I was under the impression that Uber has to act as a pure play buyer-seller matching system. Otherwise the drivers aren’t independent contractors, they’re being controlled like employees.
I don’t think this is a fair retort. Personal communication is not what is being looked at here.
No business I’ve ever worked at has encouraged or tolerated the use of personal messaging platforms for business.
Why do these execs get an exception? What are they doing that warrants hiding? I think any normal bystander would see this as suspicious.
Why are so many companies trying to hide their executive decision making? It keeps showing up in the news.
Why did Arthur Anderson and Enron shred all those documents? Who knows? I have no idea what was in those reams, and nobody ever will. I’d bet it would not look good for the folks at the top if we could.
With the amount of power these businesses yield, they absolutely should be held to basic record keeping standards. Companies are groups of people, their lifeblood is communication. The only way they can perpetrate large scale wrongdoing is via communication.
Our elected government representatives should be able to inspect and question how these powerful entities are run and respond to any wrongdoing they find.
We ask a lot from our elected representatives. Likewise, we must ask a lot from our unelected corporate overlords. Yes this is uncomfortable for them. Being powerful should be.
A disclaimer about me:
I work for a megacorp as a leaf node IC. Opinions are my own and I don’t speak for anyone else and all that.
I get the general idea, but in this case I feel that isn't strictly applicable.
OP and the parent comment are focused on tenants that don't appear to have done anything wrong or unreasonable, they're just in a bind and the landlords in question are choosing not to be fair.
Since I enjoyed OP's story, I thought I should clarify a bit.
I'm speaking broadly of how I remember (from the outside) Uber's fast-and-loose IP attitudes in the 2010s.
I don't think OP did anything of a similar sort. From comments here it sounds like they used some code they built in their free time that a previous employer didn't want.
At Uber it sounds like they asked and were permitted to post their no-longer-needed code to GitHub. It's got its own GH org and everything.
This whole chain is legally risky (I wouldn't do it and would strongly advise others not to do it).
I feel OPs actions are not Ethically Wrong, though. I wouldn't enjoy living in a world where OP gets sued for this, since it sounds like nobody at work wanted the work and it's not giving competitors an advantage. I won't claim the world isn't like that, though.
I really wish I could share OP's attitude and sense of ownership. I built something really cool (entirely in my free time) for a previous employer's hackathon. That code lives on some server they own now, possibly deleted. I deleted my copy after submitting it to the hackathon because I didn't want to risk anything. Company lawyers make just building things for fun feel so risky! It takes the soul out of our work.
I'm of two minds on this, I both agree and disagree.
Once a code base is a certain size, explicit but bigger can be a boon. Magic dynamic dispatch systems and other tools that simplify plumbing make onboarding and routine, drive-by maintenance way harder IME.
I find that once you understand systems that have a dash of "magic", though, it is easier to add features and stuff. Single points of maintenance and all that.
It's a continuum, with each side having different benefits.
To add insult to injury, sometimes the share sheet is really, really slow! Like several seconds with no UI feedback to indicate anything is going on! That’s quite frustrating when I want to quickly invoke my password manager or search on page.
I agree, the share sheet is just too confusing. Favorites management, my password manager, air drop, texting, find on page, and the kitchen sink are all in there and are quite undiscoverable if you don’t know to look for them.
To add some confusion on top of that, some features and extensions go in the similarly un-discoverable “aA” button in the URL bar, so it’s not even like everything goes in the share sheet. That button is really tough to remember even exists since it goes away when you scroll.
I was under the impression that Uber has to act as a pure play buyer-seller matching system. Otherwise the drivers aren’t independent contractors, they’re being controlled like employees.