It can be worse. Something similar is happening to the "binary option" industry in Tel Aviv, Israel. A "binary option" is a bet on whether some financial indicator will go up or down. While there are such things as real binary options on real exchanges, the ones sold from phone banks in Tel Aviv are bets against the house. The house sets the odds and usually wins, and even when they lose, most binary option shops don't pay up. 80% of investors lose everything. In Israel, it's illegal to scam Israelis this way, but completely legal to scam the rest of the world.
The scale of this industry is substantial. It's doing at least $1.2 billion a year in income, and that's the part that pays taxes in Israel. This has been going on for almost a decade, and the scam was growing rapidly.
Then, in 2016, the jaws began to close. The US CFTC won a big case against the biggest binary option firm in Israel, Banc de Binary. They had to pay back everybody who lost money and pay huge damages. (Banc de Binary once offered $10,000 to anyone who would remove that info from their Wikipedia entry. That attempt backfired, badly.) Then there was a 15-part expose in the Times of Israel, titled "The Wolves of Tel Aviv".[1] Now, finally, there are more investigations and a bill to make it illegal to run this scam out of Israel. Banc De Binary ceased operation a few weeks ago. (Or at least they disappeared, removing their sign from the Banc De Binary Tower.) At least four other binary option "brokers" have gone out of business in recent weeks.
As a result, there are lots of layoffs. Scamming people from a phone bank was a good-paying job. The companies liked to hire recent immigrants to Israel who could speak the languages of their target countries fluently. English and Arabic were the most popular languages. A lobbyist for the binary option industry, testifying before a committee of the Knesset, claimed that there are 20,000 people employed in binary options in Israel, and 60,000 people indirectly. "You see the building boom right now in Tel Aviv? Well, you can just say goodbye to that because most skyscrapers in Tel Aviv will be empty. There will be no one to fill them up." There's even a claim from the binary option industry that shutting down this scam will increase terrorism, because it will take away the income of thousands of Arabs.
So 20,000 scammers are becoming unemployed, in a city of only 400,000 people. A former employee of a binary option company faces a far worse black mark than being from Uber. The binary option salespeople are full time con artists. Nobody legit in finance is going to hire them. Getting any legit job will be tough.
If this results in common knowledge that parents will tell to their college-age kids "don't go working for scammers, because when they get exposed this will be a black mark on your CV for years" - well, then that's a good thing for society in general, as it will make recruiting for "technically legal, not yet explicitly prohibited" scams harder.
That is what I read, that AA was a good company which got nuked on account of a few bad apples. This was Enron/AA, circa 2001, and the net job loss of around 85,000 meant that when it happened again on a grander scale, Too Big To Fail was the result. Politicians didn't have the stomach for that many white collar job losses, especially in that economy. They were probably right. We were on the brink of another Great Depression and that wasn't the time to be moralistic about corruption. It really wasn't.
I've heard pieces of this story, so thank you for the history and summary.
I suspect what you say is true, this is a 'black mark'. Working for Uber? Maybe if you are in upper management, would it be a similar "black mark" but even then, are you going to blame every C_O for their scandals? Probably not all. As for the 98% of employees? I doubt working for Uber will seriously impact their next job (and much less all following jobs).
Just think, today we don't hold it against middle management or individual contributors who happened to be employed at Enron at the wrong time...
I worked with a dude that got laid off in the whole Enron fallout. Everything was normal Friday when they left for the weekend. Monday morning, they found a box of personal items where their desks used to be.
He had some trouble finding a job afterwards, and wound up working at a call center (where I met him). Seems folks didn't want to take the chance that he just might have been in on it, nor did they want to un-train a toxic culture out of him. Really was a shame as the dude was a joy to work with.
Actually after Enron was exposed, most former employees head a very difficult time getting hired. It was a major black mark, made worse by the fact that many employees had significant savings in Enron stock.
This really depended on what their role was. Many star traders or analysts were able to get re-hired almost immediately or start their own firms without a problem. Here's an example:
Is it not obvious? They're practically identical in every respect, right down to corporate culture, grandiosity and being propped up on a titanic and imaginary valuation which is all that empowers them to carry out their activities.
I don't see much similarity except ridiculous valuation and the consequent financial threat level between a company that used to be normal, developed an infection of criminal behaviour on the part of a small group and collapsed because of epic law-preaking, and a company that began as a hugely funded startup, behaves badly from day 1, appears to be openly run by assholes for assholes, and hasn't broken the law on a catastrophic scale yet.
Having worked in the energy industry, the traders previously from Enron were some of the most sought after in the world since they basically invented many of the markets from the ground up and could get shit done. Not sure how the accountants fared, though...
> So 20,000 scammers are becoming unemployed, in a city of only 400,000 people.
It's pretty weird to take into account only population of Tel Aviv and not the whole metropolitan area; and anyway, there are a lot of people working in Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Givataym, Petakh Tikva and other cities around the center who actually commute from the north of the country or other regions.
One little secret of retail/sales industry is that everyone knows that best salespeople are pathological liars. So I really doubt that they will be out of job, being con artist is just a plus.
Oh yeah, just like it's an open secret that the best programmers are socially awkward, introverted nerds.... and all DJs are stupid, like athletes. ;-)
Or maybe we just confuse cliches with averages and averages with individuals.
It turns out that in my anecdotal experience, every sales book I read from 'the greatest' advocated an honest, sustainable approach to customer relationship, because trust and word of mouth get you much farther than any immediate 'win' on a deal. The matter of the fact is that you don't want to ever be the sole 'winner' of a deal, you want all parties to win: otherwise no one will want to deal with you anymore at some point. Business isn't about winning, not even about sole profit, it's about sustainable profit, and honest cooperation gets you there.
