Very meta query, but if you feel you need to disable flags to keep a potentially interesting story on the front page, doesn't that imply that there's something broken with the way the current flag model gets used?
Getting free of toxic tech culture
231–240 of 420 posts
Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture
#232>What is toxic tech culture? Toxic tech cultures are those that demean and devalue you as holistic, multifaceted human beings. Toxic tech cultures are those that prioritize profits and growth over human and societal well being. Toxic tech cultures are those that treat you as replaceable cogs within a system of constant churn and burnout. has there been any factory floor, farm, private or government office where thing…
> has there been any factory floor, farm, private or government office where things have been different?
If anything, then the concern would be "out of the frying pan and into the fire", i.e., leaving tech because of real problems in the industry, but then finding it just as bad or worse in other fields.
Does anyone know of anecdotes where someone says "I left tech because of discrimination, but it was way worse in this other industry, so I returned?"
And yes - I agree that parts of the tech industry are quite progressive. It sounds like (not just from this article) that other parts are quite not.
Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture
#233Earlier 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?
That is the flagship cliché of offtopicness for this argument. We've been through it countless times, and nothing new ever comes of it. Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents.
Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture
#234Very meta query, but if you feel you need to disable flags to keep a potentially interesting story on the front page, doesn't that imply that there's something broken with the way the current flag model gets used?
I'd say no. The system has a lot of noise in it, so we're never going to get precise results. At a coarse-grained level, my impression is that it's reasonably well balanced, just messy, and it would be a mistake to try for finer-grained control than that. The way we get the latter is by occasionally manually intervening.
I know it disappoints some of the systematizers here, but IMO there's no substitute for human judgment being in the mix. HN functions best as a complex system with many feedback loops between community, software, and moderation.
(We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16182520 and marked it off-topic.)
Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture
#235I think this was well written. There were a few instances where, upon first reading it, I objected. But rereading it, I thought the language used was chosen well. I have one main gripe, though: The scope limitation to tech. > "Toxic tech cultures are those that demean and devalue you as holistic, multifaceted human beings. Toxic tech cultures are those that prioritize profits and growth over human and societal well b…
Perhaps you could say there is a specific instantiation of this problem in tech.
Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture
#236> The refrain of how a startup CEO is going to save humanity is so common that it’s actually uncommon for a CEO to not use saviour language when describing their startup. Cult leaders do the same thing: they create a unique philosophy, imbued with some sort of special message that they alone can see or hear, convince people that only they have the answers for what ails humanity, and use that influence to control the…
I've been in SV for a decade now and I am not observing anything cult-like. I haven't worked for companies like Google or Facebook or any other giant behemoths, so no idea how things are there, but in other places it's pretty far from a cult where I am. 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 befo…
You've been lucky, then, or just haven't worked at too many companies.
I've been in SV for 15 years, and one (out of four) companies has been incredibly cult-like. The exec team, and CEO in particular, often espoused how we were going to change the world of $INDUSTRY forever. Any talk of existential problems was met with accusations of disloyalty. People who were even thinking about leaving or interviewing elsewhere were viewed as disloyal and got "the talk" from the CEO or CTO.
Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
He argues that biology is, in part, a cause for different preferences and choices between men and women. At no point did he claim any superiority of ability. "X is worse at Y" is not at all the same thing as "X, on average, will choose to do Y at a smaller rate." Also, I find the notion that people who choose to not work in tech or work smaller hours are somehow inferior quite demeaning. My brother wasn't very intere…
So let's take that "biological difference in choices" as premise A, and then take premise B to be the company professing a policy to want a more even split. The result of that might be an action C, where you lower the standards required to hire people who are in one group to get the numbers more even - otherwise A will cause there to be not enough people of your usually quality for the numbers you want in B. And that…
This second premise, that Google hires under qualified candidates of they're diverse, is also incorrect. He claimed that Google made the false negative rate higher for non-diverse candidates. Here's the relevant quote:
> "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
In other words the bar was only lowered in the sense that diverse candidates didn't need to be as lucky as non diverse ones, with nothing to do with skill or ability. Many media outlets omitted the italicized part, so this misconception is common.
