11 ms·

I predict people will claim "our culture isn't that toxic. Some of those things happen, but they don't bother me much." If any non-zero subset of reasonable pe

by tlb 9y ago

I predict people will claim "our culture isn't that toxic. Some of those things happen, but they don't bother me much." If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. So don't ask "would this bother me?" Ask "would it bother someone?" And since you can't predict this from inside your head, you have to rely on firsthand accounts of people being bothered. This seems like a good overview of such accounts.

j4ship 9y ago
I disagree. I am not responsible for others feelings. There should be clear rules of conduct at any job and a clear process of enforcement. This make the situation fair and certain. One easy rule is that if someone says "Only talk to me about work." then the other person has to respect it. No forcing of social acceptance , no shaming the other to believe what you believe, just focus on what you were hired for. This is a standard taught to many managers to keep the company out of harassment issues , its very robotic unemotional but its clear and will allow different groups to work together as long as this rule is enforced. Basically we should not have to worry about a toxic culture because you should not be forced into one when you work. You should just be able to work and separate yourself from your task in any emotional way. [California dev, 8 years, have held manager position]
- tlb 9y ago
  As a manager, you're absolutely responsible for your team member's feelings. Both morally and practically because if they feel bad at work, they'll leave.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - autogn0me 9y ago
    I disagree. You are responsible for YOURSELF. If you are being ugly or talking shit - you are responsible for your actions. Saying "you are absolutely responsible for someone else's feelings" is the bat-ass craziest thing I have ever heard [It is not lost on me that I'm making a snarky comment in this thread ;)]. An example: I am talking to someone and make a comment that the other person interprets as threatening or demeaning. They do not ask me about it but they play a narrative inside their mind about how I am threatening them. This is some fictional narrative in their mind. I have no clue this is happening. How could I be responsible for this? It is in their mind. It is incumbent on the person who feels awkward to ask for clarification. This is not "extra work" or forcing the down-trodden to work harder - it is clarity. We do it all the time in conversation. "I'm sorry, but when you say X are you meaning Y?" And you give the person a chance to clear it up. Now. Where the adulting comes off the track appears to be in the hyper-Ayn-Randian culture of technology/start-ups where people who are incredibly self-centered feel they can "vent" in the open and expect others to "deal with it". This is absolutely unacceptable. And most people who act this way - are usually so self-centered - they dont KNOW they are acting this way. It is unacceptable but when you ask then "did you mean X?" it gives them some space to be clear. If they really did mean to threaten, demean and provoke someone else -- they will be clear they DID intend for that to be case. But they had an opportunity to be clear about it. Narcissism is rampant in start-up scene (imho). Likely its just on the rise in general in USA population. One of the things that is great about a narcissist is that THEY WILL OFTEN TELL YOU THEY ARE A NARCISSIST! (google, how to find out if someone is a narcissist) They are quite proud of their eliteness and expectation to entitlements. When you ask them for clarity -- they will be clear. And that is when there is no need to have some fictional narrative being built in your mind -- you will KNOW for sure because you have asked them and they have told you. Regardless. Be clear. And most importantly -- if you HEAR someone asking for clarification -- give them positive feedback. Clear, kind, and even tempered rational communication is what we need more of in the world and less reactivity.
    - dang 9y ago
      This comment breaks the site guidelines in lots of ways: name-calling, snark, using uppercase for emphasis. You can't comment like that anywhere on HN, and certainly not in this thread which was bound to teeter on the abyss from the beginning. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and do a better job of following them.
- doesnt_know 9y ago
  Can I ask what you did in your role as a manager? Where I work, even though there are some titles that have the word "manager" in, the organization refers to anyone that have people report to them as "people leaders". They are responsible for the well being of the those that report to them. If you take away the part where you are responsible for your people, what is left? Even if you take the most clinical and robotic view of the role, you still have to effectively allocate your resources. This means balancing strengths and weaknesses, allocating team members to places they are more interested in to improve performance. All this boils down to getting to know your people and making sure they are happy... > You should just be able to work and separate yourself from your task in any emotional way. This is also a crazy statement coming from someone who has people report to them. People don't turn off their emotions just because they are getting paid to perform a task !??!
  - jrs235 9y ago
    >People don't turn off their emotions just because they are getting paid to perform a task !??! Isn't that what we expect professionals to do? I mean yeah professionals still have feelings and emotions but they learn to detach them from their job. Like how we expect police officers to conduct themselves... Like trained professionals.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      There's a difference between acting professional and ignoring abuse because "I shouldn't be emotional at my job".
    - adamsea 9y ago
      We expect professionals to manage their emotions; huge difference. As the other poster says, it's a literal impossibility for a human being to not experience emotions. And police offers have to deal with stuff like PTSD and emotional trauma from their job, because of how intense it is. To a lesser degree than that, our (less intense) jobs have an unavoidable emotional impact on us.
      - 9y ago
- ant_mc 9y ago
