> After the Slack incident was reported to HR, Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan gave employees in the Slack channel a choice: leave the company or have their stock options reduced.
Leave the company, or have slightly less of something already worth zero? What a “fuck you” non-response to those women.
This is objectively the wrong way to handle sexual harassment. It only benefits the company by reclaiming some of the options and the harassers who lose nothing (and hence learn nothing).
Agreed. Years ago when I worked at Unisys, it was reported to HR that upon leaving an interview at our Training department the candidate overheard "We don't need any bitches working here!" and general laughter. That was Friday. On Monday morning that Training department didn't exist. All 6 employees dismissed instantly; the department functions farmed out to different groups. Some of those employees had worked there for a decade.
But at a startup 10 years later, after interviewing a recent graduate from the local college I asked our VP Engineering if she was a fit. He replied "Did you see the guys around her? If I hired her, we'd get nothing done around here!" I was appalled. He later became an executive at Carbonite.
Not sure I understand this correct. Those 6 people got fired for laughing at an inappropriate joke? Was it proven they all laughed? I'd focus on the leader/troublemaker.
My aunt once accused me of laughing at my grandmother's funeral. I don't remember, but I certainly meant to only be respectful at the funeral.
Look up the “shocking rule” principle from Horowitz’s “What you do is who you are”.
Sometimes you need to take a dramatic action to make it clear what your culture is (or what you want it to be).
It’s perhaps unfair to one of those 6 who was hypothetically just being polite and pretending to laugh along. But you can bet the rest of the org got the message loud and clear.
Sadly with entrenched -isms like sexism, it seems to require a drastic action like this to really make a change in org culture. It’s really hard to “make the company less sexist” if there is an entrenched bias among employees. And you may just need to fire a bunch of otherwise good people to get rid of it.
> And you may just need to fire a bunch of otherwise good people to get rid of it.
We're talking about bias here. While I don't disagree that it would get everyone to step in line firing people who did nothing wrong seems like a high level of collateral damage.
That's true, to be clear though, you could have raised it to HR without having to "be a hero" and challenge the group in public.
Not to diminish the fact that even raising it to HR could be challenging in some orgs (e.g. see Susan Fowler's saga at Uber).
And also worth noting that it's easier to find the confidence to report to HR in an org where the line has been clearly drawn by actions such as the dismissals that we're discussing -- that's the point of the "shocking rule" principle.
I do recommend you pick up the book and give it a read (it's great), as Horowitz does go into a lot of detail on when the "shocking rule" strategy is appropriate and the considerations. I won't do as good a job summarizing here but I'll try.
It's true that this inflicts collateral damage. That's part of the point. The fact that you're willing to inflict collateral damage to preserve/enshrine a norm is shocking, and that demonstrates the commitment to that norm.
You definitely should not play this card often (ideally never, but you should have it in your playbook).
The action is shocking, and you'd expect many employees to be shocked. They will discuss the event because it's shocking, and so your decision will be well-known and the news will be self-perpetuating. (And maybe some will leave who don't think that it's a big deal to call women "bitches"; this is a good thing, you have made your cultural norms clearer, and employees who realize they are not a cultural fit will tend to self-select out at the margin.)
Note you can use the "shocking rule" principle in non-ism enforcement too, e.g. "mishandled customer PII => instant fired", "plane crashed due to failures in the QA process that was your core responsibility => instant fired" or even Bezos's famous "All Amazon internal services will communcate over public APIs, if you don't do this you're fired". Not making any specific claims about whether these are good reasons, but just pointing out that whatever norm you want to enforce that are critical to the company's/org's survival, you can use this principle to fuel a dramatic culture shift. You don't get to play this card often though, so be sure that the shift is worth it.
Doesn't this just create a culture of fear? Where you can get fired instantly for a single, ill-considered remark? I would certainly never participate in any kind of socializing at such a company, since the consequences of a misstep would be so drastic.
Every single business on the planet has a circumstance in which a single ill considered remark is cause for immediate dismissal. I can construct examples where nobody would expect the relevant parties not to be fired. eg calling the CEO a stupid [racially denigrating whatever]
So the argument you're really making is about whether what they did was sufficient to pass the bar for "should be immediately fired". Because it wasn't that bad? Because a little casual comic sexism never hurt anyone?
If that joke was made without rebuke by anyone in the group means it was a common occurrence. If it was your boss and you didn't notify hr still means you are okay with such a joke so. The decision to let go the whole group was the correct call. Lax enforcement of rules usually results in making rules worthless
I think failure to report digressions of severe enough circumstances are digressions. Eg. calling people "bitches" much to laughter in the workplace isn't acceptable. If it ever got out to the media, a glassdoor review, etc. that the company did nothing to a whole department laughing and calling people "bitches" the company would be in major, expensive shit.
Trying to take it further ("report days"?) seems like a slippery slope fallacy to me.
what if they were waiting until Monday to make that report giving it the weekend to think on the best course of action rather than making a knee jerk reaction?
One thing I noticed about some corps, they don't fire so much as 'prune'. They'll decide that some branch of the organization is rotten and they'll prune it. Pruning has the advantage that whatever the negative behavior is it leaves with the offending group.
Advice if you work at a place like that and find you're under a bad boss or your coworkers are assholes you need to transfer out. Otherwise eventually you'll get made redundant with the rest of them.
My guess is that the the complaint was another clue on a string of complaints already known to the company. It's unlikely they would risk the firing on one complaint of one employee.
Unless that comment was followed by a chorus of every other voice in the room calling the one out for an obviously completely inappropriate statement, yes, everyone who didn't push back is gone.
A comment like that isn't remotely appropriate. If that's what you're willing to say off the cuff, how am I going to expect you to treat the women around you day to day? I don't want that future lawsuit, or at a minimum another complaint to HR to have to navigate.
Bye. The door is likely to hit your sexist ass on the way out.
The fact someone supposedly laughs at a sexist joke or does not oppose a sexist joke doesn't mean they're sexist. Drawing such conclusion and firing those alleged laughers is like shooting with a cannon on a mosquito.
The discussion isn't about firing someone who made an inappropriate joke. Why is that not enough example already?
Even notoriously quiet Charlene who is 4 months pregnant and working here on an H1-B visa while supporting her ailing mother at home? Or Bob who was wearing headphones and on a video-call at the time?
Things are not always as clear-cut in real-life as they are when contemplating a scenario on the Internet.
Years ago I applied for a major American company. When I went to the interview it was two guys asking me the questions. They made a sexist joke and were losing it with laughter, and I felt obligated to join in. And because I did, I got the job. So it has only opened doors and opportunities for me.
> I asked our VP Engineering if she was a fit. He replied "Did you see the guys around her? If I hired her, we'd get nothing done around here!" I was appalled.
Erm, I actually don't think that's an undue assessment necessarily if the guys really were acting like idiots. Hiring a female employee into that atmosphere would be suicidal. And the candidate is lucky she doesn't work there.
