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.
Uber’s C.E.O. Plays With Fire
So Apple would not find out that Uber had secretly been tracking iPhones even after its app had been deleted from the devices, violating Apple’s privacy guidelines.
.. In a quest to build Uber into the world’s dominant ride-hailing entity, Mr. Kalanick has openly disregarded many rules and norms, backing down only when caught or cornered. He has flouted transportation and safety regulations, bucked against entrenched competitors and capitalized on legal loopholes and gray areas to gain a business advantage.
.. Mr. Kalanick, 40, is driven to the point that he must win at whatever he puts his mind to and at whatever cost — a trait that has now plunged Uber into its most sustained set of crises since its founding in 2009.
“Travis’s biggest strength is that he will run through a wall to accomplish his goals,” said Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire investor who has mentored Mr. Kalanick. “Travis’s biggest weakness is that he will run through a wall to accomplish his goals. That’s the best way to describe him.”
.. Mr. Kalanick mixes with celebrities like Jay Z and businessmen including President Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary D. Cohn. But it has alienated some Uber executives, employees and advisers. Mr. Kalanick, with salt-and-pepper hair, a fast-paced walk and an iPhone practically embedded in his hand, is described by friends as more at ease with data and numbers (some consider him a math savant) than with people.
.. the company has been reeling from allegations of a machismo-fueled workplace where managers routinely overstepped verbally, physically and sometimes sexually with employees.
.. Uber is financed by a who’s who of investors including Goldman Sachs and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund,
.. Mr. Kalanick controls the majority of the company’s voting shares with a small handful of other close friends, and has stacked Uber’s board of directors with many who are invested in his success.
.. He is interviewing candidates for a chief operating officer, even as some employees question whether a new addition will make any difference
.. “Scour was about efficiency. Swoosh was about efficiency. It’s just the way his brain is wired. It’s like the way Uber works right now: What’s the fastest, cheapest and most efficient way to get from point A to point B? That consumes him, and all parts of his life.”
.. When the company struggled, Mr. Kalanick and a partner took the tax dollars from employee paychecks — which are supposed to be withheld and sent to the Internal Revenue Service — and reinvested the money into the start-up, even as friends and advisers warned him the action was potentially illegal.
.. he once held the world’s second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game.
.. “The Travis Kalanick I came to know 17 years ago was relentless in pursuit of his goals at the expense of those who supported him along the way, deluded by his own embellished personal narrative, and a serial prevaricator,”
.. he told Mr. Kalanick, “Sometimes in business you have to battle the establishment, and it can get brutal and ugly.”
.. The idea for Uber came in 2009 from Garrett Camp, a friend of Mr. Kalanick’s, who became fixated on hailing a private luxury car with a smartphone app after being unable to catch cabs in San Francisco.
.. His pacing is so legendary, his father once said, that he wore a hole in the carpeting.
.. In October 2010, the company shortened its name to Uber after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from San Francisco officials for marketing itself as a taxi company without the proper licenses and permits.
.. In some places, Uber employees were also told to create computer programs known as scripts that would automatically vote for the ride-hailing service in city-administered surveys.
.. Hollywood stars were eager to buy into Uber, which they had started using to get around. Actors like Edward Norton, Olivia Munn and Sophia Bush took small stakes in the company.
.. Mr. Kalanick and a top lieutenant, Emil Michael, sometimes hung out with Leonardo DiCaprio, who is also an investor, and Jay Z, whose wife, Beyoncé, performed for Uber employees at a poolside party in Las Vegas in 2015.
.. Mr. Kalanick began mixing with elite business executives. He developed a close relationship with Mr. Cohn, then a top-ranking executive at Goldman Sachs. At one point, the two men spoke on a near daily basis.
.. Mr. Kalanick’s main mantra was “growth above all else.”
.. Uber’s top performers were often promoted and protected. When one general manager, a title for a city-level chief, threw a coffee mug at a subordinate in a fit of rage, the incident was reported to human resources — but there was no follow up.
.. Friends and employees told Mr. Kalanick that he should at least pretend to care about how it looked to take such a hostile stance with Uber’s users. Several described him as “emotionally unintelligent.”
.. Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business.
.. Uber’s “driver satisfaction rating,” an internal metric, has dropped since February 2016, and roughly a quarter of its drivers turn over on average every three months.
.. The tool, developed to aid driver safety and to trick fraudsters, essentially showed a fake version of Uber’s app to some people to disguise the locations of cars and drivers. It soon became a way for Uber drivers to evade capture by law enforcement in places where the service was deemed illegal.
.. Mr. Kalanick told his engineers to “geofence” Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code from people within that geofenced area, essentially drawing a digital lasso around those it wanted to keep in the dark. Apple employees at its headquarters were unable to see Uber’s fingerprinting.
Bill O’Reilly’s Sexual Harassment Was ‘Unconservative’
As conservatives, we need to acknowledge that behavior that takes sexual advantage of women is inconsistent with a movement that heralds family values and moral righteousness.
One of the core pillars of the modern American conservative movement is its emphasis on personal responsibility. Conservatives believe that a self-governing society depends on individuals taking responsibility for their actions, and those of their family and community. They deride others, especially American liberals, who fall short of this standard, who blame anything other than themselves for personal transgressions or failures. For conservatives, every policy solution starts with an individual picking oneself up, acknowledging his or her mistakes, as a first step to improving his or her circumstances.
.. We saw no acknowledgment of mistakes publicly or privately from Mr. O’Reilly nor from Roger Ailes, the former Fox News chairman. Instead Mr. O’Reilly blamed others, embracing the victimization he so ridiculed of the American left. He claimed his departure was no fault of his own, but the cost of doing business as a high profile media personality.
.. Today’s conservatives must dissociate themselves from a “Mad Men” culture of the past. They should flatly condemn this disrespectful behavior toward women. Otherwise they, too, are complicit.