from Hacker News

The Holder Report on Uber

by sunils34 on 6/13/17, 5:33 PM with 213 comments

  • by dragonwriter on 6/13/17, 7:19 PM

    This is not the Holder (well, Covington would be more accurate) Report. The Introduction to this document makes reference to report Covington prepared for and presented to the Special Committee of Uber's board, and to the fact that the full board adopted all of the recommendations in that report.

    Beyond the Introduction, this seems to just be the recommendations from the Covington report; the full report (per the Introduction ) was to cover “(1) Uber’s workplace environment as it related to the allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in Ms. Fowler’s post; (2) whether the company’s policies and practices were sufficient to prevent and properly address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in the workplace; and (3) what steps Uber could take to ensure that its commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace was reflected not only in the company’s policies but made real in the experiences of each of Uber’s employees.”

    This document only includes the part addressing (3), which implicitly indicates that the bottom line conclusion on (2) was “no”, but doesn't really provide any clear information on (1).

  • by killjoywashere on 6/13/17, 7:55 PM

    Every new grad: read this. Then file it away and review it as soon as you have people reporting to you. This should be required reading for every start-up founder and every manager at every mid-size and large org, and every person who criticizes the decisions of those people or hopes to be in those positions. Which means every creative, every knowledge worker, engineer, designer, lawyer, physician, all of them. And therefore, almost without exception, everyone reading this comment.

    Edit: This is the executive symmary. It contains a lot of what to do. Going forward, you don't need to know so much how Uber got into the mess they're in. You need to know how to stay out of similar messes. This is a good plan for how to stay out of such messes.

  • by paulsutter on 6/13/17, 6:21 PM

    The meat of the document is missing. It states the situation that triggered the investigation, describes the process followed, and gives the recommendations.

    But it doesn't tell us what they learned through the process.

  • by terryjsmith on 6/13/17, 6:19 PM

    While there are some concrete next steps in here (hire a COO, management training, HR training, the "Rooney Rule"), what is the goal and how do these steps connect to it? As far as the harassment stuff, I think the solution is clear: have a zero tolerance policy and enforce it. But it otherwise says the words "inclusion" and "diversity" a lot, but never really connects those words to achievable outcomes and seems superficial. Maybe the end result is to restore Uber's image - in which case doing those things makes sense - but without any goal posts or authority, many of these recommendations seem to fall short.

  • by wonder_bread on 6/13/17, 7:37 PM

    My eyes are bleeding from all the bureaucratic jargon. "Special Committee", "Oversight Committee", "Independent Committee" for the promotions process, checklists for alcohol consumption, human resources training, etc. I dearly hope it doesn't take this many layers of control within a company to ensure a livable atmosphere for its employees.

  • by cozzyd on 6/13/17, 6:26 PM

    I especially like:

    "Uber should consider moving the catered dinner it offers to a time when this benefit can be utilized by a broader group of employees, including employees who have spouses or families waiting for them at home, and that signals an earlier end to the work day."

    Note to Linux users: this PDF looks terrible without msttcorefonts installed. I guess MS Word neglects to embed fonts? Also, as someone who is not used to seeing documents generated by MS Word, I'm surprised at how bad the typography is in general (although maybe this due to user error...for example it looks like hyphenation might be disabled.)

  • by aemachado94 on 6/13/17, 6:48 PM

    Feels like Uber just paid a load of money to get patronized by a well-respected official. Nothing(as far as this public version suggests) in this document should be surprising to a growing company. "You mean if we create a patriarchal company culture that preys on personal weaknesses and demeans women and minorities we're going to have a bad public image? Gee, who would've thought!"

  • by sjbase on 6/13/17, 6:09 PM

  • by mandevil on 6/13/17, 9:44 PM

    According to https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/13... One of the Uber board members made a misogynist joke during the company-wide meeting explaining how Uber was going to fix its culture. This is... special.

  • by boxcardavin on 6/13/17, 6:16 PM

    I think this whole Uber situation is a good reminder to the valley that the "No Assholes" rule is still a good policy.

  • by favorited on 6/13/17, 10:20 PM

    According to Yahoo reporting[1], a board member made a sexist joke at their all-hands meeting to address this report today.

    Huffington: There’s a lot of data that shows when there’s one woman on the board, it’s much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board

    Bonderman: Actually what it shows is it’s much likely to be more talking

    What a garbage fire.

    [1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inside-ubers-hands-meeting-tr...

  • by sywan on 6/13/17, 9:58 PM

    While some of the points in the report are legit, I feel most of the content is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any other tech firms and it will probably still work.

    I genuinely believe that people work hard because they believe what they do has a meaning, not because the company serves free dinner/beer/water at 7pm or 8:15pm. I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup like a non-profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered anything, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.

  • by jstewartmobile on 6/13/17, 8:46 PM

    This smells a lot like a pentesting report: pay people a lot of money to make a report, persevere with current bad practices, then when litigation comes up say "Hey, we took this seriously. Look at all the money we spent on this report!"

  • by sywan on 6/13/17, 9:55 PM

    While some of the points in the report are legit, I feel most of the content is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any other tech firms and it will probably still work.

    I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup as a non-profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered dinner, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during the weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.

  • by tmh79 on 6/13/17, 6:16 PM

    Very interesting recommendations, but no mention of the CTO, Thuan, who was called out by Fowler herself in her blog post.

  • by ryanmarsh on 6/13/17, 8:24 PM

    > Uber should establish key metrics to which its leaders will be held accountable in the performance review process. This would include, for example, metrics that are tied to improving diversity, responsiveness to employee complaints, employee satisfaction, and compliance.

    Every metric has the power for evil. This will be gamed, simply by measuring these things behaviour will be affected in unpredictable ways. I understand the challenge they're up against but I absolutely cringe at turning some of these subjective items into metrics.

  • by jonstewart on 6/13/17, 7:01 PM

    Blind Résumé Review stands out.

  • by Cyclone_ on 6/13/17, 11:19 PM

    Don't think for a second that these are isolated incidents. These things happen all the time, it just so happened that people like Susan Fowler fought back. I've seen these things happen constantly.

  • by netvarun on 6/13/17, 6:46 PM

    Random thought: Marissa Mayer (who hacker news informs me, just quit her previous job) could potentially be their COO

  • by misterbowfinger on 6/13/17, 7:07 PM

    I'm mostly unimpressed. Most of the suggestions are just process changes, which often just obfuscate organizational issues and cripple performance. The only value is the signal it sends to employees that affect the culture negatively.

    The most substantive recommendation, IMO, is that they suggest a COO that controls most of the day-to-day. It's a clear move to reduce the CEO's power, and most likely a path to remove the CEO in the future unless the CEO regains power, which is unlikely.

  • by 1dundundun on 6/14/17, 6:58 PM

    Bottom line is this...

    At some point EARLY on, you're going to want to put some thought into casting a wider net for talent and wrapping your heads around the fact that people from different (age, gender, racial, ability, socioeconomic) backgrounds can be a strategic asset to developing a world class orgs.

    Throw away the notion of cultural fit where you assume people have to like what you like and think how you think to "fit in". That's bullshit and extremely limiting.

    Build an environment where everyone feels whole and contributes.

    You WILL sacrifice some of the benefits of that frat boys club environment a lot of early stage startups have.

    You will gain the type of insight that will allow you to navigate an increasingly divese workforce and (US and global) consumer base.

    Be willing to make mistakes. It's a clumsy process.

    Uber is going to have a hell of a hard time retrofitting a less toxic culture and the numerous leaks we're seeing points to an employee base that's begging for change.

    Successful high growth orgs of tomorrow are gonna be the ones stumbling towards getting this shit right today.

  • by sbarre on 6/13/17, 6:15 PM

    So is this the full report, or an abridged version for public consumption (as was indicated might be released a few days ago)?

  • by blacksqr on 6/14/17, 12:25 AM

    So Mr. Holder, were you able to confirm the veracity of Susan Fowler's descriptions of her experiences at Uber?

    Mr. Holder?

    Is this thing on?

  • by alanh on 6/13/17, 9:57 PM

    Anyone have plain text or HTML of this content? Update: https://pastebin.com/L0Qf7Ddp

  • by Tycho on 6/13/17, 11:09 PM

    I suspect Uber has a Hudsucker Proxy situation going on.

  • by dingdongding on 6/13/17, 6:26 PM

    TLDR version. Anyone?

  • by thogenhaven on 6/13/17, 6:18 PM

    If someone can write 13 pages in bullet forms about things you need to change, you're not doing your job very well...

  • by ProAm on 6/13/17, 6:19 PM

    So long Travis.