by Isaac, Mike
“No, no, no,” Rigetti said. “I don’t use Uber.”
Fowler was confused. She was, after all, an Uber employee.
Rigetti said all the negativity around the company bothered him; as an entrepreneur running his own startup, he didn’t like Uber and chose not to support it. Rigetti swore off using the app as a result.
It was an omen Fowler would remember later.
After two weeks of introductory training, Susan Fowler began work with her new team in December 2015. That same day she received a string of chat messages from her manager.
Fowler was still riding the new-hire high. She got to pick the team she wanted to work with, a pleasant surprise. Site reliability engineers, SREs, played a crucial role at Uber. They kept the platform up and running—hence the job title. At companies like Facebook or Twitter, SREs worked to keep the service online 24/7 so that people could post status updates or tweets whenever they wanted. For Uber, SREs were focused on keeping the hundreds of thousands of drivers working for the service connected at all times. SREs were told even a few minutes of downtime could threaten Uber’s very existence; if riders got frustrated they would choose another service. The work of keeping Uber online thrilled Fowler.
Some of Uber’s worst crises fell upon the shoulders of harried SREs. Halloween night in 2014 was a date scarred into the minds of Uber employees: The company’s supply and demand system went down that evening, wildly overcharging people on one of the busiest Uber nights of the year. The next morning, angry riders woke up to Uber bills as high as $360 in their inboxes.
And then, on the first day with her important new team, her manager started hitting on her. Apropos of nothing, he told her that he was in an open relationship. While his girlfriend was having no trouble finding new sexual partners, he was struggling to do the same. He said he was trying to “stay out of trouble at work,” but that he “couldn’t help but get into trouble” since he spent all his time at work anyway.
Fowler was taken aback by her manager’s insinuations. She knew the Valley was a treacherous place for women engineers—it seemed every department across every tech company had a skeezy man or two looking to bag a colleague—but getting propositioned over the company’s uChat system on her first real day of work was a new low. It wasn’t exactly someone she could shrug off, either; she reported directly to him.
Nor was Uber some rinky-dink startup. By the beginning of 2016 it was a full-fledged private corporation, with offices in dozens of countries. She had faith that a company of Uber’s size would do the right thing if she called out her new manager’s behavior. As her superior prattled on about his wish list of sexual conquests, Fowler took screenshots of the conversation and reported him to the human resources department. Uber was a big corporation; HR would know what to do. She expected him to be out the door by the end of the week (if not the end of the day).
What Fowler didn’t know was that becoming a “big corporation”—like so many others in the Valley—was Travis Kalanick’s nightmare. In his mind, Uber needed to stay scrappy, to “do more with less” and “always be hustlin’.” Growing into a boring, faceless megacorp meant employees would become complacent, lazy, inefficient. Nothing would be lamer than for Uber to turn into Cisco, a bloated behemoth where midlevel executives still tucked in their polo shirts.
But avoiding the “big company” feel also meant avoiding bureaucracy, like a proper human resources department. All Kalanick cared about was recruiting. He saw HR as a tool to onboard swaths of new talent and quickly dismiss the inevitable bad hires, rather than as a way to retain and manage Uber’s standing workforce. Managerial coaching and training were almost completely ignored. A handful of people looked after the working lives of thousands of full-time employees.‡‡‡‡‡‡ To Kalanick, the phrase “HR” meant behavior codes, sensitivity training, sexual harassment policies, misconduct reporting procedures, formal reviews—all things that make a hard-charging young man roll his eyes. Nevertheless, the company was more than doubling in size every year; by early 2016, it employed more than six thousand people, not counting drivers. Kalanick may not have wanted to instill systems that would give Uber a “big company” feel, but he could deny it no longer: Uber was a big company.
