Co-founder Travis Kalanick departs but for Uber battles remain
“We saw how Travis treated his drivers,” said Sayah Baaroun, head of a driver’s union in France, referring to an incident where Mr. Kalanick was videotaped arguing with an Uber driver. “But for us, the larger battle continues.” Mr. Kalanick later said he was “ashamed” of the behavior capture on the video.
.. Still, Uber’s aggressiveness around the world has often been viewed as interlinked with Mr. Kalanick’s own personality, and the change of leadership could offer a fresh start with some of the authorities with which Uber has tangled. Dave Ashton, co-founder of French car-booking app SnapCar, said Mr. Kalanick’s departure is “an astute move by the board” that could “repair Uber’s reputation and help the company mature.”
The Uber Pattern Continues With a Sexist Comment at a Board Meeting
Less than 24 hours after unveiling policies meant to combat sexism, David Bonderman resigns over remarks about women.
.. Arianna Huffington, a board member, says, “There’s a lot of data that shows when there’s one woman on the board, it’s much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board.” Bonderman replies, “Actually what it shows is it’s much likely to be more talking,” to which Huffington says, “Oh come on, David.”
.. A powerful male board member makes an offensive comment about women in response to a female board member speaking at a meeting meant to introduce policies to address allegations of sexism.
Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber
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’t. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.
.. I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man’s first offense, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to.
.. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.
.. I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that.
.. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”.
.. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being “his first offense”, and it certainly wasn’t his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his “first offense”. The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done.
.. Myself and a few of the women who had reported him in the past decided to all schedule meetings with HR to insist that something be done. In my meeting, the rep I spoke with told me that he had never been reported before, he had only ever committed one offense (in his chats with me), and that none of the other women who they met with had anything bad to say about him, so no further action could or would be taken. It was such a blatant lie that there was really nothing I could do.
.. It seemed like every manager was fighting their peers and attempting to undermine their direct supervisor so that they could have their direct supervisor’s job.
.. We all lived under fear that our teams would be dissolved, there would be another re-org, and we’d have to start on yet another new project with an impossible deadline. It was an organization in complete, unrelenting chaos.
.. According to my manager, his manager, and the director, my transfer was being blocked because I had undocumented performance problems.
.. I pointed out that I had a perfect performance score, and that there had never been any complaints about my performance. I had completed all OKRs on schedule, never missed a deadline even in the insane organizational chaos, and that I had managers waiting for me to join their team. I asked what my performance problem was, and they didn’t give me an answer.
.. finally I was told that “performance problems aren’t always something that has to do with work, but sometimes can be about things outside of work or your personal life.”
.. It turned out that keeping me on the team made my manager look good, and I overheard him boasting to the rest of the team that even though the rest of the teams were losing their women engineers left and right, he still had some on his team.
.. He said that because there were so many men in the org, they had gotten a significant discount on the men’s jackets but not on the women’s jackets, and it wouldn’t be equal or fair, he argued, to give the women leather jackets that cost a little more than the men’s jackets. We were told that if we wanted leather jackets, we women needed to find jackets that were the same price as the bulk-order price of the men’s jackets.
.. 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 making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem.
.. I pointed out that everything I had reported came with extensive documentation and I clearly wasn’t the instigator (or even a main character) in the majority of them – she countered by saying that there was absolutely no record in HR of any of the incidents I was claiming I had reported (which, of course, was a lie, and I reminded her I had email and chat records to prove it was a lie).
.. When I pointed out how few women were in SRE, she recounted with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others, so I shouldn’t be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering. Our meeting ended with her berating me about keeping email records of things, and told me it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR.
.. Less than a week after this absurd meeting, my manager scheduled a 1:1 with me, and told me we needed to have a difficult conversation. He told me I was on very thin ice for reporting his manager to HR. California is an at-will employment state, he said, which means we can fire you if you ever do this again. I told him that was illegal, and he replied that he had been a manager for a long time, he knew what was illegal, and threatening to fire me for reporting things to HR was not illegal. I reported his threat immediately after the meeting to both HR and to the CTO: they both admitted that this was illegal, but none of them did anything. (I was told much later that they didn’t do anything because the manager who threatened me “was a high performer”).
Why Companies Like Uber Get Away With Bad Behavior
In 2016, it reportedly lost $2.8 billion
.. Amazon, even in its darkest, loss-accumulating early years, was a piker compared with Uber.
.. For all its candor and specificity — rare qualities in corporate America — the report doesn’t directly address the sources of Uber’s misbehavior: its longtime chief executive, Travis Kalanick, and his chief enabler, the endlessly forgiving board of directors that is controlled by Mr. Kalanick and his cronies.
The Holder-Albarrán report recommends that the company consider eliminating its official “core values” like
- “Always Be Hustlin’,”
- “Principled Confrontation” and
- “Let Builders Build,”
principles that “have been used to justify poor behavior.”
.. The requested repudiation of the company’s cultural values would be a repudiation of Mr. Kalanick’s cultural values. The entire mess that Uber is in is, ultimately, his doing.
But the report treated Mr. Kalanick with kid gloves, recommending only that a chief operating officer be appointed to take on some of his responsibilities.
.. Consider all that this presumes: that he is so invaluable that he can step aside — apparently no single person will be in charge during his absence — and work on self-improvement and then, his spot at the top held for him, return. He acts like the company belongs to him.
.. typical in Silicon Valley, encouraged by weak boards, investors who compete among themselves to be the most “founder friendly” and dual-class stock structures, similar to those at Google and Facebook, that give founders’ shares 10 times the voting rights as ordinary shares.
.. “Investors in high growth, financially successful companies rarely, if ever, call out inexcusable behavior from founders or C-suite executives.”
.. As long as the company keeps growing, the founder can be forgiven almost anything.