The problem is the VP of Engineering not trying to fix his employees acting like jerks around a female candidate. Eventually that's going to bite the company in the ass.
> That was Friday. On Monday morning that Training department didn't exist. All 6 employees dismissed instantly
Without more context, it's hard to know if that response was laudable or horrifying. If this was an ongoing pattern of behavior, then it's good they finally did something.
If this was the big boss making a show by firing employees for laughing at their manager's inappropriate joke bu not reporting it to HR by the end of the day, then that's a pretty horrible place to work.
The person who made the joke and his manager need to go, but the rest of the team? That's a harder case to make.
People constantly, openly make statements like "We don't need any jerks working here!" or "We don't hire jackasses" and are lauded and supported. Switching to a synonym which is maybe more often associated with female instead of male gets everyone in the entire department fired?
What a horribly toxic environment. I can't imagine any employees slept soundly at night knowing that if they were in the room when someone said a PG-13 word that they'd be fired on the spot.
This just goes to show how much of a total pushover their CEO is.
A competent CEO would have fired all of them on the spot once the investigation was completed. You don't let someone who sexually harasses coworkers resign in order to save face. Letting these people off the hook, regardless of how good an employee they were otherwise, perpetuates this behavior. I guarantee you that these men will go on to other companies and continue to do the exact same thing to someone else.
The people that were "disciplined" were the offenders, not the people reporting the offense. Nevermind what I said. That said, I agree, they should definitely not be working for that company anymore (at least). It doesn't matter if you're firing your golden goose. This shows the level of respect this company has for the people it's surveilling, though, if even their own employees, when under surveillance, experience this level of disrespect.
THIS PART IS WRONG, IT'S THE ORIGINAL POST AND I LEFT IT FOR POSTERITY: If in the US, wouldn't this be illegal? Retaliation against employees tends to go poorly for the retaliators.
"In a statement emailed to The Verge, a Verkada spokesperson said: “Verkada does not tolerate sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior. This isolated incident was investigated and all individuals involved were disciplined accordingly."
So, it was investigated by deleting the evidence? Stellar company!
That says nothing without knowledge about the next largest financial penalty. It could just as well be the _first_ financial penalty dealt in the history of the company.
This is a company which had high-level employees use their own product to take pictures of women who worked for them, privately shared those images on a corporate network, attached sexually explicit captions to the images, then deleted the evidence when shit hit the fan.
Literally just one of these transgressions is a fireable offense at most other companies.
"nuclear" implies indiscrimiately devastating (lots of collateral damage), not just out of proportion, so losing a job, while painful in the moment, isn't a "nuclear option" for this sort of sexual malice that instills real doubt and insecurity in victims and divides employees and customers otherwise. a lawsuit and an arrest might be closer to that extreme. or at the extreme, a lynching (in no way advocating that of course).
hyperbole has the exact extremist effect you're railing against, which is indeed needless.
with that said, a demotion, an unpaid furlough, or pay cut may be part of a more reasonable consequence, giving the offenders a chance to reflect and grow (and eventually return to their prior status), rather than throwing them into a potentially negative cycle.
Not a day goes by on here where I don't read ten comments reminding everyone that employment is a mutual contract that can be terminated by either party at any time. So I'll say to you what those people say: you can always just get a new job, one where sexism is tolerated.
So a company that sells to an industry that is primarily a blue collar boys club hires sales associates for culture fit (with the industry they are selling into) and then acts surprised when they abuse internal resources for amusement and make wisecracks that are wildly out of line for most white collar business environments.
The company is just acting shocked about the gambling to appease the public. Everyone knew something like this was bound to happen eventually. The cultures just aren't compatible.
Everyone who's ever worked blue collar knows exactly what I mean. These people aren't any more racist or sexist or whatever than anyone else. They're just willing to crack jokes about a hell of a lot of stuff that would make most white collar employees cringe.
In a blue collar work place welders are dumb, electricians are gay, jokes about wives and girlfriends are fair game and a suction cup didlo is a tool of endless comedic potential, not a HR disaster waiting to happen. And the overwhelming majority of the time nobody takes any of that seriously or gets offended by any of it. It's just how the culture is.
Then you need to have a speak with someone in HR. (ed: to understand the impact) Attorneys on the other side of the courtroom dream of the payouts such a "comedic" situation would provide.
At an old job of mine, we'd all often work at golf courses, in a fenced area, thus we had a mountain of golf balls everywhere in the shop.
We'd always play a game where you'd throw a golf ball at the shop floor, trying to bounce it into the nuts of your coworker. I'd never even think of playing something like that in an office.
Condom/balloon/zip-lock full of acetylene is a classic. Probably don't do it in any workplace large enough to employ anybody with "safety" in their job title though.
I've been shot in the eye by Nerf darts at my desk, while trying to do work. I don't think that's much different than being hit in the pants by a golf ball thrown by hand.
>If your testicles can be hit by a bouncing ball you should re-evaluate your jobsite wardrobe choices.
At this stage I'm at least 50% sure I'm conversing with GPT-3 now.
A man's testicles hang outside his body and, short of a cup or another hardened material in a dedicated protective shape, are exposed to the potential for impact with foreign objects.
If this isn't GPT-3 then I'd highly reinforce my suggestion to go see a physician about your "testicles". In the interim, may I be so bold as to suggest you consider changing your screenname to "mulmxn"?
I worked blue collar jobs for a long time and I was always offended by the kind of speech you mention. I just didn’t say anything because I needed the work and didn’t want to become a target.
Women are most often also involved there. They don't treat them worse, they just aren't that fragile. A.frwshmen could actually learn something about interpersonal relationships working such a job. My impression is that it is needed.
Reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain really opened my eyes up to how different the work place is at different class levels in modern society.
Kitchens are a notoriously cruder and harsher working environment than most. My wife went to culinary school to be a chef. While she stuck with it and graduated, she is totally against ever working in a kitchen. Instead, she's a daycare worker. That was the less stressful and more respected position for her.
It seems like, if all restaurant workers put up with the culture, it might be because those who won't never joined in the first place.
>In a blue collar work place welders are dumb, electricians are gay, jokes about wives and girlfriends are fair game and a suction cup didlo is a tool of endless comedic potential, not a HR disaster waiting to happen.
Dunno what kind of lousy shops you worked at but nobody ever did anything like that at the granite shop I worked at for 5 years, nobody did that kind of stuff in the landscaping crews I worked on.
I hate to say it, but he does have a point. Anecdata: I was a mechanic quite a while, and while my coworkers were decent, I know that there were enough other shitty people in the trade that none of the parts stores in town could keep a female delivery driver on staff. I never knew of a female delivery driver that lasted over 2 months; and I had 2 black drivers comment along the lines of "those jackasses as shop X called me a n* b/c we didn't have something in stock". Delivery drivers weren't especially high-turnover positions, normally drivers lasted long enough I would end up knowing them by name.
