11 ms·

I Am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He Is Wrong About Women in Tech

116 points by kelukelugames 11y ago

LogicFailsMe 11y ago
I remember interviewing for an engineering gig at WildTangent at a time when my latest gig in the valley paid $120K plus 0.5% of the startup. WildTangent offered me $35K, less than I had made as a post-doc before leaving for industry. #$%& you Alex...
- mimo777 11y ago
  And someone took that offer. And I bet he complained about the engineer he got at that price. Summarily launching into a tyrade about how important it is for non management to know their place--manager here--and just like his big brother Bill, didn't understand how non managers were making a manager's salary. Meanwhile, better paid engineers were making the job of many FLMs redundant by turning the employees they manage into scripts. Sounds like a good reason to pay a programmer like a manager, huh?
- beachstartup 11y ago
  yeah, i'm searching, digging deep for sympathy for someone naive enough to accept a 35k offer in a 100k+ environment, and i'm failing. the stress, the hours, the burnout, it's not for passion, it's for MONEY. you can go work on your passions in absolute leisure on a beach in southeast asia and never worry about money, but for the kids out there reading this, don't be tricked into thinking developing throwaway shitbox games for some asshole ex-microsoft millionaire is your passion. 35k is a very different kind of 'fuck you' money.
  - LogicFailsMe 11y ago
    What? You think I accepted that offer? No no no, Instead, I went to a post-IPO company while the stock was down from the dotcom crash and did just fine when it recovered. In-between, Craig Venter offered me $45k, so glad I have standards. Everyone should have standards, no? Edit: +1 for "35K is a very different kind of @#$% you money."
rectang 11y ago
Here's what she's rebelling against: http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pdf http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pd... RULE 1: You don’t recruit and retain male engineers you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends * If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone * If the relationship breaks down the engineer is gone * The paycheck goes to HER * Why does SHE want her husband or BF to work for you?
- sgift 11y ago
  And it just gets better and better from there in later slides .. so much information about the character of one person so readily available. Or would that be an ad hominem? Decisions ..
- protomyth 11y ago
  That's painfully not exactly wrong by itself. Its been good advice to make sure the significant other is very happy with the company, and it is often missed. If children are involved, making "family" life easier will make things better. // I have no real idea of the history here, I'm just commenting on one rule that can be personally costly not to heed
  - HillRat 11y ago
    Obviously the gender assumption is pretty cringeworthy in and of itself, but what I find particularly strange is how he advocates this but then turns around and complains that developers don't want to do 80-hour weeks as a regular requirement of employment. These are not mutually-reconcilable recommendations.
    - gilleain 11y ago
      Maybe the reasoning is : "get his partner to agree to the idea of him doing 80 hour weeks"...
- gryphonshafer 11y ago
  So this is somewhat OT, but in reading the slides, I noticed this gem: > Potential money is worth more than actual money. In very, very rare circumstances, that is true. In the vast majority of cases, it's total B$. It's what company founders tell employees to exploit them, to get them to work overtime as a norm for crap normal-time pay. It's what the founders genuinely hope is true because they own so much of the company, but it rarely turns out that your shares are worth as much as the net-present-value of the delta to an average salary. At least in my experience.
pdabbadabba 11y ago
This whole saga has been uncomfortable from the beginning--and now I'm cringing harder ever than ever. Not because I disagree with much of what Amilia has written, but just because it's painful to be, in some way, a witness to the rift that this piece makes evident. In any case, Amilia is right to highlight this quote: > Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks. This, folks, is a racial (and gender) pathology claim. Unless we interpret Alex as inquiring about the social circumstances that prevent women and 'blacks' from seizing these 'opportunities' (and I don't see how that's a plausible interpretation here), then what Alex is suggesting is that there is something wrong with women and black people, a physiological symptom of their gender or race, that prevents them from seeing or taking these opportunities when presented with them. I find that, if you pay attention, you also see this way of thinking at work behind the scenes in more reasonable-sounding claims about racial and gender politics. Sometimes its overt, but more often its buried in points about, e.g., the corroded norms of "black communities."
- actionwords 11y ago
  asians are massivaley over represented in tech. europeans are actually under represented. But let's not let facts get in the way of argumentation shall we?
- dvdcxn 11y ago
  >Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks. I've always wondered if the answer to this was due to the culture and class demographics. The Current crop of tech leaders came from the era where middle class boys were bought computers by their parents as it was seen as a thing for boys to be into and not girls (I think this stereotype is still prevalent but far less powerful now). Computers just were not affordable to working class folks back then. Considering the poverty most minorities families faced then and still do now, it's sadly the case that they couldn't afford computers. I expect (and hope) that in the next 10 years we'll see the distribution of tech leaders become naturally more diverse. Not because of any activist drive but simply because these kids are much more likely to have access to the tools they were denied in the past.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