Beyond complaints and workplace problems, employees felt HR hadn’t created systems to properly evaluate workers. Performance reviews were little more than a list of three positive and three negative attributes about a worker—the “T3 B3” process, devised by Kalanick—followed by a largely arbitrary number score. Those scores fluctuated wildly, often depending on how close a given employee was with the manager or department head who was doing the grading. And the backdrop to the entire grading system was Uber’s fourteen cultural values: a worker might receive poor marks for a lack of “hustle.” (Uber’s cultural value wasn’t “sometimes be hustlin’.” It was always.) Managers made their evaluations in private and came back with a score, with little explanation of how they arrived at it. Positive or negative, the score was your score. And one’s year-end bonuses, salary increases, and overall career trajectory inside Uber hinged upon that score.
Over time, scoring and advancing through the organization required politicking, cozying up to the right leaders, and, above all else, delivering products or ideas that led to growth. Your quality as an employee, or as a person, didn’t really matter. At the end of the day, growth—trips, users, drivers, revenue—won all arguments.
Often, the emphasis on growth created unintended side effects, or “negative externalities,” in management-speak. Managers would pursue growth even if it led to staggering inefficiency in other parts of the business. For example: In Uber’s earliest days, the company sent free iPhone 4 devices to all new drivers. In order to get drivers on the road as quickly as possible, managers started sending out iPhone 4s as soon as someone signed up. But some eager managers began mailing phones out before drivers passed their background checks or completed other paperwork. Growth of new drivers exploded, which made the managers in charge look better. But so did a rash of iPhone thefts and fraudulent sign ups, costing the company dearly in what amounted to free iPhone giveaways to scammers.
Uber’s ill-fated Xchange leasing program was another example. At one point in Uber’s history, someone had the idea that there might be thousands of potential drivers who didn’t have enough collateral or credit history to secure a car loan. But Uber could overlook that and lease the cars anyway, requiring only that the lessee work off their obligation immediately by driving for Uber. So Uber began leasing to high-risk individuals with poor or nonexistent credit ratings. It worked—sort of. Growth went through the roof as people who were never eligible for loans before were suddenly being given car leases. Thousands of new drivers came onto the platform, and the managers in charge were given hefty rewards for the idea. It was the ride-hailing equivalent of a subprime mortgage.
And just like 2008, the negative consequences came soon after. Uber noticed that the rate of safety incidents spiked after the company began the Xchange leasing program. They later figured out that many of the Xchange leasing drivers—those with poor or nonexistent credit histories—were the ones responsible for these incidents, which ranged from speeding tickets to sexual assault. The managers had created a moral hazard, indirectly causing pain for thousands, and potentially triggering a public relations and legal nightmare.
Further, car dealerships were pushing these marginal drivers into more expensive leasing options, thereby lowering drivers’ opportunity to profit from their work. And after driving the cars around the clock, drivers were returning the vehicles in far worse condition than when they began the lease. Despite all the driver growth, Uber soon found it was losing upwards of $9,000 per vehicle on each Xchange leasing deal, far above the initial estimated losses of $500 per car. Never mind that the company was giving people subprime loans that they couldn’t pay back while ruining their credit—all for a gig-economy job that returned less and less each year as the
company garnished drivers’ wages.
Still, despite the waste and ill effects caused by imbalanced incentives, Kalanick never ceased rewarding growth. Growth was what made the difference between an average employee and a high performer who delivered results. High performers were untouchable.
That was another Uber value: The Champion’s Mindset.
Fowler didn’t get the response she expected.
The HR representative told her since it was her manager’s first sexual harassment offense, he’d receive a stern reprimand. Further, since he was a “high performer,” he likely wouldn’t be fired for what was “probably just an innocent mistake on his part.” Fowler was told she had a choice: stay on her current team under him and almost certainly receive a bad performance review when it came time for her evaluation, or find another team she wished to work with and switch.
As she saw it, it wasn’t much of a choice. HR didn’t seem to care about her experience or the fact that her manager might harass other women beyond her. And she was scared he would give her a bad review when it came time to evaluate her performance. So, she left her team, spending the next few weeks looking inside the company for another good fit.