Which fits my personal work experience as well --worked at Esprit de Corp (retail clothes) when I was younger and was among the top sellers, always telling the truth to customers; e.g. "these pants don't fit you, sorry I don't have anything else, please do check back on us often". Note: this was the brand's policy as well, that satisfaction was the real product we were selling, even if it did not always translate into an immediate sale. In the long run, I'm positive the trust we built was a key factor to making this brand top 3 worldwide sustainably (as far as the frontend is concerned, quality/price and having great stores in every major commercial location being the other two).
In this particular brand and in many of our competition (Zara etc.), not only would "pathological lying" be frowned upon as you'd expect from most (normal) human beings, it would be just about the worst sales tactics, ever, if you wanted customers to be satisfied, thus come back for more (which is the bulk of your profit in volume retail).
I wasn't there to see how things went at Uber, but from what I heard/read, it's obvious their culture was everything but sustainable.
> One little secret of retail/sales industry is that everyone knows that best salespeople are pathological liars.
Is that really true? There's a pretty meaningful distinction between someone who lies all the time as part of their profession and someone who lies out of a compulsion. It seems like being unable to stop lying would be a handicap.
The point is that they provide customers with a service that they really want. Transport after Uber is a lot better than before. Companies like Uber NEED to exist. Luckily there is competition now.
Uber's apparent bad work culture is an entirely separate point. And so are the laws they skirt. I think most of those laws should be scrapped anyway.
you're conflating fraud and evasion of regulations. these are not the same things. Uber evades regulations (and has a shitty office culture) but they don't defraud their customers.
The binary option industry went in for heavy "search engine optimization". There were hundreds of phony sites about binary options, with real finance stories scraped from elsewhere to make the content look fresh. There were enough of these sites to push things like SEC warnings and negative news stories off the front page of Google results.
But Wikipedia stayed near the top of search results. Something had to be done about Wikipedia, which was tracking the lawsuits, news stories, and regulatory actions. There was a huge effort by Banc De Binary to get the "bad stuff" out of their Wikipedia article. This resulted in one of the worst paid editing disputes in Wikipedia history.[1] We got to see their "hustle-oriented culture" in action. Eventually, all Banc De Binary editors were blocked.
The "hustle" was that the call center people claimed to be "brokers", acting on behalf of the customer and trading options on some exchange. In reality, there was no exchange and no third party on the other side of the transaction. The "broker" is a shill for the house. This is called a "bucket shop", illegal in the US and seldom seen since the 1920s.
First you suck them in for 8 to 10 generations, then wham! You hit them with the sting and take them for all they've got. Unless they, like, vote in a government that stops you doing that, or something.
This is a classic halo effect [1]. A positive halo was "Google is making lots of money and they have 20% time. So, smart companies should do this." This is a negative halo "Uber is experiencing lots of bad PR and hustling is part of their culture. So, smart companies should stop being scrappy."
The problem isn't scrappiness. It is when you push far past scrappiness and start breaking the law.
Uber is not the first (or the last) company to get in trouble for too much "hustling"[0].
It is not just the "hustle" people don't like. People view their employees as sexist bigots. All the smart companies don't want people from that culture.
It's about putting a "merit"ocracy in place that encourages people to backstab and generally act like jerks in order to get ahead.
I don't know why you put meritocracy in quotes, because that's what it is. The merits that are rewarded just so happen to be acting like jerks. In general society that is not a merit; but in the company it is a merit therefore Uber is a meritocracy.
If keeping important business information for yourself so colleagues fail counts as merit, then yeah, uber is meritocracy. Simultaneously, the word merit lost all meaning.
The example is from original article by susan who started current backslash.
I prefer to call this act "The Meritocrats!" as a way to highlight that it's likely to be obscene and out of line with what people think of as "merits".
A meritocracy is, by definition, a system where participants succeed based on relevant ability and talent. Meritocracies do not involve pushing others down, only pushing yourself up. Backstabbing is a textbook "down" action.
A system that encourages people to backstab to get ahead is effectively just a medeival court, in which employees act as petty nobles jostling for the king/boss's approval.
I put it in quotes because in my view it's not merit that gets you ahead in such an -ocracy.
Merit implies a quality of being good, or otherwise praiseworthy. Being a backstabbing misogynist dickbag gets you ahead at Uber but I would not describe you as worthy of merit.
Won't go too far to say all Uber employees are sexist bigots, but I do, after all these media exposure, now have a images they have a strong feel-good bro culture
I think a company with a strong and directed culture will even absorb former "bro dudes" successfully and de-bro them. (Meaning, they will learn empathy and stop behaving in a way that hurts others)
Doubt it. Mainly because if a company has a strong and directed culture they would bounce-back every bro-dudes already in the interview phase for "not a culture fit"
There's a spectrum of bro-ness, and I've seen pretty hardcore stereotypical "frat guys" at 22 mature into "normal" adult human beings on a regular basis.
If you can keep your bro-ness under wraps for 4 hours for the interview, you can get hired at a company with a reasonable culture and that will continue to mold and shape you, just like any other community influence to which you are consistently exposed.
Why is it someone else's job to "un-bro" them? Why can't it be their job to do it for themselves, and just have them find out they're unemployable in their desired job unless/until they do? Companies insist they won't hire people who'd need to learn other fundamental skills of the job (and that if you want the job, learn that stuff first), so why not this?
It is not just the "hustle" people don't like. People view their employees as sexist bigots. All the smart companies don't want people from that culture.
As much as that makes sense, it's also interesting considering that TFA makes it sound like people are leaving because of their dislike of that culture. And having trouble because they're being associated to the thing their fleeing.
And notably, a lot of what Uber has done wrong doesn't even read as "scrappiness gone too far". Retroactively changing performance reviews isn't "too scrappy", it's just malicious.
Let's take all of this with a grain of salt. It wouldn't be the first time a journalist with a preconceived notion went out and solicited quotes until she found some that supported her position. We don't know how many people she talked to along the way.
If you were in the Hitler Youth in 1941, and you were 14, and it was mandatory, people will still bring it up 72 years later when you are literally the Pope [1]
Is it fair? No. Will some people do it anyway? Absolutely.