simonswords82 11y ago
This is ridiculous, she lost me at: {Dad, if you use my face in an offensive slideshow again I beg you to please at least throw me a bone and put in a more flattering picture. As a self absorbed millennial I have provided the internet with a profusion of selfies in a rainbow of sepia tones. Please choose any of those.} This is some sort of weird public spat between a father and a daughter, it's not newsworthy or even constructive.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  I'm not sure if I clicked upvote or downvote, sorry. Using HN on a small screen right now. I meant to upvote.
edgyswingset 11y ago
> Dad, if you use my face in an offensive slideshow again I beg you to please at least throw me a bone and put in a more flattering picture. As a self absorbed millennial I have provided the internet with a profusion of selfies in a rainbow of sepia tones. Please choose any of those. He picked an unflattering photo of his daughter and used it as a visual example of a "woman in tech" without her permission? What on earth?
lintiness 11y ago
earth to freud
dudul 11y ago
The slide about "real engineers" is priceless. Real engineers don't care about money? They want a "mission"? Ha! Good luck hiring engineers in ad-tech, finance, etc. What's the mission? Showing more annoying ads to users? Yeah! I guess I'm not a real engineer, cause I care about money. I sell a skill, provide a service, this service has value, pay me. Now, TBH, a few good advice in this presentation, but often weirdly worded. Making sure the spouse/family is happy is a good advice, but doesn't have to be presented as "the wife/girlfriend".
- ownagefool 11y ago
  The entire presentation is essentially a list of "how I think we can get good developers and underpaid them". I don't really care if he invented gaming itself, fuck this guy.
mikestew 11y ago
I guess I haven't been paying attention to the latest from a man who would give toddlers a run for their money in the tantrum department (well, other than telling Wild Tangent to leave me alone). Why he's getting the time of day, I have no idea. Sure, he did something something DirectX twenty years ago at Microsoft, but if he's done anything of note since other than run his mouth, I must have missed it. If anything he has to say upsets you, ask yourself "why?" Because he's a brilliant game dev ala Carmack? Because everyone wants to work for Wild Tangent? Because of those lovely AAA titles Wild Tangent cranks out one after another? The answer to all is "no". So why do you care? Hell, his own offspring doesn't want anything to do with him. You can't stop VentureBeat and TechCrunch from writing it, but you don't have to read it.
- RodericDay 11y ago
  He's a particularly bad exponent of what people feel are actually very widely held ideas in the tech community (ie: young > old, work long hours don't complain, etc).
- dennisgorelik 11y ago
  > Hell, his own offspring doesn't want anything to do with him. That is obviously not true. She even wrote blog post about him. That is a clear indication that, as a minimum, she cares a lot about him. And Alex is proud of his daughter: http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/21/i-apologize/ http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/21/i-apologize/ Daddy is very proud of her. She’s no millennial slacker that’s for sure.
JamilD 11y ago
Dupe; discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542664
- sridca 11y ago
  Why is this post hidden from the front page? It was there moments ago.
  - untothebreach 11y ago
    maybe it hit the flamewar detector? maybe people were flagging it?
  - sridca 11y ago
    I came across this: > (2015-10-16) The people behind the scenes at Hacker News now hand pick stories they want on the front page. It's not a user-generated voting-controlled news site. But it pretends to be one and tries to look like one. It's deeply dishonest. http://www.curi.us/1612-anti-israel-bias-at-hacker-news http://www.curi.us/1612-anti-israel-bias-at-hacker-news / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10402465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10402465 This is outrageous, and I will find a way to create a front-page list that is "unadulterated".
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      There's really no pretense that votes are the only factor in ranking stories. Here's the moderator commenting about the many factors: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20rank&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20rank&sort=byPopulari... (not all the results are applicable, enough are)
      - sridca 11y ago
        > There's really no pretense that votes are the only factor in ranking stories. True, however the HN front page has always given me the impression that votes matter the most, and that the front-page is largely reflective of the interests of the HN demographics. The question I'd ask is: why is there no explicit indication (written in the footer, perhaps) of the front-page being vetted by a handful of moderators? A subtle form of pretense is not speaking of the truth.
bad_user 11y ago
The article has a quote from: http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/16/game-developers-must-avoid-the-wage-slave-attitude/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/16/game-developers-must-avoid... > "I can’t begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work" I cannot speak for developers in Silicon Valley or other places, but I suspect the feeling of disgust when hearing such things is similar. The problem is that solving design, engineering, computer science and math problems every day can be stressful and exhausting. Do that for more than 8 hours per day and maybe also multitask between projects everyday, in an environment that has toxic management and it's a recipe for burnout, burnout being that deep sense of tiredness, emptiness and helplessness, being nothing less than depression out of which some people never recover. Now I'm sure that this is way better than digging for blood diamonds to feed your family, as Mr. Alex St. John is saying. But I can't believe that somebody born into privilege can even think to suggest that such jobs aren't so bad compared to African slavery.
