hires at those companies feel like they missed out on the early days and want to go to Uber.

Uber seems like one of the worst companies to work for right now. I don&#x27;t understand why there are hordes of Google and Facebook engineers still leaving to work there. Is the pay really that good?

I&#x27;m happy to hear more about this, is this something you&#x27;ve personally done or represented someone in such a case? What steps should one take in such a situation, if you have experience in it?

No - employee lawsuits are not that uncommon.  The vast majority are settled before they see the inside of courtroom.  The majority that do go to a courtroom go the employees way unfortunately for employers in frivolous cases.  Talking to a labour law attorney to consult about your case is not that expensive - if you have an open and shut case most lawyers will want to work on a contingency fee anyways.

What is the last lawsuit you voluntarily started? A lot of things are &#x27;an option&#x27;.

yes, but &quot;does it make financial sense?&quot; is always the question.

Engineers, especially the ones at Susan&#x27;s level, are pretty well paid. Suing would have definitely been an option for her.

For all the people saying &#x27;HR works for the company&#x27; and &#x27;She should have sued!&#x27;, I think you&#x27;re underestimating how difficult that is to do. You&#x27;re reading the account of a person who was clearly perfectly aware of her rights and how corporate workspaces operate.What would you actually do in their position? You leave work one evening, go home and google &#x27;lawyer that will get me lots of money from my company and work for free while I&#x27;m out of a job using nothing but my certitude I will prevail to pay rent&#x27;? Nobody (statistically) does that. In the 99% case, you&#x27;d try to make it work and then you&#x27;d find another job. As it turned out.

This sounds like it has all the makings for a successful gender-discrimination class action suit. I would hope she and the rest of these women would consider it.Uber sounds like a pretty toxic environment.

True, as much as I sometimes hate the extra &#x27;red tape&#x27; that the Australian Government puts upon businesses here, they do offer a pretty fair level of protection against employers abusing or unfairly treating employees.It is pretty hard for a business here to dismiss an employee without reasonable grounds that would stand up in court - which of course, if it got to that level, means that the whole story would have to come out, so a situation like the one in this thread would have meant Uber being in a world of hurt while all their dirty laundry was aired in a court.

arbitration clause should only apply in civil suits, iirc. I would hate to think that sexual harassment is a civil case, rather than criminal.

you can&#x27;t sue. but you can file charges with the EEOC, and if they want to they can sue on your behalf.

You can&#x27;t sue, there is likely a mandatory arbitration clause in the employment contract (because why not, it&#x27;s free) and it applies to everything.

Who was fired? The victim or the harasser?

As a fellow Australian I must add that in three separate occasions, at two distinct tech companies, I have seen people be terminated immediatelly following a complaint of this nature to HR.These were men and women in high management positions and by immediately I mean within 48 hours or a fortnight or so in a bullying case.

Also Australian, and this entire story seems absurd to me. I guess I&#x27;ve never worked in an office with more than 50 people, so don&#x27;t get the full gamut of human interactions.

As someone who is Australian and not American, if anything like this happened and HR failed in the trainwreck like manner that they did in this story, we have a government organisation that oversees and enforces workplace legislation.It seems insane to me that the only recourse you have after HR is basically &quot;gather evidence and sue&quot; which seems to be common advice in this thread.

&gt; I can&#x27;t fathom what kind of weirdo does something like this, male or female.People who get off on violating other people&#x27;s boundaries.

Well, it sounds like she quit, wasn&#x27;t fired&#x2F;laid off, so a severence package probably doesn&#x27;t apply (although if the rumors about how bad Uber is to work at are true, perhaps they do offer severance packages to those quitting...).

I would guess that this happens more often than you imagine. Women often don&#x27;t share stories like this for fear of retribution at their current company or future companies, or because they think you won&#x27;t believe them. In addition NDA&#x27;s are often a condition of receiving severance.Most women in Silicon Valley have had experiences similar to those mentioned in the article (HR disbelief, multiple women reporting same man to no effect, retaliation, legal threats, &amp;c, &amp;c).The OP probably declined a severance package to write this.