  So what, you're going to punish someone who mentions they saw the shape of water last night and it was really good? That seems rather ridiculous. Or how about, I'm trying to learn rust and it's pretty neat but also pretty hard. I don't use rust at work. Is that work related enough since it's tech? If I walk up to a coworker and say "You idiot, this damn bug is ridiculous" am I not responsible for them getting upset at that?
  - dang 9y ago
    Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments in this thread? and not post them to HN in general?
    - ant_mc 9y ago
      Would you please stop accusing me of that? I can't make a fucking comment without you up my fucking ass about it. I was illustrating the point that I think the standard proposed is not a good hard rule. The moderation here has become truly ridiculous.
      - dang 9y ago
        If you abuse the site and get banned, you can't just create a new account to keep doing the same things. Shouldn't that be obvious?
        ant_mc 9y ago
        > abuse the site You mean like by being a shitty moderator?
cutcss 9y ago
Not really, as an example bothering people that believe earth is flat by saying "it is not" is a positive in my book; in other words, bothering ideas that need to be bothered.
drdaeman 9y ago
> If any non-zero subset of reasonable people Isn't the problem here that there is really no global (or even industry-wide) consensus on what's reasonable and what's not? What feels perfectly reasonable to one may look absolutely and intolerably insane to someone else. And vice versa.
- tlb 9y ago
  This is an empirical science. Any current consensus rules about what's acceptable derive ultimately from listening to people who are bothered by things. For example, in the 60s women started to object in large numbers to being wolf-whistled at when they walked past. Gradually, that became unacceptable in most workplaces. Many more things have become unacceptable since, and many more will in the future. So there's no fixed rule, just a dialectic where people who are offended by things speak up, and people who run organizations listen and ban things that offend the most people. The process is always frustratingly slow, but it seems to be mostly moving in the right direction.
smsm42 9y ago
> If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. That's a very high demand. People can leave the industry for a very wide variety of reasons, often mutually contradictory - some want to work as much as possible, provided it translates to $$$$, some are ok with earning less provided they can pursue side interests or family life, some want to make worldwide impact and break paradigms and change the world, some want quiet, predictable and organized workplace, some want high-risk/high-reward environment, some want benefits of predictable income and steady promotion... It is literally impossible to make an industry in which there would be nothing that would cause anybody to leave. Tech industry not special - some people may try it and find it's not what they'd like to do anymore and leave. Surely, if some things bother people and we could reasonably fix them without bothering even more people in the process, then there's no reason not to do it - it'd be a positive-sum action that would make the world better. But pre-committing to a goal that no non-zero subset of reasonable people ever wanted to leave tech does not seem like a smart thing to do, because it's impossible.
- kelnos 9y ago
  I think you're describing different things. The list of things in your first paragraph is not "behavior", it's... heh, not sure I have a word or phrase for it. At a very small startup, people are going to expect to have to work hard. While I disagree that this absolutely necessitates a lack of work/life balance, let's say for a moment it does. Sure, you're probably only going to be attracting people who are interested in working as much as possible, in a high risk/reward scenario. In some cases that's also going to be selecting for single people who have no children. And that's fine, for the most part. What's not fine is engaging in exclusionary behavior related to diversity of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. E.g. it's not fine to have a bunch of white employees who make racist jokes at work, or a bunch of men who talk at work about their sexual exploits, or a bunch of straight people who marginalize homosexual candidates during interviews. My initial reaction to the parent's assertion of "any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it" was also negative, because it sounds super absolutist, and PC (in all the actual negative ways "PC" has been used), and an indictment of being your genuine self. But really it's just about keeping stuff out of the workplace that has nothing to do with work. If work is about building products and figuring out how to sell them, and you focus on that, it eliminates a lot of problems. That doesn't stop you from being friends with people at work, but it does mean you might want to keep certain conversations away from the workplace, and instead have them on your own time. It really isn't that hard, as long as you're committed to examining your unconscious biases and eliminating behaviors that stem from them, at least in the workplace.
ryandrake 9y ago
If I actually abstained from all things that “would bother someone” I would never even be able to leave the house. No matter what you do, I guarantee that there is someone, somewhere, who will be gravely offended by it. This doesn’t even include the people who are out there actively looking for things to take offense to. Trying to please everyone is not a winnable game.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  Yeah, the assumption that people leave tech because they are so offended by a behavior doesn't sound like a reasonable assumption. People have jobs because they have to work, not because they would like to do it. If they leave the industry, it's because they don't find jobs in the industry worthy enough to endure. I'm sure more would stay for better rewards.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    > the assumption that people leave tech because they are so offended by a behavior doesn't sound like a reasonable assumption. The reality is more that they are moderately to highly offended by a series of behaviors. It's usually not one single thing that someone runs into and says "that's it, I'm out", it's a long list of often smaller things that ultimately adds up to an intolerable experience. > People have jobs because they have to work, not because they would like to do it. Why can't we have both? Given that most of us spend the majority of our waking hours for the majority of our lives working, wouldn't we prefer to actually like what we're doing? Perhaps we'll never get there, but moving in that direction seems like a worthwhile goal.