Didn’t help Ratzinger that he spent his whole career being the inquisitor attack dog of the Church’s right wing.
My Mexican Jesuit friends called him “Nazinger” for his political actions as an adult, not for his past. German Catholics called him the “Panzerkardinal”.
If you were a low level Wells Fargo employee, that could be something you had to explain in an interview. According to NPR, Wells Fargo employees have found they can't get another job in the banking industry:
There's also an additional difference in the industry which is explained in the article:
It turns out Wells Fargo had written on Jeremy's U5 report card that he admitted to opening accounts for customers without their authorization. A bank is required to report wrongdoing on a U5. But Jeremy says in his case it just wasn't true. "The second I found out about the U5 information I was appalled," he says. "And now it all made sense." That is, all the times he'd get so close to getting a job only to have it get yanked away after a background check.
Employment lawyers say getting a negative mark on your U5 is like getting the mark of Cain in the world of bankers and brokers. The U5 database is maintained by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, which is an industry self-regulatory organization. The goal of the U5 system is to hold financial advisers, brokers and bankers who sell securities accountable for wrongdoing.
Some major banks have a flat-out "zero-tolerance policy," says attorney Scott Matasar with the firm Matasar Jacobs. "They just flat out will not hire" anyone with an entry on their U5 that even suggests a sales practice violation or unethical behavior, he says.
This isn't halo effect. When hiring someone from a company that has a certain culture, you expect people to share some of that culture. With more severely negative points of Uber's culture coming to light, companies are wondering how much of that culture the current employees share.
And there's a difference between being scrappy and hustling.
Could you describe the difference? Other than the less common definition of "fraud or swindle", I think the common definition of hustle and scrappy have a heavy overlap.
There is a heavy overlap between the two, but my impression is that being scrappy has a side that hustling doesn't: finding ways to do things with far less resources that it would be normally required.
Essentially, scrappy is, IMHO, finding shortcuts and detours to avoid an obstacle. Hustling feels more like beating down that obstacle until it gets out of the way.
But that's all semantics, and therefore my personal opinion. I've always heard "scrappy" as a positive thing, and "hustling" as something either ambiguous or just plain bad.
This piece is another cheap "strike it while the iron is hot" hit job to get attention. Yes, Uber seems to be having serious culture issues but the underlying problems of sexism and favoritism towards "high achievers" are industry-wide - not just limited to Uber. They have a lot at stake - it's only fair to assume that they will come out of this mess and fix their problems as soon as possible.
Uber employees, both current and former, will have no problem getting good offers - tech companies have biases but are smart enough not to mass generalize. The fact that they "made it into Uber" far outweighs any speculation around Uber's culture.
The real black mark is the "hit job oriented" culture of media. They need to step back and rethink what they stand for.
> Yes, Uber seems to be having serious culture issues but the underlying problems of sexism and favoritism towards "high achievers" are industry-wide - not just limited to Uber.
Although these issues are experienced everywhere, they appear to have a higher occurrence at Uber, so it makes sense to focus more on Uber than the industry as a whole.
> it's only fair to assume that they will come out of this mess and fix their problems as soon as possible
That's appears to be part of the issue with Uber - their culture of self-promotion at all costs. I have no doubt Uber will do whatever they can to make it through this mess. My major concern is that "whatever they can" is merely superficial change, like maybe firing some token dude who's only been there a month and saying, "See? We've changed!"
The linked article, by associating risk with merely being employed at Uber, does the industry a favor by helping uber to do the Right Thing and protect itself by protecting its employees.
The real change that needs to happen, is that people that work at Uber are safe. What better way to make that happen then threaten Uber's ability to hire and retain talent?
> firing some token dude who's only been there a month
I assume this is in reference to Amit Singhal. I don't think "some token dude" is a good characterization of the Senior Vice President of Engineering, and while that was a good sign it's very much not all Uber is doing.
I work at Uber, and many of us are quite fired up about holding the company to account. While there are definitely things we can critique, it does seem that the situation being taken seriously and we're all hoping (and, with reservations, expecting) that there will be real change.
MSM hit jobs seem to be increasingly frequent, although it is an old tactic. I think (or at least hope) more people are starting to see through it now though. But the MSM is subtle and many reports that might not seem it are actually hit pieces as well. Sometimes it is as subtle as the phrasing of a single line in an otherwise ordinary article.
There's nothing new under the sun as far as this type of piece is concerned. Even pissant local journalists are well versed in the art of using innuendo to create stories where there are none. Hijacking the reader's imagination and letting them jump to your conclusions is one of the oldest tricks in the book.
About ten years ago, one of our local papers did a 23 piece series on a pile of dirt with trace amounts of old pesticides in a middle school. Everyone at the school was transparent and forthcoming and the health rick of this temporary pile of dirt was beyond miniscule. That's not just my opinion. I interviewed the toxicologist who authored the newest and toughest environmental regulations.
That local journalist had successfully push vague innuendo that hijacked many parent's worst fears and sense of outrage and they ended up firing the superintendent. Based on the models, the increased risk of cancer from being exposed to these pesticides were something around 1/250,000. Your normal risk of cancer is between 1/3 to 1/2. Many of these parents were convinced their kid's health faced an imminent threat and the photos of their outraged faces reflected that.
But they sold a lot of papers running that series and I'm sure it was the boost that journalist needed to make it to the next level.
Hiring is hard. We have to use all the data points available to us. If someone seems to have thrived in a culture that is counter to the culture we're trying to build, that's a valuable data point.
The reason certain minorities are protected is in part because the reason for discrimination is because of race, gender, or other attributes they were born with and cannot change.
The choice of where to work is just that--a choice. Choices have consequences. If you willingly accept continued association with a known group of bad actors, it's reasonable that someone might judge your character poorly for that choice.