Unfortunately the &#x27;I am in an open relationship, want to fuck?&#x27; line is something that I&#x27;ve seen more than once, initiated by both men and women engineers. At least one of those examples goes to a lot of conferences, and pretty much opens with that line to people in the opposite sex, and has a Twitter following in the 5 digits.I am also aware of a funded dev tools startup that has a single woman engineer: She happens to share a bed with the CEO every so often. Imagine how comfortable that must be for any other woman that might join the company, or anyone sharing a team with said woman engineer.So I have seen the kind of weirdos that do something like this. I don&#x27;t wish them on my worst enemy.

Sex addict is the term that comes to mind.

&gt;On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn&#x27;t.Totally normal behavior! Who hasn&#x27;t spoken about their sex life the very first day of interactions?&quot;Welcome to the team, we use Git for source control, all of our company knowledgebase is on Confluence, and I&#x27;m in an open sex relationship! See you at lunch!&quot;I can&#x27;t fathom what kind of weirdo does something like this, male or female.

I actually used Stripe as an example before I realized that&#x27;s where she had moved to so consider that a double endorsement, it&#x27;s not like I have any dog in that particular race but I know some people that work there and without fault they report working there is a dream come true.The brothers have something good going there and I&#x27;ll bet that when the dust settles Uber will be part of that dust and Stripe will have IPO&#x27;d or similar (possibly even this year).This is how it&#x27;s done:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;code-of-conduct" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;code-of-conduct</a>

Is it? A person in need of a lifeboat will take one.Also, the author repeatedly used the percentage of women engineers as an index of workplace quality&#x2F;sanity. So we&#x27;d expect Stripe&#x27;s to be much higher, right?Is that the case?

Stripe seems to hire an unusual amount of really talented engineers who are also really good at explanatory writing. (Though this may just be an availability bias thing for me.)Fowler is one. Julia Evans is another that comes to mind.I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if they had amazing internal documentation for their engineers.

If anything, OP&#x27;s subsequent employment by Stripe is a very strong endorsement for the workplace culture of the company.

That&#x27;s an interesting angle that I had not considered. That money is such a weird thing from another viewpoint as well, it means that Uber doesn&#x27;t have to perform at all for the next decade or so, they can basically wait out all of their competition. It removes every incentive to actually perform which might be just what it takes to kill them.

I&#x27;ve always wondered what Uber is going to do when their self-driving cars can legally drive in Saudi Arabia, but women can&#x27;t. Seems like they&#x27;re going to run up against that pretty soon.

It&#x27;s not all bad though: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.voanews.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;saudi-employment-uber-careem&#x2F;3667608.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.voanews.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;saudi-employment-uber-careem&#x2F;366760...</a>

If taking a billion dollars from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia says something about a company&#x27;s stance regarding women&#x27;s equality, what it says is not terribly inconsistent with Fowler&#x27;s story.

The one comment that literally matches &quot;this is unbelievable&quot; isn&#x27;t saying it literally.

Over the years I&#x27;ve learned that most of the time people tell you they are going to rip you off before hand. Not flat out directly, but they&#x27;ll provide deliberate warnings because it makes it makes it easier to rationalize what they are going to do. The best test for whether or not someone will pay me is whether or not they will write me a check up front. People who intend to pay are ok with it, people who don&#x27;t intend to pay aren&#x27;t.

Learnt that lesson the hard way - as an independent consultant working with local businesses, did some work with a seemingly successful guy who boasted about how he always got a good deal&#x2F;complained about service and got money back etc. Surprise, surprise, a month later he did that to me too, including stupid petty things like trying to pay the invoice without the VAT.What goes around comes around.I still support our local taxi company and talk to the drivers who take me (typically to&#x2F;from the airport). Many of them have had experiences with Uber and don&#x27;t have good things to say. However their traditional business is struggling.

It&#x27;s the weekend. The pros are no more likely to take a busman&#x27;s holiday than anyone else.

Maybe because it is more of a clear-cut case of sexism and workplace intimidation, than, say, ones about “watching your co-workers hula-hooping” (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-exit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;julie-ann-horvath-describe...</a>) or “making a joke about dongles”? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;how-dongle-jokes-got-two-people-fired-and-led-to-ddos-attacks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;how-dongle-jokes...</a>)Those cases invoke skepticism because they twist otherwise innocuous situations and try to blow them up into witch hunts where people lose their livelihood. No one should lose their job because an accusatory party happened to overhear them making a stupid juvenile dongle joke.Susan&#x27;s case on the other hand has clear, well-defined accusations of people acting in what sounds like unprofessional and sexist behavior to anyone with common sense. People should get fired if they ask their subordinates for sex multiple times. No wonder it (rightly) gets a lot of support.

