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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

#451

Post by dlwdlw »

gerbilly wrote: post #409

Every visible trait that makes you seem different from the rest of the in-group counts as a 'demerit.' - Are you a woman in a male dominated field? -1 - Are you a racial minority relative to the dominant group? -1 - Do you take time off in a 24/7 work culture? -1 - Are you gay? -1 - Are you transgender? -1 - Do you have a physical disability? -1 . . . If you have enough of these, then the group will likely reject you…

Yea, it's a weakness to have to constantly be evaluating a situation with "Was that because I'm black/female/gay/..."

Power comes with the leverage of keeping a function DRY and re-using it. One small change is leveraged across everything. Large changes though are unwanted because of the harm than can happen.

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

#452

Post by tomxor »

bane wrote: post #290

I think it's very important to parse Pao from the reprehensible behavior she describes in her workplace. Being polite, Pao does not come off well in her own personal story. But she was also swimming in a garbage pit. I have no doubt that what she writes about is true, and probably even holds back on much of the frat house nonsense. There can be entire semesters spent at school exploring other avenues that she might h…

>Pao's story is important to tell, but she lacks the personal credibility for people to care

^This, because it matters, reverse the scenario if you like, and make it a man... It's very difficult to care about any type of discrimination when the person discriminated against is unpleasant to say the least.

This is not hate, stop the mad flagging and form an argument!

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

#453

Post by pervycreeper »

Natsu wrote: post #415
pervycreeper wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In response to my suit, Kleiner hired a powerful crisis-­management PR firm, Brunswick. On their website, they bragged about having troll farms — “integrated networks of influence,” used in part for “reputation management” — and I believe they enlisted one to defame me online. The "I believe" is the operative phrase in this allegation. It's not implausible, however. Comments everywhere on topics where powerful agent…

Well, I mean, that's kind of the question, isn't it? She's sharing a lot of personal anecdotes after losing on her claims about those in court. I do not know what happened or what people actually said, but I won't take the illogical step of inferring things about this case from the outcome of other cases or vice versa and I disliked the fact that this is a lot of scandalous, unverifiable anecdotes that she was not ab…

No judgement from me on the ultimate truth or falsity of her claim. My only point is that the idea that a PR firm would engage in astroturfing has enough plausibility not to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory out of hand, since such things do actually happen. Other contextual factors certainly do bear on the overall credibility of the claim, but taken in isolation, it is not an absurdity, as the parent comment seems to suggest.

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

#454

Post by ikeyany »

fav_collector wrote: post #446
ikeyany wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit cynical to say that's done simply in the name of gender. There are certainly many talented people who move away from tech because they look at it from the outside and observe that tech "isn't for them". There is nothing "inherently wrong" in correcting some of that unless you willfully ignore how our society came to be.

> There are certainly many talented people who move away from tech Let's be honest, most biology majors turned programmers aren't oppressed people who had passion for tech but were discouraged from tech by terrible, systemic biases. They're people who either couldn't make it to med school or didn't want to go to med school who realized that there is more $$$ in the tech field than in biology research. > It's a bit cy…

> Let's be honest

If you're going to make such a claim, you should provide some sort of proof. By your cynical logic, engineers are no more than nerds who don't have the stones to go into finance--where the money really is.

> There isn't much of a reason to specifically recruit biology majors (other than for demographic reasons or if the company software is related to biology).

I know many talented biology majors who have no interest spending their entire career alongside men smugly assume they "couldn't make it into med school". Or those who actually believe in the work that they're doing. Try telling the hundreds of thousands in research labs working on groundbreaking science like CRISPR that their careers are considered settling.

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

#455

Post by sangnoir »

samstave wrote: post #408
sangnoir wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter devils advocate - let me remap what you're saying to race: >> racism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be. >To play devils advocate, racism is a thing everywhere. In some cases, there are good biological reasons why blacks and whites are treated differently, e.g. basketball (mostly blacks) versus swimming (mostly whites ) If the above doesn't sound insane to you, I don't know what to tell you.

Just because you can substitute words doesn't invalidate the point. Replace with religion and blacks and whites with Jews and muslims, sure the paragraph can still be written as such, but still doesn't change the original meaning.

Perhaps you'd like to expand on what "the original meaning" was to you?

