Uber blocks employees at work from chatting on Blind App(businessinsider.com) |
Uber blocks employees at work from chatting on Blind App(businessinsider.com) |
There's a lot of problems at the company and it's been a difficult week for many of us here. Not having access to blind is not one of them.
https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/835193441814392833
I'm curious though, what tipped her off? While I've worked at tech start-ups before and can believe all the behavior she outlined (because I've seen similar things myself, it's very believable) it still bothers me to continue to take someone's word at face value. I mean I do, I would trust what she says over Uber any day, but I wish more of this type of information was verifiable.
Streisand Effect in 3... 2... 1...
It's 2017. Have we really not learned this lesson yet?
(You shouldn't use corporate wifi for a personal phone anyway)
It's literally an admission that what is written on Blind is actually true and leadership is in panic mode. The right response was to dismiss it all as gossip and act nonchalant; moving from the "laugh at you" step to the "fight you" step means they're on their way to defeat.
(working at a startup so can't just sign up and see it myself...)
MS was amongst the first, or perhaps the first, Blind forum. It started off as a successor to MiniMSFT so people used it to compare comp (salaries, raises, bonuses, stock awards) since then it's massively expanded into other companies all with their own private forums, there are also forums visible to everyone.
The most popular thread in the shared Tech industry forum is "What is your age and base salary?" and it makes for some soul-crushing reading (e.g. late-20s kids at Uber SF with $200k base, $400k stock).
Back on the MS forum, it's usually layoff rumours (one regular poster who comments on layoff rumour threads claims to be in HR), people asking how to get VSA severance, and people complaining about why Skype, OneDrive and SharePoint are so terrible.
I'm glad that people at MS themselves complain about how awful Skype has become. This proves that there are still sane people over there, for a moment I thought that me and my colleagues who still rely on Skype (Slack has never caught on with us) are not paranoid when we complain among ourselves about it.
(if you do find any vulnerabilities you should of course report them responsibly)
And god beware they start asking what Blinds business model is going to be!
It should be assumed as a given that any company or hotel wifi network is monitored and HTTPS is quite possibly is MITMed.
This doesn't tell you the content but if an employee uses the app. Make of this what you want but given Uber's previous actions I don't think they would just ignore this.
...
>And over 2,000 Uber employees in total use Blind, says Blind's head of operations Alex Shin.
Jebediah O. Springfield! As the "head of operations" at an "anonymous chat app" you have ONE JOB, Alex Shin! And you just blew it.
(To be explicit, I am saying Alex is way out of line for disclosing this information. An anonymous app should not have such information revealed even in the aggregrate - you can see what just happened as a result. Instead his public, and private, statements should have been "We do not disclose - confirm or deny - any users who may or may not use Blind, their affiliations or locations.")
In point of fact I do agree with sharing this news, however it should be presented disclosing as little information about employees as possible. Plus the app isn't doing a very good job if its traffic is easily distinguishable from other apps' traffic (technically making it possible for Uber to take the actions we've just read about, or directly monitor based on telephone MAC addresses, the exact employees using the app and the timing of their doing so).
But there's not so much that can be done about that. However, revealing the number of users at a company is not information that should be given out, in my opinion.
It appears that one has to register using a corporate email address, so it's trivial to figure out which employees are using this service.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-investi...
They did the same to intimidate journalists:
http://fortune.com/2014/11/18/uber-rides-into-new-pr-storm-o...
> They previously (and probably illegally) hired a private intelligence firm to dig up dirt on their opponents in a court battle
What was done there seems obviously inappropriate. It's unclear to what degree the intent was (I certainly understand wanting context). The situation was obviously very different.
> They did the same to intimidate journalists
Maybe. On the other hand: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicole-campbell/what-was-said-... And even in the Ben Smith's account they didn't actually do it.
And an editorial in HuffPo from someone who pals around with the person engaging in the abusive behaviour is a pretty weak defense. Especially since they did a similar thing before:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/19/uber-inve...
