Getting free of toxic tech culture • Hacker News Board

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#381

Post by whatshisface » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #346

Sacho wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you read his comment in bad faith and ascribed "flamebait" and unsubstantiveness to it. Specifically, the comment states: > The willingness to slog though abusive working conditions is one of the most highly-selected-for trait in tech. The comment claims that "abuse tolerance" is one of the most highly-selected-for traits, not the only thing you need to become a programmer. Further, programming skill isn't ev…

The comment was edited after I posted that. Originally it said, "is the most highly-selected-for trait in tech". It always shocks me when people silently do that to undermine someone's reply; it seems so blatantly dishonest. Do we need to make comments non-editable once they have replies?

I was actually just trying to file off the flamebait without changing the meaning - since "the most" was meant as a figure of speech in the first place I missed that someone could have seen it as a key point.

The sibling essentially sees what was going on here, I was thinking of a closely-weighted linear classfier where a small change to the weights could alter their ordering but do little to change the results.

Although it's definitely my responsibility to write clearly, in the future I'll think more carefully about what my replies are actually disagreeing with before I make edits that I think are just phrasing!

(And yes, I also had a few edits here before I found a way to write it clearly.)

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#382

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

candybar wrote: post #374

I'm your garden-variety liberal who works at a tech company and the description here is entirely foreign to me. I've mostly worked outside of tech and my social circle outside of work is almost entirely liberal but non-tech - the tech world is far more progressive, the culture is far more supportive in general and more specifically in the direction that is favorable to outsiders and marginalized minorities. Outside o…

[deleted]

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#383

Post by m00g00 » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

hypatiadotca wrote: post #323

adamsea wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you could say there is a specific instantiation of this problem in tech.

Well put. I’m always amused by arguments of the form “but this isn’t just a tech problem” - people get so mad about limiting the scope to one’s own expertise and experience, but also accuse you of overreach when you try to generalize beyond it! Can’t win.

Not only is it not just a problem in tech, it's not just problem for women and minorities.

Focusing on tech is fine, but claiming there's a unique problem of demoralization, underappreciation, shit management etc. to only "marginalized people" is what makes this article highly questionable.

All that "toxicity" applies just as well to white males in tech.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#384

Post by tr0ut » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

yakitori wrote: post #366

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #86

I wonder if a lot of toxicity in tech culture is that it is billed as a lifestyle and identity more than just a job. One of the big drivers for civil rights came from the experience in WWII. In war, there is an overarching purpose. You want to achieve your mission, and survive the war to make it home to your family. The identity of those who help you achieve those goals doesn't matter as much (very few people care ab…

> The identity of those who help you achieve those goals doesn't matter as much (very few people care about the skin color of someone who saves their life). This is not true. Color lines were reinforced in ww2. It didn't recede. Black soldiers were routinely attacked by white soldiers. And japanese american soldiers couldn't serve in the pacific for a variety of reasons ( including being killed by their fellow white…

>This is not true. Color lines were reinforced in ww2. It didn't recede. Black soldiers were routinely attacked by white soldiers. And japanese american soldiers couldn't serve in the pacific for a variety of reasons ( including being killed by their fellow white american soldiers ) and in europe, japanese soldiers were essentially killed off by their own white commanders in suicide attacks. Feel free to look up the death rates of japanese american soldiers in europe. It's horrendous. Pretty much a war crime.

Why is it that we forget the history of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Which cost 10-20mil+ Chinese civilian lives? Which was also an extremely grotesque human rights atrocity of an unbelievable magnitude.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#385

Post by cafard » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

"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."

Literally? As in, Thank goodness some people aren't smart enough to code and have to become neurosurgeons?

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#386

Post by Aloha » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #335

malvosenior wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm responding on topic to the threads though. Here we have a blog post calling the industry I work in toxic, why can't I comment on it?

It isn't a question of individual threads but of overall behavior. If you're using HN primarily for ideological battle then you're not using it for intellectual curiosity, the intended use of the site. The two are not compatible. Worse, one destroys the other, so we have to moderate HN to keep that toxin below fatal levels. We can't exclude politics altogether, nor would we want to. But we can't let it take over the…

dang - I very much appreciate the fine line that HN toes here - I think there is much to be learned from genteel debate about issues of the day, moreover when you can push the ideologues out of the conversation, and instead refocus the debate on the actual issues at hand - this kind of environment allows people to learn and perhaps understand points of view that they would be unable to learn about otherwise because of the inherent echo chamber of their social network - in most debates there is some inherent truth to both sides of an argument, but usually we're too busy with out own cheering section to hear the other side of the discussion.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#387

Post by candybar » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #380

candybar wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to generalize but I don't think it's true for the kinds of things Valerie Aurora cares about. My experience is that those competitive SV companies have the most supportive culture when it comes to marginalized minorities, while software companies that aren't in SV and aren't run like SV tech companies are closer to non-tech companies, both in terms of sensitivity towards minorities and political orientation…

