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The tips in here on topics like building relationships outside work, being financially prudent and learning how to say no are all good nuggets of advice. With

The tips in here on topics like building relationships outside work, being financially prudent and learning how to say no are all good nuggets of advice. With that said, I thought that the article's title was kind of ironic because in my opinion, the intersectional identity politics espoused by the authors is itself one of the most toxic aspects of contemporary tech culture. It's the part of working at a mature venture-funded startup in SV that I miss the least, by far.

adamsea 9y ago
A) With respect, your experience and the author's experience may vary, for a variety of reasons, so I'm not sure it makes sense to pit one set of experiences against another, so to speak. B) Would you be willing to clarify what was toxic about your experience with SV startups as you described? C) Realistically, without denying the problems which probably do exist with "intersectionaly identity politics", etc, it seems pretty clear (as in there are studies, etc) that sexual harassment is one of the most toxic aspects, not only of tech, but of contemporary business and American life. Discrimination based on the color of one's skin is up there as well. So it does seem a bit disingenuous to point out the flaws in ways in which people are trying to ameliorate these problems without acknowledging the problems themselves, and/or to imply that said flaws are more pervasive than the damaging behaviors which they are a response to.
- malvosenior 9y ago
  The answer is and always has been to judge people by the output of their work and nothing else. As soon as you bring identity politics into to equation, you’ve lost because many people will (rightly) take attacks on white people and men as racist and sexist respectively.
  - adamsea 9y ago
    I concur that judging someone by the output of their work as opposed to their sex or skin color is extremely important, however, I believe that by itself is a narrow and inaccurate view of the whole situation/problem. In fact, acknowledging the vastness of the problem is a major challenge in and of itself. > As soon as you bring identity politics into to equation, you’ve lost because many people will (rightly) take attacks on white people and men as racist and sexist respectively. So, it's pretty much been like this but times a thousand for women and people whose skin is not pinkish white. Of course some people of color are racist towards white people, and of course some women are sexist towards men. However to acknowledge this without acknowledging the vast amounts of institutionalized and socialized sexism/racism in American culture (which doesn't just come out in tech - look at the racist/sexist behavior of the current President) is a bit ludicrous. It's like talking about optimizing performance in one small domain while ignoring the major bottleneck!
    - malvosenior 9y ago
      As a non-white male who has succeeded in this industry based on talent alone, I couldn’t disagree more. I also take offense to people suggesting I need some sort of handout or special attention. Feels infantalizing and quite frankly terrible.
      - adamsea 9y ago
        It's never my intent to offend anyone; I apologize. I wasn't trying to suggest there that anyone needed a handout. However, yeah, I do think affirmative action has its place, and also that it can be challenging to implement well. Same with diversity programs in the workplace. Personally I don't think it makes sense to characterize these program as a handout, since it's a particular policy meant to try and make up for concrete, specific injustices which have long-term effects. For affirmative action, redlining of black people in Chicago is a great example - easy to Google. I am genuinely curious - do you think it makes sense to extrapolate from your own individual experience to all other nonwhite people, or to women? I suppose if we wanted to try to get an aggregate sense of what people believe, we could look at polls or voting patterns of women and various peoples of color. And, without attempting to knock or take away from your talent, it's my own belief that _nobody_ succeeds on talent alone, that we all have people in our lives (teachers, mentors, coworkers, family, etc) who help(ed) us succeed or become our best. And, correspondingly, that we have an obligation to help others as best we can. Lastly, if my comment offended you, I have to imagine that you can understand how and why James Damor's memo (poor science and all) - I noticed you mentioned him several times in the thread - was quite offensive to a large number of people and provoked such a negative response, since it mimiced a lot of the historical rhetoric around attempting to use a misconceived scientific basis for racial/gender inferiority as a justification for discrimination, oppression and dehumanization.
