CS109 Spring 2018: Unethically Ethical

(Sriram, Danely, Alvin, Xeon) After reading the two blog posts from women who worked at Uber, it was clear that unethical behavior was allowed to propagate around the company. Both Susan Fowler and Amy Vertino experienced sexual harassment and “stifling” to the point where they couldn’t take it any longer and quit. Contemplating the culture of Uber taken from these blog posts, we can try and understand how and why the toxic culture and was allowed to grow, but also what can be done to change the current situation.  To see how the culture developed, we should probably look at the macro and micro levels of the company. From the macro level, the management and HR departments in both blog posts was extremely unethical with its handling of internal issues, showing favoritism towards certain individuals and citing that they were basically too important to lose and lying to keep up the illusion that they were doing their jobs. When Susan Fowler reported the manager that h...

(Alvin Lo, Danely Gonzalez, Sriram Hariharan, Xeon Gutierrez) Not all groups are created equal, and it can be very difficult to make one in which everyone is content with the other group members.  The point of groups is to allow people to bring together different strengths to create a better end product. A lot of the time,  we see people who don’t how  to collaborate which creates a bad group environment, but rarely is anything addressed verbally  in order to mend these problems.  For this blog post, we looked at three different situations where there were issues with collaboration  within a group, and analyzed the situation from both sides and how ethical dilemmas were faced in these bad group set ups.  The first group member’s perspective seems great from the person giving it. He/she said their partner helped them learn and grow as a programmer, but the situation was probably not ideal to their partner. He/she said, “He is a much better prog...

(Sriram, Danely, Alvin, Xeon) Sexual harassment, assault, and the need for consent have recently come to the forefront of society with the emergence of the #MeToo movement, where victims of sexual harassment are encouraged to share their stories. This movement has led to changing the discussion around sexual assault and consent, which now must be an “enthusiastic yes”. A common definition of consent is an affirmative response to the proposal of a sexual act. However, this definition is not sufficient to protect people involved in a sexual relationship. Sexual consent must be an “enthusiastic” agreement between involved parties. For example, consider the case where there is a difference in power and authority between two people. In such a situation, it can be difficult for the person with lesser power to refuse the advances of those with more power for fear of retaliation, especially professionally, such as being fired or blocked from being promoted. A CNN article...