And even though I felt my coworkers were somewhat OK, they would still make remarks (especially homophobic & racist ones) that would be at least grounds for disciplinary action in most white collar fields.
That (along with RSI and the pay) was one of the reasons I left the trade. I enjoyed the job, it is really satisfying to have that sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, but I was frankly tired of having to be around/associated with crappy people.
> These people aren't any more racist or sexist or whatever than anyone else. They're just willing to crack jokes about a hell of a lot of stuff that would make most white collar employees cringe.
I wouldn't cringe if I heard off-color jokes at an auto repair garage.
I think I'd call the police if I saw a bunch of dipshits sitting around a workstation, targeting random women from the other room with facial recognition software to share degrading posts about them being receptacles for their own sexual gratification.
Aside from TV sitcoms and online forum caricatures, I haven't a clue what that kind of sociopathy has to do with blue collar workers.
There is a massive spectrum of juvenile behavior out there in workplaces. I've worked in a place where overt, graphic (often disgusting) harassment happened regularly, and I've also worked in a place where even making what you thought was an innocuous wisecrack would probably get you fired. Obviously the former is totally unacceptable and probably illegal, and the latter is stifling and feels oppressive. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and where it gets drawn is not necessarily the same at every place you can possibly work. There is not one line that fits all companies. Where the line gets drawn can and does depend on the existing workplace culture, the industry, the job function, the country, and the law. There is a legal/illegal point on the spectrum that the company definitely doesn't want to go near. There's a "reputational disaster" point that most companies also don't want to go near. On the other side of the line, there's the "exceedingly woke" point that you won't see outside of multi-national corporations and silicon valley. Most office workplaces draw the line somewhere in the middle, where you basically are expected to treat people thoughtfully and pleasantly, with dignity, respect, assume good intentions, behave like an adult, etc. You know, the "no assholes" rule.
You've obviously never worked with large numbers of telecom tower climbers, or linemen, or underground utility contractors. There's a reason for the stereotype of toxic masculinity bro culture.
By no means is it everyone but the percentage that could be categorized as such per 100 persons is definitely higher.
If you want to see it taken to an extreme go spend some time with Alberta oil/mining/gas industry workers.
They would say that but it doesn’t change the fact that they make people around them uncomfortable. They may have a right to speak but they don’t get to claim other people’s emotions are wrong or nonexistent.
I think the argument is not that other people's emotions are wrong or nonexistant, but that different cultures assume different behaviors in regards to those emotions. Responses to the different emotions are culturally coded, hence there is no "correct" way to respond to an emotion. Just because someone feels a certain way does not imply or entitle them to a certain kind of treatment.
I'm not trying to apologize for ultra-masculine culture, but this epistemic argument about the presence or absence of emotions boils down to "their culture is not my culture" and just increases the divisions between those cultures and accelerates the culture war.
In the end - if what you actually cared about was people being uncomfortable you'd think through the economic, social and technical structures that make them feel uncomfortable. IMO, it has overwhelmingly to do with naive adoption of technology, with PC culture being a way for those who benefit from this adoption to cope with the negative results of that adoption.
It's not either/or. Someone can opt not to try to modify their behavior in an effort to never offend anyone without accusing other people of having the "wrong" feelings. A person can also make concessions on some of their behaviors and not others.
Those aren't the people who have to worry about the bottom line. People who just kind of have a "job" and, magically, money comes to them every few weeks, sometimes don't appreciate how difficult the magic money is to create. Nor can they appreciate how easily it can disappear.
I always look at it as the customer has my money in his or her pocket. As I'm not, myself, ever going to risk getting that money by calling that guy's daughter ugly. I'm not even going to consider putting anyone in front of that guy if there's even the slightest chance that he or she might call that guy's daughter ugly.
A lot of business success and failure is just common sense stuff like this. That's probably at least a part of what gave rise to that blue/white division in the first place. The guys at the top simply don't want to lose money over something stupid.
I agree with what you said but with the caveat that a large part of dealing with both customers and employees is being able to wear both hats. You can probably skate by wearing just one but you'll either have bad morale or miss out on some customers. Letting people act uncouth when it's not inappropriate to do so is basically free. Like anything you have to be reasonable and it comes down to a judgement call.
Letting people act uncouth when it's not inappropriate to do so is basically free.
No it's not free, because it bleeds. It bleeds into interactions where it's completely inappropriate. You want to be uncouth, do it at home in places where there is no possible connection to me or my business. You're at this business, then you're on your P's and Q's or you're out. Simple as that. Times are already hard enough without throwing nuggetheadedness on top of everything else that's losing businesses money and putting employee livelihoods at risk.
>it's not free, because it bleeds. It bleeds into interactions where it's completely inappropriate.
But the million dollar question is how much it bleeds and whether that is worse than the trade-offs you get from telling people not to joke around. (obviously it's a scale not a binary choice)
Sure it's a scale. My point is that people who are responsible for keeping the money for everyone's paycheck flowing are going to use a different scale than people who have no responsibility for keeping the money for everyone's paycheck flowing. It should be obvious why that is.
Yes, because PC doesn't change the dispositions. I have worse experiences with prejudices that were underhanded while holding to etiquette just fine. I prefer the more honest variant if it has to be.
But it isn't a masculinity problem, it is just plain dominance behavior. That can have different manifestations. Some use drastic expressions, some try to shield women from the barbaric hordes.
Professional distance has its place in business of course.
Yeah, and when the woman start shooting back and is actually funnier than the bully, he start trying physical "play", and go cry to the boss once he's taken a knee in the nuts.
Listen, i won't argue about "too PC", but in my experience, if a workplace have a not PC culture and the target of discrimination start shooting back harder than the bully, it always end poorly for everyone.
I share this thought. I have worked in different industries and the hyper sensitivity of a modern office just makes me withdraw from all social activity. I'm in constant fear of doing the wrong thing which seems to change day by day.
I'm a decent person and I treat people with respect. The reality is this isn't the goal of PC, I have to be socially submissive to the trend of the month.
It went onto a company Slack. These are not sales athletes. An athlete is easily intelligent, in this case would have a private whatsapp group or similar. These are sales dumb jocks.
Well, if I worked for a surveillance company, I would expect my co-workers to be dubious at least.
I wonder why they use slack to post images. What went wrong when employees were trained on handling personal data? Would they also post images of clients on a slack channel?
This paints a clear picture. There should not be a place in anything IT that regularly handles confidential information. This might have been the sales team, but especially in their industry it should be dogmatically condemned.
Trust is key in security and sadly the industry has become a shame for anything remotely connected to tech and nobody gets any safer here.