What scares me is that there is no evidence, only allegation. Yet people are jumping on the bandwagon, making sure to pillory anything they disagree with in connection to an alleged incident. Guess what? People lie. Until some proof is offered, you should treat the accuser with dignity but assume the story is false.

It is good to see the support here. I am unpleasantly surprised at the comments admonishing her for not lawyering up, though. She bothered to write publicly, which is more than anyone outside the situation could rightly ask. She wrote very well on painful, personal events and I think can be proud of how she handled it. It opens the door for others, and Uber management is going to have to deal with it one way or another this week.

I fully expected this thread to be a shitshow, but comments here are overwhelmingly supportive of Fowler, and except perhaps for the very bottom of the thread, I don&#x27;t see much much &quot;this is unbelievable&quot; at all. I&#x27;m pleasantly surprised.

Ok, thanks for pointing that out. Even so, I also don&#x27;t find it astonishing. It&#x27;s about as surprising as the sun rising tomorrow.

I absolutely believe it but find it astonishing that a company can behave like this.So, not sure what you&#x27;re referring to but perhaps people are using unbelievable as a synonym for astonishing. ie. not literally.

Even if this wasn&#x27;t Uber, it&#x27;s totally believable.

We don&#x27;t have to look very hard to find examples of sexual harassment lawsuits that the four major tech companies have lost.Anecdotally, I have been organizationally close (same manager, adjacent team) to serious misconduct and was completely oblivious to it, finding out about the wrongdoing years later.It is likely that Uber is alone with its scope of HR incompetence and wrongdoing. Although their SRE is supposed to have been lifted straight from Google and Facebook, the sexual harassment cases from those organizations didn&#x27;t involve nearly as much dishonesty and apathy by their Human Resources sections.

I&#x27;ve worked in the industry for 25 years. I&#x27;m not shocked. It&#x27;s no surprise at all. The only people who are saying &quot;it&#x27;s unbelievable&quot; are people who have worked VERY hard to not see disgusting bigotry and rampant unprofessionalism that is endemic in this industry.

I think the &quot;this is unbelievable&quot; comments are coming from people who have worked in the industry for a long time -- but not at Uber -- who are surprised that this sort of thing not only goes on, but that HR appears to be advocating the behavior through inaction.At least from my anecdotal experience, I&#x27;ve never seen anything like this among the four companies and 20 years I&#x27;ve been in software development and engineering. Granted, the percentage of women who were in technical, non-management, positions[0] hovered around 20%. In those cases, the skillsets of the women ranged as much as it did the men and all of the folks I worked with treated each other, regardless of gender, respectfully and professionally.I wouldn&#x27;t imagine seeking a date with co-worker. What happens when you break up? Do you want to bring that to work with you ever day? At the companies I&#x27;ve worked for, I know of one incident where a person was let go for &quot;having a crap-ton of porn on his work PC&quot; that someone from security noticed when the proxy logs flagged his workstation. This individual was a VP, a &quot;high performer&quot; and was very well like. He was also out on his hide a few hours after his laptop was seized and inspected. This was with no reports from women even hinting that he&#x27;d acted inappropriately on the job. And we had nobody inspecting proxy logs looking for this sort of thing -- that guy in security who happened upon his workstation ended up being there because he was investigating a malfunction, but because of corporate agreements we&#x27;d all signed, he was obligated to report what he found[2].I hate to say it, but this is the kind of behavior I&#x27;d expect out of teenagers, not adult men. And it&#x27;s one of those things you usually don&#x27;t have to tell people not to do. Though I have no experience with this specific kind of behavior, I&#x27;ve noticed that when people fail on morally obvious things, they&#x27;re often failing on many other things and I would be worried if I were an investor about having my money tied up in a company that had this kind of a reputation -- what other laws does this corporate culture find acceptable to break? I&#x27;d be twice as concerned if this were my employer -- not just out of fear of being harassed, but out of fear that a company with these kinds of ethical lapses is often quickest to screw those who work for them (or take them down with them). No way.[0] Perhaps my experience is unusual, but for 17 years the VP level individuals in my teams have been women, I&#x27;ve reported to a Director level employee who was a woman and I&#x27;ve had a woman for a manager on more than one occasion.[1] Thus far, I know only of this account, which without additional data is as anecdotal as my comment, here, but based on others piling on, I am inclined to believe that there&#x27;s a real problem here.[2] Paraphrased, we were basically required to report everything even if we were not directly involved, but if I saw something this inappropriate, I wouldn&#x27;t need a signed agreement to persuade me -- I had full confidence in the HR teams at the places I was at and knew it would be handled appropriately.

