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This Industry is Fucked

blog.jessfraz.com

61–70 of 311 posts

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#61
post #14

This is terrible. Are scenarios like this really common? I work with several women in the office, but have not heard of them dealing with such harassment. Is our situation unique? Either way, I hope this changes soon. There's no reason for acting like that.

I asked my only female coworker about this, and she said she had never experienced sexual harassment, and found tech culture tame compared with finance, where people would shout at programmers over the phone if things went wrong. Just one data point.

Someone shouting and being rude is a little different to gory Photoshopped photos.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#62

This is not common and, given her focus area in tech, it just happens to be more pronounced among those individuals. Ever heard of 4chan? All it takes is one post of your info and you'll get a swarm of people descending on you... Linux/open source is full of such individuals. They do it to get a rise out of people and the internet is a nice anonymous vehicle to do it under. Has nothing to do w/ the broader industry o…

Why are you so sure that it's not common? I keep reading articles like this and I'm inclined to believe it's more than a coincidence. I dearly wish this woman's experience was an outlier but that is hard to believe.

I truly wish that there was a bright light I could shine over the world of software relieving the clearly disturbed souls of this woman's abusers from whatever pain it is that they act out of. It's extremely sad that my faceless colleagues have so many issues with women, and sadder still that these innocent women have to bear the brunt of it.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#63
I already thought this was something of importance, like, talking about a bubble or concerning trends in the industry. What I got was an emotional rant of someone who got trolled. Our digital media have more than enough possibilities to blacklist the baddies, or even whitelist the people you want to be in contact with. Don't look at things you don't want to see, nobody is forcing you to.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#64
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being a bit overbroad in speaking for all women (that's the kind of thinking which leads to sexism in the first place). Frankly the 'consequences' here are receiving a bunch of unsavoury PMs. i.e., there are no real-world, physical, dangerous consequences. So the fear of contributing to a community because of it is unfounded. It's just a side-effect of Internet culture, and it happens to men too.

The author received private messages saying that someone jerked off to a picture of her at a conference and also photoshopped pictures of her full of blood. Those sorts of messages -- even in isolation -- have real-world, often physical, consequences. This attitude that sexual harassment is only harmful if it's a physical assault needs to go back to the 1950's where it belongs.

>Those sorts of messages -- even in isolation -- have real-world, often physical, consequences.

No, in the vast majority of cases they don't. Trolls gonna troll, sorry. I'll bet we can count on one hand the number of times Internet death threats have led to actual deaths.

There's a reason authorities don't investigate or prosecute stuff like this.

>This attitude that sexual harassment is only harmful if it's a physical assault

Sorry, what? How is a death threat sexual harassment?

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#65
post #18

Kudos to her for standing up to it, but she should clearly never have to. This kind of thing just shouldn't be happening... I don't think I know anybody who does this to women. I really hope that's because I don't actually know anyone who does, and not that people I otherwise respect are secretly doing this. How would a person know, if it's anonymous? Well, maybe a few ways. The question is, are these all actually an…

Absent any binding reputation system with meaningful consequences, making such a registry public would be a pretty broad abuse risk; you'd need extremely heavy moderation, distributed over a large number of people, and even then you'd just be increasing the effort required to abuse the system, rather than eliminating the possibility. Given the potentially serious consequences of being blacklisted this way, I'd be very hesitant to make a registry like this public.

On the other hand, I'm really not sure anything less would be worthwhile -- keeping such a registry, but having it be private, would I think be hardly better than nothing, in terms of actually bringing this kind of misbehavior under control.

There's a tradeoff here that I'm not sure I'm qualified to evaluate.

On the one hand, I don't really care for the idea of an industry blacklist in general, on whatever grounds.

On the other hand, I'm not having to put up with death threats, rape threats, depraved sexual harassment, et cetera ad nauseam, simply in order to try to do my job to the best of my ability.