If there's a common thread in all these IT security oriented companies stories, is that they'll abuse their power. By mistake or by business plan, covertly or in the open, it just seems to keep on happening... We are talking on one hand about software development ethics and codes of conduct, and on the other hand... all this flaming mess.
This is something like the 30th or 40th time I've seen a documented instance of toxic "bro" culture in sales/marketing groups.
I think there is a lot to be said for the business plan concept of intentionally NOT hiring "sales" people who come from a traditional sales/marketing background. Have a compelling product and website marketing material about it that doesn't require outbound sales efforts to go hunt down the customers.
My personal theory is that aggressive outbound sales attracts the sort of personality that may be more likely to engage in many possible manners of outlandish behaviour.
Yes, you might be leaving some money on the table, but you'll also have a better corporate culture as a whole.
I don't think that is fair. It may be true but it isn't fair, and to me, the proper response is to have an absolute zero tolerance policy on this sort of thing. If you are harassing women or really anybody at your workplace you should be fired, and the employer should make it extremely clear that that is their policy. I don't think you should exclude someone from the hiring pool because they have a background in the job they want to do.
Yeah, I have seen it too. I have lost the number of times I have had negative interactions with someone only to realise they work in sales. This is not going to 100% accurate but just how I see the parallels between bully/victim culture from high school transforming into workplace. Sales adds value but is also highly rent seeking. The pay for sales executives is no way in proportion to the contribution of you look at it holistically. Because they bring in the “actual” dollars, sales get paid a lot more than the engineers and product people who build the actual product.
My own personal startup hell was when the founders daughters made mandatory "Spirit WEEK" Halloween with different themed costumes every single day of the the week. One day was Disney costumes, one day was "Sports" one day was superheros, another day was animals, final day was scary costumes. Each daughter ran a department and both had personal shoppers and stylists on call who procured all of their costumes. Meanwhile the rank and file was all complaining what a pain it was to come in with different costumes for 5 days in a row. One of the days I "won" the daily costume contest and my prize was a used 1st generation iPad that one of the founders family members no longer needed because they got the newest version. It still had their old data on it, they didn't even wipe it.
My 2 cents as a person on the sales engineer side of the fence.
I can't speak to your experience or all organizations, but what you're getting at in my eyes are two things.
Sales Executives _tend_ to be the most transparently compensated employees. It generally is 60 (base) / 40 (variable) but other ratio exist (70/30 is more common the technical sales side). Since the sales side has explicit KPIs tied to revenue, it's very clear how success can be determined unlike most other roles inside of organizations. In the best case, there's a stock plan but that is only indirectly related to revenue. Moreover, if you don't hit your quota, you are gone. If you're a seasoned sales rep or have personal relationships, you can skate by having a bad quarter / half / year but this is the exception, not the rule. This is a fine-ish solution for compensation for the sales side of the org, right? You have a quota, your success is based on attainment. Easy-peasy. Didn't hit your quota because of a recession? Didn't hit your number because of a global pandemic? Didn't hit your number because of A, B, or C? Tough luck.
For other roles, in my eyes, there does need to be an intrinsic decoupling of current or next quarter / half / year sales objectives and their incentive structure. Refactoring may be important for a code base but fundamentally doesn't bring in revenue. It nets to _hurting_ short-term revenue since the man hours aren't focused on the newest widget the competitors have. Over a longer time horizon, it can fuel revenue indirectly by making it easier to add new features, etc, etc but for someone like me who has a quota, it doesn't _help_ me in any direct manner. I have to build presentations and demos to work around the bugs I know exist, weak spots in the product. I have to explain roadmaps for feature sets while being very transparent that a purchase today does not entail a customer commitment so that we don't have revenue recognition issues in 3 months when a feature slips. If the company doesn't ship features X and Y within 6 months, are engineers fired? Generally not. Will the net effect from a marketplace competition perspective result in sales reps being fired? Generally yes.
Back to the culture issue, yeah, that's present. The boiler room mentality of a lot of sales reps breeds a locker room mentality and the incentive structure formalizes things. Sales reps aren't retained for being a nice gal / guy / whatever. They are retained based on a single figure: revenue. That's the focus and in poor sales orgs that's the only focus.
Will someone make more money, all else being equal, selling something? Yes. Will they have a stable livelihood? Almost assuredly not.
And that's unfair. Sales roles ends up being overly pushy on customers. Relationships are entirely transactional. The stress on them is also undue and a net negative for the culture. I should have made it clear. I have no qualms with Sales as a position or role. It's required for an org. But the way it's setup today doesn't feel right. And likely is also the reason why it attracts a certain type of people. Someone who genuinely wants to help a customer or someone who actually listens to the customer's needs and propose a solution even if it's a competitors' would obviously not survive in the field.
This all depends on the organization, but that isn't my experience. There's always room to be a trusted technical advisor. Shitty sales orgs do shitty things, but sub sales for any other group and the answer is the same. In the software industry the land and expand model is extraordinarily common and wasting time on unqualified opportunities is a net drain on achieving a quota. So there's a self-correcting cycle embedded in many sales cycle, although obviously not all.
I really don't understand how these things can keep happening at the workplace, really I can't understand the thought that goes through some of these guys' heads that makes them think it's OK to do this.
I understand bro culture through and through, I've got a group of friends and we some of the most vile things to one another after work, in private. The thought that we would turn right around and do the same things we do after work at work is untenable.
Like how can you be so effing stupid for lack of a better term. Some will rightly say that the environment reinforces that behavior but even them I'm at a loss. Out of all my guy friends, not one of us would even think of doing something like this.
> I can't understand the thought that goes through some of these guys' heads that makes them think it's OK to do this.
The answer is in the article. Nothing of consequence happened to them. They think it's ok to do it, because they want to do it and they won't get in trouble for it.
This right here sums up the entire issue. A workplace will reap what it sows. You want to allow weeds to take over your fields? OK, don't be surprised when there is no crop at harvest time.
This is something like the 30th or 40th time I've seen a documented instance of toxic "bro" culture in sales/marketing groups.
This is true but a company founded to do a sleazy thing like “surveillance” is only going to hire sleazebags anyway. Or turn previously decent people into them.
A bad sales team can create huge opportunity costs as well.
Quarter million dollar contracts that promised functionality our system wasn't designed to support? Let's just drop everything for three months and butcher our architecture so that you get your bonus. I'm sure this won't have any negative consequences.
> Verkada board chairman Hans Robertson has said publicly that he intentionally hired a team of “sales athletes,” and Verkada’s strategy is to “make the culture really fun.”
So, you have a test setup. In addition to violating the privacy of the employee, I assume you could see the employee workstation and whatever information of an actual client that may be on screen.
Probably easier to make the sale if you demonstrate a relaxed, unconcerned attitude towards camera privacy - "Of course your employees won't mind being spied on, ours don't!"
Presumably to demonstrate the product? I guess they have to "pinky swear" they'll only lookup people with their consent, but there was nothing technically preventing them from looking up anyone.