- douche 11y ago
  If everybody else's lived experience matters, then take into account that this guy grew up in a log cabin in Alaska. I didn't grow up that far off the grid, but doing anything on a computer is a damned sight easier than working all day swinging a chainsaw or turning wrenches on heavy equipment. Pays way better too, and I haven't smashed a finger, lacerated anything, or taken a bath in hydraulic fluid since I became a desk jockey.
  - dblohm7 11y ago
    Perhaps if we were to restrict this discussion to the physical aspects of the job, then yes. That is a very narrow view, however.
searine 11y ago
They both seem like awful people.
RyanZAG 11y ago
Seems like the big thing everyone is missing: you can hate Alex all you want, but he's not making conjectures. He's giving his advice based on successful experience in reality. I'll take his word - as politically incorrect as it is - over 1000 people making arguments off what is 'right'. If you're running a business and Alex's tactics give you even a 10% edge - take them.
- tsycho 11y ago
  His advice falls in the same philosophical category as... 1/ use children as Labor in 3rd world countries since they are cheaper and more pliable 2/ cheat in environmental tests (eg: Volkswagen) 3/ dump toxic waste into poor countries since they don't have environmental protections, and it's cheaper than processing/dispoaing them correctly Basically you can get an edge by doing a lot of ethically wrong things. But should you? And should we celebrate anyone who wins by doing such things?
  - RyanZAG 11y ago
    I don't understand - how does his advice hurt anyone? It seems very benign. He's free to run his business how he wants. 1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force. They're not allowed to work anymore because companies get too much flak for hiring them. Instead they starve on the street and resort to crime. It's easy to say 'no work for children!' from your comfy home. 2/ Looking after an employee's wife and trying to find Asperger graduates to employ is not illegal. The environmental test cheating is only having a negative effect because it is illegal, dishonest and fraud. None of the things mentioned by Alex are any of those. He's very up front about it - he's giving presentations on it while his employees are present. 3/ Not necessarily evil. A company could pay $100 to dump some waste in their own country with full regulations, or pay a poor country $10 to dump the waste there. If that $10 means better schooling for children there, then I'd say accepting a bit of waste that can be cleaned up later seems satisfactory. It's actually worked out quite well in some countries. Basically - you're applying 'justice' that makes you feel better, and not justice that really solves anything. Making people like Alex stop bringing together teams that create things we use every day isn't helping us.
run4yourlives2 11y ago
I hope that if I turn into what can best be described as a self righteous asshole, my children will be smart and capable enough to call me on it, hard and fast. There are so many incredibly insulting and poorly thought out half-truths in the original presentation referenced that I'm shocked it was given in the context of a professional environment.
bmurphy1976 11y ago
I more-or-less said the same thing on Reddit: GOOD FOR HER! If every asshole who had influence or power had such a strong and confident daughter calling them out on their bullshit, this world would be a MUCH better place.
- danso 11y ago
  The most surprising fact to me was that she is just 22. Rebelling against parents isn't uncommon at a young age, but writing a full-blown public takedown is uncommon at...any age.
ahallock 11y ago
> Worst of all, many women enter into CS majors only to find that they are already hopelessly behind as they discover that their male counterparts already know the material from tinkering in their childhoods. My college experience was quite different. I never tinkered with computers or electronics during my childhood, and I had no problems getting up to speed. In fact, I'd say most of my peers at the community college I went to had zero programming experience. The instructors didn't assume any prior knowledge, either.
- tetrep 11y ago
  Indeed. The extent of my programming knowledge entering collage was basic HTML/CSS and making and making a form in Visual Basic that swapped the positions of the "Okay" and "Cancel" buttons whenever you moused over one of them. I knew much less than many of my peers and our school specifically had an introduction to CS class that was geared towards 0 knowledge students. A lot of the CS majors skipped it and went straight to the 2nd class, which I took the following semester.
- eberfreitas 11y ago
  I guess the idea is to say that, generally speaking, boys will be encourage to tinker with electronics and computers even from an early age without any recrimination. On the other side, girls won't have the same "luxury". Even their toys reflect the kind of life society chooses for them: taking care of babies and taking care of the house. This isn't to say that your statement isn't true, but I would bet it is just an anecdote. [edit]grammar and more ideas[/edit]
- drumdance 11y ago
  Same here. I didn't even study CS, nor did I own a computer until I was 23. And this was back before the internet was ubiquitous so if you wanted to program you had to spend real money on books and developer tools. No free/open source resources at your fingertips. My first real exposure to programming came after I bluffed my way into a temp gig building spreadsheets in Quattro Pro.
- whateveridunno 11y ago
