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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

#561

Post by notyourday »

jpao79 wrote: post #440
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…

Agree - I think many of the recent examples of Silicon Valley issues in the media seem more related to Silicon Valley VCs who inherit more traits from NYC finance, sales and hedge fund/investment banking than the hacker in the garage inventing next generation networking, programming language, search engine, machine learning or open source project. In fact many men (and women) who chose engineering/computer science we…

> I think many of the recent examples of Silicon Valley issues in the media seem more related to Silicon Valley VCs who inherit more traits from NYC finance, sales and hedge fund/investment banking than the hacker in the garage inventing next generation networking, programming language, search engine, machine learning or open source project.

The cultural zeitgeist simply shifted which is why the media is full of stories of "baddies" in the tech. Culturally, tech boys are the new finance boys who of course were preceded by rock-star boys. Hell, we even call tech boys with the devil may care attitude "rock stars". Do you know what were finance boys called in the late nineties? That's right: "rock stars". Want to know who culturally is on a top of the mountain? Look at whom the likes of Miranda Kerr and Amber Heard are dating.

Did anything change in finance? Nope. Still the same types of people go into finance. Interns/juniors are still being hazed err... harassed, "rock stars" still spend thousands of dollars in strip clubs entertaining clients, etc and everything is still for sale.

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

#562

Post by notyourday »

fav_collector wrote: post #431
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…

> recruit junior devs from the ranks of biology grad Targeting specific groups just because of the racial or gender makeup of the group seems inherently wrong to me. A biology major doesn't give people many relevant skills for programming. If it was a math intensive subject like Physics, Stats or Math, I could see it being more fair and valid.

> Targeting specific groups just because of the racial or gender makeup of the group seems inherently wrong to me.

It did not click in my head initially but damn this is a great proxy.

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

#563

Post by notyourday »

Powerofmene wrote: post #540
xhedley wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can define it by imagining a male co-worker in a meeting with your mother/sister/daughter/other female relative/female friend. Are you comfortable with your male co-worker discussing pornography and sex work in that level of detail with her? If not sure, ask your mother/sister/daughter/other female relative/female friend. If you don't have a female relative or friend to ask - random HN user and Ellen Pao advise y…

At a government training, I once had a harassment trainer explain it very similarly. If you would not say it to your grandmother, mother, sister or daughter, do not say it. If you would not want someone saying, sharing explicit details or even joking about personal relations with your grandmother, mother, sister or daughter the same thing that you are saying about a coworker or even a stranger then do not say it. It…

> At a government training, I once had a harassment trainer explain it very similarly. If you would not say it to your grandmother, mother, sister or daughter, do not say it

And this is the crux of the problem. Let's pretend that I do not have any issue having this kind of a discussion ( in passing, as a single comment or even at length ) with grandmother, mother, sister or daughter?

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

#564

Post by notyourday »

4c2383f5c88e911 wrote: post #176
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.

If I understand your reply correctly, you mean to say that it's acceptable to be a total douchebag as long as you are "talented"?

> If I understand your reply correctly, you mean to say that it's acceptable to be a total douchebag as long as you are "talented"?

It's a sliding scale. The better one's results are the bigger douche one can be and get away with it. And that's a very good thing because it ensures that most people who know that they are not that fantastic at producing great results go out of their way to avoid being total douche bags.

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

#565

Post by smsm42 »

crdoconnor wrote: post #552
smsm42 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> poorer countries footing the bill for educating their best and brightest only to see their best and brightest flee to San Francisco Do you imply that "poorer countries" somehow own their people and those people owe them indentured servitude until they "return" the "investment" made into them to their "country"? And until then they are not free to move wherever they please and seek as large salary as they can find?…

Nope. That's a massive Straw man you just lit on fire. Honestly, I don't even really like the Singaporean approach of educating your citizens and then slapping a bond on them either. I think education should be free. I think the US owes the poorer country if it takes their citizens though, and in a just world, corporation taxes on the companies that employ these people would foot the bill of the education they are ar…

> I think education should be free.

You mean college professors should work for free? Or somebody else should pay for your education? That's not the worst part though. The worst part is where you turn around and say "well, since we paid for your education (with other people's money of course, but let's forget about that), we now own you and you are indebted to us forever".

> I think the US owes the poorer country if it takes their citizens though

So, you think the "poorer country" owns its citizens. Because otherwise how you can owe anybody for something they don't own? Do you owe me for sunlight? For the air you breathe? No, because I don't own it. But if you took something I do own, I would certainly be expecting something in return, you'd owe me. That's directly the idea of ownership, and what you said directly implies ownership of the country (at least "poor country") over the citizens.

> We live in a world where poor subsidize rich

No we do not. It is a completely false statement. Look into any table of who pays most of the taxes, they are widely available online.

> USSR being both very poor and having a great education system

Did you experience that system? Because I did. It sucked. There were a few (half-dozen or so) of good schools per city (if the city is large). The rest were more or less garbage. Even in the good ones, usually some things were taught well (i.e., in one school, math & physics, in another - languages, in another - chemistry, etc. - the rest again was pretty bad). There was a number (maybe a dozen or so over the whole country) decent higher education institutions, the rest was mediocre at the best. And for it being free I was forced (literally, under the threat of expulsion) to sort rotten vegetables in the local agricultural storage depot. Do you know how potatoes rotting for weeks smell like? Did you have to go through a pile of them with you bare hands? It was part of my CS curriculum. Tell me more about how education in USSR was the best. Fortunately, I got the idea eventually and left (I was lucky, by then it was permitted) and got education in a place where you can pay for it with money and not forced labor.