        malvosenior 9y ago
        > I am genuinely curious - do you think it makes sense to extrapolate from your own individual experience to all other nonwhite people, or to women? I'm speaking of my own personal experience but you seem to be speaking for all of these other groups (nonwhite people and women). There's no way we're going to agree on things like affirmative action and diversity programs but I hope you can at least understand how some people may see that as condescending and racist/sexist in its own right.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    Could you elaborate on the form of the attacks on white people and men you're seeing in SV companies? I'm both white, male, and at an SV company, and haven't seen them in my experience. From a managerial perspective I'd love to hire more people from underrepresented groups because it would mean a bigger pool to hire from, so I'm all for recruiting efforts, outreach/education programs, etc, but at the end of the day the yes/no on the candidates coming through the door is in my hands, and even if I wanted to abuse that, I can't hire people who aren't even applying. :|
    - malvosenior 9y ago
      Sure, from Damore’s Google lawsuit: https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/950446329603461121 https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/950446329603461121
      - adamsea 9y ago
        Ah, James Damore, the guy who thought he knew stuff. Seems like that is the worst possible example. It's like, self-defeating. It's like, yes, lets pick the guy who yet again wants to rationalize institutionalized sexism with bad science and thought it would be OK to tell his _coworkers_ why some of them are, scientifically, inferior to him. And expect for nobody to take offense to this and that he would not get fired for it.
        malvosenior 9y ago
        Did you read the link? Those aren’t his words, they’re straight from Google employees.
        adamsea 9y ago
        I read his memo, the Wired article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, the Quora article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, and the recent Gizmodo article about the lawsuit. I glanced at your twitter link; once I saw it was about his lawsuit I shifted gears to the root of the issue. I thought Damore's comment in footnote 9, when discussing compensation in the workplace, that "Considering women spend more money than men" was particularly insightful ;) /s https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncensored-memo-with-charts-and-cites-339f3d2d05f https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-... "The problem is, the science in Damore’s memo is still very much in play, and his analysis of its implications is at best politically naive and at worst dangerous" https://gizmodo.com/lets-be-very-clear-about-what-happened-to-james-damore-1822160852 https://gizmodo.com/lets-be-very-clear-about-what-happened-t... "But despite the legal gymnastics of Damore’s attorneys, getting fired for his memo wasn’t discrimination, and it certainly wasn’t censorship. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time of the memo’s circulation, it violated the company’s policies, perpetuating sexist ideologies. Damore disclosed to his non-male colleagues that he believes that they are predisposed to being worse at their jobs than males. Former Google engineer Yonatan Zunger sums it up nicely in this line from his blog post responding to Damore’s memo: “You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.” In a workplace, you can’t say whatever you’d like without consequences—violating a company’s code of conduct is grounds for firing." https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017 https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio... "TL;DR: Yes, men and women are biologically different — which doesn’t mean what the author thinks it does. The article perniciously misrepresents the nature and significance of known sex differences to advance what appears to be a covert alt-right agenda."
  - geofft 9y ago
    > The answer is and always has been to judge people by the output of their work and nothing else. Should it not be to judge people by the output of their work relative to their working conditions? I'm much more interested in hiring someone who operated 5 servers in a culture of manual configuration over ssh by introducing automation than someone who operated 500 servers by following existing procedures and using Ansible playbooks that they didn't contribute any improvements to, even though the second person produced quite a bit more output. (If by "output" you mean to count in this way, then sure, but a lot of people don't—for instance, lots of people want to see GitHub activity without asking whether the previous employer had onerous IP rules, or the candidate has a family they're busy with on evenings and weekends, or whatever.)
    - malvosenior 9y ago
      > Should it not be to judge people by the output of their work relative to their working conditions? No we shouldn’t look at that. I only care how you can produce in the role you occupy. To clarify by “output” I mean work output, not public display output.
      - rifung 9y ago
        > No we shouldn’t look at that. I only care how you can produce in the role you occupy. Aren't you agreeing then? After all, you are looking at output given the role they occupy right?
        malvosenior 9y ago
        I think you’re right actually.