  She didn't say "all women", she said "many women." I attend the University of Texas at Austin. I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field. One of the reasons was the fact that although I'd taken AP CS courses in high school, I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late". This attitude came from my peers, the companies that attended our career fairs, and even from my first exposure to the online tech press/blogosphere- I remember reading an essay by Paul Graham wherein he essentially implied that if a woman hasn't started coding by 13 all hope is lost for her. The only people I didn't get that impression from were (most of) my instructors, but that wasn't really enough, especially in the 500+ person intro classes I was in at the time. Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.
Gratsby 11y ago
It's always fun to pile on, but what I got out of ASJ's post was "love your job for whatever hours you are there." Negativity begets negativity, but thinking positive and thinking big is just as contagious.
- JamilD 11y ago
  The tone of it was more like: love your job for whatever hours you are there, even if it's 80 hours a week, and if you don't love it, you're not a real engineer, you're in the mediocre majority, and you don't deserve to be there anyway.
  - Gratsby 11y ago
    I didn't get that. I guess perception is everything.
- awinder 11y ago
  I'm all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, but after reading through this it was pretty damn hard to justify any benefit of the doubt: http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pdf http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pd...
  - Gratsby 11y ago
    That... that's not what I was referring to. I'm not touching that with a 10 foot pole.
erroneousfunk 11y ago
Obviously, the entire slide deck is terrible, but, a personal thought about the "The NOT male engineers" slide... Some people might think "Well, it's a terrible thing to say like that, that women should get the more social jobs, but society/culture/genetics/hormones -- perhaps a grain of truth, right? Women are just social!" You might even think it's a good thing to promote them, or make them the "communicators" or put them in architect positions. I just want to say that these are the good intentions that made my first few years of out of college job experience absolutely awful, which makes this slide especially upsetting to me. I was an engineering major with a strong CS background, but also a 6' tall, beautiful, outgoing, well-spoken woman. Obviously, I'd be perfect working with clients, or acting as a liaison between developers and designers, or as a technical sales engineer, right!? So, I was "let go" twice, the first time, just 5 months after graduating, and then again a year later. I missed meetings, told clients their ideas were bad, was a terrible diplomat, didn't prepare very nice-looking reports, complained about using MS Office, constantly forgot to log billable hours, spent too much time writing code... I hated it, I was terrible at it, and yet I kept drifting towards these types of jobs! It was what recruiters showed me, what college counselors showed me, what everyone said I should do, and what I thought I should do! It took me way too long (to my credit, I was young) to realize that I'm much much happier "just" writing code, and working on a project that I can really take the time to get into. If I'm going to do "collaboration" I'd rather do it with other engineers that share a common(ish) technical background, where we all bounce ideas off of each other and have similar goals for the product or feature. And I'm so much happier not having to worry about what I'm wearing to work every day, or if I need to prepare for a customer meeting in the morning! So, even if you think that it might be true that women are more social on average (whatever your own personal reasoning is, doesn't matter) PLEASE don't automatically try to lead women into roles like this, or assume that she'll be great at bridging gaps between clients/developers/designers/god-knows-what (because she's a LADY! Amirite!?). Some are, some aren't. Some men are, some aren't. But using these social/cross-discipline positions as kneejerk suggestions for a woman to "move up", or "do something more interesting" may be doing more harm than good to her career if she takes the advice.
DonHopkins 11y ago
Alex St John glorifies the benefits of slavery and Microsoft's imperialistic dominance of game developers in his own words [1], describing his infamous Toga Party / Roman Orgy / Slave Auction he threw in the Spartan Stadium at the 1996 Computer Game Developer Conference: >"Sex, violence and debauchery were all hallmarks of a great Roman “orgy” and I wanted to come as close to capturing that experience as I could get away with." >"The slave auction was also a special occasion. The Roman guards were rounding up the losers from the gladiatorial events and anybody who was offending a “senator” or Cleopatra and throwing them in the slave pit. Once a sufficient number of slaves had been collected from the party, Gillian returned to the stage to auction them to the audience for the gold they had won in the games. Gillian could set any base price she wanted for a “specimen”, if the audience wouldn’t pay the price the slave would be “thrown to the lions”. We had configured a “pit” full of foam to one side of the stage and directly in front of the first caged lion. A failed slave would be marched to the edge of the pit at spear point and pushed in by the praetorian guard where they would fall into box full of foam below the audiences line of sight. Then a huge video clip of lions tearing up a wildebeest and roaring would be played on the big screens on either side of the stage accompanied by the sounds of screaming. Down in the foam pit we had a collection of fake bloody body parts that somebody would toss up in the air during the lion feeding. Of course the “victim” was then allowed to sneak out the back and return to the party." [1] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/ http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/

