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Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

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Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#221

Post by sqldba »

thanksgiving wrote: post #159
noir_lord wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought since the 90's that programmers need a professional body with teeth. Doctors have them, lawyers have them, civil engineers have them. Lots of software written is at least as critical as what the above professionals do. But software is a young field compared to all the above so I think it'll take time (or several really serious disasters...which is how the civil engineers got theirs).

I have opposed a professional body with teeth because it ends up like a zombie, the original goals look alive but they're really dead. What is left is a. Protectionism that prevents lowering of wages too much b. The organization being subverted by its loudest members because everybody else is too busy living their lives. The examples we see, AMA included, are all plagued with problems. There's a quote about doing the…

I agree. Professional bodies become expensive self sustaining beauracracy machines run by the very same highly paid idiots Ellen had to work with.

Look at the Australian Computer Society. You pay hundreds per year and have to jump through thousands of dollars of training and such. For what?! That you meet their standards?? What a joke.

I'm a member of the American Association for Computer Machinery instead. At least they charge a reasonable amount and you get a Safari subscription with it.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#222

Post by ImSkeptical »

arkitaip wrote: post #165
Boothroid wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say similar things about the alt-left and Soros.

Blaming Soros for everything that's wrong in the world is conspiracy theory paranoia.

I think that's the point. If you look at /r/the_Donald as an example, they believe that all their ideological opponents are paid actors.

This is insidious belief that lets you dismiss different view points as the evil machinations of your favorite villain (Soros and Democrats on one side and Russia on the other).

I think it's much more likely that some people hold different views and express them online. Believing an evil power is hiring people to pretend to disagree with you is probably evidence of unhealthy delusion.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#223

Post by nyxtom »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #155
new299 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a more explicit example of how the job Ad should look? I don't quite understand.

(These are generalizations as happens with marketing personas [1] - individual targetting with ads would be better, also for real I would spend more than 5 min to create those personas) Many women are more self-critical than many men. So if you have a huge list of needed skills, women might apply less often. Do write only the really relevant skills, don't copy and past from previous apps. Do not require what can easi…

This is great advice on the importance of persona driven design.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#224

Post by somecallitblues »

trabant00 wrote: post #65

One thing to remember: it's only one side of the story from somebody who had/has serious financial interest depending on the outcome of the scandal. It kind of worries me how most comments take the allegations for granted.

Arjit, is that you?

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#225

Post by golergka »

ralusek wrote: post #41

I think that it's really interesting that conversations about venture capital and conversations about engineering both get to be lumped into a more general conversation about sexism in Silicon Valley. A lot of engineers have a good bit to say against the existence of widespread sexism in engineering, myself included. Engineering in computer science has long been represented by a nearly nonexistent barrier to entry ou…

> nobody within is creating any value, you're only ever vying for a piece of the pie baked by the outsiders who actually produce things

What? I wonder how anyone who has real interaction with VC and financial sphere in general can have such an opinion about the industry.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#226

Post by sqldba »

yorwba wrote: post #219
maehwasu wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In tech people get away with wildly unprofessional behavior as long as "they get stuff done", and personally I never felt that was acceptable. As a decent software developer, if my less talented co-workers, or, god forbid, some HR-type, started telling me constantly about how I needed to be more "professional", I would hand in my resignation the next day and go somewhere that didn't absolutely suck to work.

What about your current behavior makes you think people will feel the need to constantly tell you to be more professional? I'm assuming you don't intend to defend mistreating coworkers, so you must think that there is unprofessional behavior that is nonetheless acceptable in the workplace.

For me probably:

Because I avoid meetings that exist solely to stroke manager egos. If it's not related to what I'm doing I don't go no matter how mandatory it is.

Because I avoid war rooms (getting people from every team into a room for days on end to troubleshoot some issue; but where it's not your problem and everyone just does normal work because it's not their problem either - again it's another management ego stroking thing).

Because I don't attend team building sessions especially if they involve sports or touching other people or being touched.

Because I refuse to travel. I generally don't travel for myself, so I don't travel for the company - spending days and weeks in a foreign place with nothing to do away from my family and in an unfamiliar bed teeming with potential nasties. No thanks. Had bed bugs once and it led to me losing everything and becoming homeless for a while. Never again.