I like to think I did my part - I made small UI/UX improvements that I snuck into my official feature work (it all passed peer-review and testing, don't worry) - things like bad margins/padding around controls, something with the wrong color scheme, etc.
If an employer wants to issue me a company phone, that's fine. If an employer wants to enable IMAP, that's fine. Otherwise, I won't have mobile access to email, because the risk is unacceptable. And if that's not fine - well, it's been great talking with you, and I appreciate your time, but I'm afraid this position doesn't seem like a good fit after all.
There are various third party applications that will allow you to use Exchange protocols without the OS integration: they'll let the Exchange server admins wipe the application's container/data rather than the entire phone. I think it's a much fairer implementation.
Source : I have implemented this protocol.
So I guess I can understand not trusting the IT department but I worry very little about losing the data on the device.
Of course if you're not sold on the cloud-backed model because of privacy concerns and you prefer treating your device itself as a source of truth and a secure store then I can understand the attitude.
They've dug up dirt on ex employees making public accusations like this? I haven't seen any claims to that effect. As I said, I think it's unlikely because I don't think the people involved are that evil, and I am confident that they are not that stupid. If I'm proven wrong, I'll be loud about it and I'll be working some place else.
> And an editorial in HuffPo from someone who pals around with the person engaging in the abusive behaviour is a pretty weak defense.
It's not decisive. I didn't present it as such. It's still the case that even the original source describes someone in a role that doesn't deal with the press ranting about how Uber could do something. Even if we take it on face value that's a far cry from establishing that they did it, as was your assertion.
> Especially since they did a similar thing before:
This is the first I've heard of that event. Obviously, that's an inappropriate use of PII, at least. It's entirely unclear from the article whether the list "sent to make a point" was meant as a threat of disclosure or to point at some specific discrepancy between the data and the reporting. The former would be similar. The latter, a different issue.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/13/uber-empl...
-your bar for skepticism/reproach is only cleared with proof that they've done the exact same thing before, telegraphing their intentions along the way?
Ok.
>This seems to be Uber's modus operandi every single time they're in trouble and it almost always seems to backfire on them, PR wise.
From attending all hands meetings I get the sense TK has a victim mentality and sees himself doing no wrong or Uber doing no wrong.
Since we're clearly not wrong, it has to be the critic, right? /S
To be fair, we do get some BS scandals related to surge (they turned off surge for natural disasters! They're profiting off us! They left it on, they're profiting off our misery!) but almost all of our scandals are self inflicted.
>I'm curious though, what tipped her off?
I'd wager an employee.
Employees are very angry now at leadership, and in our last few all hands / CTO speaking to everyone (something they put together just for this week I think) people questioned publicly what's been questioned in the shadows for a while.
For instance, Uber has a list of stupid "cultural values" that include values like "always be hustling" (yes, it's a direct quote) and I've been in private conversations with people who find these values obnoxious and poorly written. Never raised to management though.
But this all hands people threw these bullshit values at TK and Thuan and pointed out how bad they are, including this specific "always be hustling" value. The questioner even referenced Zootopia ("It's called a hustle, sweetheart") to skewer it.
Also it was pointed out how our perf review process doesn't reward collaboration between teams at all (hence the politicking).
Felt almost like a press conference with ace reporters fighting against an unprepared, incompetent politician. Our CTO even cried, which was a little dramatic for me.
Happy to see I'm not the only angry employee.
The idea sounds nice, but it ends up just reinforcing cronyism. If you belong to the right in-group, usually stratified along some social injustice, you'll display the merits that in-group wants.
I would give Uber a fair 50% chance unless there is strong evidence on the table.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/former-uber-worker-cl...
Solving underrepresentation issues is, in my opinion, more about changing the perception of the industry for those poorly represented groups and performing outreach at younger ages, rather than having companies hire disproportionately more women or people of colour so that their employees look more diverse. That doesn't really solve anything.
