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I do want to know whether or not X is true, and it does matter. And I do enjoy being part of a community of people who are looking for the truth. The problem i

I do want to know whether or not X is true, and it does matter. And I do enjoy being part of a community of people who are looking for the truth. The problem is that hacker news is not a place where it's safe to ignore the political effects of your speech and focus purely on epistemic truth. Private mailing list? Sure. In person? Sure. On a public forum where management types will imply that you're an overpaid lazy hipster? Yeah no. If you want a place where people can focus on finding out what's true, you need to make it safe to do that. You're never going to get a truth-seeking discussion about gender or race on r/SRS for exactly that reason. Hacker News is better than most because it's well moderated, but it can't and won't be that way for things that touch on the economic relationships between software developers and their employers.

ryanwaggoner 10y ago
Wait, so you're implying that "management types" are so stupid that they would have read this article (plus many more like it) and been like "yeah, guess it's better for us to pay the engineers more", but then they see a short comment from someone on a forum saying "hmm, I'm skeptical of this; is there good evidence?" and so the management types are like "whew! never mind! turns out there's no evidence!" This is simultaneously: a) a bizarrely uncharitable view of "management types" and their intelligence level, b) a clear indication that you don't think the evidence is very good, and c) a ridiculously impractical view of how impossible it is to keep a simple thought from spreading, let alone just occurring. The fact that the person you were responding to is, in your words, a "management type", and came up with this objection should show how dumb it is to try and keep it out of the discussion. They can clearly think of this objection on their own.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  You're missing the core of what I'm concerned about. What I care about is something like "what looking like you're putting in sincere and whole-hearted effort looks like". I oppose publicly talking about how you as a software engineer can put in 45 good hours of work reliably every week and feel like you have good work-life balance for the same reason people make comments if their coworkers over-dress for work. If you can, and you say that you can, and you don't complain about it, then that becomes expected. This is as true of wearing a suit and tie to work as it is for putting in long hours. Finance is in a really shitty place because of this and I don't want the tech scene to follow suit.

ryanwaggoner 10y ago

Wait, so you're implying that "management types" are so stupid that they would have read this article (plus many more like it) and been like "yeah, guess it's better for us to pay the engineers more", but then they see a short comment from someone on a forum saying "hmm, I'm skeptical of this; is there good evidence?" and so the management types are like "whew! never mind! turns out there's no evidence!" This is simultaneously: a) a bizarrely uncharitable view of "management types" and their intelligence level, b) a clear indication that you don't think the evidence is very good, and c) a ridiculously impractical view of how impossible it is to keep a simple thought from spreading, let alone just occurring. The fact that the person you were responding to is, in your words, a "management type", and came up with this objection should show how dumb it is to try and keep it out of the discussion. They can clearly think of this objection on their own.

ThrustVectoring 10y ago
You're missing the core of what I'm concerned about. What I care about is something like "what looking like you're putting in sincere and whole-hearted effort looks like". I oppose publicly talking about how you as a software engineer can put in 45 good hours of work reliably every week and feel like you have good work-life balance for the same reason people make comments if their coworkers over-dress for work. If you can, and you say that you can, and you don't complain about it, then that becomes expected. This is as true of wearing a suit and tie to work as it is for putting in long hours. Finance is in a really shitty place because of this and I don't want the tech scene to follow suit.