116 points by kelukelugames 11y ago

I remember interviewing for an engineering gig at WildTangent at a time when my latest gig in the valley paid $120K plus 0.5% of the startup. WildTangent offered me $35K, less than I had made as a post-doc before leaving for industry. #$%& you Alex...

mimo777 11y ago
And someone took that offer. And I bet he complained about the engineer he got at that price. Summarily launching into a tyrade about how important it is for non management to know their place--manager here--and just like his big brother Bill, didn't understand how non managers were making a manager's salary. Meanwhile, better paid engineers were making the job of many FLMs redundant by turning the employees they manage into scripts. Sounds like a good reason to pay a programmer like a manager, huh?
beachstartup 11y ago
yeah, i'm searching, digging deep for sympathy for someone naive enough to accept a 35k offer in a 100k+ environment, and i'm failing. the stress, the hours, the burnout, it's not for passion, it's for MONEY. you can go work on your passions in absolute leisure on a beach in southeast asia and never worry about money, but for the kids out there reading this, don't be tricked into thinking developing throwaway shitbox games for some asshole ex-microsoft millionaire is your passion. 35k is a very different kind of 'fuck you' money.
- LogicFailsMe 11y ago
  What? You think I accepted that offer? No no no, Instead, I went to a post-IPO company while the stock was down from the dotcom crash and did just fine when it recovered. In-between, Craig Venter offered me $45k, so glad I have standards. Everyone should have standards, no? Edit: +1 for "35K is a very different kind of @#$% you money."

rectang 11y ago

Here's what she's rebelling against: http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pdf http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pd... RULE 1: You don’t recruit and retain male engineers you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends * If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone * If the relationship breaks down the engineer is gone * The paycheck goes to HER * Why does SHE want her husband or BF to work for you?

sgift 11y ago
And it just gets better and better from there in later slides .. so much information about the character of one person so readily available. Or would that be an ad hominem? Decisions ..
protomyth 11y ago
That's painfully not exactly wrong by itself. Its been good advice to make sure the significant other is very happy with the company, and it is often missed. If children are involved, making "family" life easier will make things better. // I have no real idea of the history here, I'm just commenting on one rule that can be personally costly not to heed
- HillRat 11y ago
  Obviously the gender assumption is pretty cringeworthy in and of itself, but what I find particularly strange is how he advocates this but then turns around and complains that developers don't want to do 80-hour weeks as a regular requirement of employment. These are not mutually-reconcilable recommendations.
  - gilleain 11y ago
    Maybe the reasoning is : "get his partner to agree to the idea of him doing 80 hour weeks"...
gryphonshafer 11y ago
So this is somewhat OT, but in reading the slides, I noticed this gem: > Potential money is worth more than actual money. In very, very rare circumstances, that is true. In the vast majority of cases, it's total B$. It's what company founders tell employees to exploit them, to get them to work overtime as a norm for crap normal-time pay. It's what the founders genuinely hope is true because they own so much of the company, but it rarely turns out that your shares are worth as much as the net-present-value of the delta to an average salary. At least in my experience.

pdabbadabba 11y ago

This whole saga has been uncomfortable from the beginning--and now I'm cringing harder ever than ever. Not because I disagree with much of what Amilia has written, but just because it's painful to be, in some way, a witness to the rift that this piece makes evident. In any case, Amilia is right to highlight this quote: > Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks. This, folks, is a racial (and gender) pathology claim. Unless we interpret Alex as inquiring about the social circumstances that prevent women and 'blacks' from seizing these 'opportunities' (and I don't see how that's a plausible interpretation here), then what Alex is suggesting is that there is something wrong with women and black people, a physiological symptom of their gender or race, that prevents them from seeing or taking these opportunities when presented with them. I find that, if you pay attention, you also see this way of thinking at work behind the scenes in more reasonable-sounding claims about racial and gender politics. Sometimes its overt, but more often its buried in points about, e.g., the corroded norms of "black communities."

actionwords 11y ago
asians are massivaley over represented in tech. europeans are actually under represented. But let's not let facts get in the way of argumentation shall we?
dvdcxn 11y ago
>Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks. I've always wondered if the answer to this was due to the culture and class demographics. The Current crop of tech leaders came from the era where middle class boys were bought computers by their parents as it was seen as a thing for boys to be into and not girls (I think this stereotype is still prevalent but far less powerful now). Computers just were not affordable to working class folks back then. Considering the poverty most minorities families faced then and still do now, it's sadly the case that they couldn't afford computers. I expect (and hope) that in the next 10 years we'll see the distribution of tech leaders become naturally more diverse. Not because of any activist drive but simply because these kids are much more likely to have access to the tools they were denied in the past.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

simonswords82 11y ago

This is ridiculous, she lost me at: {Dad, if you use my face in an offensive slideshow again I beg you to please at least throw me a bone and put in a more flattering picture. As a self absorbed millennial I have provided the internet with a profusion of selfies in a rainbow of sepia tones. Please choose any of those.} This is some sort of weird public spat between a father and a daughter, it's not newsworthy or even constructive.

