Getting free of toxic tech culture • Hacker News Board

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#311

Post by jrumbut » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:26 AM UTC

I believe this article has great advice for everyone in tech, and really gets at the core of some of the problems that are widespread in the industry.

The thought exercise of thinking of yourself as something other than an engineer/technologist was eye opening. I got very nervous just thinking about it, and I really do have well rounded interests, other skills, and am not locked into a 24/7 work lifestyle.

Apparently I've let being a software engineer become a core part of who I am as a human being, and I think it's very worth my time to consider how that happened and whether it's healthy for me. I don't believe I judge others for not being engineers, why would I judge myself so strongly for just thinking about it?

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#312

Post by rifung » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:28 AM UTC

tlb wrote: post #79

rifung wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am unemployable because I'm a white male whose in his 40s, has a family, and because somehow, in this industry experience is a bad thing. What indications do you have that those are the reasons you are unemployable? I have many well respected, senior coworkers who fit this description so at least personally I don't understand why people would be hesitant to hire you based on that description alone..

I can attest that many tech companies are hostile to older people. I'm a white male in my 40s, and I've felt it myself and heard many more accounts. The existence of counterexamples doesn't falsify the claim. The temptation to blame victims is strong. I think it comes from wanting to reassure oneself that "it can't happen to me." So you have to actively silence that voice in your head, and assume that victims are act…

I apologize if I made it seem like I was blaming the victim; I was genuinely interested in learning how one would know the reason they were rejected. I've often been rejected and wondered why.

I don't at all find it hard to believe some interviewers would be biased against older candidates, especially for junior roles. However, given the person who posted seemed to have such a wealth of knowledge and experience, I was very surprised that they wouldn't have a very easy time finding a job even if places that refuse to hire older workers exist.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#313

Post by mpweiher » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:35 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #151

mpweiher wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, all the statements in the study would need to be qualified like that (and most of them much more), and virtually none of them are. I am assuming the study has taken some care to be representative. Otherwise, there's no need to talk about the findings at all.

(See my edit if you haven't - I agree that the blog post is trying to claim something that the Kapor study is not saying, or at least is phrased poorly.)

I see the same sort of thing in the "study", all over the place.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#314

Post by x0x0 » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:40 AM UTC

amyboyd wrote: post #120

This feels like the perfect timing for me to read this. I just quit my job on Sunday after 1.5 years of trying and failing to get on with the CEO. I'm not sure I want to stay in tech at all. I'd be interested in hearing other people's stories about changing careers entirely -- to sales (I'm not a people person but trying hard to learn the soft skills), to writing a TV show or movie (theatrics and drama are fun), to n…

You may be interested in eevee's story: https://eev.ee/blog/2015/06/09/i-quit-the-tech-industry/

My partner left finance to work in medicine. She makes a lot less money and likes it a lot better. I dunno where you live, but becoming a physician assistant can be a pretty good gig: much less school, pretty good salaries, pretty defined hours, very little debt.

Personally, I worked at a series of toxic startups and needed two years away to not loath programming. I regret nothing about leaving tech the first time, and after returning, my biggest regret is waiting so long to start my own company. Closely followed by tolerating so many shitty bosses. It helped me to have friends that did things besides work; workaholics are very common in sfbay. Dunno if that helps, but good luck.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#315

Post by mpweiher » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:44 AM UTC

zasz wrote: post #304

Aloha wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people would stop conflating poverty with racism, I think we'd have a better chance is solving both. Poor people, regardless of color, have a remarkably similar experience (with education, the police, the criminal justice system), while yes, people of color are more likely to be poor - the harder we focus on race, the harder it is to fix the underlying issue, a lack of educational, and economic mobility for the po…

> Poor people, regardless of color, have a remarkably similar experience (with education, the police, the criminal justice system) That's not true. Google "red-lining." Black people face considerable housing discrimination that white people simply do not. Studies have also shown that people of color face longer prison sentences for the same crimes. It is false to say that all poor people have the same experiences.

> people of color face longer prison sentences for the same crimes

Yep. And yet the same effect exists for men (vs. women) and is about six times as strong. Yet our society is "obviously" sexist against women.

https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_g...

'After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, "men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do," and "[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted." This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper.'

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#316

Post by mpweiher » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:54 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #142

finnthehuman wrote: post #123

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…

You've confused "nice" with "kind". Nice is about social performance. That includes things like being a conflict-avoiding people-pleaser. Docility, as you put it. Being kind, on the other hand, involves having empathy and working to help others. The two are somewhat correlated; kind people are often nice. But it's easy enough to be nice without being kind at all, and sometimes being kind requires being visibly not ni…

> confused "nice" with "kind".

Possibly. However, when it comes to companies what they claim is that they want "kind" when what they actually demand is "nice".