I wont hire someone from google, because they have hyper creepy dossiers on everyone. I wont hire from FB, because they were bros in the past, have privacy problems and also have creepy dossiers on everyone. I wont hire from apple, because how could someone support an asshole like steve jobs? I wont hire someone from amazon/AWS, have you seen how they treat their warehouse workers? I won't hire someone from microsoft, they were monopolist assholes! I wont hire someone who worked at a chinese company, they act even worse than all of the above!
I won't hire someone who moved to large powerful country X, because they could immigrate to europe and not support such a bad government with their tax dollars. I wont hire a person who moved to city X, because they generate the housing disaster displacing poor people. I wont hire a religious person, becaue religion has done horrible things. I wont hire a non-religious person, because they have no morals.
I won't hire a guy who stayed at media-hated company for X years even though I have no idea what their personal situation was. Maybe if they left, their green card would be delayed for a year a two. A year of someones life is nothing right? Maybe the 100 person team at their 10-50k employee company was really nice and had none of the toxic crap reported by the media.
It's a dangerous road to judge people like that, lest you be judged the same, in secret.
As if majority of Uber workers thought "hey, I could offend women and do shit there, I want to work for them!". And sure all programmers value workplace image over technical challenges?
It's as reasonable to think ex-Uberist is douche as that ghetto-looking dude stole a bicycle on the way to job interview. Possible? Yes. More likely than average citizen? Yes. Reasonable?
If people would be (soft-)forced to steer clear from anyone who might look like a bad actor, it'd suck big time. Want to take down opponents? Spread some rumours and people are afraid to work with them. Or companies would be over-the-top to look good instead of focusing on what they actually do. Github and their diversity team comes to mind.
> And sure all programmers value workplace image over technical challenges?
No, but then they've made a decision and sometimes those come back to haunt you. That said: I wouldn't dismiss someone from a position just because they've worked at Uber, but I would ask "pointed questions" to quote the article. At the end of the day you will have to work with that person and I'd rather work with nice people than not.
If you willingly accept continued association with a known group of bad actors
Speaking of which, what's the polite euphemism YC now uses to describe its relationship with Peter Thiel? and how likely is anyone to believe they're continuing that in order to stand on principle vs. baser reasons?
That's absurd and offensive on a lot of levels... The thing anyone in a protected class wants is to not be judged on that as a factor one way or the other. People working at Uber are "struggling" because their perceived ticket to the stars is looking kind of bad; they wish there were getting offers left and right for working there, because plenty of people get jobs on the basis of their last company.
You get judged in interviews, and it is a best case scenario if it is over recent stuff you had control over.
I don't care of they're struggling with or without quotes.
What sucks is sweeping generalisations. Which is exactly what is going on. I'm pretty sure most people went were because of tech challenge and/or money. Not because of chasing bro culture or possibility to offend coworkers.
From what I read about Uber, it looks like most people were not happy about what was going on. There were a small amount of assholes (which exist in any company or community). The problem is that management is OK with assholes and give them a pass. However, all the good folks are thrown together with few assholes.
P.S. I'd be happy to see Uber gone. I'm not using it on principle for their "disruption" mentality. As well as the rest of "sharing economy".
Well, yes, that's why it's a protected category. It's the fact that it's a protected category that distinguishes it from non protected categories. That's the distinction and that's why the same doesn't apply there as for any random thing.
If you substitute "poor programming skills environment" it suddenly makes sense. That's the thing with substitutions. They change the meaning.
I'm all in favour of letting people discriminate on these grounds. They're the people reducing their own hiring pool. Everyone else is going to evaluate the candidates directly for culture and consequently have a competitive advantage.
> If you substitute "poor programming skills environment" it suddenly makes sense
Why would it? From my experience, companies with poor code quality are great to poach junior-to-mid programmers. They're super happy to jump the ship and they're well aware of code smells and problems poor code causes.
> I'm all in favour of letting people discriminate on these grounds.
Would you discriminate based on person himself or because he dared to work for company you don't like?
Those people were not borne and bred at Uber, many are talented people who were poached from other "high status" companies. It may be the "culture" at Uber makes some people do dumb things, but it seems to follow that if they behaved well while at other well managed companies that they would become good assets under a positive management structure elsewhere.
Data are useful, but interpretation is more murky. You are interviewing the people who don't want to work at Uber anymore. The people who might not "fit in" (following your logic) are the people who aren't interested in leaving.
Actually, I work and am friends with a number of ex-Uber employees, did contract work for them years ago, have driven for them in the past... But you certainly think that the few words of mine you've read seem to give you ample perspective into what I know, don't you?
To most people their work is just work they go there and do what they need to do to support their family and I think those that aren't directly working to support iniquity can be forgiven for not considering whether their companies culture is negative.
The fact that you can't separate their work ethic and value as employees from your judgment of the company as a whole is an analytical failure. These are distinct things.
In 2015, Uber employed 1,200+ engineers. Some of them worked in insular settings like self-driving research where they might never meet the people recently in the news, or even hear stories. (Yes, some of this has hit the news before. No, that doesn't mean everyone heard about it, even in-industry.)
Compare to some place like Amazon, where it's pretty well-established that the answer to "how's the engineering culture?" is "depends entirely on which part of engineering you're in". If you dislike the Amazon.com product ranking team, are you going to blackball AWS SREs for it?
If the idea is that Uber's business model itself is the ethical problem, then yeah, you could hold all the engineers accountable for that. But that's a very different question than the internal crises.
(Also, do remember that "ample other opportunity" isn't very applicable to anyone on a visa tied to Uber.)
(Also, do remember that "ample other opportunity" isn't very applicable to anyone on a visa tied to Uber.)
I don't really agree with the rest of your comment (I think Uber has had enough broad ethical problems over the last several years that hearing stories would be inevitable), but this is a fair point, and I'd like to acknowledge that I missed it. Thank you for pointing this out.
My friend's wife was previously in an abusive relationship. Some people would say she stayed too long. She's a great person and I'm glad my friend married her.
...yeah, you're going to have to explain that one.
