Getting free of toxic tech culture • Hacker News Board

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#391

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

dang wrote: post #343

malvosenior wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't understand. I'm now being threatened with being banned while adamsea is getting a slap on the wrist. If you're only allowed to discuss one side of this topic without getting kicked off HN, why even allow the threads in the first place? I was responding to the question: > Could you elaborate on the form of the attacks on white people and men you're seeing in SV companies? What could I have done to…

I answered you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062 , which should clarify most of this. I can see why, before reading that, you might think this was a double standard, but it isn't. The reason is that adamsea hasn't been using HN primarily for political battle (though I grant you his account history is close to that, and a different moderator might have called it differently). The key word here is 'pr…

Got it. I used to post on other stuff but dropped off and admittedly came back to discuss what I feel are attacks on our industry and my personal career story.

If I commented more on “regular” posts, would I still be able to chime in here? It’s important to me that this point of view gets representation. I try to keep it very civil and can continue to refine that.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#392

Post by dang » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

whatyoucantsay wrote: post #350

dang wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of degree. If you think we need more Damore wars, HN is not the site you're looking for. No, I wouldn't say the current submission's topic has been done to death at all, though I grant you that it touches on topics that have. But it's the other parts that led us to try turning off flags on the story. I would not call the experiment successful. Part of the art of substantive discussion, which is always i…

I am still glad to have been informed of what the tweet revealed, but thank you for the clear response. It provides a good explanation for what appeared indefensible.

Thanks for posting this. I sometimes feel a bit hopeless about typing out those detailed explanations, when no one seems interested in receiving the information, so the counterexample is tonic.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#393

Post by dang » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 7:49 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #391

dang wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I answered you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062 , which should clarify most of this. I can see why, before reading that, you might think this was a double standard, but it isn't. The reason is that adamsea hasn't been using HN primarily for political battle (though I grant you his account history is close to that, and a different moderator might have called it differently). The key word here is 'pr…

Got it. I used to post on other stuff but dropped off and admittedly came back to discuss what I feel are attacks on our industry and my personal career story. If I commented more on “regular” posts, would I still be able to chime in here? It’s important to me that this point of view gets representation. I try to keep it very civil and can continue to refine that.

Right, the idea is to be here to gratify intellectual curiosity. People who use HN that way and occasionally comment on a political topic as one of many things they're interested in, tend not to have so toxic an effect on the site. I think it's partly a question of the spirit one is in the habit of adopting here.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#394

Post by dang » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 7:51 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #381

dang wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Alth…

Thanks for explaining. It often happens that I assume bad faith in someone on HN and then was completely wrong. Sorry about that! I have to work to follow the site guidelines (which say "assume good faith") as much as anyone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#395

Post by ant_mc » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #345

ant_mc wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please stop accusing me of that? I can't make a fucking comment without you up my fucking ass about it. I was illustrating the point that I think the standard proposed is not a good hard rule. The moderation here has become truly ridiculous.

If you abuse the site and get banned, you can't just create a new account to keep doing the same things. Shouldn't that be obvious?

> abuse the site

You mean like by being a shitty moderator?

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#396

Post by bostik » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 9:55 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #269

adamsea wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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?" Office Space ? Hard to believe that movie is almost two decades old now.

> Office Space ?

Funky anecdote coming up.

We went to see Office Space when it was in the cinemas, after having heard a number of good things about it. There were 8 of us. 7, myself included, kept bursting into laughter throughout the film. The last one didn't really register.

When we walked out, the silent one quipped: "I don't get how that was supposed to be funny. I see that same stuff at work every day."

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#397

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 10:22 PM UTC

After thinking about this article for a while, I have two observations to make.

One, if we're at the point where we need a how-to guide for people to leave the technology industry, the industry has a really big problem. And I don't jsut mean its "toxic culture" as the article puts it. Women and minorities who make it into a technology career in the first place are probably twice as competent as others, simply because their work is judged twice as harshly [1] and there are no end of people eager to make their life harder, one way or another. So those companies that are losing their women and minority workers, are losing talent they really want to retain, over and beyond any diversity considerations.