      - kelnos 9y ago
        If you can increase an employee's output by $X by spending $Y to improve their working conditions (where $X > $Y), shouldn't you do it? Isn't it then worthwhile to examine not just an employee's output, but their working conditions as well?
    - 9y ago
  - JohnHaugeland 9y ago
    i guess i feel like letting one great programmer drive away 25 good programmers isn't actually a very savvy move
    - adamsea 9y ago
      Agreed. Or even worse, 1 great programmer drive away several other great programmers and several other good ones.
    - Sacho 9y ago
      I would like to challenge this assertion. If "good programmers" are replaceable, and "great programmers" are not, then keeping one "great programmer" and rotating the "good programmers" may be a wise business decision. YMMV what "great" and "good" means, or how disposable "good programmers" are, but I don't think the assertion is categorically true.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    How people treat others in the organization can negatively impact the output of others' work. If firing an asshole (who otherwise has high quality output) increases the quality of the output of others past a certain point, then that's an easy argument from a simple financial/productivity perspective that treating others with respect is a positive for the company.
    - zbentley 9y ago
      It's often true that firing assholes improves others' output, but that shouldn't be the only reason to fire them. I think there is independent merit to removing people who are terrible, even if doing so deprives the company of an incredibly valuable asset--e.g. firing your mythical 10x founding engineer because they're harassing other employees and making them feel unwell/unsafe, even if it severely damages your company's ability to produce. This is because growth and profit are not--and despite the "100% meritocracy free market" advocates' arguments, never have been--the sole aims of a business. Businesses exist within a broader community; they aren't optimizing for widget creation in a vacuum. The rise of intangible/cultural reasons for punishing a business in the court of public opinion (uber; those scandals didn't highlight things that directly impacted the company's bottom line, but rather things that were unacceptable ethically to the broader community, or things that might have, given time impacted the bottom line) speaks to this; so does the decrease over time in Tamany Hall/Boss Tweed-type abuses of employer authority. In short, for a business, acting ethically has an objective value which is independent from (or, if you want to nitpick "independent", at least has primary influence on) profit/growth.
  - itronitron 9y ago
    A problem with identity politics is that people make assumptions about which groups other people should identify with. There is nothing right about taking an attack on a group of people, especially when the groups are based on their genetics.

adamsea 9y ago

A) With respect, your experience and the author's experience may vary, for a variety of reasons, so I'm not sure it makes sense to pit one set of experiences against another, so to speak. B) Would you be willing to clarify what was toxic about your experience with SV startups as you described? C) Realistically, without denying the problems which probably do exist with "intersectionaly identity politics", etc, it seems pretty clear (as in there are studies, etc) that sexual harassment is one of the most toxic aspects, not only of tech, but of contemporary business and American life. Discrimination based on the color of one's skin is up there as well. So it does seem a bit disingenuous to point out the flaws in ways in which people are trying to ameliorate these problems without acknowledging the problems themselves, and/or to imply that said flaws are more pervasive than the damaging behaviors which they are a response to.

malvosenior 9y ago
The answer is and always has been to judge people by the output of their work and nothing else. As soon as you bring identity politics into to equation, you’ve lost because many people will (rightly) take attacks on white people and men as racist and sexist respectively.
- adamsea 9y ago
  I concur that judging someone by the output of their work as opposed to their sex or skin color is extremely important, however, I believe that by itself is a narrow and inaccurate view of the whole situation/problem. In fact, acknowledging the vastness of the problem is a major challenge in and of itself. > As soon as you bring identity politics into to equation, you’ve lost because many people will (rightly) take attacks on white people and men as racist and sexist respectively. So, it's pretty much been like this but times a thousand for women and people whose skin is not pinkish white. Of course some people of color are racist towards white people, and of course some women are sexist towards men. However to acknowledge this without acknowledging the vast amounts of institutionalized and socialized sexism/racism in American culture (which doesn't just come out in tech - look at the racist/sexist behavior of the current President) is a bit ludicrous. It's like talking about optimizing performance in one small domain while ignoring the major bottleneck!