  - adamsea 9y ago
    Susan Fowler didn't leave tech, but she left Uber: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
- cutcss 9y ago
  And even if you could please everyone that doesn't guarantees you are a net positive for society; for example Galileo had to bother a lot of people to convince them the earth rotates around the sun and not otherwise; and pretty much anyone with an unpopular opinion that at the end turned out be for the best had to bother a lot of people.
finnthehuman 9y ago
>If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. I used to think like this. After years and years of refining my own behavior, a non-work, non-"tech" friend let it slip that my fiends though I had turned into a non-confrontational, lawyer-sounding, people-pleaser. He wasn't wrong, I had gotten in the habit of always walking on eggshells, navigating every conversation like a minefield and letting myself be treated like a doormat. I did. After all, if I hadn't, I'd be one of those "bros" that only people who have never met a bro say are filling up the engineering departments. The very next day I got chided about not being empathetic enough or whatever the buzzword was at the time. Maybe I could have kept up the facade if I was simply guilty by association. But it was specifically my behavior that was "toxic." That was it. And I'm out. I'm done. The never-docile-enough nature of "tech" is what's toxic. I hadn't been able to feel comfortable in my own skin for years out of fear of being off-putting to anyone else. The people who's behavior is worth changing aren't listening anyway, so I'm done letting it be my fault, and I'm never over-correcting to make up for it again. edit: Want to complain about something in "tech"? Why don't you (not you, specifically, parent poster) start with the ethics of your employer's products/practices.
- Firebrand 9y ago
  Just don’t write any manifestos to your co-workers.
  - qu4z-2 9y ago
    I can't help reading this as "We'll know we have a healthy workplace culture once people subconsciously realise that any time management makes a space available for internal feedback, you should make sure not to express your actual opinions there."
- tptacek 9y ago
  As a consultant whose client portfolio used to include F500's in health, insurance, and NY finance, and whose portfolio now includes nothing but startups, and having had the pleasure of whiling away many languorous afternoons in the cube farms of those companies, I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that the average startup tech employee is "walking on eggshells" and being performatively docile compared to the day-1 baseline expectations of, to a first approximation, every non-tech company with more than 1,000 employees in the US. The idea that tech employees are docile compared to the accounts receivable group at a major US insurance company seems pretty hard to support with evidence.
bsder 9y ago
> If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. Maybe. But why don't those same people build companies that don't have this behavior and out-compete the companies that do? It's not enough to eliminate the behavior, you have to eliminate the incentive. To that end, founding a "service" to help me be diverse doesn't convince me. Founding a company doing something and blowing your competitors out of the water because your diverse employee base simply outperforms them convinces me.
- tlb 9y ago
  I think they'll find customers. If I ran a company and I was losing good people because of a toxic culture, I wouldn't say "Oh well, I guess those people I lost will start their own companies and out-compete me, and everyone will be happy." I'd want to fix my toxic culture and keep the people and win. I used to think (terribly naively) that a company having a particular type as a founder would ensure that all such people would feel welcome there. But I have seen that not be the case.
  - bsder 9y ago
    > I think they'll find customers. Sure, but that doesn't convince. Anyone who has ever been in a big company has lots of stories of HR "initiatives" that have been utter garbage. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-07 http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-07 The path that these women pursued can be countered with "They were actually those icky, squishy HR types to begin with and our failure was in not detecting that. We need to change our hiring procedures to make sure that we don't make this kind of mistake hiring for a "hard" tech position again." > I used to think (terribly naively) that a company having a particular type as a founder would ensure that all such people would feel welcome there. But I have seen that not be the case. And that's the crux. Why should that be the case? Apparently that founder believed that their behavior was going to be more successful. Until someone takes a "diversity" touchstone, founds a company, and blows people's doors off, most offenders will never take these kinds of "squishy" things seriously. And, if the "diversity" advocates can't do this, well, that's data, too ... I'm actually in the camp that they probably can't. Practically all of the biggest successes in any industry which has a schedule component have stories of the carnage of divorces, health problems and relationship damage left in the wake. Probably the only counterexample of a continuous, plodding, sustainable success is the space shuttle software. Consequently, the diversity advocates need to change the narrative and start focusing on changing the conversation as to what constitutes success in broader society.
vtempest 9y ago
It's SJWs who are destroying freedom my always playing the victim card to have power over companies thru social shaming and acting really offended to scare you into apologizing or else you lose your job. Fuck this bullshit ends now.
- dang 9y ago
  We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's against the spirit and the rules of the site, regardless of ideology. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
adamsea 9y ago
