Stripe co-founder John Collison at the Web Summit in Dublin in 2014. Image: Web Summit/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Stripe employee who exposed harassment at Uber to edit new magazine.
Susan Fowler, the techie who revealed Uber’s failure to address harassment in the workplace, has been named editor-in-chief of Stripe’s new magazine for software engineers, Increment.
In February, Fowler published a blog post that went viral as it cast a spotlight on Uber’s poor response to serious sexual harassment claims and raised important questions about the culture in Silicon Valley.
‘If we can help accelerate the transmission of good ideas even a little bit, that could be a big deal across the industry’
– WILL LARSON
In the lengthy post, Fowler described how she refused the sexual advances of her manager and reported the incident to the HR department.
Her HR managers’ inaction and an implied threat of retaliation encouraged Fowler to probe further and she discovered that the harassment had occurred before.
She also claimed that all attempts to progress within the organisation were blocked due to her previous complaints about management.
Since leaving the company for Stripe, Fowler said that there are few women engineers left at Uber.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick responded by confirming that heads will roll at the taxi-booking business if similar cases are reported.
Stripe’s focus on knowledge-sharing
Now happily ensconced at Stripe, Fowler will head Increment, a publication that will focus on the intricacies of writing code.
The online magazine will be published quarterly and will include tips and insights from experts across the industry in Silicon Valley.
According to Stripe’s Will Larson, the software engineering publication will be dedicated to “providing practical and useful insight into what effective teams are doing so that the rest of us can learn from them more quickly.”
Larson explained: “We plan to focus on the ostensibly small things that are actually big things: testing, deployment, development tools, code review. Team practices are very mutable; if we can help accelerate the transmission of good ideas even a little bit, that could be a big deal across the industry.”
The launch of Increment signals the increasing interest of Stripe and its founders John and Patrick Collison in gathering and sharing knowledge through a media lens.
This week, we reported that Stripe has acquired Indie Hackers, a website for entrepreneurs, for an undisclosed sum.
Stripe, which was recently valued at $9bn, is emerging as one of America’s fastest-growing tech brands, and is hurtling steadily towards becoming a 1,000-person company.
Last week, the company revealed it was bringing its Atlas tool to US businesses to enable them to start up quickly by removing bureaucratic frictions.
Stripe co-founder John Collison at the Web Summit in Dublin in 2014. Image: Web Summit/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
