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Getting free of toxic tech culture

blog.valerieaurora.org

401–410 of 420 posts

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#401
post #365
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depend on what movies you include when counting. Many studies prefer to only look at the top 10 or 100 highest gross earning movies and those only cover a tiny portion of the female audience. Selection bias. Looking at the gender distribution of the movies that a sample of 10000 women and 10000 men has seen, you get very different numbers.

This sounds like you've got data backing this up. Do you have a link?

I recall that last time I went looking I took imbd, located movies with large difference in approval rating of one gender compared to the other, and then looked at the cast. Its not perfect proxy for identifying what the targeted/intended audience is, and there is also top lists of so called "chick flicks" if one permits those.

Every study however that I have seen has only looked at the highest gross films, be that the top 5 or top 100. Of those only a few will specifically target a female audience like the 2008 Sex and the City that only had women in star roles.

Here is the IMBD ratings: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1000774/ratings

It should not be hard to find a matching movie with the genders reversed where all the star roles are men, the target audience are male, and the ratings flipped.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#402
post #185
post #100

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. That's a very high demand. People can leave the industry for a very wide variety of reasons, often mutually contradictory - some want to work as much as possible, provided it translates to $$$$, some are ok with earning less provided they can pursue side interests or family…

I think you're describing different things. The list of things in your first paragraph is not "behavior", it's... heh, not sure I have a word or phrase for it. At a very small startup, people are going to expect to have to work hard. While I disagree that this absolutely necessitates a lack of work/life balance, let's say for a moment it does. Sure, you're probably only going to be attracting people who are intereste…

> What's not fine is engaging in exclusionary behavior related to diversity of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.

Right. And fixing what you described is a good thing. But - if you think there would be no reasonable people disliking tech and leaving it - that's not going to happen. As for "offended", this word is used now pretty much in any context - one seems something he doesn't like, he's "offended". Maybe once it had some special meaning, like being sexually harassed at work, or being fired or disregarded at work for having skin of wrong color... But now people are "offended" by Shakespeare, by algebra, by clapping hands, by Christmas, by marble statues, by Thomas the Tank Engine, by burritos and by hoop earrings (all real examples, I can find links) this no longer has any distinctive meaning that can be singled out. So we can just accept some people would dislike some stuff and leave, and that's fine. Not everybody in the world should work in tech. We should strive to provide environment free of obviously bad behavior - like harassment or racism - and then if other stuff that happens in tech does not work for everybody, it's fine.

> it's just about keeping stuff out of the workplace that has nothing to do with work.

That'd be nice but I'm afraid that ship has sailed - tech is getting politicized, and if you believe what you hear about companies like Google, Facebook or Twitter, you can replace "getting" with "has been". It's not a good thing, but it's a thing. That's not the reason to dig deeper and make the situation even worse, though, by undertaking unachievable PC-driven goals.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#403
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ma…

Some notes about your requirements:

1. What you mean by "wellbeing"? A company - outside of government investment, like defense company - can only exist if people pay for their product. If they voluntarily pay for it, doesn't it mean they want it? Or are you allowed to argue that they may want it, but you think they shouldn't so it doesn't qualify as wellbeing? If so, you basically define what "wellbeing" is and I can't hope to guess what it is.

2. Again, what is "net benefit" - how you count it? I know one way, see above. You probably know about it too, and yet added two separate special requirements - so you probably have something else in mind. Again, it would be hard for me to see what.

3. Why not? I didn't have an urge to learn Spanish until I learned about Duolingo and an urge to learn about variety of subjects until I read Coursera catalog. It just didn't come to my attention it's possible for me to do it that easily. Now I can. We can go further - before air travel existed, I'd probably never thought I want to visit another continent. Now I know I do. Does it mean air travel didn't change the world? Of course it did.

