Uber president Jeff Jones quits, deepening turmoil

[mountaineer]

Uber president Jeff Jones quits, deepening turmoil
By Heather Somerville
ReutersMarch 20, 2017

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Ride services company Uber Technologies Inc has been thrust deeper into turmoil with the departure of company president Jeff Jones, a marketing expert hired to help soften its often abrasive image.

Jones quit less than seven months after joining the San Francisco company, an Uber spokesman said on Sunday.

In a statement to Reuters, Jones said he could not continue as president of a business with which he was incompatible.

"I joined Uber because of its mission, and the challenge to build global capabilities that would help the company mature and thrive long term," Jones said.

"It is now clear, however, that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business," he added. Jones wished the "thousands of amazing people at the company" well.

Jones' role was put into question after Uber earlier this month launched a search for a chief operating officer to help run the company alongside Chief Executive Travis Kalanick.

Jones had been performing some of those COO responsibilities. He joined Uber from Target Corp , where he was chief marketing officer and is credited with modernizing the retailer's brand.

"We want to thank Jeff for his six months at the company and wish him all the best," an Uber spokesman said in an emailed statement.

Uber's vice president of maps and business platform, Brian McClendon, said separately he plans to leave the company at the end of the month to explore politics.

"I'll be staying on as an adviser," McClendon said in a statement to Reuters. "This fall's election and the current fiscal crisis in Kansas is driving me to more fully participate in our democracy."

Jones and McClendon are the latest in a string of high-level executives to leave the company.

Last month, engineering executive Amit Singhal was asked to resign due to a sexual harassment allegation stemming from his previous job at Alphabet Inc's Google. Earlier this month, Ed Baker, Uber's vice president of product and growth, and Charlie Miller, Uber's famed security researcher, departed.  ...

Rest of story at Reuters via Yahoo

[mountaineer]

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
February 19, 2017 
Susan J. Fowler

As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.

I joined Uber as a site reliability engineer (SRE) back in November 2015, and it was a great time to join as an engineer. They were still wrangling microservices out of their monolithic API, and things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done. The SRE team was still pretty new when I joined, and I had the rare opportunity to choose whichever team was working on something that I wanted to be part of.

After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on - unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he "was a high performer" (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.

I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that.   ...

Rest of article at Susan J. Fowler's blog

[mountaineer]

Two Executives to Leave Uber, Adding to Departures
By MIKE ISAACMARCH 19, 2017
New York Times (excerpted)

The number of executive departures from Uber is growing.

Jeff Jones, Uber’s president of ride sharing, has left the company after just six months, Uber said on Sunday. In addition, Brian McClendon, vice president of maps and business platform at Uber, also plans to leave at the end of the month.

The two men are exiting Uber under very different circumstances. Mr. Jones, who was poached from Target to be Uber’s No. 2 executive, resigned after the ride-sharing company’s chief, Travis Kalanick, said he needed leadership help and began a search for a chief operating officer.

Mr. McClendon is departing amicably from Uber and will be an adviser to the company. In a statement, he said he was moving back to Kansas, where he is from, to explore politics. His exit has been in the works for some time, and his last day at Uber is March 28.

The departures add to the executive exodus from Uber this year. Raffi Krikorian, a well-regarded director in Uber’s self-driving division, left the company last week, while Gary Marcus, who joined Uber in December after Uber acquired his company, left this month. Uber also asked for the resignation of Amit Singhal, a top engineer who failed to disclose a sexual harassment claim against him at his previous employer, Google, before joining Uber. And Ed Baker, another senior executive, left this month as well.

Mr. Jones did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement to Recode, he said, “The beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber.”

Mr. McClendon, in a statement, said he was returning to his hometown, Lawrence, Kan., after 30 years away. “This fall’s election and the current fiscal crisis in Kansas is driving me to more fully participate in our democracy — and I want to do that in the place I call home,” he said. “I believe in Uber’s mission and the many talented people working there to make it a reality and that’s why I have agreed to stay on as an adviser.”  ...

Rest of story at NYT

[Oceander]

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
February 19, 2017 
Susan J. FowlerRest of article at Susan J. Fowler's blog

That's a little bizarre.