I disagree that the regular employees are innocent here. You support the company you work for. Most employees there could easily get jobs elsewhere. Sure, they forfeit options, but they stop powering truly one of the worst companies we have seen in some time. Not to mention the sexual harassment and bad work environment, which is at least partially on rank and file employees.
I have no sympathy for well-off workers more or less choosing to work for shitty companies and supporting them in a complicit manner. We have ethical duties to work for companies that make a positive impact when we have realistic options. If there are no options and you're doing the job for reasonable comfort of life that you can't get elsewhere, different story. I don't think most employees at Uber fall into that category.
Uber employee here:
Give some thought to what you'd expect to see over time if the company genuinely had changed internally. Hold Uber to it. I suspect it'll meet that bar.
Future actions do not excuse past ones. A right and a wrong don't cancel out, they both exist. I have noticed small improvements with the introduction of tipping and I'm sure it will get better, but that's not very hard to do from the starting point. Becoming not a shitty company doesn't make it any better to support anyone who possibly was a part of the old Uber. The damage is done. It's not likely the company fires everyone in the old Uber, and even if it does, the people who funded it still profit. That's not proper justice for the original actions that they still consistently avoid accountability on at all costs.
I don't want to skate over the moral grey area here because obviously improvement is better than not. But, you have to consider alternatives.
Let's rephrase the question: Why should anyone use Uber if Lyft is available and they can afford any small price difference, if any?
I think most people are concerned with making sure they're not actively supporting and organization currently behaving badly (and I pretty strongly believe that Uber isn't).
I've been at the company for 2.5 years. I'm solidly within your firing range. I've seen a company with a behavioral distribution that was slightly shifted from the societal mean. My job has almost exclusively involved interacting with people whose behavior fell within societally normal. Nevertheless, the upper tail of Uber's behavioral distribution was, retrospectively, clearly in a bad place.
I believe that that behavioral distribution has shifted to being mundane.
> I think most people are concerned with making sure they're not actively supporting and organization currently behaving badly (and I pretty strongly believe that Uber isn't)
I don't think that's morally right to only consider that. Even still, I don't see a reason not to use Lyft. They are more or less identical products at this point. One is owned by a company that used to do some pretty bad things. Why support the people that funded that and people that supported those people? Why take the risk it could ever happen again (even if you assure us it won't)? If you fall within those original parameters I set, I think there's no excuse for not using Lyft.
To the extent that you're asking about product differentiation: scale, eta, and price are reasons people choose one over the other.
To the extent that you're keen on punishing people who have behaved badly in order to disincentivize future bad behavior, good on you, that seems reasonable. I think it's hard to draw the line as to where this is actually useful/practical, and obviously it'll be a different line for different people. I'd guess that you're not boycotting every other startup that Benchmark has put early money into, for example.
I agree, not everyone has the luxury of choosing a job they believe in, and back before Uber became uncool I can see how people would sign up. That said, we're talking about a few thousand people compared to over a million drivers, and most of them are probably quite employable.
