Uber Technologies has hired former Obama administration attorney general Eric Holder to lead an independent review into the company's workplace environment, after a former Uber worker's highly detailed blog claiming sexual harrassment went viral.

CEO Travis Travis Kalanick has sent a company-wide email Uber board member Arianna Huffington, if Huffington Post fame, will also join the probe, as will Uber's chief human resources officer, and Angela Padilla, the company's associate general counsel.  Kalanick described the details of the sexual harrassment as "abhorrent & against everything we believe in", and that "anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired".  

Over the weekend, a former Uber site reliability engineer named Susan Fowler Rigetti uploaded a blog that told of enduring a number of sexual harrassment epicodes, only to have them ignored by Human Resources; in some case, she claims management targeted her for retaliation.  Ms. Fowler says the abhorrent behavior began almost instantly.

"On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat.  He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't.  He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with," she wrote.  "It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR."

"I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to," Ms. Fowler continued.  "Upper management told me that he "was a high performer" (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part."

After being given what she said were the options of sitting around and taking it or getting a poor performance review, Fowler says she met other female Uber engineers with similar stories.  She also alleges a "game-of-thrones political war" in which "every manager was fighting their peers and attempting to undermine their direct supervisor so that they could have their direct supervisor's job".  

And then it got even worse, with managers ignoring glowing performance reviews, retroactive changes to said reviews, intangible goals linked to Fowler's personal life, and other hijinx growing "more comically absurd with each passing day".  The area she worked in was 25 percent female when she started with teh company - by the time she left the company in December 2016, that was down to six percent.