On a similar note, I had a UK credit referencing agency salesman contact me and try to sell me their product; as part of the sales pitch he gave me credentials to their web UI and encouraged me to try it out; on there I saw their other leads' credit reports (including mine, which was empty as expected) and their trial attempts at looking up other companies, and had the possibility to look up any company or individual as long as I pinky-promised I had their consent, and even if I did have their consent, that data would still be exposed to anyone else having access to this demo account.
..and if they where a bioinformatics company, would sales have access to employee health records?
Security cam info is sensitive, I see no reason anyone but security should have access to it.
testing and demos? create purpose-built test data. Even if you need to use real data, the last thing that should be used is that of fellow employees that you actually know, and therefore have greater scope to act on maliciously.
> Verkada board chairman Hans Robertson has said publicly that he intentionally hired a team of “sales athletes,” and Verkada’s strategy is to “make the culture really fun.”
Surveillance is not fun, it is serious business and doesn't deserve a "fun" culture. I guess from a surveilor business' point of view it is a rather effective way to numb the inner critic of your employees.
I don't have any particular knowledge of this company (although at a glance, I probably hate them?). But at a glance I think people don't have a good sense for sales. I've seen maybe a dozen small-mid size company sales operations. Many sales cultures are pretty insane. Many hires don't have much experience or just kind of end up in sales. Sales groups tend to be run extremely competitively against themselves, with high compensation that would likely surprise outsiders, especially for people with no paper credentials that say they're skilled. It's common to find yourself with a bunch of 20 year olds suddenly being told their gods gift and it's not really that surprising when they go cocky with their power, not unlike tech bros in similar situations.
edit: Just to be clear, that's not an excuse for any of the behaviors discussed
I would ask "why are they surveilling their own employees? Why don't they have responsible, limited access to the technology?" but then I think if they had any issues with doing so they probably wouldn't be in the business in the first place.
It's time we started separating actions that are illegal from those which violate company policy.
Illegal actions should be dealt with by the police and the courts. Apart from providing evidence, the company should stay out of things.
Company policy violations should be dealt with by the company as they see fit, including no punishment at all, or even a bonus!
In this case, the article criticizes the company for not sufficiently punishing people for their actions, when clearly it's a matter for law enforcement not the company.
The parent wasn't claiming it definitely was, so much as expressing that the police and courts are appropriate parties to determine the legality, beyond what actions the company itself may take for violating internal policies.
Sexual harassment is illegal, but the conduct described here doesn't sound _criminal._ The police are only relevant when it comes to enforcing criminal law. Workplace discrimination policies are typically enforced under the authority of a state or federal regulatory agency with _civil_ penalties (aka. getting sued into next Sunday).
Many people see how problematic it is to increase the surface area of police enforcement, which carries the threat of physical violence. Is it really necessary to resolve workplace disputes with armed state agents?
The average HR department is highly motivated to avoid lawsuits of this kind. Police departments, by contrast, have no liability if they get it wrong. Officers themselves are disproportionately male and have traditional/regressive upbringings (as demonstrated by the high prevalence of domestic abuse against officer spouses).
Then too, we must consider the rights of the accused. Simply being arrested can be a huge life-altering event. Being docked pay or fired is more proportional to the size of the infraction. And society needs a gradient of responses: not every offense should consumer the resources of the police and the courts... that simply doesn't scale, and it's not a humane solution.
From rights of the accused point it seems that handling these issues by police seems much better, as criminal justice have established rules to protect accused (e.g. including 'beyond a reasonable doubt' evidence level) that seems to be lacking in these extrajudicional punishments.
I see your point, but we aren't talking criminal behavior here with criminal consequences and criminal standards of proof. Businesses can decide you are a liability and/or reputational risk without a jury.
Depend on jurisdiction. In many countries there is no at-will employment and you need a legally valid reason and procedure to terminate someone's employment.
> llegal actions should be dealt with by the police and the courts. Apart from providing evidence, the company should stay out of things.
Illegal actions often violate company policy. Indeed, there are often legal mandates that company policies must also effectively address illegal conduct or else the company will be liable for the conduct.
Generally, illegal things done while on the job or representing the company are also against company policy.
I’m not sure how it could possibly be different. Companies should be able to develop policies about things that affect their business and employees, which obviously includes illegal behavior.
I wonder how long it will be before the company changes its name as a result of the bad reputation from this incident.
Any surveillance company, scratch that, any company run by Filip Kaliszan should not be in business. Any company with Hans Robertson on the board should be avoided.
They really shouldn't be able to change the company name to hide their guilt. They should be seeking other lines of work, out of the surveillance industry forever.
People worry about a culture that doesn't seem to allow for grace, but this is the sort of case that seems appropriate. There's no real recognition of fault here, and the affected women are still forced to work alongside their harassers. Horrific!
Anyone who reads an article on The Verge and thinks they truly understand what actually happened internally is an awful person that I hope never has responsibility over other human beings.
There is nothing in this article that might help you understand what happened. There is nothing in the articles it is based on. To judge just on this information makes you a bad person who likes to hurt others.
1/10 you really need to put more effort into this.
There is nothing in your comment that might help people understand what happened except abuse. So, to be charitable, if you were trying to help people to steer people to new understanding, this fails as there's nothing in your comment that is of any positive or encouraging value.
In the context of the slack channel name "raw dawgz" which is intercourse without protection, squirt in this context is probably referencing male ejaculation.
> “This investigation found that one person was responsible for instigating the incident and nine other members of the team were part of the Slack channel. By the time we became aware of it, the Slack channel had been deleted; we attempted to recover it but were unable to...
I find this slightly worrying. We use the free tier of slack (which in itself is a bone of contention), one of the big problems being that there's only a 10,000 message history available to users so useful information quite often drops out of view.
That said, Slack have specific admin tools to deal with harassment and bullying. Even on the free tier it's possible to contact them and ask for this history, even if it's been deleted by a user and even if it's past the 10,000 limit. The fact they can't get the chat log strikes me as suspicious.
My guess is they did an edit then delete, or it was deleted more than X months ago. This level of logging is really expensive and likely only enabled on Enterprise tiers.
I'm almost certain it's not. In the UK I'd assume there's GDPR requirements that mean they need to keep track of it. I also contacted them a couple of years ago after we had a bullying issue and no history of it; Slack confirmed that they had the history and that they could give it to us, but as it would be PMs, they'd have to inform every member of the workspace when they did.
In the context of the slack channel name being "raw dawgz" which refers to intercourse without protection, squirt in this context is probably referencing male ejaculation.
> I imposed the largest financial penalty in our company’s history on the instigator
$0 in zero-valued stock options? I guess technically that is likely the truthfully largest penalty ever because it's unlikely that they have ever imposed any financial penalty on any employee. Or, they do have a policy of imposing financial penalties on employees ... I don't know which is worse.