Well said. Those of us who have worked with folks in management at Uber or who have friends who have worked at Uber all know very well what Uber is like. This is no more shocking than discovering that Amazon is a brutal, highly political workplace. People in tech just don&#x27;t want to admit that their little playground is a cesspool of discrimination, entitlement and bigotry. That&#x27;s all.

What&#x27;s with all the &#x27;this is unbelievable&#x27; comments here?This is absolutely believable, Uber has pretty much made it their standard to break the laws where-ever they can, why should work place conduct be any different? In for a penny, in for a pound.You&#x27;d never hear something even close to this from Stripe or some other company run by upstanding folks.Fish rots from the head.

I wish I could say this isn&#x27;t happening all the time at many more companies in a less obvious way.  Other than being straight up propositioned for sex, most of this other stuff has happened to me too.  And I don&#x27;t work at Uber.

Another reason not to support Uber.  People need to stop using services from companies with behaviour like this.

I am not sure why this post was down-voted, but the first statement is correct -- the author of the post is early in her career and is not an industry veteran. She has about 2 years of working experience, and does not qualify as an industry veteran.

What qualifications does Susan lack that would make her an &quot;industry veteran&quot; in your eyes?

I wouldn&#x27;t qualify her as an industry veteran. This is not how things would have played out at a lot of the risk-adverse companies I have worked for. I&#x27;m sure it does at some places and it&#x27;s no surprise to hear this about Uber TBH. Being just a couple years out of college, I&#x27;m not sure why you would expect her to understand all the shity ways the world can work.

Graduated two years ago and already has a book out, quite the career progress.

I&#x27;m as horrified by the story as anyone, but I don&#x27;t think the author can be considered an industry veteran. I just looked at her LinkedIn profile and she graduated from undergrad in 2014 and held two &lt;=6 month jobs before joining Uber.

&gt; Susan is an industry veteran and her interactions with HR are typical of what I&#x27;ve seen so I would have expected her to know how things would play outHere&#x27;s what she says she expected:&gt; Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go onWhich sounds about right...

&gt; HR is there to make sure the company doesn&#x27;t get into any hot legal waters.Yes, this I totally agree with. In these situations, HR is there to minimize risk for the company.&gt; Most of the time the easiest way to do that is to just suppress any wrongdoing and sideline whoever is being wronged.This, however, I totally disagree with. I see a lot of comments saying that you can&#x27;t trust HR because they are only there to protect the company, but that&#x27;s why in cases like this you usually can trust HR, because their incentives (which are &quot;don&#x27;t expose the company to lawsuits&quot;) line up with yours.I&#x27;m sure other HR people are reading this blog post in complete horror, because Uber&#x27;s HR org did basically everything you DON&#x27;T do in a professional HR org, and in the process have exposed the company to what could be a slam dunk lawsuit, not to mention horrible press. If even an iota of what Susan Fowler described was accurate, everyone up the chain in the HR org should be fired.

Susan is ~an industry veteran~ a somewhat experienced engineer and her interactions with HR are typical of what I&#x27;ve seen so I would have expected her to know how things would play out. In my experience HR is never there to protect the employees. HR is there to make sure the company doesn&#x27;t get into any hot legal waters.Most of the time the easiest way to do that is to just suppress any wrongdoing and sideline whoever is being wronged. That&#x27;s exactly how things played out in her story. Once again solidifying my opinion of HR being a company instead of an employee protector. If you see any wrongdoing then just get a lawyer. Never go to HR.Edit: Folks are right. She is not an industry veteran. Incorrect assumption on my part.