cookiecaper 11y ago
I'm not sure if I clicked upvote or downvote, sorry. Using HN on a small screen right now. I meant to upvote.

edgyswingset 11y ago

> Dad, if you use my face in an offensive slideshow again I beg you to please at least throw me a bone and put in a more flattering picture. As a self absorbed millennial I have provided the internet with a profusion of selfies in a rainbow of sepia tones. Please choose any of those. He picked an unflattering photo of his daughter and used it as a visual example of a "woman in tech" without her permission? What on earth?

lintiness 11y ago

earth to freud

dudul 11y ago

The slide about "real engineers" is priceless. Real engineers don't care about money? They want a "mission"? Ha! Good luck hiring engineers in ad-tech, finance, etc. What's the mission? Showing more annoying ads to users? Yeah! I guess I'm not a real engineer, cause I care about money. I sell a skill, provide a service, this service has value, pay me. Now, TBH, a few good advice in this presentation, but often weirdly worded. Making sure the spouse/family is happy is a good advice, but doesn't have to be presented as "the wife/girlfriend".

ownagefool 11y ago
The entire presentation is essentially a list of "how I think we can get good developers and underpaid them". I don't really care if he invented gaming itself, fuck this guy.

mikestew 11y ago

I guess I haven't been paying attention to the latest from a man who would give toddlers a run for their money in the tantrum department (well, other than telling Wild Tangent to leave me alone). Why he's getting the time of day, I have no idea. Sure, he did something something DirectX twenty years ago at Microsoft, but if he's done anything of note since other than run his mouth, I must have missed it. If anything he has to say upsets you, ask yourself "why?" Because he's a brilliant game dev ala Carmack? Because everyone wants to work for Wild Tangent? Because of those lovely AAA titles Wild Tangent cranks out one after another? The answer to all is "no". So why do you care? Hell, his own offspring doesn't want anything to do with him. You can't stop VentureBeat and TechCrunch from writing it, but you don't have to read it.

RodericDay 11y ago
He's a particularly bad exponent of what people feel are actually very widely held ideas in the tech community (ie: young > old, work long hours don't complain, etc).
dennisgorelik 11y ago
> Hell, his own offspring doesn't want anything to do with him. That is obviously not true. She even wrote blog post about him. That is a clear indication that, as a minimum, she cares a lot about him. And Alex is proud of his daughter: http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/21/i-apologize/ http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/21/i-apologize/ Daddy is very proud of her. She’s no millennial slacker that’s for sure.

JamilD 11y ago

Dupe; discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542664

sridca 11y ago
Why is this post hidden from the front page? It was there moments ago.
- untothebreach 11y ago
  maybe it hit the flamewar detector? maybe people were flagging it?
- sridca 11y ago
  I came across this: > (2015-10-16) The people behind the scenes at Hacker News now hand pick stories they want on the front page. It's not a user-generated voting-controlled news site. But it pretends to be one and tries to look like one. It's deeply dishonest. http://www.curi.us/1612-anti-israel-bias-at-hacker-news http://www.curi.us/1612-anti-israel-bias-at-hacker-news / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10402465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10402465 This is outrageous, and I will find a way to create a front-page list that is "unadulterated".
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    There's really no pretense that votes are the only factor in ranking stories. Here's the moderator commenting about the many factors: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20rank&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20rank&sort=byPopulari... (not all the results are applicable, enough are)
    - sridca 11y ago
      > There's really no pretense that votes are the only factor in ranking stories. True, however the HN front page has always given me the impression that votes matter the most, and that the front-page is largely reflective of the interests of the HN demographics. The question I'd ask is: why is there no explicit indication (written in the footer, perhaps) of the front-page being vetted by a handful of moderators? A subtle form of pretense is not speaking of the truth.

bad_user 11y ago

The article has a quote from: http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/16/game-developers-must-avoid-the-wage-slave-attitude/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/16/game-developers-must-avoid... > "I can’t begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work" I cannot speak for developers in Silicon Valley or other places, but I suspect the feeling of disgust when hearing such things is similar. The problem is that solving design, engineering, computer science and math problems every day can be stressful and exhausting. Do that for more than 8 hours per day and maybe also multitask between projects everyday, in an environment that has toxic management and it's a recipe for burnout, burnout being that deep sense of tiredness, emptiness and helplessness, being nothing less than depression out of which some people never recover. Now I'm sure that this is way better than digging for blood diamonds to feed your family, as Mr. Alex St. John is saying. But I can't believe that somebody born into privilege can even think to suggest that such jobs aren't so bad compared to African slavery.

