Getting free of toxic tech culture • Hacker News Board

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#151

Post by geofft » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 1:21 AM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #39

geofft wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not totally sure "significantly more men in the study left due to unfairness than women do" is the right summary - I agree that the report says that, of men who left , significantly more reported unfairness as a cause, but I don't think that that translates to more men leaving, or men being more likely to leave because of unfairness, or more unfairness towards men (i.e., "women being treated more fairly"). And ev…

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.)

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#152

Post by ucaetano » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 1:21 AM UTC

I'd add another one: move away from the Bay Area, even if just for a year and even if still working in a technology company.

Often, just stepping out of the bubble and checking out what the real world looks like will provide you with plenty of perspective.

If you move or visit emerging markets (outside their little tech bubbles especially) you will gain even more perspective.

Sadly, most people in the SF Bay Area don't have a clue about how emerging markets work, and how their users live. And surprisingly this seems to be valid even for those who came from the same emerging markets.

Step out, even if only temporarily.

PS: My main criticism of the article is lumping many external factors in "toxic tech culture", but that's minor enough not to matter in the bigger context.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#153

Post by cutcss » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #117

tlb wrote: post #44

I predict people will claim "our culture isn't that toxic. Some of those things happen, but they don't bother me much." 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. So don't ask "would this bother me?" Ask "would it bother someone?" And since you can't predict this from inside your head, you have to rely on firsthand acc…

If I actually abstained from all things that “would bother someone” I would never even be able to leave the house. No matter what you do, I guarantee that there is someone, somewhere, who will be gravely offended by it. This doesn’t even include the people who are out there actively looking for things to take offense to. Trying to please everyone is not a winnable game.

And even if you could please everyone that doesn't guarantees you are a net positive for society; for example Galileo had to bother a lot of people to convince them the earth rotates around the sun and not otherwise; and pretty much anyone with an unpopular opinion that at the end turned out be for the best had to bother a lot of people.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#154

Post by HowdyDang » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

Hi, Dang. You've been banning me for years. I feel like we have a pretty solid relationship.

You see, my resume is so solid that it gets me into any tech company I want for at least an interview or a tour. I make it a point to get onto their corporate inter/intranet and make a HackerNews account and post a valid contrarian position that you're guaranteed to always find a way to distort as a violation of guidelines. I repeat the process until your systems automatically ban/shadowban the entire IP/network from creating new accounts. And when I'm not doing this, the people I've trained to do this are out there doing the same. There's a whole lot of people who really don't like the colonial intentions of HackerNews moderation and censorship.

You don't even know how many opinions of potentially "correct people" you've preemptively stifled because of my efforts. :D

I've been doing this for years. The more overtly activist Silicon Valley gets, the more effective I become at disguising myself as a socialist, the more network access I get to the "correct people" with "correct opinions", the more networks your system automatically prevents from creating new accounts.

Seems petty? Perhaps I could be more efficient? Why am I even doing this? I'm sure you could conjure up a myriad of reasons that make sense to you, so there's no need to give you anything more beyond that. You're a smart guy, you'll invent something. In fact, I'm relying on that amazing capacity to defer to that self-healing moral plasticity you bathe your ego in.

You'll never see how you are part of the toxic tech culture. I have absolutely no interest in ever making you see this or changing your mind. The only interest I have is exploiting your moral plasticity.

Thanks for building and maintaining those censorship tools over the years. I can't wait to hijack the psychology behind these tools and steer it against the people you claim you're protecting. And I'm truly looking forward to how your moral plasticity justifies it.

Don't forget to leak the IP address, psychographic signatures, and behavioral profile of this account to your "secret" network of resistance collaborators. My honeypots are waiting to map your support system. <3 <3

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#155

Post by pmarreck » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #9

As usual, the actual numbers don't back up the narrative. For example, significantly more men in the study left due to unfairness than women do: 40% vs. 31%. So either women are treated more fairly or these numbers don't mean anything, yet you would never know it from the text, which is all about the horrible things that happen to women. Hmmm...

Just out of curiosity, do you have a link to this data?

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#156

Post by busterarm » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 1:23 AM UTC

fphhotchips wrote: post #141

> 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. This spoke to me for two reasons. 1) Plenty of professions are like this. Lawyers, consultants, doctors, bankers, stock broke…

As a software developer who goes to infosec conferences, i frequently feel "lesser" because everyone seems to be working on cooler stuff than me. Then I go to their meetups and they tell me how much they hate their jobs and I feel better. The truth is ultimately you do what you do because you can't get out of bed in the morning and do anything else -- if you don't feel that way, switch to what motivates you. If you do feel that way though, lean into it hard! I switched from a non-dev tech career to development and it has transformed my life in a very positive way.

That said though, the developer-oriented tech conferences definitely skew towards "rockstar" in terms of who is popular and I mean that word in the most negative sense possible. I have found this especially true of the "inclusive" ones. I feel sick around personality cults and avoid more and more of these.

