Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by alexandercrohde » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 6:03 PM UTC

khazhoux wrote: post #469

Now that I've read her own account, I have the same impression I got years ago: maybe, in addition to an environment of harassment, she wasn't actually that good at being a VC. She recounts the Flipboard incident -- she spotted a good deal early and was shot down, and then others took (a worse) deal for themselves. So... yeah, they ignored and steamrolled the junior partner. Cutthroat and not nice, but it's not shock…

Isn't that beside the point? Whether or not one particular woman is a great investor or not isn't so substantial. What is substantial if we have a broken system that perpetuates the ingroup and doesn't make avenues for the actual talent (e.g. Warren Buffet) in if it's not bro-y enough.

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

#472

Post by nodamage » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 6:04 PM UTC

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'…

While it may be true that the hiring process in the tech industry is has a more utilitarian basis than in other industries, it is quite a jump to go from there to concluding that sexism in tech (at the "worker bee" level) is not a problem.

Consider the high-profile stories of how women get treated in the industry after they are hired.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describe... https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

Even if we assume the hiring process is 100% utilitarian and unbiased (which itself is quite a questionable claim), the tech industry still has a serious problem with the way it treats women once they are hired.

So attempting to argue that the problem comes from the venture capital side and not the engineering side comes across as a little naive.

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

#473

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 6:04 PM UTC

dreta wrote: post #69

An interesting read. Though, for me, VC in general is not the kind of job that favors people who are nice. When people are rude to you, or try to use you, there's a multitude of ways you can interpret that. For Ellen, it's sexism. What baffled me was that in the opening paragraphs she felt the need to point out that the powerful men were white. For me, it set the tone for the whole article, and painted a clear pictur…

[deleted]

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

#474

Post by ralfn » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 6:10 PM UTC

pencilcode wrote: post #263

adekok wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be. To play devils advocate, sexism is a thing everywhere . In some cases, there are good biological reasons why men and women are treated differently, e.g. child care (mostly women) versus hard physical labor (mostly men) Where those biological differences aren't effective (e.g. typing on a keyboard), then yes, men and women should be treated the same. But even with…

Just to nitpick an issue that some people mix up. On average more interest does not equate on average more skilled within the interested population. Also this gender diff does not play out so starkly in other sciences, eg biology, physics, etc. And, some decades ago in the west, and currently in other countries/civilizations, this gender difference does not pan out. This seems to point to other factors beyond genetic…

> On average more interest does not equate on average more skilled within the interested population.

But it might impact supply and demand of applicants with a certain background (either educational or self-study). Companies can take responsibility for the demand, but not the supply of human capital. Solutions are more likely found within education, family and youth culture. The top tier companies (like Google) can't hide behind that fact, since they generally get first pick, but that would make it even harder for lower tier companies to uphold an effective diversity policy.

There may be a strong business opportunity to exclusively invest in and hire minorities. If you have (a lot of) money and believe minorities to be discriminated against due to culture, hiring policy or financial rewards, it logically follows that you should invest in minorities. You would get, on average, better people that are more competitive.

Nothing argues quicker than profit. And the end of the day, we live in a capitalistic society. The economic arguments are the only types of arguments that will change anything.

If the invisible hand of the free market has a bias where it does not properly allocate its resources for maximum profitability, go bet against it and get rich.

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

#475

Post by iosDrone » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 6:11 PM UTC

Asdfbla wrote: post #59

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…

>Subsequently she fired Victoria Taylor, an incredibly popular moderator at /r/ama. She didn't. Alexis Ohanian did: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/details-emerge-abo... She actually did very few of the things the Reddit witchhunt accused her of. The whole Pao affair was just another dark period that showed how insane online communities can really be.

She still banned the subreddits though, which completely ruined Reddit and turned it from an interesting place into a ban-happy wasteland controlled by oversensitive mods.

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

#476

Post by curun1r » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 6:12 PM UTC

direfungasaur wrote: post #364

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…

obvious and unobjectionable steps like "recruit junior devs from the ranks of biology grads I don't follow how this is an obvious decision. Would you please elaborate? If the target software isn't dealing with the biology domain, why would I prefer biology grads over computer science grads? It seems like the lack of formal knowledge around CS fundamentals could prove a hindrance, while the biology knowledge wouldn't…

Not biology, but I've had great success hiring mechanical engineers to write code. I'm not sure what it is--perhaps some mindset they learn in school--but I've yet to meet one that didn't develop into an excellent software engineer as well.

So perhaps biology has a similar synergy.

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

#477

Post by barsonme » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 6:16 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #410

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…

What struck me was that the same Jenna Jemison obsessed CEO was one of the most ardent spokespersons for "Lean In". As someone once said, "some of the most vocal feminist men are some of the creepiest". It's as if it's their red herring for behaving badly. Going from her quotes, it's as if they went out of their way to be obnoxious.