I'll build on this and predict that: a) People will not want to acknowledge just how oppressive, racist, and sexist, our society has been in the past and the demonstrable ways in which we are still dealing with the aftereffects of that. b) People will not want to acknowledge that there is systemic sexism and racism, with extremely negative and unjust consequences for those discriminated against, within our society, and that consequentially .... c) People will not want to acknowledge that there is systemic sexism & racism within business, including tech, with negative and unjust consequences for those discriminated against, particularly, and relevant to this article, women. Think that it wasn't until 1919 that women got the right to vote; it wasn't that long ago. It's logical to extrapolate from the sexism of the past that there is sexism (not as pernicious but still here in a big way) in the present.
majormajor 9y ago
There's something kinda like a first mover problem here, but that's not quite the right word. I honestly don't know what the next steps should be (individually for me, or for the industry as a whole). It's easy to say "get better" for the latter, but hard to turn that into discrete actions. I think this linked post is pretty good, specifically with this bit showing a nuance that is lacking in more mainstream-media regurgitations of "tech is bad, news at 11": "We say “toxic tech culture” because we want to distinguish between leaving tech entirely, and leaving areas of tech which are abusive and harmful." I do understand the sort of "righteousness fatigue" that makes people tired of hearing about how they, their coworkers, their employer, their friends, are so terrible. Lose too much nuance and the reaction gets defensive, which from a purely practical point of view is a problem (this might get labeled as a "privileged" thing to be concerned with, but it's tough to reconcile wanting change but not being concerned with accomplishing it). I think a lot of the mainstream coverage of this is starting to poison the well, and then you end up with "sure, it's not your responsibility as non-white-male to fix the behavior of assholes, but it's not my responsibility to fix that asshole either." Which leaves me back where I started. If my company seems pretty good in this respect - the ratio isn't great, a factor of our incoming applications/recruiting, but retention is high among the relevant employees, and no complaints have been raised (at least at my level of visibility). We try to broaden our candidate pool, and have widened it a LOT in the last five years, and are definitely hiring more candidates who do great despite not being run through the 5-algorithms-on-a-whiteboard gauntlet, but that doesn't translate directly into women and minorities... So other than continuing to work at attracting a broaer pool of candidates... What else should we do? Even if only from the "name and shame" perspective of "god, it's annoying seeing the gender ratio published"? Asking seems like a good first step, since another pervasive issue in tech is too many people who try to solve problems without ever thinking of talking to someone about it. :)
ant_mc 9y ago
> If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. But reasonable people were offended by Brandon Eich donating to an anti-gay marriage proposition, and other reasonable people were offended that he got ousted from Mozilla. Some people are offended by Damore and been quite vicious towards him, others are saying he's right about things (including you pretty much can't be a conservative in Silicon Valley). Isn't reality more complex than this idea? Its easy enough to say "don't comment on a coworkers physical appearance" or something equally stupid, but "any non-zero subset" offended by any particular behavior doesn't seem reasonable.
- kelnos 9y ago
  > Its easy enough to say "don't comment on a coworkers physical appearance" or something equally stupid, but "any non-zero subset" offended by any particular behavior doesn't seem reasonable. Maybe it isn't, but it's a pretty good yardstick to hold things up to. If you can actually say that no reasonable person would be offended by something you want to say, then say it. If you're not sure, or maybe can think of a few people who might be offended, then you can make a choice. If you still decide to say it, and then someone comes to you and says they were offended, you'll probably want to apologize. Or not; that's also up to you. At the end of the day it's about recognizing that the things you say and do can affect people in different ways, and being thoughtful about that.
geofft 9y ago
Let me propose an alternative to "non-zero subset of reasonable people": "any people you want to work with." This shifts from the pseudo-objective, nebulous standard of "reasonable" to a much more clearer standard of what you personally want to support and what you personally don't. For instance, there are people I would easily call "reasonable" who hold religious views that I myself have held in the past but which I now believe are incompatible with the society I want to see. I don't want to work with these people. I am not actively opposed to working with them - I suspect I'm coworkers with lots of such people right now - but I have no particular desire to help those people make money. If they want to start their own business with like-minded folks, great; I support their freedom to do so. However, I do want to work with good engineers of various demographics underrepresented in my industry, because I want to work with the best engineers my company can hire (a secondary goal to "I want society to work in certain ways," so the desires in the previous paragraph would override this desire, but hopefully that happens rarely). If someone from one of those groups says, this behavior bothers me so much that I'll leave over it, then yes, absolutely, I'm going to trust them and what they say they care about. (And if you say "Actually, I don't particularly want to work with people of this demographic?" That's fine, in the sense that it's a free country. But you would fall into the group of people that I no longer want to work with because I think that politically/financially empowering you would not build the society I want to see; I would much rather compete with you.)
notacoward 9y ago
Perhaps ask "why does something that bothers others not bother me" as well. The answer can be uncomfortable, but enlightening and ultimately liberating.
aantix 9y ago
The truth is sometimes harsh. And it would be a sad day when a message must be softened, filtered and censored in an effort to make everyone comfortable.

