Whistleblower
"The unbelievable true story of the young woman who faced down one of the most valuable startups in Silicon Valley history--and what came after In 2017, twenty-five-year-old Susan Fowler published a blog post detailing the sexual harassment and retaliation she'd experienced as an entry-level engineer at Uber. The post went viral, leading not only to the ouster of Uber's CEO and twenty other employees, but 'starting a bonfire on creepy sexual behavior in Silicon Valley that... spread to Hollywood and engulfed Harvey Weinstein' (Maureen Dowd, The New York Times). When Susan decided to share her story, she was fully aware of the consequences most women faced for speaking out about harassment prior to the #MeToo era. But, as her inspiring memoir, Whistleblower, reveals, this courageous act was entirely consistent with Susan's young life so far: a life characterized by extraordinary determination, a refusal to accept things as they are, and the desire to do what is good and right. Growing up in poverty in rural Arizona, she was denied a formal education--yet went on to obtain an Ivy League degree. When she was told, after discovering the pervasive culture of sexism, harassment, racism, and abuse at Uber, that she was the problem, she banded together with other women to try to make change. When that didn't work, she went public.
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2020–2021years
67% recommend33% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- Hatching Twitter - Nick Bilton
Bad Blood - John Carreyrou
How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story - Billy Gallagher
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork - Reeves Wiedeman
Whistleblower: My Unlikely Journey to Silicon Valley and Speaking Out Against Injustice - Susan Fowler
Uncanny Valley - Anna Wiener
What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley - Adrian Daub
The Scapegoat - René Girard
- > Out of curiosity, how long did they ban you for
at the time, this was never clearly stated but I believe the shared understanding was indefinite
> will they give you any 'parole hearings' for good behavior
noone even thought of that
> but it's not clear to me what role rehabilitation plays in CoC enforcement.
This is not as simple as sitting on the bench for a time and then you are back and yay.
I'd say the road to rehabilitation is rare. You do not get the banhammer for straying just once and so if you are hell bent on being so toxic that you need to be banned then bending out of that shape is probably quite rare. It took the entire #metoo movement (for me especially Susan Fowler's incredible Uber blog post, the Hungarian accusations I blogged about and the infamous Drupal one I alluded to in the blog post) to shake me badly enough to make it possible to re-investigate my entire world view on these topics. And then came the time when the CoC was introduced to Linux and the bro avalanche again provided me a unique opportunity to say "no. this is not right." and I spent an entire day on reddit trying to answer all this crap. I got lucky but as they say, luck is when preparedness meet opportunity and I am not sure others will have these opportunities.
If you haven't read Susan Fowler's Whistleblower book, do so now.
- This may sound flippant, but it's not: you mean like Uber. (See eg Susan Fowler's book Whistleblower.)