4. What is "adequately"? Obviously, if people are paying money for the new provider, they find something in it that wasn't covered by the old provider. Again, you can claim people "don't need it" - like, they don't need smartphones, just sending ravens to each other and occasionally having a maester write a long letter is perfectly fine, but who decides that? You do. And I can't hope to match your criteria here. Of course, people lived lives in 600 BC, and by all indications were not hellishly unhappy, at least most of them, so should we claim all that happened since was unnecessary and didn't really change the world? Makes no sense to me.

> examples of SV startups that have, in your opinion, changed the world?

OK, here are some examples that made the world be different for me. Note I don't consider how good the change was and how good are the companies at day-to-day operations, only whether they did something that changed something in a big way. And I only consider relatively new companies, e.g. IBM won't qualify even if they invent time travel. Also, I do not discuss Google, because a) obvious, b) not a startup for a while.

Twitter. I mean, US president is using it and everybody in the world is jumping around it. You may not like it, but you have to admit this is happening. It's a different world now.

Square. The enablement of small businesses driven by it is phenomenal. And it certainly changes my patterns of behavior - I no longer need to run around looking for ATM (or, in many cases, just not patronize that particular business because it's too much trouble).

Yelp. Completely changed how people choose where to eat and who to hire and so on.

Uber. Changed the world for me - now in any city on the planet that has Uber I can be sure I can get whereever I want. Bus broke down? Train has 2 hour delay? Car in the shop and I need to go somewhere right now? I know what to do. Yes, taxis existed before - and my experience with them sucked (once I was stranded in the middle of pretty large US city and was told by dispatcher no cabs are available in the next hour or so. I had to call the only person I knew in the whole city - which was barely an acquaintance - and beg him to take me to the hotel. Very unpleasant).

Facebook. It is criticized a lot, and deservedly. But I now am talking to people that I literally haven't seen for decades. Yes, it's not "real" talking like sitting in the same room etc. This would probably never happen - we are too far from each other, and too busy, and too... well, a lot of things, but at least we're not 100% disconnected as it would be before.

Automattic. This is the company behind WordPress, which made publishing accessible to common people. Now everybody can do what in the past only major newspapers and writers could do.

Coursera (also Udemy) - not unique, but hugely game-changing thing, you can now get an several degrees worth of education completely free, not leaving your home and needing nothing but an internet connection. Of course, yes, getting a formal degree in a college has its benefits, but now it's not the only way.

BitTorrent (along with predecessors, copycats, etc.). This can be arguable whether it's good or bad, but the way that content is consumed online has been changed forever when peer-sharing networks appeared.

Netflix, as a complement to the above. Changed how people consume entertainment, and more. I mean, netflix and chill, right?

Mozilla - without it existing, Internet probably would be owned by Microsoft now, and Chrome would have much chance to happen either because everybody would think there's no chance to beating Microsoft there.

Apple, of course, may not qualify as a startup, but deserves a honorable mention by making the concept of smartphone finally work. One can argue that'd happen even without them, but somebody would have done it, and mobile computing has changed the world, and Apple took a huge part in it.

Wikipedia (not your regular "startup", but can be seen as part of SV) - need I explain anything here?

Of course, the geographic criterion here - only SV ones - is kinda limiting and arbitrary, but I guess it's a decent sample anyway. And probably missed a lot of viable candidates, it's just a list that I could make without starting a doctoral thesis on it.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#404

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…

The irony is that there were probably significantly more female computer scientists and programmers in the 1960s than there are now. The industry has regressed severely from the early days.

The extra irony is that's because computer programming was considered "women's work" in those early days, as basically a form of clerical work, like being a secretary. So it was one of the few occupations that was traditionally socially acceptable for women to be in.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider yourself to be a specialist in cloud storage/infrastructure? Anecdotally the people in their 40's--60's who continue to find employment as individual contributor software engineer seem to be specialists in a particular field.