Also you're omitting the most plausible explanation in your last paragraph: the negative and often exaggerated media coverage on the memo. Remember the memo was circulated for a month without repression. This indicates that it was the media coverage, not the memo itself, that caused Damore's firing.
Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
White male, 44 years old. I'm a principal engineer at a big tech company and could get a job at a moments notice paying really well any time I choose. I'm not sure ageism really exists, outside of some toxic startups with a "bro" culture, and in my experience, those are the types of places that nobody wants to work anyway.
Do you mind me asking what languages/stack you're currently working with? Just out of curiosity.
I'm white male, 46, and last time I switched jobs (14 months ago) I had 3 offers to choose from. My stack is enterprise java. My peers are mid thirties and up.
Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture
#239> white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford,"
Literally 99% of white, male, nerds don't fit this description. Every day in Silicon Valley people show favoritism to individuals that, for purely economic reasons, got into Stanford or Harvard.
Investors that went to Stanford invest in founders that went to Stanford because their own investors (LPs) that also went to Stanford will favor them.
This is literally racist because it's a bias against socioeconomically disadvantaged people, of which people of color are disproportionately represented. And yet, this bias is openly accepted in Silicon Valley and even celebrated!
Looking at most investor bio pages, you would think the 99% would have almost nothing to contribute: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/
The 99% need to start a social movement in Silicon Valley to reform it into the semi-utopian meritocracy we all wish it was. We should demand an end to socioeconomic discrimination, which will enable people of all walks of life to lift themselves out of the shadows, turning Silicon Valley into the cross section of society it rightfully ought to be.
We should be calling for investors, universities, and companies in Silicon Valley to move to blind admissions and interview processes, and an end to all forms of "culture" testing.
We should call for #EqualOpportunity.
Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture
#240Could constantly identifying oneself as being 'marginalized' contribute to the feeling of being an outsider? As another commenter pointed out, the Kapor Center data is not nearly as damning as this piece suggests. Many of the reported reasons for leaving show similar numbers between genders & races. Sexual harassment is clearly a bigger problem for women than men, but not as drastic as this article claims. The Kapor…
I think there are studies that showed if children received messaging about their "inferiority" (in one sense or another) before taking a test, they did worse.
[Edit: Ah! The term is "Stereotype Threat": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat]
This article was more about the effect of teacher bias in education, however I think there is a study showing bias having a cognitive effect on how students perform.
http://time.com/3705454/teachers-biases-girls-education/
"The impact of unconscious teacher bias is long understood and well-documented. This new research confirms decades of work done by Myra and David Sadker and Karen R. Zittleman. Through thousands of hours of classroom observations, the Sadkers and Zittleman identified specific ways in which implicit and stereotypical ideas about gender govern classroom dynamics. They, as others have, found that teachers spend up to two thirds of their time talking to male students; they also are more likely to interrupt girls but allow boys to talk over them. Teachers also tend to acknowledge girls but praise and encourage boys. They spend more time prompting boys to seek deeper answers while rewarding girls for being quiet. Boys are also more frequently called to the front of the class for demonstrations. When teachers ask questions, they direct their gaze towards boys more often, especially when the questions are open-ended. Biases such as these are at the root of why the United States has one of the world’s largest gender gaps in math and science performance. Until they view their videotaped interactions, teachers believe they are being balanced in their exchanges.
The two reports released last week were focused on girls. However, the same biases have been implicated in teachers unconsciously undermining boys’ interest in the arts and language, enabling harmful gender gaps in self-regulation, and tacitly accepting certain male students’ propensity to believe that studying is “for girls” – all factors that contribute to boys’ lower academic performance."