I seem to recall hearing somewhere that relationships are voluntary too, and there's groups offering help to anyone looking to escape a bad one. Yet, blaming people for not leaving immediately tends to be rather frowned on.
Is the difference just that in one case you're getting paid, and are therefore transformed into a perfectly rational homo economicus? Is it that it's easier to (know you need to) leave if the only danger is to your morals rather than to your physical body? Is it somehow easier to recognize moral danger than physical danger?
People go into relationship with expectation of those being long term. People are expected to create ties to them and leaving your husband/boyfriend/wife/girlfriend is oftentimes seen as wrong - you are supposed to be loyal.
It is not nearly the same with companies.
Also the issue here is not that they accepted being abused, it is the suspicion that they contributed to toxicity. It might be unfair to quite a few of them, but it is still very different.
> You are supposed to be loyal... It is not nearly the same with companies.
I'm not defending the primary analogy, but this is bizarre to me. As I grew up, many different people told me about the importance of loyalty to coworkers (and by implication employers). I heard about how you have to show you're willing to stick around for the long haul, dedicate yourself to a business, and suck it up when things are bad. At least if you're the one suffering, lots of people will tell you to stay with a company regardless. The phrase "paying your dues" is all about this.
Yeah, 20-somethings and software devs are both known for being a bit more mercenary than that. I think that
s a good thing, since it encourages companies to act responsibly.
But there is still a strong culture that expects loyalty to employers, even when they're treating you poorly. It's not universal, but for some people it comes from most of the people they care about.
I suspect you're just making a fun comparison without much thought, but it comes across as pretty obnoxious. Nobody at Uber is afraid they'll be murdered if they quit their job. Stop trivializing domestic abuse.
Doesn't read like trivialization to me, and I've been in abusive relationships both intimate and professional. If we want to talk about trivializing, we could talk about your implicit equation of all domestic abuse with the relatively rare case where murder a plausible concern, but that's beside the point; what reads like trivialization to me is saying "oh, anyone still at Uber prima facie has ethical problems, I wouldn't hire anyone like that."
Not everyone who could easily change jobs realizes it, especially after being worked out on awhile by a workplace culture that seems to prioritize gaslighting good engineers into thinking they're poor ones - cf. Fowler, and imagine how much worse it is for someone less confident in herself.
Not everyone who realizes they could change jobs does so, and not because they like the shitty culture where they are - Uber uses golden handcuffs, too, and that's not an Uber problem, but a startup culture problem in general.
Abusive relationships tend to end when the victim gets a "wake-up call" - a moment that takes them outside the narrow perspective their abuser has been at such pains to create, and brings home the reality of their situation. There are certainly people at Uber for whom Fowler's article, and the follow-on exposés it's prompted, have constituted just such a moment. And now that they're trying to get away from their abuser, they get to deal with being stereotyped this way? That's trivialization.
I've worked with a number of otherwise smart people who have a low social intelligence. These folks tend to do their work and keep their heads down, and might not even realize that there are widespread cultural problems at their workplace.
I would also bet that even at the most toxic of workplaces there are pockets of normalcy.
This should be marked as an opinion piece. I struggle to find the data to back this article. Even the recruiting agency interviewed for the article gave a wishy washy answer.
It may be unfair to make a "black mark" on every journalist at The Guardian, but after the false "WhatsApp considered harmful" stories, I am unable to take anything they print at face value. Response by moxie: https://whispersystems.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoo...
The Guardian used to be a "serious" newspaper, but since they went after markets outside of the UK, including online, they're more of a "classy tabloid". Farming clickbait. A very unfortunate turn. Used to really enjoy their culture content in the 90s
It would be tempting to vote no on an otherwise qualified candidate citing "culture fit" who has Uber on their resume and a whiff of "bro dude" about them. Ultimately though I hope I'd resist that temptation, because people deserve the benefit of the doubt; even young, white, physically fit dudes who enjoy sports and previously worked at Uber.
I've worked with some nerds who were awful mean-spirited tyrants, and some bro dudes who were really kind and sweet.
It would be tempting to vote no on an otherwise qualified candidate citing "culture fit" who has Uber on their resume and a whiff of "bro dude" about them. Ultimately though I hope I'd resist that temptation, because people deserve the benefit of the doubt; even young, white, physically fit dudes who enjoy sports and previously worked at Uber.
If you substitute the gender or the color of "young, white physically fit dude" you get blatant racism or sexism.
If someone did something wrong, then hold that against them. Being biased against someone's color or gender isn't ok.
If you substitute the gender or the color of "young, white physically fit dude" you get blatant racism or sexism.
I agree. If I did have a bias against white males I might consider it technically racism or sexism, but not blatant.
In my view it's simplistic to think of bias based on gender or race as sexism or racism without considering the larger societal context. Can a historically dominant gender/race in a given society feel the occasional isolated sting of racism and/or sexism? I believe they can, but I also believe it's a false equivalency to view that with the same lens as the often systemic and institutionalized racism and sexism faced by those in the marginalized minority.
I think we're having an argument about semantics. I think it's a mistake to conflate racism with prejudice. I believe it diminishes the concepts of racism and sexism to invoke them in a non-systemic context.
When you change the meaning of racism to actually mean only institutional racism, the behavior that the old meaning represented suddenly becomes much more acceptable. In my opinion this shows a lack of moral clarity on the part of the people who do this, either willingly or not, since it shows that the reason they were opposed to racism was only because of the social prohibition to whatever was thought to be racist, not to the act of racial prejudice itself.
Excellent point. Racism and sexism are big ideas that operate on more than one level. Thanks for the reminder that I was thinking about it a narrow way.
When you are basing your prejudice on the color of one's skin it's racism. As it relates to hiring, it's unconstitutional and illegal in the US. People say "cultural fit" when it means they are discriminating based on age, sex, race, religion, personal beliefs or behavior that have nothing to do with being qualified to perform the work, which is what equal opportunity laws were established to prevent.