by tlb 9y ago

j4ship 9y ago

I disagree. I am not responsible for others feelings. There should be clear rules of conduct at any job and a clear process of enforcement. This make the situation fair and certain. One easy rule is that if someone says "Only talk to me about work." then the other person has to respect it. No forcing of social acceptance , no shaming the other to believe what you believe, just focus on what you were hired for. This is a standard taught to many managers to keep the company out of harassment issues , its very robotic unemotional but its clear and will allow different groups to work together as long as this rule is enforced. Basically we should not have to worry about a toxic culture because you should not be forced into one when you work. You should just be able to work and separate yourself from your task in any emotional way. [California dev, 8 years, have held manager position]

tlb 9y ago
As a manager, you're absolutely responsible for your team member's feelings. Both morally and practically because if they feel bad at work, they'll leave.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- autogn0me 9y ago
  I disagree. You are responsible for YOURSELF. If you are being ugly or talking shit - you are responsible for your actions. Saying "you are absolutely responsible for someone else's feelings" is the bat-ass craziest thing I have ever heard [It is not lost on me that I'm making a snarky comment in this thread ;)]. An example: I am talking to someone and make a comment that the other person interprets as threatening or demeaning. They do not ask me about it but they play a narrative inside their mind about how I am threatening them. This is some fictional narrative in their mind. I have no clue this is happening. How could I be responsible for this? It is in their mind. It is incumbent on the person who feels awkward to ask for clarification. This is not "extra work" or forcing the down-trodden to work harder - it is clarity. We do it all the time in conversation. "I'm sorry, but when you say X are you meaning Y?" And you give the person a chance to clear it up. Now. Where the adulting comes off the track appears to be in the hyper-Ayn-Randian culture of technology/start-ups where people who are incredibly self-centered feel they can "vent" in the open and expect others to "deal with it". This is absolutely unacceptable. And most people who act this way - are usually so self-centered - they dont KNOW they are acting this way. It is unacceptable but when you ask then "did you mean X?" it gives them some space to be clear. If they really did mean to threaten, demean and provoke someone else -- they will be clear they DID intend for that to be case. But they had an opportunity to be clear about it. Narcissism is rampant in start-up scene (imho). Likely its just on the rise in general in USA population. One of the things that is great about a narcissist is that THEY WILL OFTEN TELL YOU THEY ARE A NARCISSIST! (google, how to find out if someone is a narcissist) They are quite proud of their eliteness and expectation to entitlements. When you ask them for clarity -- they will be clear. And that is when there is no need to have some fictional narrative being built in your mind -- you will KNOW for sure because you have asked them and they have told you. Regardless. Be clear. And most importantly -- if you HEAR someone asking for clarification -- give them positive feedback. Clear, kind, and even tempered rational communication is what we need more of in the world and less reactivity.
  - dang 9y ago
    This comment breaks the site guidelines in lots of ways: name-calling, snark, using uppercase for emphasis. You can't comment like that anywhere on HN, and certainly not in this thread which was bound to teeter on the abyss from the beginning. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and do a better job of following them.
doesnt_know 9y ago
Can I ask what you did in your role as a manager? Where I work, even though there are some titles that have the word "manager" in, the organization refers to anyone that have people report to them as "people leaders". They are responsible for the well being of the those that report to them. If you take away the part where you are responsible for your people, what is left? Even if you take the most clinical and robotic view of the role, you still have to effectively allocate your resources. This means balancing strengths and weaknesses, allocating team members to places they are more interested in to improve performance. All this boils down to getting to know your people and making sure they are happy... > You should just be able to work and separate yourself from your task in any emotional way. This is also a crazy statement coming from someone who has people report to them. People don't turn off their emotions just because they are getting paid to perform a task !??!
- jrs235 9y ago
  >People don't turn off their emotions just because they are getting paid to perform a task !??! Isn't that what we expect professionals to do? I mean yeah professionals still have feelings and emotions but they learn to detach them from their job. Like how we expect police officers to conduct themselves... Like trained professionals.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    There's a difference between acting professional and ignoring abuse because "I shouldn't be emotional at my job".
  - adamsea 9y ago
    We expect professionals to manage their emotions; huge difference. As the other poster says, it's a literal impossibility for a human being to not experience emotions. And police offers have to deal with stuff like PTSD and emotional trauma from their job, because of how intense it is. To a lesser degree than that, our (less intense) jobs have an unavoidable emotional impact on us.
    - 9y ago
ant_mc 9y ago
So what, you're going to punish someone who mentions they saw the shape of water last night and it was really good? That seems rather ridiculous. Or how about, I'm trying to learn rust and it's pretty neat but also pretty hard. I don't use rust at work. Is that work related enough since it's tech? If I walk up to a coworker and say "You idiot, this damn bug is ridiculous" am I not responsible for them getting upset at that?
- dang 9y ago
  Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments in this thread? and not post them to HN in general?
  - ant_mc 9y ago
    Would you please stop accusing me of that? I can't make a fucking comment without you up my fucking ass about it. I was illustrating the point that I think the standard proposed is not a good hard rule. The moderation here has become truly ridiculous.
    - dang 9y ago
      If you abuse the site and get banned, you can't just create a new account to keep doing the same things. Shouldn't that be obvious?
      - ant_mc 9y ago
        > abuse the site You mean like by being a shitty moderator?

