> Companies publish investigator reports of bias and discrimination somewhat regularly.
Are you thinking of a specific example? I don't recall ever seeing this apart from sometimes a short statement on an outcomes (which Coinbase has given us - they found the complaints baseless [0]).
> ...but they can certainly commission a new one that they can disclose.
I did mention law but this isn't fundamentally a legal argument. I was just saying I'd expect there to be a law, given what releasing a detailed report would entail about employee privacy. I'd be ropeable if someone did that to me after I complained to HR and the story got international attention.
Companies have no role at all in airing internal dirty laundry of employees to Hacker News. Coinbase's position is an employee made a baseless claim - in my book it would probably be a very poor precedent for them to start broadcasting details globally. Best case, utterly unfair because of the power imbalance between a company and an individual employee. Worst case, a smear campaign. All cases, unhelpful except for the enjoyment of pundits Hacker News comment threads.
Sure, an example would be the Uber Covington & Burling report.
I don't know where this "baseless claim" thing comes from; the only foundation you have for that belief is that Coinbase said so. The point of an external report is not having to take Coinbase's word for it. What's funny is paying for an external report, then not showing it to anybody, or even disclosing who did it, and relying on that external report as evidence.
Here's a reasonable question: is the reason Coinbase won't disclose the external reports they commissioned because they can't, because their investigators won't allow them to, because neither are willing to stake their reputations on the interpretation Coinbase drew from them? If not, how do you know that?
Do you have a link? I searched quickly and you might have been mislead by lazy titling. They released the recommendations of the report - I can find that very quickly [0] - but the actual investigation isn't obvious.
And that was investigating stuff Susan Fowler had already attacked them publicly on. I'm not going to try and look up all the details but it is probably a different set of circumstances.
Are you thinking of a specific example? I don't recall ever seeing this apart from sometimes a short statement on an outcomes (which Coinbase has given us - they found the complaints baseless [0]).
> ...but they can certainly commission a new one that they can disclose.
I did mention law but this isn't fundamentally a legal argument. I was just saying I'd expect there to be a law, given what releasing a detailed report would entail about employee privacy. I'd be ropeable if someone did that to me after I complained to HR and the story got international attention.
Companies have no role at all in airing internal dirty laundry of employees to Hacker News. Coinbase's position is an employee made a baseless claim - in my book it would probably be a very poor precedent for them to start broadcasting details globally. Best case, utterly unfair because of the power imbalance between a company and an individual employee. Worst case, a smear campaign. All cases, unhelpful except for the enjoyment of pundits Hacker News comment threads.
[0] EDIT Rather than replying - "all of whom found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded the claims were unsubstantiated" https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...