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tl;dr: "The legacy textbook publishers the company wants to disrupt aren’t perfect, sure, but that doesn’t mean they need to be destroyed. Those publishers do m
by pj_mukh 8y ago
tl;dr: "The legacy textbook publishers the company wants to disrupt aren’t perfect, sure, but that doesn’t mean they need to be destroyed. Those publishers do many things very well, and they do them slowly, with great care, for a reason. We should resist change for change’s sake. I’m being naïve, aren’t I?"
No, you're being wrong? Source: I used TopHat's predecessor products in University and the predecessor was Terrible (with a capital -T) and made zero effort to fix things. I am guessing this is true for a large swath of largely profitable web-first companies like Top-hat.
Bro culture is a deep-seated problem in tech that I'd love to see excised and tbh, as the author points out, this happens when a company has more sales people than "devs. But "gongs", incentives and aggressive sales goals are a tale as old as Capitalism. The author seems to try to lump a myriad of mostly inconsequential idiosyncrasies into a nice little bow called "bad".
Or maybe, Canadian publishers like Toronto Life are just catching up to the tired old tech "expose's" American media has been writing for about 5 years now.
- rsynnott 8y ago> Bro culture is a deep-seated problem in tech that I'd love o see excised When did this start, actually? Where did it come from? I don't remember it really being a thing in the early noughties, but by the end of the decade it was deeply entrenched.
- pj_mukh 8y agoThe author alludes to the problem, I'd venture a guess it is a cultural import from Wall St. after the success of B2B companies in late 2000's.
- gaius 8y agoNo, it coincides precisely with the rise of RoR and is largely confined to webdev, even if the trendy language had changed to Node. You just don’t get C++ or R or Python brogrammers.
- currymj 8y agoIf you hire mostly men directly out of top US colleges you'll get a lot of this just by default, because that's the culture on those campuses. I get the sense that in the past, relatively fewer people came to tech through that particular pipeline.
- Woberto 8y agoI'm confused, you're saying TopHat, the one "changing for change's sake," is doing a bad job, but you're also saying GP is wrong for calling them out?
- pj_mukh 8y agoSorry, I might've messed up the subject of the sentence? "I used TopHat's predecessor products in University and they were Terrible" TopHat's predecessor was terrible and TopHat's innovations are very much welcome (which also made them quite profitable).
- Woberto 8y agoNah, I think I just misread it, sorry.
- verteu 8y ago> Bro culture is a deep-seated problem in tech In engineering? Could you elaborate a bit more? I've worked in SV tech for a decade and every large company was about 50% nerdy white engineers and 40% quiet Asians.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ng12 8y agoIt's just lazy sexism. Some startups have a party culture and some folks conflate that with the "male problem". For my part I like to share the anecdotal evidence of a past company where our star beer-pong player was a female engineer.
- astura 8y agoIt's not "lazy sexism," "bro" in "brogrammer" comes from the "bro" subculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro_(subculture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro_(subculture)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- verteu 8y agoIt is lazy sexism because engineers are nothing like the "bro" subculture. From the article you linked: > "The subculture is not defined consistently or concretely, but refers to a type of "fratty masculinity" Engineers are underrepresented in fraternities. > predominantly "if not exclusively" white In Silicon Valley tech, Asians are overrepresented by a factor of 10, while whites are roughly at parity with the demographics of the US. > associated with frayed-brim baseball hats, Engineers are less likely to care about sports than other men. > oxford shirts, Engineers are famously casual. > sports team T-shirts, Engineers are less likely to care about sports than other men. cargo shorts, > Maybe this one applies :) and boat shoes or sandals > Boat shoes? Hardly.
- eigenvector 8y agoI graduated from the University of Toronto around the time Top Hat's products started to come into use in some first year engineering courses. The end result as far as I saw was students already saddled with tuition that increases at 3-4x inflation annually for no apparent reason being forced to shell out additional hundreds of dollars for Top Hat products in order to get their grades. Textbook publishers are vultures, but their products are inherently optional. You can buy used books, borrow, pirate or simply take good notes and not use the text at all. As long as you show up to the calculus exam with a pencil and your wits no one will check that you've bought the book. The insertion of Top Hat into higher ed just feels yet another money grab from Big Education for no pedagogical benefit. They've gotten away with it because it looks like shiny new technology instead of just an unjustified fee increase.