I think there's a very big difference between being biased against race or gender and being biased against someone's work history.
The whole point of interviewing and reading resumes is to filter people out (or in) based on their experience. If recruiters start tossing out resumes because they mention Uber that's not "discrimination" in any powerful sense; it's simply caution in the light of recent events.
If it's about work history, then why mention that "even young, white, physically fit dudes" still "deserve the benefit of the doubt" if they "previously worked at Uber"?
If someone reads a resume from a former Uber employee, and the evaluation process includes well, his parents came from Korea and he doesn't lift weights, so..., is that really a good thing?
At no point has anyone ever suggested white male developers will find it harder to get jobs because of their colour or gender. Refusing to employ a white male developer because they worked at Uber is not racist or sexist. It's "Uberist", but that's no different to being "Googleist" or "IBMist". Hiring managers are allowed to think people who worked in those cultures might have learnt things that make them a bad hire. To be honest, that's the hiring manager's job.
I've said this on HN before - if you work for Uber and you're worried about it becoming toxic to your future career, speak up when you see the sort of behaviour other companies think make you a risky hire. You're perfectly placed to stop the problem.
Speak up wherever you work. This problem isn't limited to Uber.
You're asking me to experience something I can't experience and have empathy for that experience. I do have empathy. That's all I can have. Using the fact that I can't experience something as a justification to be racist and sexist is disgusting, though. Just because a group of people are "in power" doesn't excuse racism or sexism. If I move to Japan am I allowed to be casually racist towards Japanese people since they are in power and the majority there?
Not to mention that I can't help my skin color, or gender. I didn't choose these things, nor do I have any individual say in the institutional racism that has persisted in the United States over the last few hundred years. I can keep being myself, and not being racist or sexist, and call out anybody who is being racist and sexist as being wrong, but that's it. Regardless, that doesn't excuse being racist/sexist toward white men. Over time demographics are going to change. Eventually, the United States will be more multi-ethnic than perhaps any country in history. When this happens, casual racism from times like these can lead to actual racism and bigotry later. You can't tolerate it anywhere, or it will grow like a virus and infect the minds of people for generations.
Culture shapes how individuals behave, and people will change to accommodate new cultures. They might come in with bad habits, but the only reason I would look at their last company's behavior was if that person had been their early or high enough to shape that culture.
One really good point in this thread is that people leave companies for cultural reasons as well as professional ones. Blackballing ex-Uber employees hits not only the people who created that culture but also people who had the integrity to leave because of that culture, who are presumably quite good candidates (culturally).
So yeah, I can't really imagine applying that judgement to people who never had the time/position to shape the culture.
> “To be perfectly honest, I don’t want to work with someone who did well in that environment,” he said. “If you did well in that environment upholding those values, I probably don’t want to work with you.”
My faith in humanity has been instantly restored by 10% :)
I'm being contacted around 3 times a day for the last couple of weeks from a laundry list of companies so I don't think the article is true. Not all orgs at uber have/had a bad culture and the engineering teams are fantastic. Many people love working at Uber, but clearly something needs to change, and they are, for the better.
Oh, they know people are on the market. That's the vultures circling. They also know they need to be on the lookout to disqualify you if you exhibit bad behavior, so they're going to be very picky in the hiring.
Rooting out assholes in interviews is even harder and less reliable than evaluating programmers with whiteboard interviews. The SVP from Google passed an extensive due diligence check, and some of the high performer assholes that got fired hid themselves almost perfectly. Hopefully this environment is over at this point but I'm readying my resume just in case.
Given that key HR people at Uber come from Google, is it possible that Uber senior management actually knew about the issues surrounding their star SVP hire from Google when they hired him and were OK with it until reporters were tipped off due to current events and they started sniffing around? I am a little dubious of Uber's narrative that they first found out about this from reporters and fired him soon after.
Every asshole I've ever known in tech got flagged by an interviewer during the hiring process, but the people making the hiring decision ignored the feedback. Often the person doing the flagging was female, or the hiring manager was desperate for a body, or it was otherwise easy for them to justify their decision to themselves. And in every case it wound up costing the company other, productive employees and millions of dollars.
It's very easy for assholes to 'hide' their assholishness if the people with power aren't looking for it, and won't listen to the people who see it. However, even people like that are now on notice that Uber employees are tainted.
Having worked at companies with varying degrees of "hustle" culture, I have to say I prefer (and I know others who prefer) the hustle, the energy, the sense of urgency, the culture of always being present and checked in. If you've got in-born hustle, it's tough to work around people without it. Once lack of hustle takes hold, it spreads like a virus through a company, and soon everyone comes down with this "eh, we can always do it later" attitude about everything. People start not taking deadlines seriously, start worrying more about taking time to build consensus rather than being quick and decisive. Roll in late to meetings, etc. You can even see it watching foot traffic--non-hustlers physically walk slower through the halls. Companies that hustle aren't for everyone but let's not condemn it. It's good to have a variety of work cultures available because different personalities work better in different environments.
Note the above rant doesn't excuse illegal or discriminatory behavior. I'm just addressing the simplistic "hustle = bad" argument.
"...the culture of always being present and checked in..."
So people who like to stop working (you know, weekends, nights, etc.) need not apply? How did the world ever progress when we had companies willing to quit bugging people with inane busywork? So much of "hustle" is "look at me I'm emailing at 9:30 PM I must be super dedicated!"
"eh, we can always do it later" - I think this is what some people hear when somebody who's played the game before says "we can take the time to do it right" - they know that in the long run you get a better product and they won't be stuck issuing hotfixes at 2 AM. Sometimes you need to get to MVP quick, true, but sometimes the arbitrary deadline that a dudebro pulled out of their ass is just that.
You're misunderstanding hustle with commitment and energy. See, hustle is urgency for sake of urgency at the expense of everything, including breaking rules and social values.
Going without consensus is also one way companies (esp. small ones) implode or do unethical and illegal things.
