On managing outrage in Silicon Valley • Hacker News Board

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#51

Post by fireflash38 » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:00 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #29

fireflash38 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure is! People can be offended all they want. Where things get really iffy is when they want 'justice'. It often means that they try to get that person fired or lambasted in front of their peers. I don't see how that's at all constructive, let alone 'justice'. At the very least, it leads to even more divisiveness, instead of rational discussion. As a thought experiment: have you ever seen someone change their mind o…

> As a thought experiment: have you ever seen someone change their mind or worldview as a result of being insulted & fired? It's fundamentally not about them; it's about their co-workers. Making it about them is the wrong approach.

I personally wouldn't want to work with people who can't handle the slightest adversity.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#52

Post by hncens0rship » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:00 PM UTC

Meekro wrote: post #39

"If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking." -- Paul Graham, What You Can't Say [1] "And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company,…

SV/YC culture is extremely toxic, and people hate having that pointed out to their faces.

edit: sv/yc are toxic for how they actively shame outsider opinions, then headhunt the individuals who put said opinions forward. from sama's what i heard from trump supporters, "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried about getting “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him”. One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter."

like for instance on this website, where flagged & downvoted comments lead to rate limiting. sorry guy i can't respond to, it's the mods' fault. minority opinions get to say 1, maybe 2 things, before being silenced. controversial threads are flagged or removed by dang and co from the front page within an hour. ever have a convo with a conservative on here, where they just stopped responding to you? was probably silenced by the moderation team.

this discussion is flagged to obscurity, while the stupid circle jerk post about "google engineer breaking his bubble through global travel!" is on the front still.

http://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-heard-from-trump-supporters

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#53

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:00 PM UTC

dionidium wrote: post #30

sbierwagen wrote: post #8

It's interesting to note that the only reason this is a news story is because "a Google engineer" wrote it. If the essay had been published entirely anonymously, then it would have attracted no attention at all, like a dozen similar essays. The story is the source, not the content.

It's only interesting because it was said in a context where you're not allowed to say it. This is a mainstream debate that has been undertaken without much controversy by mainstream social scientists. See, for example, this debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke: Steven Pinker & Elizabeth Spelke | The Science of Gender & Science | Mind Brain Behavior Discussion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8

[deleted]

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#54

Post by fireflash38 » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:01 PM UTC

navait wrote: post #17

fireflash38 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure is! People can be offended all they want. Where things get really iffy is when they want 'justice'. It often means that they try to get that person fired or lambasted in front of their peers. I don't see how that's at all constructive, let alone 'justice'. At the very least, it leads to even more divisiveness, instead of rational discussion. As a thought experiment: have you ever seen someone change their mind o…

My manager threatened one of my co-workers with termination if they didn't take a more proactive approach towards making the code he wrote more robust. He took out specific examples of shit code he wrote, and had us criticize it and the mindset that created it. It changed how he programmed for the better and his outlook towards his job.

I wouldn't consider that a change in worldview, which tend to be far more deeply ingrained.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#55

Post by geofft » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:01 PM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #27

The major elephant in the room here, which the memo doesn't seem to address, is that as late as the 1960's, computer programming was seen as a natural career for young women. Has biology changed that much in the last fifty years?

This is the one place where I actually do agree with the author of the essay: computer programming is now seen as a high-status field, so it's worth it for men who seek high-status careers to displace women and construct rationalizations. It wasn't high-status in the 1960s.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#56

Post by caseysoftware » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:01 PM UTC

losteverything wrote: post #37

This is called growing up. We dont need to know how everyone thinks. We dont want to know either. We tailor our words to our audience. We avoid saying or typing dumb things. We only say what we really feel to our confidante. These outwardly stupid writings are simply that: bad childish judgement.

Let's be honest. Many companies and people - such as yourself - don't want dissent. And that's fine. You'll have total agreement and get a lot done.. for a while.

But then the clueful people will leave and be replaced with yes (wo)men who know what productive work looks like but are incapable of actually doing useful things. A great organization that makes leaps and bounds will turn into an okay company that grows by a couple points a year.. and then get wiped out when the new thing/idea comes along.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#57

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:02 PM UTC

losteverything wrote: post #37

This is called growing up. We dont need to know how everyone thinks. We dont want to know either. We tailor our words to our audience. We avoid saying or typing dumb things. We only say what we really feel to our confidante. These outwardly stupid writings are simply that: bad childish judgement.

> We dont need to know how everyone thinks. We dont want to know either.

So ignore it?

You must hate graffiti.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#58

Post by wanderingshi » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:02 PM UTC

s73ver wrote: post #31

Quarrelsome wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it okay to campaign towards the goal of firing someone for expressing an opinion they feel outraged about?

Let's be frank, here. This is not someone merely "expressing an opinion." This is someone rallying against diversity, using pseudoscience to back up claims that women and minorities are inferior, and thus shouldn't have been hired. On top of that, they ranted about how Google had not done enough to make conservatives feel they have a safe space, when the only thing Google has done on the subject is to make others fee…

actually, I think the author was pro-diversity but anti-diversity programs. in other words, he's rallying against diversity programs, not diversity.

he also didn't outright claim women/minorities are "inferior" but that biological differences mean they are good at different things and maybe driving them into tech isn't necessarily a good thing. he also further claims we should be looking at each candidate and evaluate their skills as an individual and not because of one of their attributes (i.e. race, gender, religion)

I'd urge you to reread the manifesto and not get too focused on the part with bad science. the author makes some other interesting points.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#59

Post by geofft » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:02 PM UTC

jblow wrote: post #49

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

> He is one individual in a company that employs more than 72,000 people. Why has Silicon Valley spent the weekend talking about him Because we're not talking about a memo posted by one random engineer that got the reaction it deserved for declaring a large fraction of his co-workers sub-standard engineers (among the myriad broken things in that memo). That would have been a story for all of five minutes. Instead, we…

Did you read the memo? It doesn't seem like it.

I have read the memo, and this seems like an accurate summary. It's phrased in words that sound reasonable, but the ideas aren't reasoned, and it's a particularly common trick to use reasonable words to express unreasoned ideas to fool those who only skim a text.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#60

Post by kristianc » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:02 PM UTC

dudul wrote: post #41

kristianc wrote: post #27

The major elephant in the room here, which the memo doesn't seem to address, is that as late as the 1960's, computer programming was seen as a natural career for young women. Has biology changed that much in the last fifty years?

Maybe the industry has changed.

Without a doubt the industry has changed - it has more men in it.

The question at hand, I guess, is, have the tasks that one would be expected to perform as a computer programmer changed over the last fifty years?

Or has the hiring process - which even most male programmers are happy to admit is "broken," adjusted to favour men over women?

Two of the things that have been suggested as causes have been hiring tools focusing on puzzle solving / whiteboarding, and job applications focusing on finding "culture fit" and an ideal "programming type"

It's not hard to find male programmers who, even when gender is taken out of the equation entirely both admit that a) whiteboard interviews and culture fit is a thing, and b) is a terrible way of choosing people, so perhaps Occam's razor suggests that this is the cause rather than an inherent biological difference with an obvious counterexample?