Ask HN: Women in tech, how do you find non-toxic work environments?

Woman: "Women in tech, I'm looking for help navigating X issues that are specific to my gender's well publicized challenges in the industry."

Men of HN: "None of this is real, stop making stuff up."

...

I dunno; I've found metafilter has some folks in tech who might be more useful to you. Maybe this thread will become less of a clusterfuck as time goes on.

My experience has been that asking to talk to a woman on the team has been helpful. If HR / the manager think that's weird, they'll probably not be terribly good allies anyway.

Disclaimer/warning: Straight white male responding.

But it seems to me that an environment that is toxic for women is also an environment that I would find at least somewhat toxic - not because the crap is hitting me, but because there's a bunch of crap. So what I look for might be useful to you.

I'm older - 55 - and some of what I have is just "hey, this feels like that place that I worked, and it was pretty crummy". But I think there are some specific things you can try to look for.

Look for ego in the interviewing process. If the interviewer (even one of them) is trying to show how smart he/she is, that's a red flag. If one of them can't handle it if you disagree, that's a red flag.

Look for what they say about their culture. Or maybe, look for how they say it. It's fine if they have a ping pong table. At least, it's fine if that's an "oh, by the way". If it's a big part of what they have to say about themselves, that's more of a red flag.

Beer is a bigger red flag. The more their description of their culture sounds like a recruiting pitch for a frat house, the more it's probably toxic to someone who doesn't want to live in a frat house. ("We like to party together after work" is also a red flag.)

I don't know your age. I don't know how much of this is just "Get off my lawn!" But you might find some of it useful.

It would be a red flag if the team never did anything together, like their team events were solely an outing every 6 months.

I am a woman and work in Boston as an engineer currently programming web apps for a consulting company. I had plenty of good experiences but also had a couple of bad ones. I could always catch something during the interview and or when you walk in. I would first evaluate the employer before I evaluate the team. You will need to find an employer that think highly of women. The founder of my company relies heavily on another female leader. Half of his staff are women Another CTO that I work with only has one full time staff female support person and he relies heavily on her. On the other hand I went for an interview where there are no female engineers and the vp of engineer was suffering from unconscious bias. I later heard that other male employees actually disagreed with him for not hiring me. There was another guy that changed his mind half way through during the interview. You will catch it but if there are no strong female leaders/female staff that are heavily relied on then you probably shouldn't work there.