That said, the zero tolerance being advocated here is not helpful. Based on the story alone, it's not as if the women involved were directly being harassed/assaulted. This is more a case of locker room banter. It's actually lucky this happened in the way it did (ie, with evidence) so that it could be nipped in the bud before possibly escalating.
OTOH, Verkada could have and should have done much better than what they did. It doesn't even amount to a slap on the wrist. Does anyone even believe that the discipline amounted to more than "don't get caught next time"? Laughable. An event like this, for a company like, isn't simply an internal matter. There are predictable public-facing repercussions. They have a lot more space between "nothing" (their response) and firing.
Well, the CEO has essentially no proper experience in real companies; only the ones he founded. But, he seems like a smart guy and should know better than this.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadLeave the company, or have slightly less of something already worth zero? What a “fuck you” non-response to those women.
But at a startup 10 years later, after interviewing a recent graduate from the local college I asked our VP Engineering if she was a fit. He replied "Did you see the guys around her? If I hired her, we'd get nothing done around here!" I was appalled. He later became an executive at Carbonite.
My aunt once accused me of laughing at my grandmother's funeral. I don't remember, but I certainly meant to only be respectful at the funeral.
Sometimes you need to take a dramatic action to make it clear what your culture is (or what you want it to be).
It’s perhaps unfair to one of those 6 who was hypothetically just being polite and pretending to laugh along. But you can bet the rest of the org got the message loud and clear.
Sadly with entrenched -isms like sexism, it seems to require a drastic action like this to really make a change in org culture. It’s really hard to “make the company less sexist” if there is an entrenched bias among employees. And you may just need to fire a bunch of otherwise good people to get rid of it.
We're talking about bias here. While I don't disagree that it would get everyone to step in line firing people who did nothing wrong seems like a high level of collateral damage.
Not to diminish the fact that even raising it to HR could be challenging in some orgs (e.g. see Susan Fowler's saga at Uber).
And also worth noting that it's easier to find the confidence to report to HR in an org where the line has been clearly drawn by actions such as the dismissals that we're discussing -- that's the point of the "shocking rule" principle.
I do recommend you pick up the book and give it a read (it's great), as Horowitz does go into a lot of detail on when the "shocking rule" strategy is appropriate and the considerations. I won't do as good a job summarizing here but I'll try.
It's true that this inflicts collateral damage. That's part of the point. The fact that you're willing to inflict collateral damage to preserve/enshrine a norm is shocking, and that demonstrates the commitment to that norm.
You definitely should not play this card often (ideally never, but you should have it in your playbook).
The action is shocking, and you'd expect many employees to be shocked. They will discuss the event because it's shocking, and so your decision will be well-known and the news will be self-perpetuating. (And maybe some will leave who don't think that it's a big deal to call women "bitches"; this is a good thing, you have made your cultural norms clearer, and employees who realize they are not a cultural fit will tend to self-select out at the margin.)
Note you can use the "shocking rule" principle in non-ism enforcement too, e.g. "mishandled customer PII => instant fired", "plane crashed due to failures in the QA process that was your core responsibility => instant fired" or even Bezos's famous "All Amazon internal services will communcate over public APIs, if you don't do this you're fired". Not making any specific claims about whether these are good reasons, but just pointing out that whatever norm you want to enforce that are critical to the company's/org's survival, you can use this principle to fuel a dramatic culture shift. You don't get to play this card often though, so be sure that the shift is worth it.
So the argument you're really making is about whether what they did was sufficient to pass the bar for "should be immediately fired". Because it wasn't that bad? Because a little casual comic sexism never hurt anyone?
My point was to fire the offender, and not everyone else who might be involved. Innocent until proven guilty, you know.
For me, I wouldn't want to work for a company that fires with collateral damage.
I'm looking forward to minimum report quotas and "report your coworker" special days.
Trying to take it further ("report days"?) seems like a slippery slope fallacy to me.
Safety violations are taken that seriously at some companies, anyone observing one that doesn't report it also gets fired.
It depends on what type of culture of accountability the company wants.
Advice if you work at a place like that and find you're under a bad boss or your coworkers are assholes you need to transfer out. Otherwise eventually you'll get made redundant with the rest of them.
It doesn't sound like it was even proven that anybody said it. Yikes.
A comment like that isn't remotely appropriate. If that's what you're willing to say off the cuff, how am I going to expect you to treat the women around you day to day? I don't want that future lawsuit, or at a minimum another complaint to HR to have to navigate.
Bye. The door is likely to hit your sexist ass on the way out.
The discussion isn't about firing someone who made an inappropriate joke. Why is that not enough example already?
Things are not always as clear-cut in real-life as they are when contemplating a scenario on the Internet.
Erm, I actually don't think that's an undue assessment necessarily if the guys really were acting like idiots. Hiring a female employee into that atmosphere would be suicidal. And the candidate is lucky she doesn't work there.
The problem is the VP of Engineering not trying to fix his employees acting like jerks around a female candidate. Eventually that's going to bite the company in the ass.
Its time to stop excusing guys and blaming the women.
Without more context, it's hard to know if that response was laudable or horrifying. If this was an ongoing pattern of behavior, then it's good they finally did something.
If this was the big boss making a show by firing employees for laughing at their manager's inappropriate joke bu not reporting it to HR by the end of the day, then that's a pretty horrible place to work.
The person who made the joke and his manager need to go, but the rest of the team? That's a harder case to make.
What a horribly toxic environment. I can't imagine any employees slept soundly at night knowing that if they were in the room when someone said a PG-13 word that they'd be fired on the spot.
A competent CEO would have fired all of them on the spot once the investigation was completed. You don't let someone who sexually harasses coworkers resign in order to save face. Letting these people off the hook, regardless of how good an employee they were otherwise, perpetuates this behavior. I guarantee you that these men will go on to other companies and continue to do the exact same thing to someone else.
THIS PART IS WRONG, IT'S THE ORIGINAL POST AND I LEFT IT FOR POSTERITY: If in the US, wouldn't this be illegal? Retaliation against employees tends to go poorly for the retaliators.
So, it was investigated by deleting the evidence? Stellar company!
It seems Verkada actually does tolerate sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior.
But as long the money roles in investors don't give a shit.
Why are you sure? Especially given their weak response so far?
Literally just one of these transgressions is a fireable offense at most other companies.
hyperbole has the exact extremist effect you're railing against, which is indeed needless.
with that said, a demotion, an unpaid furlough, or pay cut may be part of a more reasonable consequence, giving the offenders a chance to reflect and grow (and eventually return to their prior status), rather than throwing them into a potentially negative cycle.
Given the facts at hand, it seems that they still choose to work with them.
Unless you're accusing Verkada of slave labour/people trafficking?
Edit: If you're downvoting this you're actively denying women agency. Not cool, you misogynists.