Two, this is really not the time to leave a career in technology, not for minorities, not for straight white dudes. Right now, tech skills are in very high demand and it is quite possible to make a very lucrative career out of them. This is a unique opportunity for women and minorities to do vey well professionally through skill and brain power alone. It is adding injustice on top of injustice to allow yourself to be swept by the wayside when you have what it takes to get ahead. Despite the "toxic culture", the industry sorely needs competent technologists. If you are one, you should let nothing stop you from taking advantage of it.

Now is not the time to give up. You give up now, you're giving up on a brilliant future and a great career that you absolutely deserve. Don't allow that to happen. Not "for the good of the industry"- for your own interest.

We need a guide for surviving and thriving int the industry, in spite of its culture- not one for bailing out.

_____________

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-gender-matte...

  These studies reveal that in many selection processes, the bar is
  unconsciously raised so high for women and minority candidates that few
  emerge as winners. For instance, one study found that women applying for a
  research grant needed to be 2.5 times more productive than men in order to
  be considered equally competent.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#398

Post by wpietri » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 11:22 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #316

wpietri wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

As I said, "nice" is about social performance, so if somebody is demanding something, "nice" is all it could be. Companies, though, don't want anything. People do. And people vary.

If you're saying that some people with power use that to demand conformance to social codes, sure, I agree. But I disagree that always prevents us being kind.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#399

Post by belorn » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 11:35 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #370

belorn wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong on so many levels. Where are you getting your data that CS is almost uniquely imbalanced? Sweden has a complete record for what every citizen here work, their education and their gender. The data is gathered as part of tax collection and as a matter of policy they also make this information public so anyone can see what the gender distribution is for any industry or profession. 70%/30% distribution is e…

_Science_, "Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines", Vol 347 Issue 6219, 2011. Note also that you've unsubtly moved the goalposts. I'm comparing STEM fields, you're comparing all occupations (and: in Sweden, but that's less important to my point). I mean, whatever, make whatever argument you'd like, but modulate your stridency. With some satisfaction, I'll also observe th…

Uniquely imbalanced is not a very good description with such small sample size of fields, but to be clear I was not the one to first bringing in non-stem fields. When you compared CS to law you was first to move the goal post.

Among the professions in general, you said, the difference is supposed to be stark. This is false since there is no general difference between the average profession and CS. Second thing is that we're stuck in the 1960. This is also false since all professions has on average a worse gender segregation in 2018 than in 1960, which includes the STEM fields. The third would be the conclusion that toxic culture causing segregated work environment is a tech-specific problem. Every report (including government issued ones) that I have read describe similar problems in profession with similar or greater gender imbalance than CS. The service industry especially has many horror stories being printed in news with rather regular intervals.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#400

Post by bsder » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 11:53 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #171

bsder wrote: post #131

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. Maybe. But why don't those same people build companies that don't have this behavior and out-compete the companies that do? It's not enough to eliminate the behavior, you have to eliminate the incentive . To that end, founding a "service" to help me be diverse doesn't convin…

I think they'll find customers. If I ran a company and I was losing good people because of a toxic culture, I wouldn't say "Oh well, I guess those people I lost will start their own companies and out-compete me, and everyone will be happy." I'd want to fix my toxic culture and keep the people and win. I used to think (terribly naively) that a company having a particular type as a founder would ensure that all such pe…

> I think they'll find customers.

Sure, but that doesn't convince. Anyone who has ever been in a big company has lots of stories of HR "initiatives" that have been utter garbage. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-07

The path that these women pursued can be countered with "They were actually those icky, squishy HR types to begin with and our failure was in not detecting that. We need to change our hiring procedures to make sure that we don't make this kind of mistake hiring for a "hard" tech position again."

> I used to think (terribly naively) that a company having a particular type as a founder would ensure that all such people would feel welcome there. But I have seen that not be the case.

And that's the crux. Why should that be the case? Apparently that founder believed that their behavior was going to be more successful.

Until someone takes a "diversity" touchstone, founds a company, and blows people's doors off, most offenders will never take these kinds of "squishy" things seriously.

And, if the "diversity" advocates can't do this, well, that's data, too ...

I'm actually in the camp that they probably can't.

Practically all of the biggest successes in any industry which has a schedule component have stories of the carnage of divorces, health problems and relationship damage left in the wake. Probably the only counterexample of a continuous, plodding, sustainable success is the space shuttle software.

Consequently, the diversity advocates need to change the narrative and start focusing on changing the conversation as to what constitutes success in broader society.