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Getting free of toxic tech culture

blog.valerieaurora.org

221–230 of 420 posts

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. I used to think like this. After years and years of refining my own behavior, a non-work, non-"tech" friend let it slip that my fiends though I had turned into a non-confrontational, lawyer-sounding, people-pleaser. He wasn't wrong, I had gotten in the habit of always walking…

Just don’t write any manifestos to your co-workers.

I can't help reading this as "We'll know we have a healthy workplace culture once people subconsciously realise that any time management makes a space available for internal feedback, you should make sure not to express your actual opinions there."

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#222
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, it very probably is a tech-specific problem. Among the STEM fields, CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. STEM fields in general range from ~30-55% women, and those fields include things like Mathematics --- anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room --- which are strong proxies for CS ability. And, of course, among the professions in g…

Where did you get this idea that all professions need to be 50%/50%? Just for example 90% of nurses are female but we are as a society are OK with that right?

Nursing is an interesting example. In places right now in the U.S. with high unemployment among men, there are a lot of nursing jobs, however men are not taking them because said nursing job doesn't satisfy the traditional requirements of masculinity (not knocking it) with which those guys were raised.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/men-dont-w...

The article actually cites other potential issues such as the quality of the job itself, but traditional gender roles is a big part of it:

> "It seems like an easy fix. Traditionally male factory work is drying up. The fastest-growing jobs in the American economy are those that are often held by women. Why not get men to do them?

> The problem is that notions of masculinity die hard, in women as well as men. It’s not just that men consider some of the jobs that will be most in demand — in health care, education and administration — to be unmanly or demeaning, or worry that they require emotional skills they don’t have. So do some of their wives, prospective employers and women in these same professions."

...

> “Marriages have more problems when the man is unemployed than the woman,” Professor Sharone said. “What does it mean for a man to take a low-paying job that’s typically associated with women? What kind of price will they pay with their friends, their lives, their wives, compared to unemployment?”

> That may be, he said, because other sociologists have found that while work is important to both men’s and women’s identities, there remains a difference. “Work is at the core of what it means to be a man, in a way that work is not at the core of femininity,” he said.

So at the moment society is trying to figure out if it is OK with nursing being a "woman's" profession.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#223
post #71
post #44

I predict people will claim "our culture isn't that toxic. Some of those things happen, but they don't bother me much." If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. So don't ask "would this bother me?" Ask "would it bother someone?" And since you can't predict this from inside your head, you have to rely on firsthand acc…

I disagree. I am not responsible for others feelings. There should be clear rules of conduct at any job and a clear process of enforcement. This make the situation fair and certain. One easy rule is that if someone says "Only talk to me about work." then the other person has to respect it. No forcing of social acceptance , no shaming the other to believe what you believe, just focus on what you were hired for. This i…

So what, you're going to punish someone who mentions they saw the shape of water last night and it was really good?

That seems rather ridiculous.

Or how about, I'm trying to learn rust and it's pretty neat but also pretty hard. I don't use rust at work. Is that work related enough since it's tech?

If I walk up to a coworker and say "You idiot, this damn bug is ridiculous" am I not responsible for them getting upset at that?

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#225
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, it very probably is a tech-specific problem. Among the STEM fields, CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. STEM fields in general range from ~30-55% women, and those fields include things like Mathematics --- anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room --- which are strong proxies for CS ability. And, of course, among the professions in g…

Where did you get this idea that all professions need to be 50%/50%? Just for example 90% of nurses are female but we are as a society are OK with that right?

I think the difference is that when a man does want to be a nurse, he isn't treated like shit by female nurses to the point where he wants to leave the profession.

The main reason for the lack of men in nursing is because it's viewed by most men as not being a masculine profession, not because of discrimination.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#226
post #167
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even if you could please everyone that doesn't guarantees you are a net positive for society; for example Galileo had to bother a lot of people to convince them the earth rotates around the sun and not otherwise; and pretty much anyone with an unpopular opinion that at the end turned out be for the best had to bother a lot of people.