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    As a non-white male who has succeeded in this industry based on talent alone, I couldn’t disagree more. I also take offense to people suggesting I need some sort of handout or special attention. Feels infantalizing and quite frankly terrible.
    - adamsea 9y ago
      It's never my intent to offend anyone; I apologize. I wasn't trying to suggest there that anyone needed a handout. However, yeah, I do think affirmative action has its place, and also that it can be challenging to implement well. Same with diversity programs in the workplace. Personally I don't think it makes sense to characterize these program as a handout, since it's a particular policy meant to try and make up for concrete, specific injustices which have long-term effects. For affirmative action, redlining of black people in Chicago is a great example - easy to Google. I am genuinely curious - do you think it makes sense to extrapolate from your own individual experience to all other nonwhite people, or to women? I suppose if we wanted to try to get an aggregate sense of what people believe, we could look at polls or voting patterns of women and various peoples of color. And, without attempting to knock or take away from your talent, it's my own belief that _nobody_ succeeds on talent alone, that we all have people in our lives (teachers, mentors, coworkers, family, etc) who help(ed) us succeed or become our best. And, correspondingly, that we have an obligation to help others as best we can. Lastly, if my comment offended you, I have to imagine that you can understand how and why James Damor's memo (poor science and all) - I noticed you mentioned him several times in the thread - was quite offensive to a large number of people and provoked such a negative response, since it mimiced a lot of the historical rhetoric around attempting to use a misconceived scientific basis for racial/gender inferiority as a justification for discrimination, oppression and dehumanization.
      - malvosenior 9y ago
        > I am genuinely curious - do you think it makes sense to extrapolate from your own individual experience to all other nonwhite people, or to women? I'm speaking of my own personal experience but you seem to be speaking for all of these other groups (nonwhite people and women). There's no way we're going to agree on things like affirmative action and diversity programs but I hope you can at least understand how some people may see that as condescending and racist/sexist in its own right.
- majormajor 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on the form of the attacks on white people and men you're seeing in SV companies? I'm both white, male, and at an SV company, and haven't seen them in my experience. From a managerial perspective I'd love to hire more people from underrepresented groups because it would mean a bigger pool to hire from, so I'm all for recruiting efforts, outreach/education programs, etc, but at the end of the day the yes/no on the candidates coming through the door is in my hands, and even if I wanted to abuse that, I can't hire people who aren't even applying. :|
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    Sure, from Damore’s Google lawsuit: https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/950446329603461121 https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/950446329603461121
    - adamsea 9y ago
      Ah, James Damore, the guy who thought he knew stuff. Seems like that is the worst possible example. It's like, self-defeating. It's like, yes, lets pick the guy who yet again wants to rationalize institutionalized sexism with bad science and thought it would be OK to tell his _coworkers_ why some of them are, scientifically, inferior to him. And expect for nobody to take offense to this and that he would not get fired for it.
      - malvosenior 9y ago
        Did you read the link? Those aren’t his words, they’re straight from Google employees.
        adamsea 9y ago
        I read his memo, the Wired article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, the Quora article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, and the recent Gizmodo article about the lawsuit. I glanced at your twitter link; once I saw it was about his lawsuit I shifted gears to the root of the issue. I thought Damore's comment in footnote 9, when discussing compensation in the workplace, that "Considering women spend more money than men" was particularly insightful ;) /s https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncensored-memo-with-charts-and-cites-339f3d2d05f https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-... "The problem is, the science in Damore’s memo is still very much in play, and his analysis of its implications is at best politically naive and at worst dangerous" https://gizmodo.com/lets-be-very-clear-about-what-happened-to-james-damore-1822160852 https://gizmodo.com/lets-be-very-clear-about-what-happened-t... "But despite the legal gymnastics of Damore’s attorneys, getting fired for his memo wasn’t discrimination, and it certainly wasn’t censorship. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time of the memo’s circulation, it violated the company’s policies, perpetuating sexist ideologies. Damore disclosed to his non-male colleagues that he believes that they are predisposed to being worse at their jobs than males. Former Google engineer Yonatan Zunger sums it up nicely in this line from his blog post responding to Damore’s memo: “You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.” In a workplace, you can’t say whatever you’d like without consequences—violating a company’s code of conduct is grounds for firing." https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017 https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio... "TL;DR: Yes, men and women are biologically different — which doesn’t mean what the author thinks it does. The article perniciously misrepresents the nature and significance of known sex differences to advance what appears to be a covert alt-right agenda."