douche 11y ago
If everybody else's lived experience matters, then take into account that this guy grew up in a log cabin in Alaska. I didn't grow up that far off the grid, but doing anything on a computer is a damned sight easier than working all day swinging a chainsaw or turning wrenches on heavy equipment. Pays way better too, and I haven't smashed a finger, lacerated anything, or taken a bath in hydraulic fluid since I became a desk jockey.
- dblohm7 11y ago
  Perhaps if we were to restrict this discussion to the physical aspects of the job, then yes. That is a very narrow view, however.

searine 11y ago

They both seem like awful people.

RyanZAG 11y ago

Seems like the big thing everyone is missing: you can hate Alex all you want, but he's not making conjectures. He's giving his advice based on successful experience in reality. I'll take his word - as politically incorrect as it is - over 1000 people making arguments off what is 'right'. If you're running a business and Alex's tactics give you even a 10% edge - take them.

tsycho 11y ago
His advice falls in the same philosophical category as... 1/ use children as Labor in 3rd world countries since they are cheaper and more pliable 2/ cheat in environmental tests (eg: Volkswagen) 3/ dump toxic waste into poor countries since they don't have environmental protections, and it's cheaper than processing/dispoaing them correctly Basically you can get an edge by doing a lot of ethically wrong things. But should you? And should we celebrate anyone who wins by doing such things?
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  I don't understand - how does his advice hurt anyone? It seems very benign. He's free to run his business how he wants. 1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force. They're not allowed to work anymore because companies get too much flak for hiring them. Instead they starve on the street and resort to crime. It's easy to say 'no work for children!' from your comfy home. 2/ Looking after an employee's wife and trying to find Asperger graduates to employ is not illegal. The environmental test cheating is only having a negative effect because it is illegal, dishonest and fraud. None of the things mentioned by Alex are any of those. He's very up front about it - he's giving presentations on it while his employees are present. 3/ Not necessarily evil. A company could pay $100 to dump some waste in their own country with full regulations, or pay a poor country $10 to dump the waste there. If that $10 means better schooling for children there, then I'd say accepting a bit of waste that can be cleaned up later seems satisfactory. It's actually worked out quite well in some countries. Basically - you're applying 'justice' that makes you feel better, and not justice that really solves anything. Making people like Alex stop bringing together teams that create things we use every day isn't helping us.

run4yourlives2 11y ago

I hope that if I turn into what can best be described as a self righteous asshole, my children will be smart and capable enough to call me on it, hard and fast. There are so many incredibly insulting and poorly thought out half-truths in the original presentation referenced that I'm shocked it was given in the context of a professional environment.

bmurphy1976 11y ago

I more-or-less said the same thing on Reddit: GOOD FOR HER! If every asshole who had influence or power had such a strong and confident daughter calling them out on their bullshit, this world would be a MUCH better place.

danso 11y ago
The most surprising fact to me was that she is just 22. Rebelling against parents isn't uncommon at a young age, but writing a full-blown public takedown is uncommon at...any age.

ahallock 11y ago

> Worst of all, many women enter into CS majors only to find that they are already hopelessly behind as they discover that their male counterparts already know the material from tinkering in their childhoods. My college experience was quite different. I never tinkered with computers or electronics during my childhood, and I had no problems getting up to speed. In fact, I'd say most of my peers at the community college I went to had zero programming experience. The instructors didn't assume any prior knowledge, either.

tetrep 11y ago
Indeed. The extent of my programming knowledge entering collage was basic HTML/CSS and making and making a form in Visual Basic that swapped the positions of the "Okay" and "Cancel" buttons whenever you moused over one of them. I knew much less than many of my peers and our school specifically had an introduction to CS class that was geared towards 0 knowledge students. A lot of the CS majors skipped it and went straight to the 2nd class, which I took the following semester.
eberfreitas 11y ago
I guess the idea is to say that, generally speaking, boys will be encourage to tinker with electronics and computers even from an early age without any recrimination. On the other side, girls won't have the same "luxury". Even their toys reflect the kind of life society chooses for them: taking care of babies and taking care of the house. This isn't to say that your statement isn't true, but I would bet it is just an anecdote. [edit]grammar and more ideas[/edit]
drumdance 11y ago
Same here. I didn't even study CS, nor did I own a computer until I was 23. And this was back before the internet was ubiquitous so if you wanted to program you had to spend real money on books and developer tools. No free/open source resources at your fingertips. My first real exposure to programming came after I bluffed my way into a temp gig building spreadsheets in Quattro Pro.
whateveridunno 11y ago
She didn't say "all women", she said "many women." I attend the University of Texas at Austin. I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field. One of the reasons was the fact that although I'd taken AP CS courses in high school, I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late". This attitude came from my peers, the companies that attended our career fairs, and even from my first exposure to the online tech press/blogosphere- I remember reading an essay by Paul Graham wherein he essentially implied that if a woman hasn't started coding by 13 all hope is lost for her. The only people I didn't get that impression from were (most of) my instructors, but that wasn't really enough, especially in the 500+ person intro classes I was in at the time. Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.

