21–30 of 116 posts
Please, keep your personal conflicts out of HN.
Just because someone other than the original author posted an item to HN does not mean the original author should be held to account for some perceived slight to this site.
I disagree, there is something called respect and politeness, if you need to learn it at work ,then your parents did a bad job raising you.
Calling a woman "a milf" is inappropriate, period. I'm black, if a colleague called me "n__gger", would he need training so he can learn to interact at work with black people ? that's not serious.
If the male employee was just a bit pushy and insistant, while it is inexcusable, I would give him a warning and training. But you can't make up excuses for someone who call a female employee "a milf". There is no training that can fix that. That's not being "insensitive", that's being straight out macho in a professional context.
[deleted]
Yes, this guy that operates "The personal blog of Michele in California" and has basically her entire HN profile dedicated to the fact that she's a woman.
The original post was by an owner/founder ("just hired a new biz person", "my existing employees", "my employee", "I'm one of the founders"), had they been big enough to have a dedicated HR department with any possible expertise in that (rather than, say, one person in charge of hiring and payroll) they'd naturally have gone through that rather than asked how to handle it on HN.
I thus assumed — and I think most others readers including patio11 did as well — that there was no such HR with any expertise on the subject which could handle the situation.
It's not a "[m]en and women need to learn to interact at work" issue. It's not your job to teach employees this. It's a business continuity issue. If an employee is kept on who shows this kind of totally inappropriate behavior it can become an existential threat to the company. If (probably "when") the behavior continues--or worsens--now you're responsible for keeping an employee that has a known history of sexual ha…
It's worth having a talk first to try and fix things, warning the employee that it won't be tolerated again. It's not like once you have the talk you lose all future opportunity to fire them.
>So, I am female. Yes, but here's the way I read it: "I am [a] female" and you provided one anecdote for us to consider. (E.g. Working relationship turned out fine for you in the end.) Nonetheless, I don't read it as "I represent females". My experience behind closed doors with HR about harassing males is to err on the side of termination. Sure, if a man makes 2 offers for a "drinks after work?" and the woman refuses…
That said given the guy is getting sexual harassment complaints his first week there one could argue he is far from an ideal hire and simply fire him on that basis. "I'm sorry Bob, you just don't mesh well with the team"
what is the beef with patio11 ? He has given my good comments on my posts over the years. That is how HN is designed.
This article reads as "Don't take his advice. I don't like him therefore his advice is bad."
...I'm assuming there's something subtler and importanter to it, because it seems Michele/Mz has a damned decent brain going on. I mean seriously, how often do you find someone with this nuance of opinion:
"I loathe the expression "The Patriarchy" and I think it mostly does not fit the issues of gender disparity seen on HN. I can think of one or two men there who strike me as staunch supporters of "The Patriarchy," but I think most men there are not actively trying to keep "little women" in "their place." They are mostly just human beings, who happen to be male, who don't know a better answer than the crappy situation we currently have. But, then, most women don't have better answers either and have much more vested interest in finding such answers. I see no reason to vilify men for such a prosaic shortcoming of happenstance." [1]
My comment about "A younger, stupider me" does explicitly repudiate advice that I had given before to people, because I had come to realize there are much better ways to freelance; it is in no way a commentary about other people.
That is all I intend to say about this.
Please, keep your personal conflicts out of HN.
To be fair, the author of the blog did not post this to HN. But yeah really hate seeing this kind of stuff here.
I've had run-ins with "high profile" people here on HN, as well as a tiff with Ycombinator. Turns out, the high profiles can be disgusting, nasty, brutish, and rude: the same way you gain status in the 'Valley. How do you defend against it? Well, you can't here. Your account is shit-canned, hellbanned, modded to death, or openly insulted and berated.
So yes, users take to other channels. That's what I did when I hacked the Thalmic Myo. Didn't know it was a YC venture. Company was crippling hardware for getting more money (surprise!). Posts here went poof. Fortunately Hackaday took it and ran with it. Took around 5 hours for Thalmic to make a statement and change their whole viewpoint, for that I am glad.
But no user Ms, don't expect much changes to be made here with regards to bad policy and bad discussion; for they will turn around and do the opposite they recommended just days prior.