His first mistake was complaining to HR about another employee griefing him. HR is always going to consider the initial complainer as "the problem."
I can say this definitely isn't always true. In the companies I've worked at HR has always been extremely reasonable and cooperative with harassment claims. But corporate culture probably matters here, and I've never worked at a place like Uber.
That said, I would be curious to actual know the correspondence that was sent between the two. I can also say being a manager who has had to deal with a situation between two employees (more than once), they often both claim to be the one being harassed -- and usually even a little bit of digging reveals really clearly who the aggressor is.
My experience is also that HR is very reasonable and cooperative with harassment claims. But the thing is that when you have a legit harassment claim, the law is there to protect you. You could make things very expensive for the company in court, and so protecting the company does mean protecting you and treating you respectfully and cooperatively.
If HR investigates and finds you don't have a legit case and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you. Your judgment and account of the facts is questionable in that case, and you're a liability from the other side.
I don't know exactly what happened in this case, but in the harassment case I've had to handle as a manager, the (male) employee said that the (female) victim had initiated everything and had this weird fascination with him, while the paper trail that everybody could see clearly showed that he was both the instigator and the one behaving improperly. Projection is strong in cases like these. So it's entirely possible we're not getting the full story from this anonymous blog post.
I agree (although had interpreted the statement originally differently). Unfortunately, the part about "XYZ isn't there to protect you" applies to so much in life. Even police don't have a responsibility to you protect you (but just the public as a whole). The lesson from stuff like this is often to make sure your best interest are aligned with the most powerful and active stakeholder in the "room".
Relating it back to the story at hand, the blogpost's author would've done well to just disengage from the coworker who didn't like him, and also to not report them to HR. What I had to tell my report when HR got involved: "The right thing to do here was nothing."
That protects other employees. If you are instigator and then go to complain to HR trying to make them punish the victim, firing you protects everyone around you. And it protects the culture from becoming toxic.
HR can play negative role, but this scenario is not one of those.
Depends on the company, but HR (and some other functions) can be relatively low power and it frequently seems that the low power person is facilitating groups that are above them, which leads to them serving as a pillow for the higher powered person to abuse the medium powered one and let the low powered absorb the blame/blows. It's unfair in a certain way, but realistically I think the low powered one refusing (in spite of them having the most to lose) is kinda the main way to keep things from getting worse and so things get worse. They can refuse or they can not take the job or they can somehow not pass the high powered person's problem on to the medium powered one, but they're disincentivized. I can empathize with the situation and expect them to take the deal that enables the high powered ones to take advantage of others while still assigning blame for not fixing the little part they could fix. Fwiw, it's also true of most middle managers and PMs, though they might not technically be the lowest powered one in the triangle. If they don't stand up for the thing they say is ethical, then I think it's straightforward that they're a/the problem.
unions are counterproductive many times - they serve the interests (only temporarily) for the incumbents while failing to or ignoring the larger consequences like the whole company or industry declining.
i wonder if the HR cliche is similar.
But if your needs as an employee go against what is best for the company by costing money, productivity, or creating risk for bad publicity, or they go against high level managers or executives who hold outsized sway with HR, then it will be difficult for you to get help from them.
Yes. The employees. That's the point.
> while [...] ignoring the larger consequences like the whole company
Good. That is, again, the point - to advocate for the employees when their interests are in opposition to those of the company.
You say they're counterproductive - sounds like they're working exactly as intended.
it can lead to the whole company or industry to be destroyed, so while it may protect the specific incumbents it puts the whole industry/country in jeopardy. in aggregate these things can work against favour.
if everyone ends up doing this the system can't work
But their job is to protect the company. If you report behavior that presents a liability for the company, HR will take it seriously. I know people who've been fired through these processes.
What you shouldn't do is report frivolous complaints. A lot of people misunderstand HR the same way they misunderstand the legal system in America. They use it in place of having a grown-up conversation. Like judges, HR people will have little patience with matters that could've been resolved by putting on your big boy or big girl pants.
This is why, even when there are verbal instructions, politely request that they give you something in writing; you know, for your reference, just in case you forget ;-)
Did anybody read the linked fortune article about Uber ceo expecting people to work on weekends.
It has that paid PR post and satirical piece vibes at the same time. With words like "unparalleled work ethic" working on weekends, wisdom and the part about checking emails right after waking up at 5 in the morning, I was expecting it to wrap up with a hint of obvious sarcasm but sadly it never came.
I appreciate that this is the reality for many jobs with lower pay - especially retail and fast food. Software and software-adjacent jobs are not like that though. Professionals in this field have, for the past quarter century, had better opportunities. I understand it's a unique job market right now and people do what they must.
That said, we moved to Europe some years ago, so I have never really seen even a 6-digit salary in my life, even though I'm formally and practically qualified and have decades of experience. So there's that.
This kind of behaviour incentivises a kind of pick-me, I’m suffering the most for the shareholders type of behaviour.
How many Saturday emails really make a difference? The whole thing is a ruse.
And the fact this shithead is spouting his nonsense on Steven Bartlett’s asinine podcast surprises me not.
"Khosrowshahi says: Just work hard, and success will follow. "
...is hilarious for a company like Uber, where the whole point of the business model is to optimize away drivers income so much that they will always be on the edge of something very much else than success, no matter how hard they work!
I know someone suing their landlord and he had to find a lawyer 3 hours away because all the local lawyers work with this property management company.
What lawyer wants to have their pay limited thusly?
You can hire your own lawyer for the proceedings but no jackpot payouts in arbitration.
This shift happened 2022 ish.
Almost every tech company still uses them.
I will give some weight to the possibility that Uber HR are utterly disfunctional, but on balance I'm left with the impression there's more to this story than we're being told.
For example: they asked for guidance and then the very next thing is them being fired. How did they respond to the coworker? Something is off here - the coworker who had messaged him about non-work topics TWO days in a row - then immediately reported him for his reply. What?
Hence my megacorp's most recent CEO fired the CPO, and hired a long time former company employee with no HR background to go clean house of the infestation of Vice-Vice-Vice-Vice-Vice-Vice-Vice-Vice Presidents in HR.
Then once the BAD VP was fired the owner fired the HR VP and the the replacement was not a VP.
DirtyDeeds.DoneDirtCheap.
No shit
That said it's hard to gauge this story as it's a one sided affair, author maybe 100% in the right but that can't really be determined.
tldr: paywalls are allowed as long as they can be circumvented easily, eg via archive.ph or similar services
"Circumvented easily" is more nebulous than people give it credit for.
Regardless, in this instance it's someone's blog.