It was Lao Tzu who said that “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
In the case of complete and utter change reeling through Uber right now — culminating in the resignation of its once untouchable CEO Travis Kalanick — it turns out that it began with one of the most epic blog posts to be written about what happens when a hot company becomes hostage to its increasingly dysfunctional and toxic behaviors.
It was clear from the moment you read the 3,000-word post by former engineer Susan Fowler about her time at the car-hailing company that nothing was going to be the same. Titled simply, “Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber,” the essay deftly and surgically laid out the map that the media and others would use to prove to its out-to-lunch board and be waffling investors that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had to go.
In her account, Fowler was neither mean nor self-righteous, although in reading the story that she laid out about her horrible time there, it would have been completely fair for her to have taken that tone.
Consider what she started with:
After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. 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.
Oh no. No. No. That was my first reaction upon reading that, because I knew that it was just the beginning of a downward journey into the belly of the beast that we all knew — we knew — was there all along. It was a tale that could only be told by an insider, really, especially one who could render the horrible misbehaviors with a kind of cool efficiency that felt completely genuine.
And what a subject. Uber was the quintessence of the kinds of sexism and sexual harassment problems that pop up all over Silicon Valley all the time. There was all of it, concentrated: The unchecked arrogance, the fucked-up power dynamics in which the talented tech-holes always get a pass for their bad acts, the we’re-busy-so-we-can-ignore-the-basics attitude and, most of all, a culture ruled by the equivalent of badly raised boys who eschewed the kind of discipline and rigor that is the real requirement of success. Read more...
In the case of complete and utter change reeling through Uber right now — culminating in the resignation of its once untouchable CEO Travis Kalanick — it turns out that it began with one of the most epic blog posts to be written about what happens when a hot company becomes hostage to its increasingly dysfunctional and toxic behaviors.
It was clear from the moment you read the 3,000-word post by former engineer Susan Fowler about her time at the car-hailing company that nothing was going to be the same. Titled simply, “Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber,” the essay deftly and surgically laid out the map that the media and others would use to prove to its out-to-lunch board and be waffling investors that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had to go.
In her account, Fowler was neither mean nor self-righteous, although in reading the story that she laid out about her horrible time there, it would have been completely fair for her to have taken that tone.
Consider what she started with:
After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. 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.
Oh no. No. No. That was my first reaction upon reading that, because I knew that it was just the beginning of a downward journey into the belly of the beast that we all knew — we knew — was there all along. It was a tale that could only be told by an insider, really, especially one who could render the horrible misbehaviors with a kind of cool efficiency that felt completely genuine.
And what a subject. Uber was the quintessence of the kinds of sexism and sexual harassment problems that pop up all over Silicon Valley all the time. There was all of it, concentrated: The unchecked arrogance, the fucked-up power dynamics in which the talented tech-holes always get a pass for their bad acts, the we’re-busy-so-we-can-ignore-the-basics attitude and, most of all, a culture ruled by the equivalent of badly raised boys who eschewed the kind of discipline and rigor that is the real requirement of success. Read more...