cutcss 9y ago

Not really, as an example bothering people that believe earth is flat by saying "it is not" is a positive in my book; in other words, bothering ideas that need to be bothered.

drdaeman 9y ago

> If any non-zero subset of reasonable people Isn't the problem here that there is really no global (or even industry-wide) consensus on what's reasonable and what's not? What feels perfectly reasonable to one may look absolutely and intolerably insane to someone else. And vice versa.

tlb 9y ago
This is an empirical science. Any current consensus rules about what's acceptable derive ultimately from listening to people who are bothered by things. For example, in the 60s women started to object in large numbers to being wolf-whistled at when they walked past. Gradually, that became unacceptable in most workplaces. Many more things have become unacceptable since, and many more will in the future. So there's no fixed rule, just a dialectic where people who are offended by things speak up, and people who run organizations listen and ban things that offend the most people. The process is always frustratingly slow, but it seems to be mostly moving in the right direction.

smsm42 9y ago

> If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. That's a very high demand. People can leave the industry for a very wide variety of reasons, often mutually contradictory - some want to work as much as possible, provided it translates to $$$$, some are ok with earning less provided they can pursue side interests or family life, some want to make worldwide impact and break paradigms and change the world, some want quiet, predictable and organized workplace, some want high-risk/high-reward environment, some want benefits of predictable income and steady promotion... It is literally impossible to make an industry in which there would be nothing that would cause anybody to leave. Tech industry not special - some people may try it and find it's not what they'd like to do anymore and leave. Surely, if some things bother people and we could reasonably fix them without bothering even more people in the process, then there's no reason not to do it - it'd be a positive-sum action that would make the world better. But pre-committing to a goal that no non-zero subset of reasonable people ever wanted to leave tech does not seem like a smart thing to do, because it's impossible.

kelnos 9y ago
I think you're describing different things. The list of things in your first paragraph is not "behavior", it's... heh, not sure I have a word or phrase for it. At a very small startup, people are going to expect to have to work hard. While I disagree that this absolutely necessitates a lack of work/life balance, let's say for a moment it does. Sure, you're probably only going to be attracting people who are interested in working as much as possible, in a high risk/reward scenario. In some cases that's also going to be selecting for single people who have no children. And that's fine, for the most part. What's not fine is engaging in exclusionary behavior related to diversity of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. E.g. it's not fine to have a bunch of white employees who make racist jokes at work, or a bunch of men who talk at work about their sexual exploits, or a bunch of straight people who marginalize homosexual candidates during interviews. My initial reaction to the parent's assertion of "any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it" was also negative, because it sounds super absolutist, and PC (in all the actual negative ways "PC" has been used), and an indictment of being your genuine self. But really it's just about keeping stuff out of the workplace that has nothing to do with work. If work is about building products and figuring out how to sell them, and you focus on that, it eliminates a lot of problems. That doesn't stop you from being friends with people at work, but it does mean you might want to keep certain conversations away from the workplace, and instead have them on your own time. It really isn't that hard, as long as you're committed to examining your unconscious biases and eliminating behaviors that stem from them, at least in the workplace.

ryandrake 9y ago

If I actually abstained from all things that “would bother someone” I would never even be able to leave the house. No matter what you do, I guarantee that there is someone, somewhere, who will be gravely offended by it. This doesn’t even include the people who are out there actively looking for things to take offense to. Trying to please everyone is not a winnable game.

zzzcpan 9y ago
Yeah, the assumption that people leave tech because they are so offended by a behavior doesn't sound like a reasonable assumption. People have jobs because they have to work, not because they would like to do it. If they leave the industry, it's because they don't find jobs in the industry worthy enough to endure. I'm sure more would stay for better rewards.
- kelnos 9y ago
  > the assumption that people leave tech because they are so offended by a behavior doesn't sound like a reasonable assumption. The reality is more that they are moderately to highly offended by a series of behaviors. It's usually not one single thing that someone runs into and says "that's it, I'm out", it's a long list of often smaller things that ultimately adds up to an intolerable experience. > People have jobs because they have to work, not because they would like to do it. Why can't we have both? Given that most of us spend the majority of our waking hours for the majority of our lives working, wouldn't we prefer to actually like what we're doing? Perhaps we'll never get there, but moving in that direction seems like a worthwhile goal.
- adamsea 9y ago
  Susan Fowler didn't leave tech, but she left Uber: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
cutcss 9y ago
And even if you could please everyone that doesn't guarantees you are a net positive for society; for example Galileo had to bother a lot of people to convince them the earth rotates around the sun and not otherwise; and pretty much anyone with an unpopular opinion that at the end turned out be for the best had to bother a lot of people.