If it wasn't obvious, one of my points was that being good at swimming is just that - it has nothing to do with software engineering. The whole "inherently different" argument is a red-herring if it has no provable bearing on the ability to do the (software engineering) work.

edit: my main point though, was that differences in statistical sport affinities are not, and do not explain "racism" - just as difference in statistical career-affinity is not, and doesn't explain "sexism".

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

#456

Post by crdoconnor »

aianus wrote: post #423
crdoconnor wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your contention that it is racist for the American government to prioritize the needs of citizens who vote for it and live under its laws over the citizens who don't?

American is not a race so it's not racist, no. But I do feel that it's wrong to restrict the supply of foreign programmers so that an engineer in Silicon Valley can earn $200k instead of 'only' $150k. The average SV programmer is already in the global 0.1%, they don't need protectionism.

>But I do feel that it's wrong to restrict the supply of foreign programmers so that an engineer in Silicon Valley can earn $200k instead of 'only' $150k.

Do you feel that Yelp paying $200k rather than $150k is a greater injustice than poorer countries footing the bill for educating their best and brightest only to see their best and brightest flee to San Francisco because domestic companies cannot compete with 'only $150k'?

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

#457

Post by arkades »

tomschlick wrote: post #395
abtinf wrote: post #344

"I didn’t have time to go through all my emails to figure out which ones to give Kleiner, so during the discovery process we gave them practically everything, some 700,000 emails — most of which we could have legally withheld. ... During depositions, they brought up everything from my nanny’s contract to an exercise I’d done in therapy where I listed resentments. Emails to friends, emails to my husband, emails to oth…

Yeah thats straight negligence by her legal team.

"I didn't have time to go through..."

She had to have done this without her attorneys. Big Firms bill by the hour: if you have the money to throw at them, they will find the man-hours to get the job done. "We don't have the time" just isn't a phrase they use.

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

#458

Post by morgtheborg »

ralusek wrote: post #64
icebraining wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find it remotely hard to believe that Ellen Pao's recounting of her experience in the world of venture capital is far from the truth Can you clarify this? I'm confused because it seems at odds with the rest of your post.

My point is that a lot of engineers get very annoyed when the topic of "sexism in Silicon Valley" is brought up, because anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is. For positions and treatment of individuals working in venture capital, however, I don't imagine very many engineers would have much to weigh in on. So what I'm getting at is that I'…

> My point is that a lot of engineers get very annoyed when the topic of "sexism in Silicon Valley" is brought up, because anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is.

To me, that shows a stunning lack of personal awareness. I've done hiring in tech. I'm an engineer. I'm also a woman. And I know I'm biased against certain groups. I purposefully offset that by making sure there is some sort of measurement (usually a coding exercise) with as objective as possible metrics for judgement (I explicitly state the criteria they'll be judged on so they're aware) that dictates whether they move on to the next stage or not.

If I need to offset my subconscious biases as a woman in tech who spent many of her formative years living in different African countries, than I can only imagine the types of biases a white man who has lived primarily in the suburbs will need to be combatting.

For such a man to be "annoyed" because "anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is" is a major part of the problem. You can't correct for biases (often subconscious or quite subtle) you're refusing to acknowledge.

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

#459

Post by nwienert »

sdenton4 wrote: post #294
SBCRec wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you provide a source please? Interested to read about it! Thanks in Advance!

Here's a piece in response to the damore memo, written up by an evolutionary biologist. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... It spends a while at the beginning on credentials and the importance of using citations (something damore failed at), and starts getting into the science at 'universal across all cultures, are we sure?'

Conversely, this one, incredibly well cited, seems to make the case that it's pretty clear that the genetic differences are the reason: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

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

#460

Post by arkades »

matt4077 wrote: post #111
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.

She was offered a multi-million payoff to stay silent. Sure, maybe she believes her book will earn her more. But she'd need to write the #1 or 2 non-fiction book of the year to get there.

If your career is equally or more remunerative than a payoff for silence, repairing your career-impacting public image would be equally or more valuable than a payoff.

It is reasonable to anticipate Pao is not giving up get career, and expects to make more than 2M from it. The spin about her during this debate has made her look pretty bad.

So... yeah. She could easily be motivated by money, in terms of investing in her long term earning potential.

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