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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

#241

Post by ForHackernews »

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…

> Protectionism that prevents lowering of wages too much

This is a really weird complaint from somebody who is (presumably) a developer. [If parent commenter is an owner or executive, then it makes more sense]

Are there other industries where workers actively disdain proposals to secure better treatment at the hands of owners?

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

#242

Post by Powerofmene »

belorn wrote: post #237
Powerofmene wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However you are forgetting in our court systems evidence can be thrown out because it was not admitted according to the Rules of Civil/Criminal/Appellate Procedures. At that point it isn't about trust or what people feel, it is only about evidence a jury can consider. It would be akin to having to acquit someone you feel is quite because the state failed to make their case or because the state made their case but scr…

So was evidence thrown out because of procedure violation in this case? I would note that this aspect is a construct of common law. In civil law all evidence is admissible, and the facts that would cause evidence to be inadmissible in common law would simply be additional context in civil law.

Not that I am aware of but all evidence is not admissible in civil court. It must be correctly admitted into evidence, it must be authenticated or meet a business records exception, can't be hearsay, etc. and must meet the rules of evidenceto name a few.

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

#243

Post by thehardsphere »

Powerofmene wrote: post #88
peoplewindow wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that reality is subjective, how would you separate "lots of men are being jerks and don't realise" from "lots of women are hyper-sensitive to perceived slights that aren't there and don't realise it"? I've seen so many accusations of sexism in tech by now that I tire of it. When investigated, it seems to always boil down to one of two things: 1. Some guy hit on me and I thought it was gross^Wharassment. 2. I fe…

>All too often the latter feels like women (and male feminists) on a power trip. The feelings of being offended aren't real, it's just a way to convince/force others to do what they want. Please explain this statement further. I am trying to understand how the person who is harassed is the person with the power or on a power trip as you put it. Wouldn't the best way to avoid such a scenario be to avoid the circumstan…

If the "person who is harassed" is actually a "person on a power trip", they will find "unwanted or unwelcome statements" in any behavior that you do. Because they can set the definition for "unwanted or unwelcome statements" and will abuse that to satisfy whatever their agenda is.

You can definitely tell in cases where the target of this is a particular individual in a group setting; the double standard in treatment becomes stark after a while.

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

#244

Post by mikekchar »

ralusek wrote: post #95
bitwize wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not utilitarian. Cultural fit dominates as a hiring criterion in software dev, and "cultural fit" can be a proxy for racism, sexism, any sort of discrimination you can think of.

I can tell you that about 90% of candidates I speak to are male, about 80% are white, Eastern European, or South & East Asian. The demographics of the hiring pool are very much aligned with the demographics of the workforce. In terms of "cultural" fit, you're right. I do a lot of work with Hindu Indians and Muslim Pakistanis, because I have an enormous "cultural" overlap with them as a white male from Southern Califo…

I think what people are saying is that they don't believe you when you say that hiring in IT is only utilitarian. You think you are being utilitarian, but instead you are leaning on your biases. In the same way the person in the article said that they hired women because there are some jobs they only feel comfortable giving to women. This is a utilitarian perspective -- women are better at X, I want X to be done well, I will give X to a woman. In the article this was described as "grunt work".

Someone might think, "I need to hire an ivy league graduate to do the algorithms work" and feel they are being utilitarian. After all, there must be some value in the incredible price tag of that education.

For me, that's still feeling a bit iffy, but much more reasonable. The more we discriminate, the more discrimination we embrace. At what point is discrimination good and at what point is it bad?

There are clearly protected classes where we are not legally allowed to discriminate. There are classes where we can discriminate, but shouldn't. And there are classes where we must discriminate, otherwise we would just be hiring random people off the street.

And even though I completely agree with everything you wrote, I think there is value in reflecting on what it means to be discriminatory and what focusing on utility might bring us. While I think it is very much beside the point of your post (which I thought was excellent), there is a bit of hubris to gloss over the issue of hiring for utility without examining how this is problematic.

Before you ask -- a different model may be not to hire for utility, but rather to consider hiring as a responsibility you take on. Your responsibility is to help that person be successful. Are you able to do it it? That, in my experience, is a far better view than hiring for utility.

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

#245

Post by pjc50 »

sqldba wrote: post #226
yorwba wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> Had bed bugs once and it led to me losing everything and becoming homeless for a while. Never again.