I do consider myself a specialist in cloud computing (of which storage is just a component). I think it's important to become really deep in one or two areas, even if you are a generalist. For example, cloud computing has too many services to be an expert in all of them, but I do consider myself very deep in data and analytics (Hadoop, Spark, data lake concepts, etc.) and containers (orchestration, service discovery,…

Do you have any recommendations for learning that sort of stuff outside of work?

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#406
post #304
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.

All of that has been illegal for many decades. At some point, you have to stop holding a grudge for the sins of long-gone people who happen to look sort of similar to some other people.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room As someone who has spent a lot of time in academic security conferences, I have to wonder what you are comparing them to. The only field with a worse female participation rate in my experience is networking (e.g. SIGCOMM). Check out this picture from EuroCrypt in 97 and count the ratio of women to…

> Clearly something is discouraging women from enrolling at the college level, Have you ever been in a 100-level CS course? Granted, it's been a while for me, but they're generally full of 18-year-olds who lack a certain amount of social grace. IME, most people are pretty okay, but there was a notable minority of people you just don't want to spend time with: annoying, obnoxious kids who feel the constant need to cor…

If that's a cause of the disparity, would it show as large numbers dropping their first course after meeting their classmates, or not enrolling in the course in the first place?

Of course it also starts before college enrollment. AP computer science courses in high school have about the same gender ratio (19%). [0] Those would probably contain the same minority you mentioned, a few years younger.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/technology/computer-coding...

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#408

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…

Law and medicine are more people-oriented, while tech is more things-oriented, so that could account for the differences between the industries. There have been studies on the gender differences in interests along the Things-versus-People dimension [0], including one that linked them to prenatal androgen. [1]

[0] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010....

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room As someone who has spent a lot of time in academic security conferences, I have to wonder what you are comparing them to. The only field with a worse female participation rate in my experience is networking (e.g. SIGCOMM). Check out this picture from EuroCrypt in 97 and count the ratio of women to…

I don't have much to say about most of this (in either direction) but I will point out that academic cryptography is not the same as academic (Usenix-style) security; cryptography is a junction between mathematics (as in, "the math department") and CS, where security is entirely a subtopic of CS. I don't know what was going on at EuroCrypt in 1997, but I've been to workshops within the last 5 years, and the number of…

I'm not sure where you got the impression that this is like USENIX. Eurocrypt is theory and application of cryptography. A significant chunk of publications have nothing to do with application and discuss interesting theoretical math. Eurocrypt is one of the best academic cryptography destinations for theoretical crypto research. See an example of the proceedings: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-56620-7

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#410
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is and always has been to judge people by the output of their work and nothing else. As soon as you bring identity politics into to equation, you’ve lost because many people will (rightly) take attacks on white people and men as racist and sexist respectively.

How people treat others in the organization can negatively impact the output of others' work. If firing an asshole (who otherwise has high quality output) increases the quality of the output of others past a certain point, then that's an easy argument from a simple financial/productivity perspective that treating others with respect is a positive for the company.

It's often true that firing assholes improves others' output, but that shouldn't be the only reason to fire them.

I think there is independent merit to removing people who are terrible, even if doing so deprives the company of an incredibly valuable asset--e.g. firing your mythical 10x founding engineer because they're harassing other employees and making them feel unwell/unsafe, even if it severely damages your company's ability to produce. This is because growth and profit are not--and despite the "100% meritocracy free market" advocates' arguments, never have been--the sole aims of a business.

Businesses exist within a broader community; they aren't optimizing for widget creation in a vacuum. The rise of intangible/cultural reasons for punishing a business in the court of public opinion (uber; those scandals didn't highlight things that directly impacted the company's bottom line, but rather things that were unacceptable ethically to the broader community, or things that might have, given time impacted the bottom line) speaks to this; so does the decrease over time in Tamany Hall/Boss Tweed-type abuses of employer authority.

In short, for a business, acting ethically has an objective value which is independent from (or, if you want to nitpick "independent", at least has primary influence on) profit/growth.

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