I’m sure that you have heard some of the stories about Uber, such as their simply refusing to pay taxes in the UK, and their relationship with the city of Pittsburgh, where after defending them against state regulators, ignoring the fact that they were pillaging the Carnegie-Mellon robotics lab, and allowing the ride service to roll out robotic cars on city streets, told the “City of Bridges” to pound sand when they requested help competing in the 2016 Smart City Challenge, Uber responded with a list of new demands.

And now, we have the case of Susan Fowler, and employee (full time programmer, not a driver) how documented the toxic and hostile workplace environment for women.

• Her manager propositioned her on her first day of work.
• HR said it was the first time that this had happened, and that he would get a stern talking to ……… The kicker is that they said this to her and at least a half dozen other complainants.
• She transferred to a rather dysfunctional and chaotic division, and then was not allowed to transfer again because her performance review was downgraded because, “Performance problems aren’t always something that has to do with work, but sometimes can be about things outside of work or your personal life.” (Translation, “Women are to be seen, not heard.”)
• It is then revealed that her performance review was retroactively downgraded because, it prevented her transfer, “It turned out that keeping me on the team made my manager look good, and I overheard him boasting to the rest of the team that even though the rest of the teams were losing their women engineers left and right, he still had some on his team.” (Women in the division went from 25% to 6%[!] while she was there)
• HR asked if, “I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem.”
• She was threatened with firing for making complaints by her boss.

Note that she is no slouch, she has written what has been described as the de-facto standard on designing standard microservices, but she still got treated like crap, because treating employees, drivers, and customers like crap is what Uber does.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is a big fan of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and I’ve said before, “That Ayn Rand Is to Business What Ebola Is to the Exchange of Bodily Fluids.”

#DeleteUber.