Silicon Valley companies are integral to our lives. You’re reading this on a device created by one of them, found this article through a search engine created by one of them, maybe while riding in a ride sharing service created by one of them.
For all that they are in our lives — and for all they know about our lives — the companies themselves are opaque.
We know a little about their hiring practices, we’ve told you about their lack of diversity, and their efforts to improve that.
And we’ve talked specifically about Uber — it’s problems with sexism, with racism, with its struggle to get its percentage of black engineers into the double digits.
Uber’s corporate culture has cost it some jobs. But a new report from the San Francisco Chronicle suggests that it may have cost a man his life.
Joseph Thomas was just the sort of engineer everyone in Silicon Valley wanted on their team. He was bright, handsome, skilled and hardworking. He worked his way up the Atlanta tech scene to LinkedIn, and it wasn’t long before Apple and Uber were fighting over him.
Thomas decided to join Uber — they gave him a generous stock package, one that would ensure the welfare of his wife and two children for years once the company went public, and a salary of $170,000 per year.
What more could a hotshot software engineer ask for?
At Uber, however, it soon became clear that things weren’t as rosy as the recruiters had made them seem.
“It’s hard to explain,” Thomas’ wife, Zecole Thomas, told the Chronicle, “But he wasn’t himself at all. He’d say things like, ‘My boss doesn’t like me.’ His personality changed totally; he was horribly concerned about his work, to the point it was almost unbelievable. He was saying he couldn’t do anything right.”
Thomas’ family says that he was perpetually afraid of being fired; that he felt immense pressure and stress. They helped him find a psychiatrist, and he spoke with the doctor about panic attacks, difficulty concentrating and an anxiety that just would not go away.
“He was always the smartest guy in the room,” Thomas’ father, Joe Thomas said. Something about working at Uber, though, caused Thomas to go “down the tubes. He became someone with very little confidence in himself. The guy just felt apart.”
Joe Thomas feels that his son was brainwashed in a way at Uber, that the company’s merciless culture was mentally damaging. “If you put a hard-driving person on unrealistic tasks, it puts them in failure mode,” Joe Thomas said, “It makes them burn themselves out; like driving a Lamborghini in first gear.”
“Words can’t really describe,” Thomas wrote to a friend on Facebook four months into working at Uber, “I’m not dead but I wouldn’t describe myself as okay.”
One month later, Zecole came home after taking the couple’s two children to school, and found her husband in the garage, sitting in his car, covered in blood. He had shot himself. He died two days later, exactly one week before his 34th birthday.
After Thomas’ death, his family applied for workers’ compensation, with the psychiatrist’s testimony as well as Thomas’ own words supporting their claim. However, Uber denied the benefits through their insurance carrier.
The Thomas family lawyer, Richard Richardson, is leading a legal despute of the denial, telling the Chronicle, “We think it was stress and harassment induced by his job, between him being one of the few African Americans there, working around the clock and the culture of Uber.”
Uber’s investors have been busy calling out that very culture; Ariana Huffington told The New York Times recently that the place is full of “brilliant jerks;” investors Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor went a step further, writing an open letter that accused the company of having “a culture plagued by disrespect, exclusionary cliques, lack of diversity and tolerance for bullying and harassment of every form.”
Although buoyed by the words of Uber insiders, the Thomas’ case is still in early days; Thomas boss is set to be deposed in April. If the family were to win the case, they would receive a benefit of $722,000.
In the meantime, Zecole Thomas has moved to North Carolina, and is pursuing a masters in analytics and cybersecurity, while working as a project coordinator.
“I’m trying to rebuild my life and generate enough income to provide for my two children,” she said, while also saying how hard it is to continue without the man she’d loved since high school, “I just don’t understand it. He was young, successful, smart; he had everything going for himself. I never in my life thought I would be without him. It’s devastating.”