finnthehuman 9y ago

>If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. I used to think like this. After years and years of refining my own behavior, a non-work, non-"tech" friend let it slip that my fiends though I had turned into a non-confrontational, lawyer-sounding, people-pleaser. He wasn't wrong, I had gotten in the habit of always walking on eggshells, navigating every conversation like a minefield and letting myself be treated like a doormat. I did. After all, if I hadn't, I'd be one of those "bros" that only people who have never met a bro say are filling up the engineering departments. The very next day I got chided about not being empathetic enough or whatever the buzzword was at the time. Maybe I could have kept up the facade if I was simply guilty by association. But it was specifically my behavior that was "toxic." That was it. And I'm out. I'm done. The never-docile-enough nature of "tech" is what's toxic. I hadn't been able to feel comfortable in my own skin for years out of fear of being off-putting to anyone else. The people who's behavior is worth changing aren't listening anyway, so I'm done letting it be my fault, and I'm never over-correcting to make up for it again. edit: Want to complain about something in "tech"? Why don't you (not you, specifically, parent poster) start with the ethics of your employer's products/practices.

Firebrand 9y ago
Just don’t write any manifestos to your co-workers.
- qu4z-2 9y ago
  I can't help reading this as "We'll know we have a healthy workplace culture once people subconsciously realise that any time management makes a space available for internal feedback, you should make sure not to express your actual opinions there."
tptacek 9y ago
As a consultant whose client portfolio used to include F500's in health, insurance, and NY finance, and whose portfolio now includes nothing but startups, and having had the pleasure of whiling away many languorous afternoons in the cube farms of those companies, I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that the average startup tech employee is "walking on eggshells" and being performatively docile compared to the day-1 baseline expectations of, to a first approximation, every non-tech company with more than 1,000 employees in the US. The idea that tech employees are docile compared to the accounts receivable group at a major US insurance company seems pretty hard to support with evidence.

bsder 9y ago

> If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. Maybe. But why don't those same people build companies that don't have this behavior and out-compete the companies that do? It's not enough to eliminate the behavior, you have to eliminate the incentive. To that end, founding a "service" to help me be diverse doesn't convince me. Founding a company doing something and blowing your competitors out of the water because your diverse employee base simply outperforms them convinces me.

tlb 9y ago
I think they'll find customers. If I ran a company and I was losing good people because of a toxic culture, I wouldn't say "Oh well, I guess those people I lost will start their own companies and out-compete me, and everyone will be happy." I'd want to fix my toxic culture and keep the people and win. I used to think (terribly naively) that a company having a particular type as a founder would ensure that all such people would feel welcome there. But I have seen that not be the case.
- bsder 9y ago
  > I think they'll find customers. Sure, but that doesn't convince. Anyone who has ever been in a big company has lots of stories of HR "initiatives" that have been utter garbage. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-07 http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-07 The path that these women pursued can be countered with "They were actually those icky, squishy HR types to begin with and our failure was in not detecting that. We need to change our hiring procedures to make sure that we don't make this kind of mistake hiring for a "hard" tech position again." > I used to think (terribly naively) that a company having a particular type as a founder would ensure that all such people would feel welcome there. But I have seen that not be the case. And that's the crux. Why should that be the case? Apparently that founder believed that their behavior was going to be more successful. Until someone takes a "diversity" touchstone, founds a company, and blows people's doors off, most offenders will never take these kinds of "squishy" things seriously. And, if the "diversity" advocates can't do this, well, that's data, too ... I'm actually in the camp that they probably can't. Practically all of the biggest successes in any industry which has a schedule component have stories of the carnage of divorces, health problems and relationship damage left in the wake. Probably the only counterexample of a continuous, plodding, sustainable success is the space shuttle software. Consequently, the diversity advocates need to change the narrative and start focusing on changing the conversation as to what constitutes success in broader society.

vtempest 9y ago

It's SJWs who are destroying freedom my always playing the victim card to have power over companies thru social shaming and acting really offended to scare you into apologizing or else you lose your job. Fuck this bullshit ends now.