Fowler was worried. In less than a month at work, she had been harassed by her boss, exposed herself to potential retaliation by reporting him, and now had to find a new role. She began having second thoughts about her dream job. But within a few weeks, she landed with another team of site reliability engineers, settled into her position, and was doing the work she wanted to do when she first arrived. She even managed to write a book for a technical publisher based on the work she did for her new team.
But as time passed, she started meeting other women across Uber whose experiences at Uber echoed her own. Her former manager had behaved inappropriately with other female colleagues, she discovered, which clashed with what she heard from HR, who said it was an isolated incident. Now, she began to understand that he had a history of bad behavior with women at Uber, but his high-performance reputation had kept him safe from dismissal.§§§§§§
The more she dug into HR and gathered data from colleagues, the worse the company seemed. Uber’s employee performance system had created an alpha, kill-or-be-killed environment. In a later meeting, Fowler recalled a director boasting about withholding information from one executive to curry favor with another (and it worked). Backstabbing was not only endorsed, but encouraged.
“Projects were abandoned left and right,” Fowler would later say. “Nobody knew what our organizational priorities would be one day to the next, and very little ever got done.” There was a constant fear that an employee’s team would be dissolved or absorbed into another warring faction of the company, or that this month’s leader would implement some massive reorganization, only to abandon it when a new person rose to replace them. “It was an organization in complete, unrelenting chaos,” Fowler believed.
Things were toughest for women. Fowler recalled that when she had joined her specific department it consisted of 25 percent women, a low rate by most corporate standards but a stellar ratio for a dude-centric place like Uber. Kalanick, after all, had been quoted in GQ nicknaming his company “Boober” for all the women it brought him.
It was the leather jackets that truly stuck out in Fowler’s mind. Earlier in the year, all of the site reliability engineers were promised leather jackets as a gift from the company, a nice team-building perk to reward employees. Uber had taken all of their measurements and would buy them for the group later in the year. Weeks later, the six remaining women in Fowler’s division, including Fowler, received an email. The director told the group of women that they wouldn’t be getting leather jackets after all; Uber got a group discount on the 120 men’s jackets they were able to find. But since there were so few women in the organization, they weren’t able to find a bulk rate. That lack of a deal, the director said, made it untenable to justify placing a jacket order for the six women in the organization.
Fowler, shocked at the decision, pushed back. It just wasn’t fair. The director’s reply was blunt. “If we women really wanted equality, then we should realize we were getting equality by not getting the leather jackets,” she was told. In the director’s mind, making special accommodations for women demeaned them, undermining the meritocracy. The director would do the same thing if the roles were reversed and men were the ones to miss out on the jackets; it didn’t occur to him that, in male-dominated Silicon Valley, that scenario would never occur.
After a back and forth with HR and top executives about the jackets and general issues with how Uber treated women, Fowler had had enough. Disgusted with Uber, she negotiated a job offer from another tech company. A few months after the jacket incident, she left Uber for good.
It was raining on that Sunday morning in early 2017, just two months after Fowler had left Uber, when she decided to go public. Uber was just coming off a disastrous whirlwind of press in the wake of Kalanick’s decision to stay on President Trump’s advisory council, and then, under pressure from employees, to decline the position.
Fowler had typed up some three thousand words on her time at Uber and pasted them into her personal WordPress blog. The incident with her manager, her nightmare battles with the HR department, the leather jacket situation—all of it went into the post. She had no idea what would happen after she hit publish, if anything were to happen at all.
Susan Fowler gave one last look at the words on the screen. “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber,” the title of the post read. She took a breath.
And then she hit publish.
Chapter 22 notes
‡‡‡‡‡‡ The recruits never stopped flooding in. By the end of Fowler’s “very strange year” in 2016, Uber’s workforce would swell to nearly ten thousand.
§§§§§§ Not long after Fowler found a new role in the company, her manager came on to yet another Uber employee, who again reported him to management. He was terminated and left the company in April 2016.
