Courtesy of Mish.
Uber faces attacks on multiple fronts.
For starters, Susan Fowler, a reliability engineer, unleashed a firestorm with a 3,000-word document describing multiple instances of sexual harassment over the course of a full year, starting with a first-day proposition from her manager.
Next, Uber’s credibility is at stake after one of its self-driving vehicles ran a red light. Uber claimed a human was at the wheel, but it turns out Uber lied.
Finally, Uber also has to deal with a Google lawsuit regarding stolen technology.
The Financial Times reports Susan Fowler, the Techie Taking on Uber.
Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, started the week by launching an investigation into claims of sexism at the ride-hailing start-up. Within days, a wave of consumers had quit the app to protest at its treatment of female developers.
The revelation that shook Mr Kalanick, Uber and the technology industry came from Susan Fowler, a 25-year old site reliability engineer, who had worked at the company for a little over a year. She wrote an entry on her personal blog called simply: “Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber”.
Ms Fowler detailed in almost 3,000 words, each alleged incident of sexism by her superiors. It was shared on Twitter just under 22,000 times. According to her account, Uber’s human resources department refused to discipline her manager when he propositioned her on her first day, despite his having harassed other women. She describes being told something “personal” might be holding her back from moving teams despite a perfect performance review, as well as subtle discrimination, such as female engineers being denied leather jackets given to men, because there were too few women for a bulk discount. “I feel a lot of sadness, but I can’t help but laugh at how ridiculous everything was. Such a strange experience. Such a strange year,” she summed up.
Uber Lies About Running Red Light
The New York Times reports A Lawsuit Against Uber Highlights the Rush to Conquer Driverless Cars
Late last year, Uber, in defiance of California state regulators, went ahead with a self-driving car experiment on the streets of San Francisco under the leadership of Anthony Levandowski, a new company executive.
The experiment quickly ran into problems. In one case, an autonomous Volvo zoomed through a red light on a busy street in front of the city’s Museum of Modern Art.
Uber, a ride-hailing service, said the incident was because of human error. “This is why we believe so much in making the roads safer by building self-driving Ubers,” Chelsea Kohler, a company spokeswoman, said in December.
But even though Uber said it had suspended an employee riding in the Volvo, the self-driving car was, in fact, driving itself when it barreled through the red light, according to two Uber employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements with the company, and internal Uber documents viewed by The New York Times. All told, the mapping programs used by Uber’s cars failed to recognize six traffic lights in the San Francisco area. “In this case, the car went through a red light,” the documents said.
Fatal Setback for Uber Coming UPO?