dang 9y ago
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's against the spirit and the rules of the site, regardless of ideology. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

adamsea 9y ago

I'll build on this and predict that: a) People will not want to acknowledge just how oppressive, racist, and sexist, our society has been in the past and the demonstrable ways in which we are still dealing with the aftereffects of that. b) People will not want to acknowledge that there is systemic sexism and racism, with extremely negative and unjust consequences for those discriminated against, within our society, and that consequentially .... c) People will not want to acknowledge that there is systemic sexism & racism within business, including tech, with negative and unjust consequences for those discriminated against, particularly, and relevant to this article, women. Think that it wasn't until 1919 that women got the right to vote; it wasn't that long ago. It's logical to extrapolate from the sexism of the past that there is sexism (not as pernicious but still here in a big way) in the present.

majormajor 9y ago

There's something kinda like a first mover problem here, but that's not quite the right word. I honestly don't know what the next steps should be (individually for me, or for the industry as a whole). It's easy to say "get better" for the latter, but hard to turn that into discrete actions. I think this linked post is pretty good, specifically with this bit showing a nuance that is lacking in more mainstream-media regurgitations of "tech is bad, news at 11": "We say “toxic tech culture” because we want to distinguish between leaving tech entirely, and leaving areas of tech which are abusive and harmful." I do understand the sort of "righteousness fatigue" that makes people tired of hearing about how they, their coworkers, their employer, their friends, are so terrible. Lose too much nuance and the reaction gets defensive, which from a purely practical point of view is a problem (this might get labeled as a "privileged" thing to be concerned with, but it's tough to reconcile wanting change but not being concerned with accomplishing it). I think a lot of the mainstream coverage of this is starting to poison the well, and then you end up with "sure, it's not your responsibility as non-white-male to fix the behavior of assholes, but it's not my responsibility to fix that asshole either." Which leaves me back where I started. If my company seems pretty good in this respect - the ratio isn't great, a factor of our incoming applications/recruiting, but retention is high among the relevant employees, and no complaints have been raised (at least at my level of visibility). We try to broaden our candidate pool, and have widened it a LOT in the last five years, and are definitely hiring more candidates who do great despite not being run through the 5-algorithms-on-a-whiteboard gauntlet, but that doesn't translate directly into women and minorities... So other than continuing to work at attracting a broaer pool of candidates... What else should we do? Even if only from the "name and shame" perspective of "god, it's annoying seeing the gender ratio published"? Asking seems like a good first step, since another pervasive issue in tech is too many people who try to solve problems without ever thinking of talking to someone about it. :)

ant_mc 9y ago

> If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. But reasonable people were offended by Brandon Eich donating to an anti-gay marriage proposition, and other reasonable people were offended that he got ousted from Mozilla. Some people are offended by Damore and been quite vicious towards him, others are saying he's right about things (including you pretty much can't be a conservative in Silicon Valley). Isn't reality more complex than this idea? Its easy enough to say "don't comment on a coworkers physical appearance" or something equally stupid, but "any non-zero subset" offended by any particular behavior doesn't seem reasonable.

kelnos 9y ago
> Its easy enough to say "don't comment on a coworkers physical appearance" or something equally stupid, but "any non-zero subset" offended by any particular behavior doesn't seem reasonable. Maybe it isn't, but it's a pretty good yardstick to hold things up to. If you can actually say that no reasonable person would be offended by something you want to say, then say it. If you're not sure, or maybe can think of a few people who might be offended, then you can make a choice. If you still decide to say it, and then someone comes to you and says they were offended, you'll probably want to apologize. Or not; that's also up to you. At the end of the day it's about recognizing that the things you say and do can affect people in different ways, and being thoughtful about that.

geofft 9y ago

Let me propose an alternative to "non-zero subset of reasonable people": "any people you want to work with." This shifts from the pseudo-objective, nebulous standard of "reasonable" to a much more clearer standard of what you personally want to support and what you personally don't. For instance, there are people I would easily call "reasonable" who hold religious views that I myself have held in the past but which I now believe are incompatible with the society I want to see. I don't want to work with these people. I am not actively opposed to working with them - I suspect I'm coworkers with lots of such people right now - but I have no particular desire to help those people make money. If they want to start their own business with like-minded folks, great; I support their freedom to do so. However, I do want to work with good engineers of various demographics underrepresented in my industry, because I want to work with the best engineers my company can hire (a secondary goal to "I want society to work in certain ways," so the desires in the previous paragraph would override this desire, but hopefully that happens rarely). If someone from one of those groups says, this behavior bothers me so much that I'll leave over it, then yes, absolutely, I'm going to trust them and what they say they care about. (And if you say "Actually, I don't particularly want to work with people of this demographic?" That's fine, in the sense that it's a free country. But you would fall into the group of people that I no longer want to work with because I think that politically/financially empowering you would not build the society I want to see; I would much rather compete with you.)

notacoward 9y ago

Perhaps ask "why does something that bothers others not bother me" as well. The answer can be uncomfortable, but enlightening and ultimately liberating.

aantix 9y ago

The truth is sometimes harsh. And it would be a sad day when a message must be softened, filtered and censored in an effort to make everyone comfortable.