I&#x27;ve been questioning the legitimacy of Uber recently, and this cemented my understanding of how they operate. I&#x27;m taking my business to Lyft from now on

Isn&#x27;t that due to the perception that they broke the recent anti-Trump taxi strike, rather than their internal work culture?

I&#x27;ve noticed this. But tempting as it is to #DeleteUber, am I not mostly just hurting local taxi drivers who keep 75% of the revenue?

I don&#x27;t think there is any stigma associated with Uber in Chicago. A lot of people will even say &quot;I&#x27;m calling an Uber&quot; even when they&#x27;re using Lyft (name brand effect).

Anecdotally speaking, I&#x27;ve noticed that Uber has become a dirty word among my friends. For example, someone using Uber will generally just say that they&#x27;re calling a car rather than naming the service. Lyft doesn&#x27;t have the same stigma. It should be concerning to management that the company&#x27;s ethos is repelling customers.Edit: Management should be far more concerned that Uber is allegedly an environment that systematically enables sexual harassment and discrimination against women.

ditto, Uber&#x27;s job postings on our internal school board are avoided like the plague.

Saying that they &quot;poached&quot; engineers make it look like they are property of a company and can&#x27;t move looking for better opportunities.

&quot;Culture was extremely heavy on the drinking;&quot;For me this is a red flag.<pre><code> Booze + programming == pissed programming
</code></pre>
This leads to bad code also bad team dynamics. Ultimately this will reflect on the product and bottom line. For individuals this reads like a culture where the barrel is creating ^bad apples^. Not a good look on a resume.

The booze thing gets exaggerated at many places. It is usually the marketing&#x2F;HR&#x2F;business dev&#x2F;sales teams that indulge in that culture. The engineering team is usually much more constrained in their alcohol consumption, although the media groups them with the frat boys from sales.

<pre><code> &gt; Top engineers were being poached from Google&#x2F;FB and these people
 &gt; were trying to carve out territory in a quickly growing engineering 
 &gt; team.
</code></pre>
It is always a bit sad when one of the top characteristic of an engineer from organization X is their political ability to carve out an empire.I&#x27;m a bit surprised she doesn&#x27;t have at least one law firm trying to get her to be the lead claimant in a class action lawsuit. Seems like she did everything right and has a pretty sold case. Of course she may have signed that option away when she left.Also, in California at least, your employer has to give you your full personnel record if you request it. She might ask them to do that.

I went to visit the instagram office on the fb main campus and saw a huge liquor exhibition.

Did any of you folks talk about the enormously unethical ways you treat drivers? Those folks who are mostly poorer than you who do the actual work that provides value?I find it laughable to hear Uber engineers cry about how unfairly Kalanick treats them.Self-awareness 0.

Can you elaborate more on the misogyny that was part of the culture?So far you&#x27;ve only identified that they like drinking, traveling and were part of the Greek social system in university.What I&#x27;m looking for are instances of demeaning women, discounting their achievements, systemic disapproval for the words of women, favours being handed out on the basis of gender, solicitation of sexual favours in non-equal power relationships, or if no examples can be provided then at least people stating that they are &#x27;in favour&#x27; of such, or are lax in enforcing rules against such.I don&#x27;t mean this as an attack of any sort (the article gives examples after all). I simply want to know more.

&gt;&quot;Crazy, most ex-employees (even the early ones) acknowledge that the culture is bad but they got their $$$ so they won&#x27;t have to work again for a long time, if ever.&quot;Can you explain why they don&#x27;t have to work again? How did they become wealthy? Those options aren&#x27;t worth anything if the company doesn&#x27;t IPO.

&quot;Workcation&quot; is an incredible idea, as is letting employees work remotely for x weeks&#x2F; months per year from wherever they want. Even though it&#x27;s not vacation-vacation it&#x27;s still a revitalizing, memory forming experience, and if you want a happy motivated work force, I think it&#x27;s a great idea.That and a sound proof studio with piano on premise would be enough to make me quit my job.That said Uber&#x27;s been on my douchebag radar at least since their execs bragged about threatening journalists. Hopefully your acquaintances already sold their shares on secondary markets because losing ~3 billion a year would worry me if I was expecting to get rich from them.