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#317

Post by pvg » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

Aloha wrote: post #273

pvg wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting narrative but, again, how do you explain nobody is complaining about these apparent frequent and wanton harsh punishments and firings? My guess is because nothing of the sort really happens, statistically speaking.

I think many of us attribute it to being socially awkward geeks - we just presume we violated another one of those unspoken rules that have been tripping us up our whole lives - it wasn't until I started working around F500 companies that I realized that, that while yes, I'm a socially awkward geek - the cultures I was in before were of little help to me in understanding the unspoken rules.

But that leaves you with the exact same question. These same socially awkward geeks have managed to complain for decades about everything from office plans through software methodologies to equity compensation, hours, the intrusion of work into social life and more recently, diversity issues, crappy interview practices, you name it. And in all that time nobody has piped up about how they're being harshly punished and outright fired for some ill-specified non-adherence to unclear expectations, at odds with what they thought their employers encouraged. There should be crusty USENET threads and brand new Medium posts about this injustice. But there aren't.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#318

Post by carlmr » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 7:38 AM UTC

walterclifford wrote: post #255

tptacek wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that breakdown, "web developer" very likely includes a large number of designers and marketing specialists. We have firsthand numbers from companies like Google; after years of concerted effort to recruit and retain women, they just hit 20%.

> We have firsthand numbers from companies like Google; after years of concerted effort to recruit and retain women, they just hit 20%. Is it possible that a "concerted effort to recruit and retain women" perhaps does more harm than good? Med schools in this country are now very nearly 50/50[1] and law schools are very slightly over 50% female[2]. Did medicine and law achieve this by the same type of concerted effort…

>females who are doctors as simply doctors (and likewise for lawyers), not female doctors whereas in tech we have a habit of treating them like female developers instead of developers (and I'm referring to when that's done with the best intentions such as female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups).

Female-only hackathons are what's wrong though. It implies that women cannot compete at the adult table, which is untrue, but if you treat people separately this is what registers in the collective subconscious. Similar to affirmative action making a lot of people think less of academic achievements depending on race, because it was handed to someone. This becomes a problem for those who don't need AA to be competitive, but have to face the stereotypes of the group they're in. Something like affirmative action should be about poverty, not race, because poverty is the underlying reason why people start at a disadvantage. Similarly with hackathons (I'll admit, I'm a guy who never went to one) the problem isn't that women can't compete, but that they're not attracted to these events for some reason. This has more to do with social dynamics. If you're male and a lot of males are going they will advertise it to their friends. So what we need would be more advertisement of these events geared toward women, with no effect on who gets selected.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#319

Post by hypatiadotca » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 7:41 AM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #59

geofft wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who firmly believes in "that male privilege thing," people who tell you that you should feel bad about it are wrong. There's nothing wrong with privilege. It's a lot like privilege in the operating systems sense. sudo isn't a bad program because it has root privileges. The kernel doesn't need to apologize for running in a privileged CPU mode. But sudo and the kernel both have abilities that regular userspa…

So, maybe male privilege exist, but so do female privilege: In my childhood girls were never beaten. Boys were by each other. During my studies girls got extra study points for higher education - just for being girls. IIRC this held true even for studies who were mostly girls anyway, like nurse and chemistry. (This has been fixed to some degree now I think so boys will now get extra study points if they apply for nur…

You may not be aware, but these days there is basically affirmative action for male college students, at least at elite colleges - they are even exempt from Title IX gender discrimination wrt to admissions. Basically so many women were applying - and qualifying over men - that universities have lowered the bar for men to get in, lest they become even more female than the 50+% women they sometimes are. Cite: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/30/...

One key quote: “Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for every two men.”

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#320

Post by carlmr » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 7:44 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #279

tptacek wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that breakdown, "web developer" very likely includes a large number of designers and marketing specialists. We have firsthand numbers from companies like Google; after years of concerted effort to recruit and retain women, they just hit 20%.

Is Google's process for women different than their one for white men? I only have direct experience of the latter, but the 2017 and 2011 versions were pretty similar. Their hiring process, as I saw it, was dominated by algorithmic college-course-type questions (as if nothing else I'd done in the last 6 years mattered at all) and years-of-experience type stuff (e.g. the message I got was good luck getting a manager jo…

>All of that is stuff that I think is highly tilted towards a certain profile of devs, and going to be hostile towards anyone who didn't follow the typical CS undergrad route.

Having gone through one of these processes (not with Google, but another big 4 company), I'm quite sure this happens. The CS fundamentals might be easy to test for, but they've had very little impact on real world problems I needed to solve in my career. For someone who's a bit farther away from college and doesn't come from a rote memorization culture (which IMHO is inherently bad for problem solving), this serves as a screening mechanism without actually testing for what's useful on the job.

I've been quite successful at interviews where they ask me to solve a little take-home project. In that case the rote memorizers who get through the Google process usually don't shine, because they're not able to put these things together properly. Recent CS grads still do well on those if they're competent.