This sounds like an extraordinary tragedy, and one that really ought to have been considered a workplace accident, in the same category as people who lose fingers to power tools. I'm sorry this happened to you.

> team building sessions especially if they involve sports or touching other people or being touched.

The dark side of team building sessions; they can be both disturbing and extremely exclusionary if they're lead by well-meaning but clueless people.

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

#246

Post by yorwba »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #167
c3d wrote: post #142

Please quote a part of the Damore original memo where he explained women were inferior (except, maybe, in numbers as far as the computer science field is concerned)?

In his tl;dr he said hiring more women would be bad for business. For those about to jump in and suggest that he only mean the current way of hiring women is bad for business, he later suggests affirmative action to hire more conservatives would be good for business because they are more 'diligent'. Note that men are more conservative then women, so this is a double whammy.

> he later suggests affirmative action to hire more conservatives would be good for business because they are more 'diligent'.

"Stop alienating conservatives" is a far cry from affirmative action. Personally, I think quota-based affirmative action targeted at conservatives would have similar downsides as quota-based affirmative action targeted at women. (Essentially, when you are optimizing for something other than profit, it's going to cost money.) However, you might have success with a test selecting for high-conscientiousness workers.

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

#247

Post by Powerofmene »

rovek wrote: post #234
Powerofmene wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but then isn't it incumbent on those around the jerk to say "not cool." Bottom line is a hostile workplace can be a hostile workplace whether from assholery or blatant sexual harassment. Some would say that gay jokes are assholery but to someone who is gay it may create a hostile work environment. Neither are appropriate. The take away is be aware of your environment, you words and your actions because they all…

> True but then isn't incumbent on those around the jerk to say"not cool." Bottom line is a hostile workplace is a hostile workplace whether from assholery or blatant sexual harassment. I agree that the general takeaway should be "don't be an asshole" but it's important to differentiate assholery and prejudice in the wider debate because the legal ramifications are different. Edit: Rogue apostrophe

I never mentioned prejudice, I addressed assholery can rise to the level of harassment depending on what is said or done and who is around at the time. Prejudice and harassment are two very different things.

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

#248

Post by trhway »

strken wrote: post #183

Articles like this really make me aware that men and women like Ellen Pao and her former partners live in a separate parallel world: three degrees, $10 million golden parachutes, private jet flights to ski resorts, affairs with a creepy married co-worker in Germany, machismo-driven muscling for VC connections, bisexual finance wizards who kickstart an Ivy-League LGBT program, dominance games over which chair an exec…

>I worry that the media looks at cases like this as typical of the experience of women in tech

well, it is hard to blame the media when even most people in the tech consider the Ellen Pao's case to be a case of genuine sexism and not just a case of a jerk in a skirt who was bitching about a coworker using the company's fax to send scans of the brain cancer stricken mother, and who tried to hijack and milk a bit for herself the cause of anti-sexism. And after Reddit failure (which has all her typical fingerprints all over) she seems to be trying to get back at riding the cause.

Not every woman with unsatisfied ambition is a victim of sexism. Not every such woman gets her day in court. Ellen Pao did get hers.

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

#249

Post by pjc50 »

maehwasu wrote: post #158
Joeri wrote: post #106

It's easy to get hung up on the particulars of Pao's story and get sidetracked into defending or judging her, but I feel that is besides the point. I am more interested in the wider notion of why she wrote this article: to point out that sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be. I'm wondering though: is this just about sexism, or is it about professionalism and maturity? Getting hit on by someone higher up…

> 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.

> somewhere that didn't absolutely suck to work

People telling you that you're unprofessional can mean that you're the one making work suck for them.

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

#250

Post by lagadu »

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 disagree, particularly in regards to r/fatpeoplehate (I didn't know r/revengeporn existed but I know revenge porn is illegal in my country at least). Fatpeoplehate was one of the strictest subs when it came to enforcing the rediquette rules of "not touching the poo": members were very quickly banned if they got caught using the content in the sub to harass anyone outside it.

Once that boundary is set it all becomes a matter of the viewer's morality. You likely think that it's wrong to dislike (or at least not to coddle and treat them like they're wonderful snowflakes) people who let themselves go and even glorify obesity; they did not. What's relevant is that as long as a group keeps to its own circle I feel we have no standing in judging them because my moral values are no better or worse than theirs.

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