It seems like this employee was in a no-win situation. If he engaged in the non-work-related conversation the co-worker was trying to initiate, he would have been fired. If he ignored the co-worker, they would have found a reason to fire him. Instead, he responded saying he was advised to keep communication to just work topics... and he was fired. The company was clearly planning on firing him for any possible reason.
His first mistake was complaining to HR about another employee griefing him. HR is always going to consider the initial complainer as "the problem."
> 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.
The phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here.
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.
> The phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here.
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".
Or don't engage with people whose interests are not aligned with yours. You can do an awful lot, and carve out a pretty good life for yourself, if the powerful people whose interests are not aligned with yours don't know that you exist. Considering that everybody else has an incentive to align with the most powerful and active stakeholder in the world, this is the only way to avoid a unipolar dictatorship.
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."
> and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you.
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.
People have this mistaken belief than HR is for them when they are there 100% for the employer. The only people who are there for you in these situations is the union (if you have one).
I also think HR has this same mistaken belief about themselves. There are things they're aware they know that the employee(s) don't so they have some sense in which they're part of a misdirection, but anything that seems "a little unethical, but those are the rules" they kinda attribute to "I'm just doing my job and so it's not unethical". The job can of course be to do unethical things.
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.
this cliche is so often repeated that i'm now questioning whether this is even true.
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.
The cliche about HR doesn't mean that HR can't ever be helpful to you, just that they are incentivized to be helpful in ways that help the company. For example advising on how to best use benefits to keep employees healthy or recover from an illness or injury so they can return to work.
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.
If you belong to a union, you are the incumbent that the union exists to serve. Depending on the union's bargaining power, it may or may not succeed in representing your interests, but it has your interests as a central goal.
> I was fired for following HR’s own verbal instructions.
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 ;-)
Oof. Never ever ever ever report a female coworker as a male. Once the "sexual harassment" card gets evoked it is almost always over which can happen over literally nothing. Fighting it will make you look like the problem. Many such cases.
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.
To be honest, if they paid me a 6 digit salary, I'd be happy to "answer an email" on a Saturday, it isn't exactly doing an 8+ hour shift at the weekend.
This isn't off topic in as much as clearly it reveals how disconnected from reality that CEO is:
"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!
Uber is a failure here in this part of Scandinavia. They were made redundant by our lowmakers and try to run some kind of cab business in accordance with our laws.
Not really. It only says that they don’t have enough to make a case where the cost of litigation will be more than what it’s worth. I’ve talked to labor lawyers before and attorneys usually won’t take the case and advise you not to pursue it unless it’s relatively straightforward to win.
Arbitration agreements have largely backed off in the last couple of years, because the main benefit (avoiding class action lawsuits) has been eroded. Activists discovered that you can cause serious economic damage to company simply by mass-filing arbitration claims, and some case law poked holes in just how "binding" the agreements were (and if someone can appeal their arbitration case, it defeats the whole point).
why would you contact Uber's legal team to ask if you could file a lawsuit against them? do you think they would have any reason not to convince you to drop the matter?
What made HR act in this way? They clearly felt they were protecting the company by firing this person, but they've done nothing wrong and it's unclear they posed any kind of threat to the company. Certainly the complaint about his co-worker would not be perceived as a threat.
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.
There are a lot of missing parts to the story. If we assume the author left out everything that made them look bad, and including only what makes them look good then the result is a very incomplete feeling article.
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?
Shit, HR doesn't even exist to protect the company sometimes. Sometimes they get so cancerous that they start to operate as if the company works for them.
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.
Ultimately it's the board of directors' call. Sometimes they are oblivious to how much HR undermines the company by bringing in unnecessary distractions and making poor hiring decisions. Like much else, it's subject to momentum.
"...I decided to share it because I think it illustrates something most employees don’t think about until it’s too late: HR exists to protect the company, not you."
Paywall links shouldn't be allowed on Hacker News. It's not possible to subscribe to every service that could be theoretically be submitted. We're not all on $350k SV wages either.
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.
You can support journalism independently of submitting to Hacker News. Paid sites aren't suitable for aggregators like this one including the likes of the nytimes et al. Even if they sometimes have great content we'd simply have to go without.
It seems like this employee was in a no-win situation. If he engaged in the non-work-related conversation the co-worker was trying to initiate, he would have been fired. If he ignored the co-worker, they would have found a reason to fire him. Instead, he responded saying he was advised to keep communication to just work topics... and he was fired. The company was clearly planning on firing him for any possible reason.
His first mistake was complaining to HR about another employee griefing him. HR is always going to consider the initial complainer as "the problem."
> 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.
The phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here.
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.
> The phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here.
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".
Or don't engage with people whose interests are not aligned with yours. You can do an awful lot, and carve out a pretty good life for yourself, if the powerful people whose interests are not aligned with yours don't know that you exist. Considering that everybody else has an incentive to align with the most powerful and active stakeholder in the world, this is the only way to avoid a unipolar dictatorship.
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."
> and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you.
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.
People have this mistaken belief than HR is for them when they are there 100% for the employer. The only people who are there for you in these situations is the union (if you have one).
I also think HR has this same mistaken belief about themselves. There are things they're aware they know that the employee(s) don't so they have some sense in which they're part of a misdirection, but anything that seems "a little unethical, but those are the rules" they kinda attribute to "I'm just doing my job and so it's not unethical". The job can of course be to do unethical things.
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.
this cliche is so often repeated that i'm now questioning whether this is even true.
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.
The cliche about HR doesn't mean that HR can't ever be helpful to you, just that they are incentivized to be helpful in ways that help the company. For example advising on how to best use benefits to keep employees healthy or recover from an illness or injury so they can return to work.
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.
> they serve the interests [...of] the incumbents
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.
If you belong to a union, you are the incumbent that the union exists to serve. Depending on the union's bargaining power, it may or may not succeed in representing your interests, but it has your interests as a central goal.
> I was fired for following HR’s own verbal instructions.
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 ;-)
Or send your own email recapping the conversation.
This article is vague enough to be useless. No actual evidence of the convo from the author’s side. Seek an unemployment lawyer
9 times outta 10, when you get somebody vagueposting about "I was fired for NO REASON," they're just incapable of actually admitting the reason.
Oof. Never ever ever ever report a female coworker as a male. Once the "sexual harassment" card gets evoked it is almost always over which can happen over literally nothing. Fighting it will make you look like the problem. Many such cases.
Off topic.
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.
To be honest, if they paid me a 6 digit salary, I'd be happy to "answer an email" on a Saturday, it isn't exactly doing an 8+ hour shift at the weekend.
You're selling yourself too cheaply. To habitually work on weekends I'd need at least a 7 figure salary. Maybe even 8 figures.
It’s not that a single email isn’t worth the bargain (it is). It’s that this is symptomatic of an unhealthy, performative culture.
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.
This isn't off topic in as much as clearly it reveals how disconnected from reality that CEO is:
"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!
Uber is a failure here in this part of Scandinavia. They were made redundant by our lowmakers and try to run some kind of cab business in accordance with our laws.
Remember, you should think of HR as a friend. Just not your friend.
The fact this person could not get an attorney to represent them says a lot.
Not really. It only says that they don’t have enough to make a case where the cost of litigation will be more than what it’s worth. I’ve talked to labor lawyers before and attorneys usually won’t take the case and advise you not to pursue it unless it’s relatively straightforward to win.
All the local lawyers have conflicts of interest?
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.
Whoa, what an interesting variation of "buying the railroads".
Not really. Most all companies have Binding Arbitration built into employment contracts.
What lawyer wants to have their pay limited thusly?
You can hire your own lawyer for the proceedings but no jackpot payouts in arbitration.
Arbitration agreements have largely backed off in the last couple of years, because the main benefit (avoiding class action lawsuits) has been eroded. Activists discovered that you can cause serious economic damage to company simply by mass-filing arbitration claims, and some case law poked holes in just how "binding" the agreements were (and if someone can appeal their arbitration case, it defeats the whole point).
This shift happened 2022 ish.
> Arbitration agreements have largely backed off in the last couple of years
Almost every tech company still uses them.
what could be the reason from the other side if we had to think of one?
why would you contact Uber's legal team to ask if you could file a lawsuit against them? do you think they would have any reason not to convince you to drop the matter?
What made HR act in this way? They clearly felt they were protecting the company by firing this person, but they've done nothing wrong and it's unclear they posed any kind of threat to the company. Certainly the complaint about his co-worker would not be perceived as a threat.
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.
There are a lot of missing parts to the story. If we assume the author left out everything that made them look bad, and including only what makes them look good then the result is a very incomplete feeling article.
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?
Shit, HR doesn't even exist to protect the company sometimes. Sometimes they get so cancerous that they start to operate as if the company works for them.
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.
Ultimately it's the board of directors' call. Sometimes they are oblivious to how much HR undermines the company by bringing in unnecessary distractions and making poor hiring decisions. Like much else, it's subject to momentum.
I have just experienced this.They raised HR exec up to VP level so they could investigate another VP to ultimately fire them.
Then once the BAD VP was fired the owner fired the HR VP and the the replacement was not a VP.
DirtyDeeds.DoneDirtCheap.
"...I decided to share it because I think it illustrates something most employees don’t think about until it’s too late: HR exists to protect the company, not you."
No shit
Paywall links shouldn't be allowed on Hacker News. It's not possible to subscribe to every service that could be theoretically be submitted. We're not all on $350k SV wages either.
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.
hn/dangs stance on this: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=paywalls%20by:dang&dateRange=a...
tldr: paywalls are allowed as long as they can be circumvented easily, eg via archive.ph or similar services
i don't get a paywall when accessing (maybe ublock?) but either way:
https://archive.ph/DbTn2
God forbid we support journalism that -- gasp -- costs money.
Regardless, in this instance it's someone's blog.
You can support journalism independently of submitting to Hacker News. Paid sites aren't suitable for aggregators like this one including the likes of the nytimes et al. Even if they sometimes have great content we'd simply have to go without.
How is some random ex-Uber-engineer's self-written story "journalism" in any shape or form?