- geofft 9y ago
  > The answer is and always has been to judge people by the output of their work and nothing else. Should it not be to judge people by the output of their work relative to their working conditions? I'm much more interested in hiring someone who operated 5 servers in a culture of manual configuration over ssh by introducing automation than someone who operated 500 servers by following existing procedures and using Ansible playbooks that they didn't contribute any improvements to, even though the second person produced quite a bit more output. (If by "output" you mean to count in this way, then sure, but a lot of people don't—for instance, lots of people want to see GitHub activity without asking whether the previous employer had onerous IP rules, or the candidate has a family they're busy with on evenings and weekends, or whatever.)
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    > Should it not be to judge people by the output of their work relative to their working conditions? No we shouldn’t look at that. I only care how you can produce in the role you occupy. To clarify by “output” I mean work output, not public display output.
    - rifung 9y ago
      > No we shouldn’t look at that. I only care how you can produce in the role you occupy. Aren't you agreeing then? After all, you are looking at output given the role they occupy right?
      - malvosenior 9y ago
        I think you’re right actually.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      If you can increase an employee's output by $X by spending $Y to improve their working conditions (where $X > $Y), shouldn't you do it? Isn't it then worthwhile to examine not just an employee's output, but their working conditions as well?
  - 9y ago
- JohnHaugeland 9y ago
  i guess i feel like letting one great programmer drive away 25 good programmers isn't actually a very savvy move
  - adamsea 9y ago
    Agreed. Or even worse, 1 great programmer drive away several other great programmers and several other good ones.
  - Sacho 9y ago
    I would like to challenge this assertion. If "good programmers" are replaceable, and "great programmers" are not, then keeping one "great programmer" and rotating the "good programmers" may be a wise business decision. YMMV what "great" and "good" means, or how disposable "good programmers" are, but I don't think the assertion is categorically true.
- kelnos 9y ago
  How people treat others in the organization can negatively impact the output of others' work. If firing an asshole (who otherwise has high quality output) increases the quality of the output of others past a certain point, then that's an easy argument from a simple financial/productivity perspective that treating others with respect is a positive for the company.
  - zbentley 9y ago
    It's often true that firing assholes improves others' output, but that shouldn't be the only reason to fire them. I think there is independent merit to removing people who are terrible, even if doing so deprives the company of an incredibly valuable asset--e.g. firing your mythical 10x founding engineer because they're harassing other employees and making them feel unwell/unsafe, even if it severely damages your company's ability to produce. This is because growth and profit are not--and despite the "100% meritocracy free market" advocates' arguments, never have been--the sole aims of a business. Businesses exist within a broader community; they aren't optimizing for widget creation in a vacuum. The rise of intangible/cultural reasons for punishing a business in the court of public opinion (uber; those scandals didn't highlight things that directly impacted the company's bottom line, but rather things that were unacceptable ethically to the broader community, or things that might have, given time impacted the bottom line) speaks to this; so does the decrease over time in Tamany Hall/Boss Tweed-type abuses of employer authority. In short, for a business, acting ethically has an objective value which is independent from (or, if you want to nitpick "independent", at least has primary influence on) profit/growth.
- itronitron 9y ago
  A problem with identity politics is that people make assumptions about which groups other people should identify with. There is nothing right about taking an attack on a group of people, especially when the groups are based on their genetics.