Lots of people will think one or more of those are "unprofessional" and that your company owns you. I have bills to pay too but I want to live what little crappy life I have on my own terms and do my job - not the ancillary bullcrap.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#227

Post by tnone »

jmkni wrote: post #66
ramblerman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "paid army of trolls" would definitely explain the campaign against her. She banned a number of subreddits, including /r/fatpeoplehate and revengeporn. A move that strikes pretty deep at what people consider to be an open platform where votes define everything. Subsequently she fired Victoria Taylor, an incredibly popular moderator at /r/ama. This combined with the perceived idea that threads discussing these issue…

The way she was treated, though, was disgusting. I have zero doubt that her gender/ethnicity was a major motivating factor for the majority of people involved in this backlash and that a white male in the same position would have pretty much gotten a pass from the same people. /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/revengeporn where two incredibly toxic subreddits, and I was personally happy to see them go.

I agree that her gender and ethnicity were a factor: when a white male is a CEO, nobody will conclude he isn't in full authority in his role and deserves full responsibility and blame for what happens under his watch and tenure.

This view of Pao as an automatic victim is special pleading and ironically, denies her the agency of a full adult that feminists claim others refuse to grant women.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#228

Post by lagadu »

ramblerman wrote: post #44
probably_wrong wrote: post #27

Interesting read. I wonder if the "paid army of trolls" she mentions followed her to Reddit. That would definitely explain the campaign against her.

> "paid army of trolls" would definitely explain the campaign against her. She banned a number of subreddits, including /r/fatpeoplehate and revengeporn. A move that strikes pretty deep at what people consider to be an open platform where votes define everything. Subsequently she fired Victoria Taylor, an incredibly popular moderator at /r/ama. This combined with the perceived idea that threads discussing these issue…

None of those were Pao's actions, they were done by her replacement.

To Pao's credit, she was very hands-off when it came to trying to impose values on the social aspect of Reddit; given ample chance to change that like her successor did, she generally left the subreddits alone as long as they didn't blalantly violate the rediquette.

The only thing that was contentious that I can recall had absolutely nothing to do with Reddit the social community: she instituted a policy where contract negotiations were forbidden reasoning that because studies showed that women negotiated less, it was an advantage towards male workers (full disclosure: I do find that policy to be an aberration). But that policy had nothing to do with the website, it was a Reddit corporate thing.

I do believe that she was a strong proponent of Reddit being an open playground for discussion and where people of all beliefs could gather and discuss them, no matter how distasteful other people may or may not find them to be.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#229

Post by humanrebar »

belorn wrote: post #196
Powerofmene wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's remember that lack of provable evidence does not mean that the harassment and retaliation did not occur. It simply means she did not prove her case with admissible evidence in order to win in court. Short of having an audio or video tape, a couple witnesses, or written documents of propositions or threats to ruin her career at KP, she was in a he said she said scenario.

This is true for literal everything in the universe, and is the basis for both a philosophical concept called Russell's teapot and a religious one by Richard Dawkins called Flying Spaghetti Monster. Without provable evidence there isn't much we can assert, so it lands on trust and which side people feel is right. The legal system follow closer the scientific model and demand that the case is proven rather than dispro…

> a religious one by Richard Dawkins called Flying Spaghetti Monster

Dawkin's is not a great argument, though. Reasoning about metaphysics is nothing like establishing facts in a lab or guilt in a courtroom.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#230

Post by yorwba »

belorn wrote: post #177
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(These are generalizations as happens with marketing personas [1] - individual targetting with ads would be better, also for real I would spend more than 5 min to create those personas) Many women are more self-critical than many men. So if you have a huge list of needed skills, women might apply less often. Do write only the really relevant skills, don't copy and past from previous apps. Do not require what can easi…

I have seen a local city event going through several iterations of marketing for what is practically the same form of event, and it has been personally very interesting to see how depending on the wording the participants end up being dominated by either women or men. (Generalizations clause applying), marketing that focused on adventure and competition caused more men than women to sign up. Marketing focus on self i…

Were there less than 10 participants in total or less then 10 iterations of the event? In the latter case, the sample size would be much bigger. Every single person deciding whether to go or not provides a data point.
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