Gratsby 11y ago

It's always fun to pile on, but what I got out of ASJ's post was "love your job for whatever hours you are there." Negativity begets negativity, but thinking positive and thinking big is just as contagious.

JamilD 11y ago
The tone of it was more like: love your job for whatever hours you are there, even if it's 80 hours a week, and if you don't love it, you're not a real engineer, you're in the mediocre majority, and you don't deserve to be there anyway.
- Gratsby 11y ago
  I didn't get that. I guess perception is everything.
awinder 11y ago
I'm all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, but after reading through this it was pretty damn hard to justify any benefit of the doubt: http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pdf http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pd...
- Gratsby 11y ago
  That... that's not what I was referring to. I'm not touching that with a 10 foot pole.

erroneousfunk 11y ago

Obviously, the entire slide deck is terrible, but, a personal thought about the "The NOT male engineers" slide... Some people might think "Well, it's a terrible thing to say like that, that women should get the more social jobs, but society/culture/genetics/hormones -- perhaps a grain of truth, right? Women are just social!" You might even think it's a good thing to promote them, or make them the "communicators" or put them in architect positions. I just want to say that these are the good intentions that made my first few years of out of college job experience absolutely awful, which makes this slide especially upsetting to me. I was an engineering major with a strong CS background, but also a 6' tall, beautiful, outgoing, well-spoken woman. Obviously, I'd be perfect working with clients, or acting as a liaison between developers and designers, or as a technical sales engineer, right!? So, I was "let go" twice, the first time, just 5 months after graduating, and then again a year later. I missed meetings, told clients their ideas were bad, was a terrible diplomat, didn't prepare very nice-looking reports, complained about using MS Office, constantly forgot to log billable hours, spent too much time writing code... I hated it, I was terrible at it, and yet I kept drifting towards these types of jobs! It was what recruiters showed me, what college counselors showed me, what everyone said I should do, and what I thought I should do! It took me way too long (to my credit, I was young) to realize that I'm much much happier "just" writing code, and working on a project that I can really take the time to get into. If I'm going to do "collaboration" I'd rather do it with other engineers that share a common(ish) technical background, where we all bounce ideas off of each other and have similar goals for the product or feature. And I'm so much happier not having to worry about what I'm wearing to work every day, or if I need to prepare for a customer meeting in the morning! So, even if you think that it might be true that women are more social on average (whatever your own personal reasoning is, doesn't matter) PLEASE don't automatically try to lead women into roles like this, or assume that she'll be great at bridging gaps between clients/developers/designers/god-knows-what (because she's a LADY! Amirite!?). Some are, some aren't. Some men are, some aren't. But using these social/cross-discipline positions as kneejerk suggestions for a woman to "move up", or "do something more interesting" may be doing more harm than good to her career if she takes the advice.

DonHopkins 11y ago

Alex St John glorifies the benefits of slavery and Microsoft's imperialistic dominance of game developers in his own words [1], describing his infamous Toga Party / Roman Orgy / Slave Auction he threw in the Spartan Stadium at the 1996 Computer Game Developer Conference: >"Sex, violence and debauchery were all hallmarks of a great Roman “orgy” and I wanted to come as close to capturing that experience as I could get away with." >"The slave auction was also a special occasion. The Roman guards were rounding up the losers from the gladiatorial events and anybody who was offending a “senator” or Cleopatra and throwing them in the slave pit. Once a sufficient number of slaves had been collected from the party, Gillian returned to the stage to auction them to the audience for the gold they had won in the games. Gillian could set any base price she wanted for a “specimen”, if the audience wouldn’t pay the price the slave would be “thrown to the lions”. We had configured a “pit” full of foam to one side of the stage and directly in front of the first caged lion. A failed slave would be marched to the edge of the pit at spear point and pushed in by the praetorian guard where they would fall into box full of foam below the audiences line of sight. Then a huge video clip of lions tearing up a wildebeest and roaring would be played on the big screens on either side of the stage accompanied by the sounds of screaming. Down in the foam pit we had a collection of fake bloody body parts that somebody would toss up in the air during the lion feeding. Of course the “victim” was then allowed to sneak out the back and return to the party." [1] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/ http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/