Just curious, what happens to employees who don&#x27;t drink?

Longtime friend was there in 2011 iirc when they were still &quot;Ubercab&quot; and was cut bc he was &quot;not a culture fit&quot;. Aka quiet Russian hacker types not wanted in the frat brotherhood.

Hijacking this top comment to provide some personal experiences.I started as an engineer in the spring of 2014 and this was definitely the case there.Top engineers were being poached from Google&#x2F;FB and these people were trying to carve out territory in a quickly growing engineering team.The misogynistic culture, in my mind, comes from most of the early employees being former frat bros. Culture was extremely heavy on the drinking; see &quot;Work-cations&quot; where most of the team would go to an exotic location which was half-hackathon&#x2F;half boozefest. There were happy hours every week with open bar because all new employees would be flown to SF (no matter where home office was) for orientation.Crazy, most ex-employees (even the early ones) acknowledge that the culture is bad but they got their $$$ so they won&#x27;t have to work again for a long time, if ever.

Yes. Culture is CEO&#x27;s responsibility. Period.

Usually in these cases, these kind of company politics trickle down from the top, so it&#x27;s unlikely the CEO does not know or has any interest in intervening.
All the companies I worked at that had weird or toxic environments showed that kind of environment throughout most of their structure. A single arsehole in an otherwise great company is usually pushed out sooner than later. If however you notice there are mostly arseholes in your management structure, chances are this goes all the way to the top...

This is a really interesting observation and something I think doesn&#x27;t factor into most people&#x27;s calculus of company culture and execution.I worked an early employee at a YC startup that was developing a hardware device and I think really ran into similar issues.There were significant delays with shipping the device which meant that all the teams which had been built up to support its launch had _nothing_ to do for months. People in a &quot;Customer Success&quot; department with no customers. Developer evangelists with nothing to evangelize. Support departments twiddling their thumbs and the worst was the sales and marketing groups which devolved into a Lord of the Flies type environment where they tried latching onto any and every project they could just to justify their existence.Timing really is everything.

I have literally never seen stack ranking mentioned in any context but horror stories and toxic company culture. What on earth possesses people to keep using it?

Woman accuses Uber of systemic misogyny, but, no, &quot;the real problem&quot; is poor project management? So, systemic misogyny not a real problem for you?

This is true of most big companies. Internally, there are at least three competing versions of what outsiders would consider the same project.

I realized Uber was in pretty bad shape 2 years ago when the company i was at was trying to hire one of their VPs of Engineering. Not only did they have many VPs of Engineering, they had multiple VPs of Engineering in his specific discipline. It seemed like people were literally only there to get a title and a piece of the kingdom.Which is funny because my experience at Uber was EXACTLY the same. 3 years ago one of the heads of their department emailed me and asked me to come in and give a talk to their managers as the team wasn&#x27;t doing so well. After I did this, I asked the VP if they were hiring at my level (I was a director&#x2F;senior manager at the time) and she said yes. When I came to interview it was clear that I was interviewing for the job of one of the people who were interviewing me. Everyone seemed to love me except for this person, who told me they don&#x27;t hire managers and that I would have to report to him. He was very junior to me and seemed to only want to keep his title&#x2F;piece of the kingdom. It was obvious I didn&#x27;t want to be a part of that, so I declined the offer and not only was the person gone a few weeks later, they were gone from their next job a few months after that. There&#x27;s some serious political stuff going on at Uber.

The real problem in Uber&#x27;s engineering orgs is that Uber hired too many people for too few real projects. From what I learned from my friends in Uber, many teams had largely overlapping responsibilities, and therefore created bogus projects to justify their existence. Their standard MO is picking a missing feature in a service, and then creating a new system that implemented that feature.It might be okay if all the talents that Uber hired could work together to build truly great software, but hell no, their management created this weird cut-throat culture by enforcing stack ranking with forced curve down to each team of first-line managers. It&#x27;s hard to imagine that a team with fewer than 10 people had to name an engineer who &quot;didn&#x27;t meet expectation&quot;. Yet that was exactly what happened in Uber. They also doted out disproportional amount of bonus to a few top performers. Naturally, people&#x27;s expectation was distorted, and chaos ensued.