The company is just acting shocked about the gambling to appease the public. Everyone knew something like this was bound to happen eventually. The cultures just aren't compatible.
Source: several friends (mostly female, some male) who are nurses. Their environments sound deeply toxic, and super political.
In a blue collar work place welders are dumb, electricians are gay, jokes about wives and girlfriends are fair game and a suction cup didlo is a tool of endless comedic potential, not a HR disaster waiting to happen. And the overwhelming majority of the time nobody takes any of that seriously or gets offended by any of it. It's just how the culture is.
Jesus, is there anything in life that Americans can't make about money?
It's no wonder your "culture" is so utterly sterile.
We'd always play a game where you'd throw a golf ball at the shop floor, trying to bounce it into the nuts of your coworker. I'd never even think of playing something like that in an office.
You're missing the point. I'd rather not be shot or hit by my coworkers at all, anywhere.
They're both examples of inappropriate workplace behavior.
At this stage I'm at least 50% sure I'm conversing with GPT-3 now.
A man's testicles hang outside his body and, short of a cup or another hardened material in a dedicated protective shape, are exposed to the potential for impact with foreign objects.
If this isn't GPT-3 then I'd highly reinforce my suggestion to go see a physician about your "testicles". In the interim, may I be so bold as to suggest you consider changing your screenname to "mulmxn"?
It is not applicable here though.
It seems like, if all restaurant workers put up with the culture, it might be because those who won't never joined in the first place.
I realized later I was just not seeing the people who felt excluded by this type of humor.
Dunno what kind of lousy shops you worked at but nobody ever did anything like that at the granite shop I worked at for 5 years, nobody did that kind of stuff in the landscaping crews I worked on.
And even though I felt my coworkers were somewhat OK, they would still make remarks (especially homophobic & racist ones) that would be at least grounds for disciplinary action in most white collar fields.
That (along with RSI and the pay) was one of the reasons I left the trade. I enjoyed the job, it is really satisfying to have that sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, but I was frankly tired of having to be around/associated with crappy people.
those guys smoke, sit in the sun all day, work with all kinds of toxic shit, can fall, and don't have huge career growth potential.
they have nothing to lose and the humor shows it
I wouldn't cringe if I heard off-color jokes at an auto repair garage.
I think I'd call the police if I saw a bunch of dipshits sitting around a workstation, targeting random women from the other room with facial recognition software to share degrading posts about them being receptacles for their own sexual gratification.
Aside from TV sitcoms and online forum caricatures, I haven't a clue what that kind of sociopathy has to do with blue collar workers.
By no means is it everyone but the percentage that could be categorized as such per 100 persons is definitely higher.
If you want to see it taken to an extreme go spend some time with Alberta oil/mining/gas industry workers.
I would daresay out of line for all business environments. Blue collar doesn't mean one must suffer boorishness.
I'm not trying to apologize for ultra-masculine culture, but this epistemic argument about the presence or absence of emotions boils down to "their culture is not my culture" and just increases the divisions between those cultures and accelerates the culture war.
In the end - if what you actually cared about was people being uncomfortable you'd think through the economic, social and technical structures that make them feel uncomfortable. IMO, it has overwhelmingly to do with naive adoption of technology, with PC culture being a way for those who benefit from this adoption to cope with the negative results of that adoption.
Don’t tell me I’m wrong for being offended because it’s your “workplace culture”.
I always look at it as the customer has my money in his or her pocket. As I'm not, myself, ever going to risk getting that money by calling that guy's daughter ugly. I'm not even going to consider putting anyone in front of that guy if there's even the slightest chance that he or she might call that guy's daughter ugly.
A lot of business success and failure is just common sense stuff like this. That's probably at least a part of what gave rise to that blue/white division in the first place. The guys at the top simply don't want to lose money over something stupid.
No it's not free, because it bleeds. It bleeds into interactions where it's completely inappropriate. You want to be uncouth, do it at home in places where there is no possible connection to me or my business. You're at this business, then you're on your P's and Q's or you're out. Simple as that. Times are already hard enough without throwing nuggetheadedness on top of everything else that's losing businesses money and putting employee livelihoods at risk.
But the million dollar question is how much it bleeds and whether that is worse than the trade-offs you get from telling people not to joke around. (obviously it's a scale not a binary choice)
But it isn't a masculinity problem, it is just plain dominance behavior. That can have different manifestations. Some use drastic expressions, some try to shield women from the barbaric hordes.
Professional distance has its place in business of course.
Listen, i won't argue about "too PC", but in my experience, if a workplace have a not PC culture and the target of discrimination start shooting back harder than the bully, it always end poorly for everyone.
I'm a decent person and I treat people with respect. The reality is this isn't the goal of PC, I have to be socially submissive to the trend of the month.
Which doesn’t alter your point at all.
I wonder why they use slack to post images. What went wrong when employees were trained on handling personal data? Would they also post images of clients on a slack channel?
This paints a clear picture. There should not be a place in anything IT that regularly handles confidential information. This might have been the sales team, but especially in their industry it should be dogmatically condemned.
Trust is key in security and sadly the industry has become a shame for anything remotely connected to tech and nobody gets any safer here.
edit: "sales athletes" - talent: talking shit?
I think there is a lot to be said for the business plan concept of intentionally NOT hiring "sales" people who come from a traditional sales/marketing background. Have a compelling product and website marketing material about it that doesn't require outbound sales efforts to go hunt down the customers.
My personal theory is that aggressive outbound sales attracts the sort of personality that may be more likely to engage in many possible manners of outlandish behaviour.
Yes, you might be leaving some money on the table, but you'll also have a better corporate culture as a whole.
Only the sales team has shown any enthusiasm for participating.
I can't speak to your experience or all organizations, but what you're getting at in my eyes are two things.
Sales Executives _tend_ to be the most transparently compensated employees. It generally is 60 (base) / 40 (variable) but other ratio exist (70/30 is more common the technical sales side). Since the sales side has explicit KPIs tied to revenue, it's very clear how success can be determined unlike most other roles inside of organizations. In the best case, there's a stock plan but that is only indirectly related to revenue. Moreover, if you don't hit your quota, you are gone. If you're a seasoned sales rep or have personal relationships, you can skate by having a bad quarter / half / year but this is the exception, not the rule. This is a fine-ish solution for compensation for the sales side of the org, right? You have a quota, your success is based on attainment. Easy-peasy. Didn't hit your quota because of a recession? Didn't hit your number because of a global pandemic? Didn't hit your number because of A, B, or C? Tough luck.
