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Get everyone focused on thinking about the team's mission, role, and what it takes to get the job done. Drill that into everyone's head and stick to it. Let e

• scandox 10y ago
  This is a wonderful message for those for whom the Status Quo works. It's what we'd like to hear and allows us to ignore tiresome issues. Eventually it's Versailles time and everybody has to have their heads cut off. So you need to balance this "focused" (i.e. ignore the problem) approach with a longer term plan. Or rather someone needs to. Or maybe we should just accept getting our heads cut off.
• travisjungroth 10y ago
  Wait, how does your advice answer your question about the event? Are you saying that you shouldn't host a diversity event because it doesn't explicitly match the four things you listed? Because someone might not like the event? I don't get it.
  • emodendroket 10y ago
    It seems like what he's saying is that you shouldn't allow it to happen because it's not strictly work-related but I find it hard to agree with that thinking.
    • peterwwillis 10y ago
      The whole position is summed up as "Be a corporate drone." I think a lot of us would disagree with it.
      • ruleabidinguser 10y ago
        Many of us don't care.
        • emodendroket 10y ago
          If you don't care then it seems like allowing people who do care to hold their women in technology groups or whatever would be fine.
          • ruleabidinguser 10y ago
            except when its disruptive, which is when i do care.
            • peterwwillis 10y ago
              I thought silicon valley loved disruption.
            • emodendroket 10y ago
              For instance?
              • ruleabidinguser 10y ago
                Well I was just thinking of it interfering withwork
                • emodendroket 10y ago
                  In what way would it interfere with work?
• madsbuch 10y ago
  I think this thinking is discouraging. Bot to men but even more to women and it might be the reason why there are so few women in STEM fields. I think generally work places should be much more well rounded. We spend a considerable amount of time there, so why not allow it to be a place where we expand our lives instead of a place where we only "make money, save money, save time, and make customers happier"?
  • mememachine 10y ago
    Many of us don't want it to be anything more than that. That's what the rest of our life is for.
    • madsbuch 10y ago
      That's completely fair. But my proposition was not about your preferences. I conjectured that a shift to a more whole view of employers (rather than just machines) would be beneficial for most people.
      • brianmurphy 10y ago
        The purpose of my life outside of work right now is dating women so I think you are treading dangerous waters by asking people to bring a more "whole" view of themselves into the workplace when that is perceived to be the problem in the first place.
        • madsbuch 10y ago
          Again, a "more whole view" is not a complete view. I didn't suggest that we bring in all aspects of life. Why is it that people purposely misunderstand my words / does not see the scope? (I talked generally, not individually, and I did not talk about bringing all aspects in)
  • tptacek 10y ago
    Careful. Plenty of STEM fields have much better gender parity than tech. Tech is singularly bad among the STEM fields; only physics is competitively bad. Mathematics, molecular biology, stat --- all have strong female participation. Worth noting: all these other STEM fields are also heavily dependent on software and computer technology, and women do fine in them.
• emodendroket 10y ago
  I mean these Silicon Valley firms keep getting caught in blatant sexual harassment cases. I think a lot of them need, like, basic remedial education.
  • briandear 10y ago
    The irony is that these are "progressive" companies.
    • emodendroket 10y ago
      Well, that's a whole different rant but, really, you read about grown men texting their female coworkers incessantly with crude sexual propositions and you have to wonder how they ever came to believe this was acceptable behavior.
      • Jach 10y ago
        Presumably it's like spam, it works some percentage of the time and the consequences for it not working aren't severe.
        • emodendroket 10y ago
          Well, until your behavior is the cause for a massive lawsuit, anyway.
    • amyjess 10y ago
      I'd say that the reason why sexual harassment is such a problem at SV unicorns is because of the SV startup culture, not despite it. SV encourages people to move fast, be aggressive, don't be afraid to break things, ignore regulations, disrupt all the things, etc. There are substantial similarities to the way a VC-funded startup operates and the way a pick-up artist operates. You'll notice that Susan Fowler's blog post also goes into detail about the Game of Thrones-esque culture with middle managers constantly and openly plotting to overthrow their superiors and take their jobs. A culture that encourages you to figuratively fuck your boss also encourages you to literally fuck your subordinates. It's a culture of aggression and proving your dominance. Big traditional conservative companies on the other hand... well, they just don't have that culture. Their culture discourages people from taking risks at every level. In order to get anything done, you have to go through several layers of bureaucracy, put everything in writing, make sure your is are dotted and your ts crossed. It discourages aggressive, disruptive risk-takers from coming near the company. And without aggressive, disruptive risk-takers, you don't have nearly the amount of sexual harassment. Yes, it still happens on occasion, but it isn't nearly as systemic or as blatant as in a VC-funded startup. So it leads to the seemingly-paradoxical situation where the best companies for women and LGBT people to work at are the kind of "conservative" companies that you can imagine Ned Flanders working at. But culturally conservative isn't the same thing as politically conservative; I've said this before, but I have a lot of politically liberal friends (most of them enthusiastic Clinton voters) who live in the suburbs, work 9-5 at traditional large corporations, and have traditional families.
• st3v3r 10y ago
  "Staying focused on making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier." To be perfectly honest, that sounds like a recipe for a dull ass, penny pinching, unenjoyable work environment. The kind where you're treated as a cost center.
  • COMPUTERLOSER 10y ago
    Usually it is. Labour is expensive.
• jmcgough 10y ago
  This is the mentality that leads to drama explosions like at Uber. They were all focused on making money and building a big company. Because of this, they ignored the "little things" like building a HR department that could support women when they were put in bad situations.
