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Subtle -isms at Hacker School

hackerschool.com

11–20 of 136 posts

Re: Subtle -isms at Hacker School

#11
I'm sorry, but I'm starting to get a bit sick of Hacker Schools constant whining about rules.

If you want to encourage a specific culture you do this by starting with a small set of people who have this culture in their bones, then growing slowly and assimilating more people into that culture, addressing deviations swiftly and letting people get back to their work afterwards, without skipping a beat.

Not by writing manuals, and then stressing everyone with looooong, reaaaaally long and exhausting "we need to talk" style posts, where we hold hands, talk about how it's so difficult to open your mouth and say something that's not offensive, and how we're far from perfect, and in fact, we're all sinners.

It's not that the intent is wrong. But this way of going about it is so extremely taxing on everybody, creating an atmosphere where everything people say is judged on the "-isms" scale.

It means when you talk, you're terrified of what you're saying.

When you listen, you listen for someone to say something so you can point your finger at them.

Re: Subtle -isms at Hacker School

#12
post #3

What's the difference between a "well, actually" and correcting someone's misunderstanding -- or rather, when is it not welcome? My understanding is that it's when someone parachutes into a conversation uninvited to correct someone, but if I was in a learning setting like Hacker School, I feel like I would welcome that from fellow students or instructors.

I was in the Summer 2013 batch.

There is no hard-and-fast rule for figuring out what is and is not a well-actually, but the biggest factors (at least for me) are (1) did it derail the conversation, (2) did my correcting someone make it less acceptable to not know something, and (3) was my motivation to do something like show off?

I've been guilty of all 3. Anecdotally, I found that the effect of this lightweight rule was that at HS it was very much ok to not know something, and let me tell you, adjusting to the real world, where that is subtly untrue, is a trial.

As for the "parachuting in" problem, that's essentially the gist of a different lightweight social rule, "no backseat driving". :)

Re: Subtle -isms at Hacker School

#14
This is a throwaway account. I feel we are being invaded. The culture we used to have didn't cared about isms or whatever you want to call them. It developed through text were it hardly matter who was on the other side of the connection, only skills and thoughts mattered. Those were the good old days, when we were free.

Now we are being invaded. We, like every other culture in the world, are ask to not use certain language and not have certain thoughts. If we do not comply, we are heretics. Only they don't use that term, they rather use some ism.

The wheel of history is repeating. The control freaks still want to control, they just changed one set of sins for another.

Re: Subtle -isms at Hacker School

#15
At a certain point don't you have to trust people to be adults?

If someone's being a "subtle" racist, they're just being racist, and you can deal accordingly (likewise for the rest of the "subtlisms"). Beyond that, if you want people to act with maturity, you have to treat them like adults, which these rules certainly don't do.

Re: Subtle -isms at Hacker School

#16
post #5

I ask this as a general question to all of tech culture, not to just this particular setting: What about subtile elitism? It's one of the biggest subtile -isms I've run into. If you didn't go to a top ten university, you're sort of in a lower echelon in the tech world. In practice this subtilely selects for people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and/or people who have an "academic-oriented" learning style as op…

If you're from, say, Kansas or Ohio you are less likely to attend one of them than if you're from California or Massachusetts.

While that might be true, there's also a population density issue. CA, NY, and MA have large urban populations, so more students are likely to attend those elite colleges.

That said, I know for a fact that admissions officers and student volunteers from these schools literally spend months driving around the country to recruit prospective students from traditionally underrepresented states. They are well aware of this perception of elitism and want to combat it. One of my good friends from MIT was from Montana. (Yeah, anecdotes != data, but this issue you mentioned is very legitimate and something that Top 10 universities are actively trying to address.)

Re: Subtle -isms at Hacker School

#17
post #3

What's the difference between a "well, actually" and correcting someone's misunderstanding -- or rather, when is it not welcome? My understanding is that it's when someone parachutes into a conversation uninvited to correct someone, but if I was in a learning setting like Hacker School, I feel like I would welcome that from fellow students or instructors.

It just seems like in order to get the most out of Hacker School one has to act with positive intent but otherwise entirely ignore the rules.

It looks immensely easy to fall into a trap of caring too much about the rules and not caring enough about the code, and I can imagine a large group of people trying to play along rather than try to become better "hackers". "Ohh, I'm sorry, you did actually just save us from three hours of bashing our head into a wall by recommending a specific algorithm, but you also broke the rules. For shame!"

Re: Subtle -isms at Hacker School

#18
post #3

What's the difference between a "well, actually" and correcting someone's misunderstanding -- or rather, when is it not welcome? My understanding is that it's when someone parachutes into a conversation uninvited to correct someone, but if I was in a learning setting like Hacker School, I feel like I would welcome that from fellow students or instructors.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html As a child, I wondered why my sister could make friends and keep them so easily, while I could not. It would take me years to discover this. And now, as a public service I am sharing with you, my fellow geek friends, what I learned. Whoever pulls a "well, actually" almost always shifts the conversation to himself.

Re: Subtle -isms at Hacker School

#19
post #3

What's the difference between a "well, actually" and correcting someone's misunderstanding -- or rather, when is it not welcome? My understanding is that it's when someone parachutes into a conversation uninvited to correct someone, but if I was in a learning setting like Hacker School, I feel like I would welcome that from fellow students or instructors.

A "well actually" occurs when a person is splitting hairs. This can be desirable, for example when you're trying to obtain a complete understanding of something. But in normal conversation, such pedanticism is often annoying. The "well actually" policy, as I understand it, is an attempt to make such hair splitting "opt-in" rather than "opt-out".

Re: Subtle -isms at Hacker School

#20
I think Hacker School's own words about why they no longer give feedback is a great example of what happens when one hyper analyzes the context and connotation of everything a person says and does.

https://www.hackerschool.com/feedback

Eventually, everyone stops communicating and just says nothing to avoid the possibility of saying the wrong thing.

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