Chapter 23
...THE HARDER THEY FALL
Travis Kalanick woke up to an iPhone on nuclear meltdown.
Within hours, the link to Susan Fowler’s blog post had been shared internally, across private messages and chat rooms hundreds of times. Uber employees were buzzing with ire, excitement, confusion. It was raining in San Francisco that Sunday morning, but Kalanick was in Los Angeles. Groggy, he began returning the flood of calls that had come in from Uber’s top executives about Fowler’s whistleblowing memo.
Fowler had never ranked high enough in the company to cross his radar. And yet this one woman—a single engineer in Uber’s sprawling workforce—was rattling the entire organization. Press calls began flooding into the public relations department, seeking comment on Fowler’s post. Fowler herself had gone dark, leaving reporters’ calls unanswered, saying nothing beyond what she had written on her blog.
Of all the scandals Uber had suffered to date, this Fowler memo struck the company the hardest. Chat rooms were in chaos. Email chains to leadership from angry employees were filled with demands and more allegations. Fowler’s memo was just the beginning. Her post had burst open a dam, through which now flowed a river of pent-up employee complaints, years in the making. Worse, for Travis, employees began airing some of their bad Uber experiences in public, on Twitter.
“This is outrageous and awful. My experience with Uber HR was similarly callous & unsupportive,” tweeted Chris Messina, another Uber employee who had recently left the company. “In Susan’s case, it was reprehensible.”
The frustration unleashed by the Fowler’s explosion hadn’t come out of nowhere; the rank-and-file resentment towards Kalanick had been building since his initial refusal to step down from Trump’s business advisory council. Tech employees had changed since the election. Before November 2016, workers felt the hard-charging, visionary founders were on the right side of history. In the age of Trump, however, the idea of one’s CE
O as an oppressive and embarrassing despot became intolerable. By the time Kalanick stepped down from the council, worker attitudes toward him had devolved. Perhaps their boss was just as bad as the president.
Over the course of the past few months, Uber employees had begun failing the Bay Area cocktail party test. For employees, Uber had become a scarlet letter. Where once wearing Uber black had been a point of pride—like Facebook blue—now, admitting you worked at 1455 Market Street immediately short-circuited a conversation and drew strange looks. Implicit was the question, “How can you work for Uber?”
It didn’t feel good. And people started quitting. Whereas over the course of 2014 through 2016, Uber was hiring thousands of Google employees away, now Google began rehiring Uber’s conscience-stricken workforce in droves; Airbnb, Facebook, even Lyft started to pick off Uber employees. Uber needed to fix its morale problem. Fowler’s blog post had only made it worse.
Kalanick snapped into action. He hopped a flight back up to San Francisco and arrived at Uber’s Market Street headquarters early Monday morning, ready to deal with the Fowler situation.
During the meeting, one board member raised the idea of an internal investigation conducted by an outside entity. Kalanick needed a flashy heavy hitter, like Covington & Burling, the DC-based law firm, to show Uber was taking the matter seriously. Covington had hired Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general. Kalanick knew Holder already; the former AG had done some work for Uber in the past. Holder had integrity. Picking him and his partner, Tammy Albarrán, to lead the investigation might provide good optics.
Others were more cautious. Rachel Whetstone, Kalanick’s senior vice president of communications and public policy, was nervous. She was an operator, a longtime communications and policy executive who had worked for Google for nearly a decade, rising to the top of the comms food chain, before coming to Uber. Thin and anxious, with wisps of long, strawberry blonde hair and a posh British accent, Whetstone came from the cutthroat world of Conservative British politics before diving headlong into the tech sector. She was a natural strategist, had a knack for seeing around corners, figuring out where the press was going to strike next, and bracing for impact. She earned her seat at the table by discussing long-term policy decisions with executives as a peer, not a subordinate. After kicking upstairs David Plouffe—who was better suited to schmoozing politicians and composing speeches than running a daily press shop—Kalanick promoted Whetstone to take his place.