What is more, this hustling approach discounts brand perception and PR. We see the effects. You may be fast, but if you damage your brand badly enough in the process you might have as well not have done anything.
Unfortunately, we don't get to choose whether or not a word has a negative connotation. "Hustle" suggests duplicity, using people and gaming the system for selfish benefit.
I don't think the little league baseball coach encouraging his team to "let's hustle out there guys!" is being duplicitous. It's a shame the word has multiple meanings and that the one with the negative connotation is the one that people always think of.
You have a lot of value judgements here that roughly equate hustling with professionalism and hard work. I am always early to meetings, I walk quickly (it's the New York / New Englander in me), and I will work all night rather than miss a deadline. I also work 40 hours a week as much as possible, and push back against artificial urgency. Am I a 'hustler' by your definition?
I'd say yes, especially if you're doing it even when you don't have to. Hustle is more than just professionalism and hard work--It's about having a "winning" mindset rather than a "succeeding" mindset. I guess it's harder to explain than I initially thought.
Blah - seems like a sensationalist clickbait article, just cashing in on the current media cycle.
I'm honestly more shocked at the myopic discussion in this thread, quite lacking in understanding the range of motivations of people who work there. I'm a long-time engineering employee, and seen a lot of ups and downs. To build a service that was used by a few thousand in one city to millions all over the world has been one of the most exciting jobs I've had, with great feats of engineering and operational execution. Numbers don't lie that we've built a reliable service - the negative media cycles don't hurt the business. There have been a ton of growing pains, with a lot of agenda-driven empire builders, bro-ey-ness, and general lack of careful cultural development that have contributed to the current situation, and left quite a few rankled employees in its wake. Whether it will come out strong from this situation is up to the strength of the leadership, and we'll see what the remedy holds.
FWIW, I have seen a huge uptick in recruiter inbounds in the last few weeks (understandably), with all the best names Facebook, Google, Amazon and Tesla on the list.
I don't think everybody that works at Uber joined because of their hustle culture, was part of that while working there or even knew about it while they worked there. I've seen many companies in my life and I was always amazed about some of the stories I heard at the water cooler about people I'd never expect in places I never expected.
If you're not part of the water cooler circle, focus on your work and the problems you are solving and have a nice bunch of direct colleagues and a manager that's not a big jerk (to you and anybody you see him/her interact with at least) you really might be surprised about hearing this stuff.
If you join Uber in 2017 or later then I feel you might deserve a stigma. But somebody hacking on the API 10 hours per day and minding his own business? Not so much.
Befitting of Uber, they stole the "Uber way" and called it their own
"Develop an incomplete solution and beat them to the market" is, of course, the Google Way, the Microsoft way, the Bell Labs way, the IBM way, ..."
Time to market is important.
“A lot of them have told me that they’re having a hard time finding something new.”
I'm not convinced that this is because they are tained by Uber. It could be that the property "having worked at Uber" carries a statistical bias with "hard to employ elsewhere" simply because perhaps Uber was blindly on-boarding toms, dicks and harriets off the street. (Maybe the way they get drivers at the bottom of the org chart permeates how they staff the rest of it.)
There's nothing wrong with your reasoning, it's just called 'painting an entire group for the sins of some subset". Or in other words, it means you're prejudiced against Uber employees.
Are you saying we shouldn't engage in this kind of reasoning because of the words used to describe it? Shouldn't reasoning be used based on its ability to model the world accurately?
If the above reasoning is prejudice, does that make prejudice a good thing?
The fault is simple - when dealing with a person, treat them for what they are, not for what your own preconceived notions tell you. Even statistically justified prejudices are unfair.
Statistically some ethnic groups are more likely to have a criminal record. Don't just assume - go ahead and check.
Is it more effort? Yes. That's why we call it "the right thing to do" and not "the convenient thing to do".
This is simple to deal with. Uber has picked up a 'roguish' reputation.
This is how it plays out. In an year or 2 'tainted' management is ejected replaced by new management with folks who have the right reputation and say all the right things. They can then move into respectable territory pretty quickly.
For now it suits the decision makers to play this out to their maximum advantage.
The "black mark" certainly doesn't apply to all employees. As one of the recruiters indicated, Uber in the work history might prompt pointed behavioral questioning of candidates.
I suspect it might be more of an issue for high-level execs and possibly project/program managers, but you have to screen for assholery for those titles regardless of where they come from.
I find myself "bemused" how while Uber was playing fast and loose with all kinds of regulations they were just good buys disrupting a rotten old boys system.
But now that accusations of sexual harassment at the office has been aired, they are suddenly "unclean".
Almost makes one wonder if the whole "feminism/women's rights" terminology has been hijacked and weaponized by some entity that could not care one bit about actual women, but are using the terms and methods for social assassination objectives.
It's amazing how much circle jerk around this is happening on HN, which usually holds reasonably cold and rational views. I'm not saying that Uber is doing good things but it definitely feels like an organized campaign that successfully snowballed.
I don't think it's organized. I've seen otherwise benign organizations and individuals (I'm not saying Uber is benign) dragged through the mud and later vindicated.
Many different publications pile on to vulnerable targets in order to catch up with reader interest. See Fatty Arbuckle, Lindy Chamberlain.
30 years ago these same aholes would've gone to Wall Street. Now they go to Silicon Valley Instead. No surprise that some companies get infected with them as a result.
That's a pretty gross generalisation based on one company. There are definitely a few cases but the industry as a whole isn't comparable to Wall Street by any means.
And why do you suppose that Silicon Valley will not crash the economy? It's not implausible, with the arrival of increased automation, self-driving cars, etc. that the economy will at least take a major hit as a result of Silicon Valley innovation. And I'll wager a lot of the Valley will get very rich off it, too - just like Wall Street.
Back in 2000, we had an asset bubble, primarily in tech stocks but also in stocks generally. But the bubble was not primarily debt-fuelled (Thank you, post-great-depression limits on margin loans!); when in burst, it had no direct, lasting consequences. Sure, a lot of people felt less wealthy, which caused a bit of a general slowdown, but the economy recovered fairly quickly.
