Having hosts at an event is one thing having people pretend to be guests of the party is seriously creepy. I've never heard of this happening at a bay area tech company (as in from someone who went to one) though perhaps they wouldn't have known.
Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models into This Year’s Holiday Parties
161–170 of 234 posts
Re: Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models into This Year’s Holiday Parties
#162This article and especially the comments here are desperately searching for something to take offense to. FFS it's just a corporate holiday party. These things are usually so bland and sterile I don't even show up. Companies do all sorts of things to drive attendance: Good food, drinks, interesting venue, and entertainment. These guests are hired to further improve the atmosphere. Artificial? Sure. The end of the world? Come on.
The article specifically mentions that male models are also employed, so all of the knee-jerk ranting about sexism and misogyny is misplaced.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models into This Year’s Holiday Parties
#163Pathetic. The whole point is to celebrate with the employees and their families and recognize the hard work everyone has put in over the year. A stranger not connected to an employee would take away from that value. If you want more women at the event, hire more women at the company and create a culture that encourages that.
> If you want more women at the event This has nothing to do with equality. They aren't hiring these models as equals, but for the misogynistic dynamic (while removing the organic nature of opposite-sex interaction)
How do you square your claim of misogyny against the fact that male models are also employed in these roles?
Re: Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models into This Year’s Holiday Parties
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you want more women at the event This has nothing to do with equality. They aren't hiring these models as equals, but for the misogynistic dynamic (while removing the organic nature of opposite-sex interaction)
How do you square your claim of misogyny against the fact that male models are also employed in these roles?
If they are, that's an improvement. What's the breakdown like? I've venture to say less than 1% overall.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models into This Year’s Holiday Parties
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally different. The article you're referencing is trying to connect two dating markets (SF and NYC) where both sides are ostensibly interested. Models at parties are actors, pretending to be real people.
Presumably models are also real people who have an interest in being there (their interest is in being paid). If consenting adults are being treated fairly, I don't see any moral problem here.
The article says they are told to say "I'm (real employee)'s friend". If I go to a party put on by my employer and they are paying people to lie to me, I would say I'm not being treated fairly.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models into This Year’s Holiday Parties
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that a splashy headline? Are you referring to "sneaking"? > “The companies don’t want their staff to be talking to someone and think, Oh, this person was hired to socialize with me,” says Kermaani, who’s sending models to seven tech parties in the same weekend. It's just accurate. And where in the article is there any implication that this is an entirely new thing? > say a record number of tech companies are q…
It's a splashy headline. "Sneaking" is unnecessary. Replace the word with "Hiring", you don't sneak atmosphere models into a party, you hire them and they show up. There's also no point in calling out this year's parties, this has happened at a bunch of parties for at least the last two decades. It's not even exclusive to Silicon Valley! Tradeshow models, booth models, and atmosphere models are also not the same. Tra…
I think "sneak" means they are trying to pass them off of friends of employees, even instructing them to say so, as opposed to disclosing why they are there. Lying to your employees, even "white lies", is sneaky.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models into This Year’s Holiday Parties
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you square your claim of misogyny against the fact that male models are also employed in these roles?
If they are, that's an improvement. What's the breakdown like? I've venture to say less than 1% overall.
LMRTAFY: "For a typical party, scheduled for the weekend of Dec. 8, Cre8 Agency LLC is sending 25 women and 5 men, all good-looking..."
Re: Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models into This Year’s Holiday Parties
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you square your claim of misogyny against the fact that male models are also employed in these roles?
If they are, that's an improvement. What's the breakdown like? I've venture to say less than 1% overall.
The article gave one example of 30 models (5 men and 25 women) -- so 20% in that case.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models into This Year’s Holiday Parties
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
IDK. My logical brain says "it's not 1950 anymore; the PR blow-black has the potential to be truly brutal." My emotional brain says "This is horridly objectifying and super awkward."
>"it's not 1950 anymore; the PR blow-black has the potential to be truly brutal." For that particular party, there definitely wasn't blowback because the next morning, everybody talked about how amazing it was. I think it caught everyone off guard because it was unexpected and it gave attendees happy memories. (Yes, maybe the attendees should have been morally outraged but I can only report how they actually responde…
Sounds amazing. Wish my company treated us to this kind of delight!
Re: Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models into This Year’s Holiday Parties
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If you want more women at the event, hire more women at the company and create a culture that encourages that." -- Yes, some magic wand will solve it? If they are tech companies and engineers are the primary value drivers, and only 16% of CS grads are female, what kind of rock will they find balanced workforce? Companies hire because they need people to feel a role, (eg. engineers, marketing, sales, hr... etc). If t…
~60% of the developers on my team are women. It's not magic. Also, in a big company most employees are not engineers, so the relative lack of female CS grads shouldn't mean there are so few women that you need to hire them for events.
>~60% of the developers on my team are women. It's not magic
Which is leagues above the vast majority of engineering companies, as well as the overall population within the software engineering community at large. Yours is an outlier, and an obvious one at that.