For other roles, in my eyes, there does need to be an intrinsic decoupling of current or next quarter / half / year sales objectives and their incentive structure. Refactoring may be important for a code base but fundamentally doesn't bring in revenue. It nets to _hurting_ short-term revenue since the man hours aren't focused on the newest widget the competitors have. Over a longer time horizon, it can fuel revenue indirectly by making it easier to add new features, etc, etc but for someone like me who has a quota, it doesn't _help_ me in any direct manner. I have to build presentations and demos to work around the bugs I know exist, weak spots in the product. I have to explain roadmaps for feature sets while being very transparent that a purchase today does not entail a customer commitment so that we don't have revenue recognition issues in 3 months when a feature slips. If the company doesn't ship features X and Y within 6 months, are engineers fired? Generally not. Will the net effect from a marketplace competition perspective result in sales reps being fired? Generally yes.
Back to the culture issue, yeah, that's present. The boiler room mentality of a lot of sales reps breeds a locker room mentality and the incentive structure formalizes things. Sales reps aren't retained for being a nice gal / guy / whatever. They are retained based on a single figure: revenue. That's the focus and in poor sales orgs that's the only focus.
Will someone make more money, all else being equal, selling something? Yes. Will they have a stable livelihood? Almost assuredly not.
I understand bro culture through and through, I've got a group of friends and we some of the most vile things to one another after work, in private. The thought that we would turn right around and do the same things we do after work at work is untenable.
Like how can you be so effing stupid for lack of a better term. Some will rightly say that the environment reinforces that behavior but even them I'm at a loss. Out of all my guy friends, not one of us would even think of doing something like this.
The answer is in the article. Nothing of consequence happened to them. They think it's ok to do it, because they want to do it and they won't get in trouble for it.
This right here sums up the entire issue. A workplace will reap what it sows. You want to allow weeds to take over your fields? OK, don't be surprised when there is no crop at harvest time.
Well, note that in this case they didn't get fired. So... that might make them think it's ok to do this.
This is true but a company founded to do a sleazy thing like “surveillance” is only going to hire sleazebags anyway. Or turn previously decent people into them.
Quarter million dollar contracts that promised functionality our system wasn't designed to support? Let's just drop everything for three months and butcher our architecture so that you get your bonus. I'm sure this won't have any negative consequences.
The culture, behaviour etc aside, that's the question I'd be asking this company.
So he can show off a real world use case to people who might buy it.
He obviously can't be showing off client's installations.
On a similar note, I had a UK credit referencing agency salesman contact me and try to sell me their product; as part of the sales pitch he gave me credentials to their web UI and encouraged me to try it out; on there I saw their other leads' credit reports (including mine, which was empty as expected) and their trial attempts at looking up other companies, and had the possibility to look up any company or individual as long as I pinky-promised I had their consent, and even if I did have their consent, that data would still be exposed to anyone else having access to this demo account.
..and if they where a bioinformatics company, would sales have access to employee health records?
Security cam info is sensitive, I see no reason anyone but security should have access to it.
testing and demos? create purpose-built test data. Even if you need to use real data, the last thing that should be used is that of fellow employees that you actually know, and therefore have greater scope to act on maliciously.
Surveillance is not fun, it is serious business and doesn't deserve a "fun" culture. I guess from a surveilor business' point of view it is a rather effective way to numb the inner critic of your employees.
edit: Just to be clear, that's not an excuse for any of the behaviors discussed
It happened because they're assholes.
Illegal actions should be dealt with by the police and the courts. Apart from providing evidence, the company should stay out of things.
Company policy violations should be dealt with by the company as they see fit, including no punishment at all, or even a bonus!
In this case, the article criticizes the company for not sufficiently punishing people for their actions, when clearly it's a matter for law enforcement not the company.
The parent wasn't claiming it definitely was, so much as expressing that the police and courts are appropriate parties to determine the legality, beyond what actions the company itself may take for violating internal policies.
Many people see how problematic it is to increase the surface area of police enforcement, which carries the threat of physical violence. Is it really necessary to resolve workplace disputes with armed state agents?
Then too, we must consider the rights of the accused. Simply being arrested can be a huge life-altering event. Being docked pay or fired is more proportional to the size of the infraction. And society needs a gradient of responses: not every offense should consumer the resources of the police and the courts... that simply doesn't scale, and it's not a humane solution.
Illegal actions often violate company policy. Indeed, there are often legal mandates that company policies must also effectively address illegal conduct or else the company will be liable for the conduct.
Generally, illegal things done while on the job or representing the company are also against company policy.
I’m not sure how it could possibly be different. Companies should be able to develop policies about things that affect their business and employees, which obviously includes illegal behavior.
>RawVerkadawgz
Any surveillance company, scratch that, any company run by Filip Kaliszan should not be in business. Any company with Hans Robertson on the board should be avoided.
They really shouldn't be able to change the company name to hide their guilt. They should be seeking other lines of work, out of the surveillance industry forever.
People worry about a culture that doesn't seem to allow for grace, but this is the sort of case that seems appropriate. There's no real recognition of fault here, and the affected women are still forced to work alongside their harassers. Horrific!
Never. People and organizations that purchase that kind of software just don't give a fuck.
There is nothing in this article that might help you understand what happened. There is nothing in the articles it is based on. To judge just on this information makes you a bad person who likes to hurt others.
There is nothing in your comment that might help people understand what happened except abuse. So, to be charitable, if you were trying to help people to steer people to new understanding, this fails as there's nothing in your comment that is of any positive or encouraging value.
All of the bro's involved in that Slack chat should have been immediately fired. No form of sexual harassment should be tolerated.
What exactly is a squirt?
http://grupopenafiel.com.mx/bebida/squirt/
this isn't a case of props at all. just a case of tier-locked features.
I find this slightly worrying. We use the free tier of slack (which in itself is a bone of contention), one of the big problems being that there's only a 10,000 message history available to users so useful information quite often drops out of view.
That said, Slack have specific admin tools to deal with harassment and bullying. Even on the free tier it's possible to contact them and ask for this history, even if it's been deleted by a user and even if it's past the 10,000 limit. The fact they can't get the chat log strikes me as suspicious.
And how could this person have known that "find me a squirt" would return an employee?
$0 in zero-valued stock options? I guess technically that is likely the truthfully largest penalty ever because it's unlikely that they have ever imposed any financial penalty on any employee. Or, they do have a policy of imposing financial penalties on employees ... I don't know which is worse.
That said, the zero tolerance being advocated here is not helpful. Based on the story alone, it's not as if the women involved were directly being harassed/assaulted. This is more a case of locker room banter. It's actually lucky this happened in the way it did (ie, with evidence) so that it could be nipped in the bud before possibly escalating.
OTOH, Verkada could have and should have done much better than what they did. It doesn't even amount to a slap on the wrist. Does anyone even believe that the discipline amounted to more than "don't get caught next time"? Laughable. An event like this, for a company like, isn't simply an internal matter. There are predictable public-facing repercussions. They have a lot more space between "nothing" (their response) and firing.
Well, the CEO has essentially no proper experience in real companies; only the ones he founded. But, he seems like a smart guy and should know better than this.