In 2007, we had an asset bubble in the housing market, fuelled primarily by consumer debt. When the bubble started bursting, consumers stopped being able to get big loans, meaning they couldn't buy at those prices and couldn't refinance their existing huge loans. Housing prices dropped, meaning even fewer loans, more foreclosures, more houses on the market and lower prices. Because consumer debt was also financing the rest of the economy, the collapse of that and the ensuing pessimism put the binders on the whole economy, hard.
In the midst of this, the institutions that had been making the loans discovered that the paper they had been shuffling around was actually worthless, leaving them with many debts and few assets. The bailouts were intended to do two things:
1. Improve the balance sheets of the financial institutions, preventing them from going bankrupt and falling over like a sack of doorknobs. (IMO, this was ultimately both good and bad. Uncontrolled collapse would have been bad, but a restructuring and breakup of those firms is still necessary or it's going to happen again.)
2. Increase the money supply, through the banks-make-loans-loans-go-into-accounts-banks-make-loans cycle. This was necessary to avoid deflation and support the overall economy. (Want to shoot an economy in the head? Think inflation is bad? Check out deflation.) Unfortunately, banks weren't making loans, so that didn't happen. Modern economic theory at its finest, ladies and gentlemen. Oopsie.
I maintain that the big, primary difference is the amount of leverage applied on the downside.
Hurling epithets at other users is. It's not like this is hard to understand. You can't argue this way on this site regardless of how right your views are.
I might have been wrong, but it's neither hard to understand the double standards HN/SV and the general consensus of left have. It's so bad that a guy who has thought of himself as liberal (or whatever you Americans like to call it), is happy to be called an old Fox News Russian Agent conservative racist homophobe idiot uneducated, because all these words have lost the meaning.
You can see from my profile I've been a good long-standing citizen of HN. Instead of banning me, maybe you should have banned the parent for hate speech. But you lack the balls for it.
It's pretty clear by now -- anyone can be as misogynist or as racist as he wants to be around here, or spew fake news and conspiracy theories with Putinesque proficiency. But one hint of calling a spade a spade and dang waves the banhammer in your face.
YC may disguise themselves in the clothes of progress occasionally, but fundamentally, they worship the dollar above all else, just like any other banker.
That's not true. What's true is that we try hard to be even-handed. That means that when you post abusively, you're subject to the rules the same as other people are, regardless of the politics you're posting for or against. I'd never claim that we do that perfectly or are unbiased—we're human, so that can't be true—but we work hard at it and are fine with admitting mistakes and correcting them.
I don't see a mistake here though. You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle, posting uncvilly, and abusing the site in other ways. Asking you to stop is not a political call, nor a hard one. It would be the same if your views were the opposite.
The world is political and ideological battle. Ideas will win and ideas will lose. People will win elections and people will lose elections. Technology shapes society, and who technology deems the winners and losers is political, both in the concern of tech-as-a-business and tech-as-a-product, as much as you try to pretend you're above it.
When you say you try to be "even-handed", what you are enforcing is "all points of view carry equal weight, regardless of concerns of ethics or truth". That YC can say "Fake news is a serious problem we would like to solve" while at the same time saying "We value civility over truth" is a political statement, and a damaging one.
Yes, I know the argument and partly agree with it, and it doesn't come close to justifying the basic abuses we're talking about here. Otherwise we would not bother asking users to be civil at all, and HN would be taken over completely by flamewars.
> "We value civility over truth"
Nobody said that. On HN, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not—especially not to make them look bad. Since you care about truth, that shouldn't be hard.
Your decision yesterday to kill my comment, and not kill the parent comment, was this in action. Apologies for the quotation marks.
I was intentionally (and, if you look at my posting history, non-characteristally) violating the guidelines so that you would pay attention to things. If there was was a feature in here to say "raise this comment to your attention" that didn't involve running off a string of four-letter-words, I would gladly have used it instead of doing what I did.
Please don't, regardless of how correct your views are or how righteous your sympathies. It breaks the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and as sillysaurus3 pointed out, makes the thread obviously worse.
The scale of this industry is substantial. It's doing at least $1.2 billion a year in income, and that's the part that pays taxes in Israel. This has been going on for almost a decade, and the scam was growing rapidly.
Then, in 2016, the jaws began to close. The US CFTC won a big case against the biggest binary option firm in Israel, Banc de Binary. They had to pay back everybody who lost money and pay huge damages. (Banc de Binary once offered $10,000 to anyone who would remove that info from their Wikipedia entry. That attempt backfired, badly.) Then there was a 15-part expose in the Times of Israel, titled "The Wolves of Tel Aviv".[1] Now, finally, there are more investigations and a bill to make it illegal to run this scam out of Israel. Banc De Binary ceased operation a few weeks ago. (Or at least they disappeared, removing their sign from the Banc De Binary Tower.) At least four other binary option "brokers" have gone out of business in recent weeks.
As a result, there are lots of layoffs. Scamming people from a phone bank was a good-paying job. The companies liked to hire recent immigrants to Israel who could speak the languages of their target countries fluently. English and Arabic were the most popular languages. A lobbyist for the binary option industry, testifying before a committee of the Knesset, claimed that there are 20,000 people employed in binary options in Israel, and 60,000 people indirectly. "You see the building boom right now in Tel Aviv? Well, you can just say goodbye to that because most skyscrapers in Tel Aviv will be empty. There will be no one to fill them up." There's even a claim from the binary option industry that shutting down this scam will increase terrorism, because it will take away the income of thousands of Arabs.
So 20,000 scammers are becoming unemployed, in a city of only 400,000 people. A former employee of a binary option company faces a far worse black mark than being from Uber. The binary option salespeople are full time con artists. Nobody legit in finance is going to hire them. Getting any legit job will be tough.
(World's smallest violin plays.)
[1] http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-...