  • true_religion 10y ago
    I think a part of "don't tolerate a culture that gets in the way of making that [making money] happen" is not tolerating sexism, juvenile behaviour, harassment, or bullying in the workplace. All of those factors make some of your employees less productive.
    • jmcgough 10y ago
      Totally agree. The distinction I'm trying to make is that it's easy to let these things happen when you're focused on building and selling a product. I'm positive that no CEO wants their business to be a place where women are harassed or personnel problems slow down progress. However these things can and do happen without a lot of careful effort spent early on, focused on preventing them. By the time the problems become visible (e.g. through a shocking public blog post), it will be significantly harder to fix the underlying causes, which is very costly to the company in terms of attracting and keeping talent and maintaining focus on objectives.
    • michaelchisari 10y ago
      You would think so, but people are very often willing to damage their own financial self-interest in favor of prejudices, especially when the former is long-term and the latter short-term.
      • ori_b 10y ago
        That would fall under "tolerating a culture that gets in the way of making money".
  • amorphid 10y ago
• Jemmeh 10y ago
  So put your head down and ignore the fact that women make up a small portion of people in STEM fields and are leaving those jobs once they get them? That's not a solution, it's what most places are already doing.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• COMPUTERLOSER 10y ago
  A level headed manager asserts that the goal of a business is to make money and outreach isn't the primary goal of a for-profit company. Such activities are fine as long as they don't create secondary conflicts. This triggers a fusillade of virtue-signalling Internets.
• LukaAl 10y ago
  That's a recipe for disaster! It works well for delivering your MVP and maybe the first version of your product. But then you want your employee to be empowered, to feel relevant and be able to take matters into their hands. Otherwise it doesn't scale. But happy and satisfied worker could step up to this level. Unsatisfied and soldier like employees cannot do that, they will be just soldiers that fear for their position. And not having even patriotism (that is what bond soldiers) work for them, the best will leave your company, the worst will stay. That's one of the differences between being a manager and being a leader. A leader takes the hard questions into his hands. But don't trust me, there are years of research in company organization saying that. Go out and read any article on HBS on the topic of leadership, workplace organization or CSR and you'll see that. So, your mentor was wrong, sorry about that.
• decker 10y ago
  Based on your statement, if the company gets more money by doing all sorts of terrible things to its contractors and employees then that's the right thing to do? There's going to be a ton of local minima in decisions and gray areas in things that you can't accurately value if you reduce it all to money. I think you haven't quite thought through this one completely.
• nothrabannosir 10y ago
  This is either ignoring the problem, or circular reasoning. "Oh well of course don't allow that kind of behaviour; it makes employees uncomfortable and that doesn't help make money." Ok, but how do you define that?
• danaliv 10y ago
  If nothing changes, nothing changes.
• stackptr 10y ago
  Sounds like the convenient POV from someone already well represented in the industry. Dismissing issues of diversity as being tangential to the core business of, well, business, is sensible from an, ahem, business-perspective. And from a human perspective, really flawed and problematic.
  • humanrebar 10y ago
    From a human perspective, humans are really flawed and problematic. That extends to even the most well-meaning diversity initiative. If nothing else, diversity initiatives create implicit filters for the types of people that are excited-to-ambivalent about diversity initiatives.
• zem 10y ago
  no, that's how you get status quo bias. the current system makes money, so if that's all you focus on, you'll never address the fact that it treats some demographics worse than others. also, this sort of "extrapolate to the absurd" list ("religion, sex, gender, age, height, phase of the moon (maybe you employ werewolves), etc.") is a classic red flag for someone not caring about the very real inequalities in the system - the most common variant is "i don't care if you're white, black, green or purple...", but what it really works out to is "i think we can just brush any black-person-specific problems under the carpet and everything will be fine".
• simplyluke 10y ago
  Except all of this fallout is because Uber HR determined employee x with a harassment issue is valuable enough to making money that the potential to lose employees y and z is an acceptable risk. Ethics do not logically fall into place magically because the ultimate goal is making money. It's easy to say "ignore those factors in favor of making money" but the reality of the world isn't that simple. Uber didn't tolerate a culture that got in the way of making money, and now they're here. "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
  • belorn 10y ago
    Focusing on work and allowing harassment is polar opposites. Harassment is by definition something personal and not professional, and outside of those supporting hazing there is not much support that harassment has any place in the work place. Reading the stories about uber, I keep hearing that the woman wanted to focus on work but the harassing person interfered. That is exactly what amorphid suggest that a company should work to prevent, fostering a culture that focus on making customers happier and getting people working together for that a common goal.
  • greenhatman 10y ago
    As long as the demand for engineers stay higher than supply, everything should fall magically into place, actually, according to economic theory. Developer turnover is very costly. What I got from these womens' answers is that their motivations are pretty much exactly the same as men's. Maybe with the exception of serial harassment cases.
    • deathanatos 10y ago
      > everything should fall magically into place I'm not so certain. I agree, it should. But engineers don't like to talk about their salary; I have no idea what my peers earn, and it isn't easy to find out. Researching data such as discussion on HN, Glassdoor, BLS data, surveys from companies that are more open, etc. yield absolutely ludicrous ranges; I might ought to (depending on who and how you ask) be earning anywhere from 60k to 250k+ as an engineer; that includes throwing out some high & low figures. The situation is made worse by the huge disparities in cost of living between various geographies, making it hard to translate salaries in one area into anything sensible in the next. (You're lucky to get a breakdown to one of a geographical area, or actual line of work, but not both. I want to know what a backend vs. mobile vs. PM makes in Boston vs. NYC vs. SF; and ideally, along even more dimensions. Alas, it seems that blog-studies never release the data.)
• tbabb 10y ago
  If you think that interpersonal and morale issues don't affect how effectively a company functions, I kind of think you don't get how companies function.