A simple thing you can do is publicly state, "we encourage women and other minorities to apply". And that's all. You encourage them. You don't have to give them any preferential treatment to pad your numbers (and I don't think anyone ever really does that, but a lot of people seem to be afraid that it happens). You just have to explicitly direct your invitation to them. That's enough to increase your hiring pool and give your company culture a nudge in the right direction. If you object to the alleged benefits of having a diverse staff, I can't imagine you would object to attracting more people to apply who otherwise wouldn't.
A further point I want to emphasise: what is merit? Who decides what is merit? If you think being nice to others has no merit (or is not "good performance"), then you may end up hiring toxic employees like Fowler's sexual harasser and then keep him around because of your merit metric. This will end up costing you good employees like Fowler.
I agree with your suggestion that encouraging women and minorities to apply, and ensuring that one's company culture is inclusive, is a good start. However, this doesn't really help with the core issue, which is that the number of women and minorities getting into the field in the first place is disproportionately low to their demographic representation. I'm not well-positioned to suggest why that is, being a white man myself, but until the underlying issues are solved, decrying meritocracy as promoting white men over other candidates is not a valid criticism.
Merit is for each company to decide for itself. I'm sure there are many companies, Uber included, that consider themselves a meritocracy but the way they measure individual merit just leads to toxic culture. Fowler made mention of a number of bad actors who were not fired because they were high-performers in the company's eyes - and this is a valid concern for companies that aim to be purely numbers-based in their evaluations. Personally, I'd say that there has to be a baseline of decency for an employee to be valuable at all, and that how someone interacts with others should be considered as a metric for their individual merit. Quantifying that, however, is a whole 'nother question.
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
Nothing to do (directly) with underrepresentation or "hiring lower-performing females".
You suggested "if the majority of developers are mal, then a majority of high-performing developers will also be male". So far so good. Then you made the non sequitur jump to "Hiring lower-performing females to attempt to achieve balance does not fix the original issue". That's a straw man, nobody suggests that. You risk being perceived as creating an absurd hypothetical ("let's hire worse people for social justice reasons") just for the sake of winning the argument, or even believing this is the choice that's posited.
I think this is a recurring problem with these kinds of discussions, people tend to put forward very extreme views of reality where what'd be useful is to seek the middle ground, understand the problem, and then nudge a bit in the right direction.
Additionally, even the basic premise that we currently hire for merit is questionable. Of course everyone tries to hover the best and brightest, but it's easy to see see how a very homogeneous group like SV software devs might mistake group conformity for competence.
Not directly, but one of the main attempts to address a lack of diversity in tech seems to be diversity quotas, or companies actively looking to hire more women or POC. Diversity quotas directly cause the exact issue I quoted, where the ratios of allowed hires by social group does not match the ratio of applicants. Statistically speaking, that's equivalent to agreeing to hire less-qualified individuals. Attempts to specifically hire more women or POC through outreach might help an individual company, but it's a zero-sum game of multiple companies competing for the existing small pool of candidates.
> I think this is a recurring problem with these kinds of discussions, people tend to put forward very extreme views of reality where what'd be useful is to seek the middle ground, understand the problem, and then nudge a bit in the right direction.
I think part of the issue is that you immediately devolved into hyperbole about hiring "idiots". Hiring slightly-less-than-the-top-candidate developers is in no way comparable to hiring "idiots" and your suggestion that it is is only muddying the topic further.
> Additionally, even the basic premise that we currently hire for merit is questionable. Of course everyone tries to hover the best and brightest, but it's easy to see see how a very homogeneous group like SV software devs might mistake group conformity for competence.
Of course suggesting that hires are always for merit is questionable - it's more of an ideal to aim for than an actually achievable goal.
[citation required]. I haven't ever seen that.
> I think part of the issue is that you immediately devolved into hyperbole about hiring "idiots".
I did not, please check who you're quoting. Regardless, I think that's overphrasing it, but it's essentially the straw man you put out.