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Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

(www.nytimes.com)
198 points 101carl | 2 comments | 22 Jun 17 00:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.447s | source
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johan_larson ◴[22 Jun 17 01:32 UTC] No.14609498[source]▶
I remain flabbergasted by all of this upheaval at Uber. What's happening is the sort of housecleaning I would expect if the company had to file for bankruptcy or got caught flat out bribing judges or something. But really, what triggered all this was acting like jerks.

It seems to me, what should have happened (a long time ago) was that they got shut down for systematically breaking the law, or encouraging others to do so. That would have made sense.

But instead they are getting flayed alive by not much more than bad press for being jerks. Makes no goddamn sense.

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stale2002 ◴[22 Jun 17 02:39 UTC] No.14609754[source]▶
Sexual harassment and retaliation against employees for reporting it is not "just being jerks".

It is illegal.

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pfarnsworth ◴[22 Jun 17 03:11 UTC] No.14609872[source]▶
Every large organization has instances of this, including Facebook, Google, and the Vatican. It's not right, but it's reality. The only thing is that every other company has done a great job of covering it up, like Amit Singhal who was fired from Google for sexual harrassment, but no one knew that before he joined Uber.
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1. _jal ◴[22 Jun 17 15:01 UTC] No.14612691[source]▶
You're right that, statistically speaking, the odds of a company facing a sexual harassment problem approaches unity over time.

But this goes off the rails on the next part. On one hand, you have a company presumably following the legal process[1] of getting through a harassment accusation being accused of a "cover up" in order to implicitly draw an equivalence with a company that apparently had a policy of shielding specific employees from harassment claims.

[1] I have no first-hand knowledge of the situation, but haven't seen any suggestions of impropriety.

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2. pfarnsworth ◴[22 Jun 17 16:25 UTC] No.14613348[source]▶
You are presuming that Google followed the proper legal process based on what? Did you even bother doing the research?

http://gizmodo.com/former-google-engineer-blasts-companys-hr...

According to multiple sources and internal notes read to me, after discussing the claims of an alleged encounter between Singhal and a female employee first with former Google HR head Laszlo Bock and also Google CEO Sundar Pichai in late 2015, he denied those claims at the time. He also apparently stated a number of times that there were two sides to every story.

A former Google employee I spoke to has described the search giant’s HR as “a nasty mess.” They are not alone. Monday afternoon, former Google engineer Kelly Ellis shared some of her own experiences with at the company in light of the news surrounding Singhal’s departure. Ellis previously tweeted about sexual harassment she faced at Google back in 2015.

Sounds eerily familiar. My point being the exact same as what I said. Uber isn't right for letting this happen, but companies like Google have allowed this to happen, you just don't hear about it.

That said, your bias against Uber is blinding you.