Another interesting anecdote is Kai Cole (Joss Wheadon's ex-wife): http://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infide...

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

#478

Post by cuckcuckspruce » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 6:27 PM UTC

direfungasaur wrote: post #461

cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of jobs now are not 'low-level hardware, highly algorithmic or heavy in the domain modeling space'. They're corporate CRUD-style apps, existing software maintenance, and other such things. There's no reason that a bright student with a biology background couldn't be a perfect fit for these sorts of things if they have some contact with a computer science class or two.

There's no reason that a bright student with a biology background couldn't be a perfect fit for these sorts of things if they have some contact with a computer science class or two. Sure, it's completely realistic for a biology student (or any other discipline) to serve in a junior or line developer position in many corporate environments. If you're just wiring Spring beans together, writing test cases, or doing basi…

Biases on the table: co-authored a paper on machine learning, graduated undergrad summa cum laude from an CS honors program with a 4.0 GPA in courses in CS, then dropped out in the first semester in an CS MSc program due to personal issues. You'll find no stronger proponent of a classical CS education.

There is plenty of time for someone to learn about DAGs (really, they're not rocket science) while they're a junior dev, and a bright person, given a series of tasks slightly increasing in complexity and difficulty, will have no trouble learning the fundamentals.

Most of my CS classmates were much more interested in going to school to get their degree to become the next Mark Zuckerberg or maybe work for him. They'd cram for tests between beer pong and bong hits and forget 90% of what they were there to learn. I'd rather hire someone who is bright with any college degree (best programmer where I worked at in my last job had a Masters in dramatic arts) than a random somebody with a CS background. Everything I need in theory from a junior dev can be tested during an interview - it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what quicksort is, or how to write documentation, or how to create a new class in Java without using an IDE.

I guess the major difference is that I don't see a CS degree as a sign of a good programmer. I see it as a sign that someone endured classes for four years, and I am open to the possibility that someone with another degree might be a better fit at a junior level than anybody with a CS degree that bothered to respond to the job posting.

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

#479

Post by rsj_hn » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 6:27 PM UTC

morgtheborg wrote: post #462

rsj_hn wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a crapshoot. There can be bad hiring decisions. There can be bad business decisions. And people can be jerks or rude. People are passed over promotions. That happens all the time to everyone. But it's problematic when someone sees each event as happening to them as some conspiracy against their race/gender/age/whatever, as opposed to someone just disagreeing with them or dismissing their argument because th…

I often think the bias occurs before the interview in terms of the pipeline. For me, that's my largest self-correcting area. There are groups of people or people who present themselves in a certain way that I simply don't want to interview because it feels like 'wasting my time'. Clearly that's bullshit and I make an active effort to overcome those biases and, if anything, now am overcorrecting (a better mistake to m…

In my case, I'm not a recruiter, so I interview everyone they ask me to interview -- I've never played a role in the original vetting.

I think most large companies have a formalized system of initial screening -- which has been criticized for relying on keywords and such. It's done by HR. After that, there's a phone screen which is much like an in person interview -- the questions should be pre-written based on the resume and generally they are. In my company I've worked to write up large banks of questions w/answers and distributed them to people doing phone screens for this purpose, and I've used that in my own phone screens.

What people should do is formalize the interview process which helps in so many ways -- a repeatable process with repeatable questions lets you compare people across times and gives a lot of insight. It also helps reduce bias.

I do think that small companies tend to do a worse job that big companies with established HR practices. That's not only true for HR, it's true across the board. Young people who are inexperienced are going to make mistakes. Certainly there is going to be "culture" type bias in start ups and other small companies at least during the screening process. I wouldn't say that's too relevant for "Silicon Valley", as you have these issues in small businesses in every industry.

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

#480

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 6:28 PM UTC

cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #403

direfungasaur wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

obvious and unobjectionable steps like "recruit junior devs from the ranks of biology grads I don't follow how this is an obvious decision. Would you please elaborate? If the target software isn't dealing with the biology domain, why would I prefer biology grads over computer science grads? It seems like the lack of formal knowledge around CS fundamentals could prove a hindrance, while the biology knowledge wouldn't…

The vast majority of jobs now are not 'low-level hardware, highly algorithmic or heavy in the domain modeling space'. They're corporate CRUD-style apps, existing software maintenance, and other such things. There's no reason that a bright student with a biology background couldn't be a perfect fit for these sorts of things if they have some contact with a computer science class or two.

> There's no reason that a bright student with a biology background couldn't be a perfect fit

There's no reason that a bright student with Chinese poetry background couldn't be a perfect fit. But I think there's reasons why we still have CS degrees even though there's no reason why any bright person can't teach oneself coding. OTOH, if you go this route and say CS degree doesn't matter at all, just drop any connection to degrees and hire people based on tests or something - why link it to biology?