"If you're not making anyone angry, you're not doing anything important." (Note, however, that the contrapositive is "if you're doing something important, you'll make someone angry", not "if you're making people angry, you're doing something important"!)

Thank you for the second half of this comment.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#227

> Early on, Valerie realized that she unconsciously thought of literally every single job other than software engineer as “for people who weren’t good enough to be a software engineer” – and that she thought this because other software engineers had been telling her that for her entire career. This spoke to me for two reasons. 1) Plenty of professions are like this. Lawyers, consultants, doctors, bankers, stock broke…

Not just for dev. I went to NIPS last year (and am in DS at startups in SF) and about 80% of the time as you introduce yourself the other person just stares at your affiliation on your tag. I went to a company (nameless) afterparty where the host DS literally stared at my tag for 2 seconds with a look of some serious disgust of how did I happen to get in without Google/FB/Apple/etc. or MIT/Stanford affiliation.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#228
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, marketing sometimes goes a bit over the board, and each release of version 8.4 is the best thing that happened to humanity since v8.3 was released and before it's time to release v8.5. But that's kind of expected, nobody I know takes it as a literal truth. > And of course (almost) each startup CEO thinks his (or her) startup is going to change the world, or at least some part of it. That's how you should…

That's the whole point, let me refine it further: the bad aspects that mentioned in the article are not unique to tech: the world is full of overboard marketing, I see ads promising scantly-clad women flocking to me if I drink sugared water of $BRAND and muscular attractive men inviting me to the world of opportunities if I use shampoo $BRAND2 - btw, if you think tech world is sexist and pigeonholing try watching TV…

> "That's the whole point, let me refine it further: the bad aspects that mentioned in the article are not unique to tech: the world is full of overboard marketing ..."

I would rephrase this to "tech is not exempt from the bad aspects mentioned in the article."

> So is the message of the article "bad things in tech were bad and that's why I left"? OK, it's nice to know, not exactly anything new but everybody has the right for one's own biography. Is there any insight there beyond that? One that pertains specifically to tech world?

If my house and my neighbors house are on fire, should I still not get out of the house?

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. I used to think like this. After years and years of refining my own behavior, a non-work, non-"tech" friend let it slip that my fiends though I had turned into a non-confrontational, lawyer-sounding, people-pleaser. He wasn't wrong, I had gotten in the habit of always walking…

Uber is "never-docile-enough" ?

This article and comment thread was about Uber specifically? Oh, well, then, yeah, no, I didn't come here to say anything in specific about them. I've never worked there, so I obviously can't speak to it, and the rumors don't sound great either.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#230
post #44

I predict people will claim "our culture isn't that toxic. Some of those things happen, but they don't bother me much." If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. So don't ask "would this bother me?" Ask "would it bother someone?" And since you can't predict this from inside your head, you have to rely on firsthand acc…

Let me propose an alternative to "non-zero subset of reasonable people": "any people you want to work with."

This shifts from the pseudo-objective, nebulous standard of "reasonable" to a much more clearer standard of what you personally want to support and what you personally don't. For instance, there are people I would easily call "reasonable" who hold religious views that I myself have held in the past but which I now believe are incompatible with the society I want to see. I don't want to work with these people. I am not actively opposed to working with them - I suspect I'm coworkers with lots of such people right now - but I have no particular desire to help those people make money. If they want to start their own business with like-minded folks, great; I support their freedom to do so.

However, I do want to work with good engineers of various demographics underrepresented in my industry, because I want to work with the best engineers my company can hire (a secondary goal to "I want society to work in certain ways," so the desires in the previous paragraph would override this desire, but hopefully that happens rarely). If someone from one of those groups says, this behavior bothers me so much that I'll leave over it, then yes, absolutely, I'm going to trust them and what they say they care about.

(And if you say "Actually, I don't particularly want to work with people of this demographic?" That's fine, in the sense that it's a free country. But you would fall into the group of people that I no longer want to work with because I think that politically/financially empowering you would not build the society I want to see; I would much rather compete with you.)

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