Running around yelling from the mountaintops about how many minorities you have, treating them like trophies, is not the same as sensitivity. Further, I don't know how you could suggest Google/Twitter/etc. have a sensitivity towards differing political orientations given the ongoing scandals of demonetization, censoring, etc. and the now famous DaMore memo. "Minority political orientation" doesn't mean the same thing…

You misread - I was saying "software companies that aren't in SV and aren't run like SV tech companies are closer to non-tech companies, both in terms of (sensitivity towards minorities) and (political orientation of their people)". You can take that however you want but whatever the merits of your criticism, it has nothing to do with what Valerie Aurora is saying. She's not saying the political progressivism of tech companies is toxic. All I'm saying here is that SV tech companies are rare in the corporate world in that they take her concerns seriously and have lots of people in leadership that are highly sympathetic to her views.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#388

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #119

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> btw, if you think tech world is sexist and pigeonholing try watching TV ads... And the other aspects are not bad but just a normal imperfect human behavior. I didn't claim this. However, there's no correlation between sexist marketing and sexist work culture. On top of this, writing off bad behavior as "normal imperfect human behavior" is just an excuse to break rules. Two wrongs don't make a right. > Maybe if they…

> writing off bad behavior as "normal imperfect human behavior" is just an excuse to break rules Which rules? There are no rules saying "you can't do marketing" or "you can't claim to change the world". > Are you implying that the hyperbolic marketing of startups is a feature and not a bug? I am implying it's a natural consequence of a startup being oriented on doing something new, never done before, and natural cons…

>> High risk investment is in no way unique to SV. There are lots of people that invest in all kinds of crazy stuff, from hipster juicers to high-stake poker games. They can afford it, and they are the lifeblood of innovation and invention. All power to them. I literally can't think of anything bad coming from a billionaire spending some promilles of his outsized bank account on some weird innovative project, that may or may not change the world. Some of those would be stupid, so what. You can't make innovation without doing a couple of stupid tries on the way.

Could I ask you (and hopefully, others) for a few examples of SV startups that have, in your opinion, changed the world?

I would like to impose some criteria however - and I don't know if you'll agree with them. I'll number them for easy reference but you don't have to respond with a respectively numbered list. You might contest my criteria, of course.

1. The change brought on must contribute to the wellbeing of a wider community, i.e., not just to the bottom line of the company. This is probably an obvious requirement.

2. The change must be a clear net benefit to the community. For instance, if a firm is selling millions of a device that "make the world a better place" but these millions of devices end up as unrecyclable garbage soon after, that's not an obvious net benefit- it's doing some good here, some harm there and it's hard to tell which is bigger. I think we should be able to agree on this being a reasonable requirement, too.

3. The change must not fulfill a need that didn't exist beforehand. For instance, insurance is not strictly needed until one is offered the opportunity to buy some, at which point there is a (conditional) benefit that was never expected before it.

4. The change must not fulfill a need that was adequately satisfied beforehand. For instance -this might be controversial- a smartphone fulfills the need of "communication" but people could communicate just fine without smartphones. Uber fulfills the need of transportation, but people had transportation long before Uber; etc.

I'm asking you specifically because you seem to believe that SV firms really want to change the world. I agree with Karrot_Kream that it's just marketing. So I am interested to hear why you think this.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#389

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

thiht wrote: post #334

JKCalhoun wrote: post #116

I agree with essentially everything in the article — and I'm not a marginalized type (white male, actually). • Avoid the "cult-like" trappings. • Avoid "genius worship" and call bullshit on the "reality distortion field". • Get a life (that is, a life outside of work – build stuff in your garage, hike, play in a band, paint, whatever). • Stay healthy. You're valuable to the corporation, they will allow for you to tak…

>• Get a life (that is, a life outside of work – build stuff in your garage, hike, play in a band, paint, whatever). I notice a trend in being demeaning towards people not wanting to do anything besides computing/tech. Why is that acceptable? Is my life worse because I don't do "hiking" or some other stuff? I like spending my free time coding, and I hate hearing I should do "something better with my life".

[deleted]

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#390

Post by DoreenMichele » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

tinymollusk wrote: post #377

DoreenMichele wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I worked for a non tech Fortune 500 company. It was fairly cult like. It didn't really bother me because my father and ex were both career military, so I considered the cult like elements evidence of how unimportant the work was. The military…

I disagree. Although I wasn't a military spouse or in the service, I worked on base for 7 years and saw a lot of things that made me think military service is essentially the ultimate cult. They: * break you down in boot camp to build you up in their image, with their values (esp Marines) * force you to accept teachings that are demonstrably false (source: friend went to nuclear engineering school, nearly got kicked…

They do what is necessary to prepare people for battle.

It seems to me hippies who see the biggest threats as internal are always a product of a secure environment. I suspect such attitudes don't thrive in places with war on the ground. America has never had a major invasion in terms of amount of land invaded. We seem particularly prone to this idea that war happens elsewhere and is not a real and serious threat.