Taken all in all, I find myself in favor of a public registry. After all, no one has to act on anything they find there, and having a solid base of information out there would give the industry at large an opportunity, heretofore lacking, to put up or shut up -- either demonstrate that this kind of malbehavior is beyond the tech industry's civilized pale, or demonstrate that the tech industry is the boys' club it's been accused of being and has no particular desire to see that change.

I'm honestly not sure which is the more likely result, but I have to say I'd be interested to see the experiment made.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#66
post #34

I see a lot of comments here ranging from support to trolling... since this is HN there is more support and (at last check) only one troll. And that's really my point. No matter what, if you put yourself and your two cents into the public domain this stuff is part of the territory. Granted in a perfect world we wouldn't have such trolling or at the very least there would be some authority doing online moderation and…

You have a good attitude about insults aimed at you. However, many people have lived lives that make such a healthy attitude impossible for them. I don't think progress is served by saying, "well it sucks that little girls are taught to stay 'safe' by taking the opinions of fuckwits seriously but I didn't teach them that so tough shit!" I doubt there's a magic bullet, but it would be better if we could build communication mechanisms that didn't expose women to the vilest excretions of the world's collective mental sewer.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked my only female coworker about this, and she said she had never experienced sexual harassment, and found tech culture tame compared with finance, where people would shout at programmers over the phone if things went wrong. Just one data point.

Someone shouting and being rude is a little different to gory Photoshopped photos.

true, but that didn't happen to my colleague. I'm just pointing out that one data point for people who are suggesting "ask your female colleagues".

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#68
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not common?" Really? This SEEMS pretty common. And while I believe it's true that not every woman in tech gets harassed, it's obvious that a much higher percentage of them get this sort of shit than men. And it only gets worse as they get more visible for the good work that they're doing. You say you're tired of this shit. How do you think these women feel? It's not you writing the tweets and emails, but if you beco…

This isn't pretty common nor are any of the off the wall comments and threats she's getting serious. It's called trolling. Have you been on the internet in the last decade? If you're dumb enough to let someone get under your skin, they will and will do so even more. I'm a minority. Do you know the kind of shit I've had to deal w/ in tech. Note the 'deal with'. Were supposedly in a society where women are demanding to…

lol @ all the downvotes I'm getting for this and the swift retracing of upvotes of my initial thread due this extended commentary.

I would delete this but i'm going to let it stay... Just goes to show you the depth of people's view on such issues. You want to go on and on about surface issues and foolishness that has nothing to do w/ the root. Yet, the minute someone brings up something real.. Oh no !! That's too much for you. Back to regularly scheduled program of man/tech bashing/white knighting a woman who was a victim of internet trolling and making all men out to be savages..

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#69
post #28

I'm sorry to hear this. But I want to add a counter statistic. I've only had pleasant experiences from people trying to help me. The only shit I got in the industry was from a business manager trying to push our team into a death march. There are many factors out in there in the world. We need to put things back into context, rather than just saying things like "Our Industry is fucked". It feels like lately its too e…

That's true of the majority everywhere, I think, but the minority in this case has a disproportionately large impact -- for example, in running Kathy Sierra, a highly competent professional with a great deal to contribute, out of the industry entirely.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#70
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not common?" Really? This SEEMS pretty common. And while I believe it's true that not every woman in tech gets harassed, it's obvious that a much higher percentage of them get this sort of shit than men. And it only gets worse as they get more visible for the good work that they're doing. You say you're tired of this shit. How do you think these women feel? It's not you writing the tweets and emails, but if you beco…

>it's obvious that a much higher percentage of them get this sort of shit than men No, it isn't obvious, since even in the case of women all we have are lots of really visible anecdotes, not statistics. It could easily be the case that the number of death threats received by males heavily outweighs the number of death threats received by females. I know that I don't write reactive blog posts every time some troll thr…

...every time some troll threatens to gut me via PM.

Has that ever happened?

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