> Do you consider the idea that there should be a societal gain for educating ones' citizens controversial?

I consider the idea that the state owns people because it took their money and made an "investment" controversial. Investment implies you own whatever you invested into. And your claims about people leaving the country after being educated being unfair implies you buy into that concept of ownership.

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

#566

Post by dang »

imaginenore wrote: post #554
dang wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This crosses into personal attack. You don't have anything like the basis you would need to credibly post such inflammatory claims, so this comment breaks the HN guidelines. We ban accounts that do this, and I'm sorry to say you've done it repeatedly in the past. Please fix this if you want to continue commenting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What exactly is a "personal attack" here? I posted widely published information. There's even a link.

Obviously you went beyond facts into making an unsupported claim about motive.

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

#567

Post by sushid »

nitrogen wrote: post #546
sushid wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. Either you're legitimately asking for a list or you are trying to say since there's no way such a list exists, we should be allowed to "publicly" discuss whatever we'd like in the company of coworkers. You're probably better off asking your HR for a training if you can't fathom what topics may be appropriate for work or not. But most of it is common sense. Is it sexual/racial or otherwise offensive to s…

It's clear that I've been misunderstood, and I'm not sure how to rectify the misunderstanding. This makes it difficult to have actual discussions about this topic that don't devolve into bandwagon parades. If we had always followed the "don't say it" default, then it would still be considered offensive to advocate for LGBT or religious or gender rights in the workplace. This is what I meant by taboos being sometimes…

> If we had always followed the "don't say it" default, then it would still be considered offensive to advocate for LGBT or religious or gender rights in the workplace. This is what I meant by taboos being sometimes harmful.

Again, you're equating social progress with the ability to say controversial things at work. I would argue that most of the progress LGBT/religious/etc. groups have made have been made outside of office cubicles. More importantly, there's a clear difference between "what are we doing to encourage a more diverse group of developers" to "who do you think is the hottest engineer on our team?"

I'm still failing to see what your point is. Yes, some people can choose to violate the rules and risk getting away with it or not.

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

#568

Post by adekok »

idrios wrote: post #553
adekok wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Counter devils advocate - let me remap what you're saying to race: That makes about as much sense as saying "let me remap what you're saying to hair color" > If the above doesn't sound insane to you, I don't know what to tell you. It does sound insane, because it is insane. But it's your text. Not mine. The problem is that you're making the following insinuation: there are no more differences between men and women…

The jump from sexism to racism made perfect sense to me, they're pretty analogous; an entire group of people has significant and pervasive adverse experiences over a part of their identity. ..We don't have a systematic cultural problem over people born with red hair, but if we did there would be a word for that too. Your analogy sounds insane and his doesn't because his stays within the domain of cultural issues. Mor…

> The jump from sexism to racism made perfect sense to me, they're pretty analogous;

Except I wasn't being sexist. The re-phrasing of my comment as racism was offensive and demeaning, and entirely not analogous.

> Sexism is about an unfair social power dynamic

Such as men dying earlier than women? Such as 80% of homeless being men? Such as 93% of "on the job" deaths being male? Such as never-married childless women earning more than equivalent men... going back to the 1960's?

I could go on.

My point is that everyone touts the party line of "OMFG women are oppressed". Very few people look into the facts. And when all the facts are presented, it's a whole lot more nuanced than "think of the Women!"

> to say "yeah but this will always be an issue because men and women are biologically different" trivializes it and takes away from the discussion.

You're reading a whole lot more into my comment than I said. That shows rather more projection that reality-based discussion.

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

#569

Post by crdoconnor »

aianus wrote: post #559
crdoconnor wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. That's a massive Straw man you just lit on fire. Honestly, I don't even really like the Singaporean approach of educating your citizens and then slapping a bond on them either. I think education should be free. I think the US owes the poorer country if it takes their citizens though, and in a just world, corporation taxes on the companies that employ these people would foot the bill of the education they are ar…

You obviously don't think it should be free because you think it should come with the obligation to stay in your poor country of birth after graduation. That obligation is worth $100,000s in opportunity cost or more.

>you think it should come with the obligation to stay

Jesus Christ. I literally explicitly said that I didn't believe that.

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

#570

Post by crdoconnor »

smsm42 wrote: post #565
crdoconnor wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. That's a massive Straw man you just lit on fire. Honestly, I don't even really like the Singaporean approach of educating your citizens and then slapping a bond on them either. I think education should be free. I think the US owes the poorer country if it takes their citizens though, and in a just world, corporation taxes on the companies that employ these people would foot the bill of the education they are ar…

> I think education should be free. You mean college professors should work for free? Or somebody else should pay for your education? That's not the worst part though. The worst part is where you turn around and say "well, since we paid for your education (with other people's money of course, but let's forget about that), we now own you and you are indebted to us forever". > I think the US owes the poorer country if…

>The worst part is where you turn around and say "well, since we paid for your education (with other people's money of course, but let's forget about that), we now own you

Except I didn't say that.

>So, you think the "poorer country" owns its citizens.

>I consider the idea that the state owns people

How many times do I have to say "I don't believe this" before you stop turning around and telling me that I believe it?

>Did you experience that system? Because I did. It sucked.

Oh believe me, this whole conversation is making me reconsider my opinion.

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