alt Hacker News> His first mistake was complaining to HR about another employee griefing him. HR is always going to consider the initial complainer as "the problem."
I can say this definitely isn't always true. In the companies I've worked at HR has always been extremely reasonable and cooperative with harassment claims. But corporate culture probably matters here, and I've never worked at a place like Uber.
That said, I would be curious to actual know the correspondence that was sent between the two. I can also say being a manager who has had to deal with a situation between two employees (more than once), they often both claim to be the one being harassed -- and usually even a little bit of digging reveals really clearly who the aggressor is.
The phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here.
My experience is also that HR is very reasonable and cooperative with harassment claims. But the thing is that when you have a legit harassment claim, the law is there to protect you. You could make things very expensive for the company in court, and so protecting the company does mean protecting you and treating you respectfully and cooperatively.
If HR investigates and finds you don't have a legit case and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you. Your judgment and account of the facts is questionable in that case, and you're a liability from the other side.
I don't know exactly what happened in this case, but in the harassment case I've had to handle as a manager, the (male) employee said that the (female) victim had initiated everything and had this weird fascination with him, while the paper trail that everybody could see clearly showed that he was both the instigator and the one behaving improperly. Projection is strong in cases like these. So it's entirely possible we're not getting the full story from this anonymous blog post.