I totally feel the same way too (edit: but almost certainly not worse than how it feels for women). Having worked in both mixed and segregated teams, I much prefer having a good mix. It feels much more natural and normal.

I don&#x27;t know what you mean by &quot;even worse as a male employee&quot;, but I suspect you&#x27;ve drastically misspoken; you might want to fix that.

I think it&#x27;s worth pointing out that this kind of male dominated culture doesn&#x27;t just put off female engineers but male engineers too. As a male I&#x27;ve worked in environments with a high male to female ratio and it makes for a stifling homogeneous type of culture. I&#x27;ve never experienced the kind of sexist culture described at Uber but I imagine that must feel even worse as a male employee. I definitely see few women as a warning sign when interviewing.

A friend of mine worked there for less of a year, turns out he didn&#x27;t realise they had a shitty reputation before joining...

When you are a new grad, you are more willing to put up with stupid nonsense for a year. Puts great experience on the resume and opens more door than previously before which sets up nicely for your 2nd job out of college. This is true for companies like Amazon.

&gt;The sad thing is why do men want to apply there after what is know about it?Some students aren&#x27;t privileged enough to graduate debt-free. Getting into any of these top compensating packages can mean being literally years less time being in debt.

Why do men end-up in dangerous yet good paying jobs? Because testosterone. Most young men are more willing to work a shit job if they can get good money than most women who value quality of life.

&gt; My CS classmates - especially women - simply do not apply to Uber,The sad thing is why do men want to apply there after what is know about it? I wouldn&#x27;t want to be near any company that treats any of their employees like that.

The CEO is the problem. The fish stinks from the head.

By all indications, Uber has a toxic work culture that costs them both top talent and organizational velocity.I&#x27;m a college senior at a well-regarded engineering school. My CS classmates - especially women - simply do not apply to Uber, in large part because of its reputation for internal misogyny and general assholery. Four classmates interned there last summer, and as far as I know none are interested in returning. A friend of mine was actually warned off by her software engineer father. I&#x27;ve heard stories from friends who&#x27;ve worked there that corroborate Susan&#x27;s tales of infighting teams and inexplicable reorganizations due to high-level backstabbing. The one woman I know who works there wants out. Susan is a high-profile and credible source; hopefully her post takes Uber&#x27;s work culture issues from &quot;open secret&quot; to &quot;problem that has public consequences for the company&quot;.The CEO should crack down and take serious steps towards addressing this problem - not just for PR, but because his company is seriously suffering as a result of these issues. Unfortunately for Uber, from what I&#x27;ve heard, Travis is part of the problem as far as Game-of-Thrones internal politics and backstabbing goes. His &quot;move fast and break things&quot; persona sounds like a poor model for subordinates. Between that and the company&#x27;s relative external success, I wouldn&#x27;t hold my breath waiting for anything internal to get better any time soon.Until it does, I simply hope that my acquaintances at Uber find somewhere less shitty to work.

This sounds like such a broken, toxic environment. Although it&#x27;s painful and the outcome is unclear, I really hope she sues. We have to publicly shame behavior like this and make it known that it&#x27;s completely unacceptable.

I am really, really happy to see this as the top story on the front page of HN and to see the top comments currently here. It speaks well of HN.

My thoughts exactly. Thank you for your comment, I really enjoyed it.

While I agree with the statements that HR works for the company, when things are working the interests of the company and employees should align. I appreciate that too often this isn&#x27;t how HR operates, but I don’t think anyone wants to be misconstrued as implying that Ms. Fowler didn&#x27;t understand how HR works or that she didn&#x27;t take all appropriate actions.&gt; I wanted to stay on the team...&gt; it was genuinely in the company&#x27;s best interest to have me on that teamI read this and the rest of the article as a testiment to Ms. Fowler&#x27;s work ethic and commitment to her employer and fellow employees.&gt; I was the common theme in all of the reports I had been makingThis is the most disgusting abuse described in the article. Not only did the organization completely fail Ms. Fowler and all employees, but the HR professionals participated in the physiological abuse.

Thanks to the author for writing this - it&#x27;d be so easy just to move on and try to forget about it. And thanks to the other HN readers for their thoughtful comments as well.

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber