Uber reported to the state that I was fired for "annoying a coworker."

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.

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.

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The advice to seek legal representation is still probably your best course of action. If you're clearly in the right and have a paper trail showing it, you have a chance. Of course, the first thing your lawyer will advise you to do is take down the Medium post.

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.

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.

Whoa, what an interesting variation of "buying the railroads".

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.

I was the one who let HR know that I sent her the message.

If you are a male, you sadly have little recourse. Just have to suck it up I guess.

Dang also indefatigably links various threads together with the clear intention of making things clearer for posterity. archive.is is great at the time of writing but will it be here a year from now or will there be another successor on another domain? I hope so but I would hate to think Hacker News will become discussions on articles people can't access. I think a good rule is if it can be archived on the wayback machine it's suitable. Will the wayback machine be here 1 year from now? I think much more likely than archive.is and there is no escaping that such bets have to be made.

"Circumvented easily" is more nebulous than people give it credit for.

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?