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Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

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Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#141

Post by dragonmum »

dominotw wrote: post #123

>woman and minority in tech its a bit of stretch to call Indians a minority in tech, if anything we are vastly over-represented by any standard.

> we are vastly over-represented by any standard.

Population India in 2013 : 1.3 billion

Number of Indians in the technology sector = ?

Lets be generous and say that all Indians in the USA work in the tech sector. That would be 2 million. Then lets be even more generous and add the entire population of Bangalore, 4 million as tech workers. 6E6/1.3E9 = 0.4 percent.

That's a simple standard showing that you are a minority and under-represented on a global level.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#142

Post by Volt »

PlugTunin wrote: post #68
tnones wrote: post #53

I can't help but notice the contradiction. A man jumped to her defense, which was sexism, and then her co-workers got resentful, which she wanted to be defended from but wasn't, and that was sexism too. Somehow, we all need to display more empathy for her situation. I imagine there's a different side to this. Her coworkers noticed her getting treated differently and started teasing her about it, in a typical form of…

It wasn't sexist for a man to jump to her defense. Sometimes people defend other people, irrespective of gender. Had it been a woman who'd come to her defense, that too could be criticized. Her department likely has more men. Blame statistics. Edit: Actually, OP characterizes gesture by the dude defending her as "sexist".(Above opinion stands.)

From the article:

>One day, one of my supervisors jumped to my defense at a team event, in an awkward display of sexism.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#143

Post by joshuacc »

module0000 wrote: post #133

> I also eventually received an apology from the company and got time off to deal with my stress. I'm not sure how I feel(as an AAPL shareholder) about this. I invest in the company, and they are spending(albeit a tiny portion in the grand scheme of things) my money to pay you...so you can deal with your stress? Really? I understand bereavement leave, sick leave, and FMLA....but stress? What happened to businesses ex…

According to the story as presented in the article, failures of Apple's official representatives (managers & HR) were among the causes of her intense stress and depression. Attempting to fix the problems they caused seems like the least they could do.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#144

Post by belorn »

minikites wrote: post #106
fatdog wrote: post #98

How is women dealing with harassment different than men dealing with other men who are just assholes? I've been in a number of companies where I've had to call out the behavior of a colleague with a manager because the alternative would have been knocking the guys teeth out. Nothing changes, except maybe a "talking to" by a manager or HR, and said asshole just presses against a different boundary. I have also found t…

> How is women dealing with harassment different than men dealing with other men who are just assholes? In general, white men get their work attacked, women/minorities get their identity attacked, that's the difference.

Source? I suspect it would be hard to find even single cases of bullying without psychological elements. Intimidation, humiliation, discrediting, and isolation are not gender exclusive, and I would not categorize them as "the work" being attacked.

For example, a person who identifies themselves as a successful professional might be bullied by someone who attack their work, but thats just an indirection. The attack is on the identity, and the work just happen to be the easiest attack vector in order to attack the identity of the person.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#145

Post by Asooka »

module0000 wrote: post #133

> I also eventually received an apology from the company and got time off to deal with my stress. I'm not sure how I feel(as an AAPL shareholder) about this. I invest in the company, and they are spending(albeit a tiny portion in the grand scheme of things) my money to pay you...so you can deal with your stress? Really? I understand bereavement leave, sick leave, and FMLA....but stress? What happened to businesses ex…

And how often did your team make fun of you, deride you on the job or act in an uncivil manner toward you in general? Stress is a real thing - when it builds up and you're not a tough military guy, you can't just suck it up. And even tough military guys do end up with severe stress, it's not called PTSD for "chin up and walk it off".

Think about it again - AAPL are also paying two shitheads to insult female employees and lower productivity. These are your money being thrown away to kick out a productive employee who was hired using your money.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#146

Post by Chestofdraw »

donatj wrote: post #130
kalleboo wrote: post #26

> No one at the company took responsibility for anything other than protecting the company’s liability in case of a lawsuit The tech industry absolutely doesn't need unions /s

From my mothers similar experiences followed by her unions absolute refusal to help, in a word, no. They exist to parasitically take your money, forcibly take others who don't want to give and really offer very little in return other than more bureaucracy. Your much better off paying a lawyer than a union.

> They exist to parasitically take your money, forcibly take others who don't want to give and really offer very little in return other than more bureaucracy.

If we look at historical facts rather than your mothers anecdotes this is incredibly far from the truth.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#147

Post by dominotw »

lostboys67 wrote: post #6

The "No Meaningful Process" is shocking in a company of Apples size - in the UK they would get the book thrown at them at a tribunal for that. Sounds like Her boss and Hr failed I wonder if things Like brexit and Trump have made closet racists fell they can be more open

is there anything that not Trump's fault these days.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#148

Post by tps5 »

I think commenters who are reacting negatively to this story are reacting to the vocabulary rather than the story.

Obviously I'm not a witness, but I tend to believe that these events took place more or less as the author describes them.

At the same time, words like "sexism" and phrases like "as a minority..." are a big turn-off to some readers, myself included. This isn't because I don't believe in racism/sexism/xenophobia, it's because we're never going to be able to agree on definitions for those terms and so they end up being almost useless as descriptors.

I would put this in almost literary terms: I don't want events to be described, I want them to be recounted. This is also how I feel about movies and literature: I want novels/screenplays that "show rather than tell." I don't want to be told how to think about an event, I just want it to be presented to me.

I also believe that categorizing your personal experiences in terms of broader social phenomena is a mistake. In my opinion, this kind of thinking leads to generalization and tends to obscure the actual events that took place and the actors involved.

All that aside, absolute sympathy to the author here. It's incomprehensible to me that people can behave like this, but sadly they do.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#149

Post by jancsika »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #113
ashark wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, effective unions–those capable of overcoming the free rider problem–are banned, then. It's like banning all sports equipment but saying Baseball isn't banned, in that you can still get together and say you're playing baseball and go through some of the motions, kind-of, and perhaps even play some cup-ball and call it baseball.

I don't know what you mean by "free rider problem". Rather than buying negotiation services from a union, I simply negotiated my own employment agreement. Who am I "free riding" on? If I hack together my own IDE in emacs, am I somehow "free riding" on the people who sell commercial IDEs?

No. But if you sell and distribute your own commercial IDE based on emacs and don't release your changes to their source, you are a "free rider".

Emacs devs even have a clever license to prevent just that. You do agree that there's value in their licensing scheme, right? I mean, it would be weird if you were comfortable casually using the software in a metaphor against "right to work" laws but were dead set against their license choice.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#150

Post by Kurimo »

module0000 wrote: post #133

> I also eventually received an apology from the company and got time off to deal with my stress. I'm not sure how I feel(as an AAPL shareholder) about this. I invest in the company, and they are spending(albeit a tiny portion in the grand scheme of things) my money to pay you...so you can deal with your stress? Really? I understand bereavement leave, sick leave, and FMLA....but stress? What happened to businesses ex…

If you went to work every day and were verbally and physically intimidated by your team, full of larger people making racist and sexist comments against you. Then when you tried to get help, your company essentially blamed you, trapping you in that situation with that "team". I'd imagine you'd feel a different kind of "stress" than what you're talking about.
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