As someone who develops for a non-technical industry, I've gotten a lot of sneers from other developers when I explain my company and role. At the end of the day though, I have 10x as much responsibility and appreciation at my job than they do in theirs. I'm leaving my job in ~2 weeks and I've had half a dozen exit interviews with people in different roles here and even a C-level (a real C-level, not a startup C-level) from another office across the country flying in just to have a meeting and say goodbye to me. How many "average developers" (because that's all I am) get to have that level of impact?

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#157

Post by adamsea » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 1:23 AM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #106

adamsea wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur that judging someone by the output of their work as opposed to their sex or skin color is extremely important, however, I believe that by itself is a narrow and inaccurate view of the whole situation/problem. In fact, acknowledging the vastness of the problem is a major challenge in and of itself. > As soon as you bring identity politics into to equation, you’ve lost because many people will (rightly) take a…

As a non-white male who has succeeded in this industry based on talent alone, I couldn’t disagree more. I also take offense to people suggesting I need some sort of handout or special attention. Feels infantalizing and quite frankly terrible.

It's never my intent to offend anyone; I apologize.

I wasn't trying to suggest there that anyone needed a handout.

However, yeah, I do think affirmative action has its place, and also that it can be challenging to implement well. Same with diversity programs in the workplace. Personally I don't think it makes sense to characterize these program as a handout, since it's a particular policy meant to try and make up for concrete, specific injustices which have long-term effects. For affirmative action, redlining of black people in Chicago is a great example - easy to Google.

I am genuinely curious - do you think it makes sense to extrapolate from your own individual experience to all other nonwhite people, or to women?

I suppose if we wanted to try to get an aggregate sense of what people believe, we could look at polls or voting patterns of women and various peoples of color.

And, without attempting to knock or take away from your talent, it's my own belief that _nobody_ succeeds on talent alone, that we all have people in our lives (teachers, mentors, coworkers, family, etc) who help(ed) us succeed or become our best. And, correspondingly, that we have an obligation to help others as best we can.

Lastly, if my comment offended you, I have to imagine that you can understand how and why James Damor's memo (poor science and all) - I noticed you mentioned him several times in the thread - was quite offensive to a large number of people and provoked such a negative response, since it mimiced a lot of the historical rhetoric around attempting to use a misconceived scientific basis for racial/gender inferiority as a justification for discrimination, oppression and dehumanization.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#158

Post by pmarreck » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 1:23 AM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #61

smsm42 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important point here - every time I read "X% of class A had this happening to them" I automatically ask "what's the baseline rate? If you weren't in class A, would it happen to you more often or less often?" If I don't find this comparison - and usually I don't - then the number of X% is useless for the purpose of deciding whether class A is an outlier or not. Unfortunately, as I said, very small number of people…

Yes. And the fact that they leave out the baselines pretty much everywhere is highly suspicious. The rest of the study provides even less information, just tendentious excerpts. What does "30% of underrepresented women of color were passed over for promotion" even mean?? The ACM did a study a while back that contradicted virtually all of the stereotypes[1]. "Men and women in our survey both generally reported a simil…

Does #1 basically boil down to, "she had kids"?

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#159

Post by majormajor » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 1:25 AM UTC

platinumrad wrote: post #56

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, marketing sometimes goes a bit over the board, and each release of version 8.4 is the best thing that happened to humanity since v8.3 was released and before it's time to release v8.5. But that's kind of expected, nobody I know takes it as a literal truth. > And of course (almost) each startup CEO thinks his (or her) startup is going to change the world, or at least some part of it. That's how you should…

Of course Loreal doesn't make hyperbolic claims about transportation. Instead Loreal tells us that their new shampoo will be the absolute end of split ends or that their latest serum is literally "age-reversing."

Do you think the people researching the chemical formulas, or the CEO of the company, actually believe the marketing slogans?

Startups do often seem to have an unusual percentage of people drinking their own marketing kool-aid.

If you want to avoid it, I'd suggest working at a startup in an unsexy-to-tech-people industry like marketing or advertising. But then you may have other issues, in terms of how you feel about your work.

Re: Getting free of toxic tech culture

#160

Post by pmarreck » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 1:25 AM UTC

QAPereo wrote: post #60

dang wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of an awkward moment for a searing indictment, as we'd just turned off flags on the OP. With suppression like that, who needs promotion? It's a common misconception, but Hacker News really isn't identified with or immersed in Silicon Valley. Those of us moderating it are largely on the margins of SV and always have been, and the community by no means has its center of gravity there. It's globally distributed and…

You turned off flags, but now you’re doing something else yourself. You’re being honest, but not really telling the whole story. Your thumb is very much on the scale however, where existing community sentiment doesn’t do the job. Edit: I didn’t intend to be cryptic or confuse you. I mean just that proclaiming you’ve put one of many tools on the shelf for this thread in no way implies what you tried to imply.

Do you have the evidence to cash the checks your mouth is writing?

Until you do, you're also making a fallacious appeal to conspiracy: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory