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I'm pretty sure the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion. My understanding of the events are thus: 1. An authentication daemon crashe

I'm pretty sure the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion. My understanding of the events are thus: 1. An authentication daemon crashes periodically due to a bug. 2. "S" discovers that rebooting the daemon's host prevents this from happening for a while, and does so. 3. The author is paged( 5 times ), discovers the problem, and writes a kludge script to keep the systems running until the bug can be fixed. 4. During the post-mortem meeting, she identifies "S" for his role in the events. 5. A thin-skinned manager suggests the author was too hard on "S". 6. The author, without any evidence, concludes that the manager said this because she is a woman, and is hellbent on "pushing [her] out" of the team. The reality is that thin-skinned managers and managers overly sensitive to maintaining office decorum exist everywhere, and they don't do this based on your sex. Citing anecdotal evidence, I can say that having a penis does not shield you from accusations of being "too hard", and that hearing this from managers, coworkers, or employees, likely has nothing at all to do with sexism or a desire to "push out" women.

briantrice 15y ago
You don't seem to appreciate the amount of forethought she not only felt she had to commit to, but self-control to execute her communication that way, and that it still didn't work. Only an idiot would provide "evidence" to a subordinate that they were trying to push them out, in any case. Discrimination is very hard to prove, and it's easier to just "get away".
- cperciva 15y ago
  I'm not sure what you're saying here. People who are discriminating against women avoid given evidence of that fact, so a lack of evidence of discrimination is evidence of discrimination?
  - briantrice 15y ago
    The idea of evidence is not implied by the article, only by the commenter above. She is describing her experience, and it jibes with other women's experience whom I have heard. If you don't accept the validity of the viewpoint, just do that as such.
- davidhansen 15y ago
  Ok. First, I will point out that my appreciation of her effort has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that her conclusion - that the manager or company in question is actively trying trying to force her to quit due to her gender - has zero support. I can claim that my business partners are space aliens who read my thoughts and are plotting to colonize the planet all day long, but as long as there's no shred of evidence of this, the fact that nobody appreciates the lengths I go to wear tinfoil hats and research anti-alien combat techniques is meaningless. Second, it "didn't work" likely because many extroverted bubbly manager types tend to perceive purely factual means of communication to be hostile. In fact, most human beings do this. This is the primary reason nerds with low or no psychological affect have a difficult time making friends, and are labeled "assholes" despite their lack of intention to actually be mean.
  - briantrice 15y ago
    You're demanding evidence from an article that doesn't state up front that it's trying to present it; it's just telling her story as an anti-pattern. That's all I mean. If she had a legal case, she wouldn't discuss it. Also, this wouldn't be a story if she didn't feel that other teams didn't work that way. This implies a difference in culture, and I have had this difference pointed out to me by many women in the tech industry.
thaumaturgy 15y ago
> The author, without any evidence, concludes that the manager said this because she is a woman, and is hellbent on "pushing [her] out" of the team. Well, without any evidence that she presented. She's been working with this particular group, and we haven't. It's not unbelievable that there have been numerous other minor instances of some form of preferential treatment or sexism. She did, after all, consult with friends, with some foresight of what was coming. While some amount of skepticism on our part might be prudent, there's also no reason to outright disbelieve her, either. > The reality is that thin-skinned managers and managers overly sensitive to maintaining office decorum exist everywhere, and they don't do this based on your sex. Woah. That's a lot of certainty right there. How are you able to be so assertively positive that managers -- indeed, in this context, no managers anywhere -- do this based on gender? Even subconsciously? Even without meaning to maintain a tight-knit good ol' boys drinking group? This is what never fails to amaze me, that enough people are so certain that there's no such thing as sexism in the technology industry. Meanwhile, someone else on Reddit or elsewhere posts a picture of a co-worker and the majority of the comments are, "she's hot, you bang her yet?"
- philwelch 15y ago
  The whole point of the blog post was to illustrate an incidence of sexism at work. The blog post failed to do so. It seems willfully perverse to turn around and push the burden of proof on those of us who are simply pointing that out.
  - lusr 15y ago
    Indeed. I really don't understand the purpose of the post. What seems to be annoying most people here is that the comments could apply equally to men or women, yet the author assumes the issue is sexism without explaining why. By doing so, the author effectively dismisses the experience and opinions of men who have been in similar situations (based on the description) and believe the issue to have a different root cause. She's making the claim that this would never happen to a guy which is clearly directly contrary to the experience of many male readers, and it's unsurprising this is going to piss people off. Note that I'm not disputing that the post MIGHT have represented a case of sexism, just that since the post doesn't explain how the author determined their position it's useless to myself and other readers. Let's flip the question around: how do you know when your manager is being sexist and when they're just presenting their opinion, which is fair criticism? The post appears to imply the answer is: "If the recipient of criticism is a woman, then it's sexism; men never receive this kind of criticism." This is a bold claim, and if accepted, it's impossible to disprove because any attempt to disagree will see you labelled as sexist - which is the second source of frustration among people with a different opinion on this thread.
pkteison 15y ago
I agree, I see nothing gender based here. I'm a guy, and I've had a similar interaction with another guy on a team. He was pretty terrible, and I eventually decided the only way I could deal with him was to limit my interaction to bare minimum ("give him enough rope to hang himself"). It involved clipped matter-of-fact-no-elaboration exchanges like this example. My manager ended up blaming me for the other guy being terrible, manager said it was because I was not supporting this guy enough. People can tell when you have an issue with someone on a team, even if you are very careful to do nothing 'wrong', because your behavior changes due to the being very careful. And managers don't necessarily assign fault in a manner that you would agree with, such as the terrible person is terrible is the root of the problem. The proper solution is to get out, which I did, and I'm glad to hear the author did. But to look for gender based explanations just seems overly paranoid.
- andrewflnr 15y ago
  This is interesting. Moving from sexism to generally dealing with crappy coworkers: you can't just limit your interaction and distance yourself from them. Part of giving them enough rope is to make it clear that you're doing your best to help them (without unduly compromising your own productivity), and they're still failing. You have to perfectly walk the line between being nice and not enabling them to come out alive. I'm still in school. This does not encourage me regarding entering the industry.
  - mkopinsky 15y ago
    These kinds of issues come up in every issue. It's not just tech. They do not, however, come up in every company. Culture matters.
praptak 15y ago
> I'm pretty sure the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion. I read the article as demonstrating a particular dirty trick and it demonstrated it well. To me the fact that the trick can be used to discriminate against women was just a part of the background, not an essential part of the article. That's why it doesn't bother me that the author omitted the proof of connection between her being female and the trick being used on her. By the way, what kind of proof would you accept?
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  To me the fact that the trick can be used to discriminate against women was just a part of the background, not an essential part of the article. I saw it as a tactic that can be used against anyone; there's nothing sex-specific about it.
  - jtheory 15y ago
    Sure. But it's going to make women on the team much more uncomfortable, because of the stereotype. If I were a blond man, and my manager would reel off a string of blond jokes whenever I made some mistake, it'd be pretty irritating. If I were a blond woman, it'd be probably be still more unpleasant. That's the point of the article. She found her particular string of experiences (and all of the other similar experiences not listed in the post) frustrating enough that she needed to leave the job, and the team suffered her loss (probably without ever understanding why she left, or how they could retain another equally-talented female techie). This is not going to be intuitive to every manager or techie. It's worth discussing.
- fleitz 15y ago
  It can only be used on women who give a crap about being viewed as emotional. The proper response to such a thing is more long the lines of: "Why does your job description list that you're looking for passionate (or whatever other BS they are feeding people to get them to view the company as anything more than a source of income) people? Passion is an emotion, you've preselected for emotional people and are now complaining about it, you really need to make a decision as to what kind of people you want at your company and act accordingly." The work environment sounds screwed, good on the OP for moving on.
radicalbyte 15y ago
"W" is being a bit unreasonable by going off on one at "S". Both of them kludged a fix, although "W" was a little smarter. But it sounds like "W" is the kind of antisocial geek who just has to explain how stupid their colleague is, and how much better they are. From what I've read, this sounds more like it's related to "W" being a bit of a jerk than it is "W" being female...
- ecdavis 15y ago
  Er, really? She gave direct, (presumably) factual answers to direct questions about a colleague's solution to a problem and that's "going off"? Perhaps her tone was snide or condescending, but that information is not supplied in the post, so you can't really judge based on that.
- brown9-2 15y ago
  If S's fix is a temporary solution and he/she doesn't notify anyone else - especially the next on-call shift - there is a large bone to pick with S's actions.
npc 15y ago
Okay, you do realize that: - the point of the post was not to prove that there is sexism in technology, but rather to show how sexism can drive away women - that the existence of sexism in tech is one of the assumptions of the article, which is pretty reasonable given: - sexism exists everywhere and there's no reason to think tech would be excluded - the small number of women in tech - the numerous other women who work in tech who have /said/ they've experienced sexism - that she worked with these people for however long, and there's obviously numerous other encounters she's had with them that aren't relayed here because that wasn't the point of the article - that just because men have a problem as well as women doesn't mean women cannot have that problem worse - that there is definitely a range of social responses that are culturally permissible for men and not women, and that tech workers are not some sort of hyper-enlightened übermenschen who have utterly cast off the shackles of their culture and now see everything with perfect clarity I'm not saying that we can know for sure that there was sexism involved here, but to call thinking that, "entirely fallacious and baseless" is complete and utter bullshit. edit: gosh darn markdown
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  If you claim sexism then you need to show sexism. None is shown here that I can see.
  - protomyth 15y ago
    Very few if any articles on dealing with situations such as disease need to prove the existence of the disease. It seemed to me that the existence was pre-assumed given the need to consult with others before the meeting. This looks to be the story of the end and not the beginning.
    - anigbrowl 15y ago
      There's nothing gender-specific about that. Men also have personality conflicts at work and are subject to being called out for over-reacting or displays of bad temper. Sometimes such conflicts are isolated and quickly resolved, other times they fester and create a headache for the team's supervisor. I've been in all these situations during my career, as have most people I know. The writer seems to think that men never need or want to consult their friends about how to handle problems in the workplace, which is just nonsense.
inopinatus 15y ago
Contrary to your claim (6) there is plenty of evidence for the likelihood of (5) being higher if the party is female e.g. see [1]. This is management 101 knowledge, so the "thin-skinned manager" (TSM) should've known it. Which leaves two possibilities: incompetence or malice. However, the former option equates to a discriminatory position by default, so either way the TSM is guilty of sexual discrimination and is party to the constructive dismissal. Interestingly that is independent of the gender of the TSM but the fact remains that women are more likely to be negatively treated with respect to emotional behaviour. My disappointment is greatest to see the production of the old canard that "anyone can be treated like this", as though it is somehow acceptable to be an incompetent manager. It isn't. Systemic and thoughtless sexism is alive and well and thriving in the IT industry. Stamp it out and reap the benefits of a huge and highly competent workforce segment. Ignore it and lose talent. Your call. [1] Brescoll, V.L. and Uhlmann, E.L. (2008). Can an angry woman get ahead? : Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace. APS. http://socialjudgments.com/docs/Brescoll%20and%20Uhlmann%202008.pdf http://socialjudgments.com/docs/Brescoll%20and%20Uhlmann%202...

briantrice 15y ago

You don't seem to appreciate the amount of forethought she not only felt she had to commit to, but self-control to execute her communication that way, and that it still didn't work. Only an idiot would provide "evidence" to a subordinate that they were trying to push them out, in any case. Discrimination is very hard to prove, and it's easier to just "get away".

cperciva 15y ago
I'm not sure what you're saying here. People who are discriminating against women avoid given evidence of that fact, so a lack of evidence of discrimination is evidence of discrimination?
- briantrice 15y ago
  The idea of evidence is not implied by the article, only by the commenter above. She is describing her experience, and it jibes with other women's experience whom I have heard. If you don't accept the validity of the viewpoint, just do that as such.
davidhansen 15y ago
Ok. First, I will point out that my appreciation of her effort has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that her conclusion - that the manager or company in question is actively trying trying to force her to quit due to her gender - has zero support. I can claim that my business partners are space aliens who read my thoughts and are plotting to colonize the planet all day long, but as long as there's no shred of evidence of this, the fact that nobody appreciates the lengths I go to wear tinfoil hats and research anti-alien combat techniques is meaningless. Second, it "didn't work" likely because many extroverted bubbly manager types tend to perceive purely factual means of communication to be hostile. In fact, most human beings do this. This is the primary reason nerds with low or no psychological affect have a difficult time making friends, and are labeled "assholes" despite their lack of intention to actually be mean.
- briantrice 15y ago
  You're demanding evidence from an article that doesn't state up front that it's trying to present it; it's just telling her story as an anti-pattern. That's all I mean. If she had a legal case, she wouldn't discuss it. Also, this wouldn't be a story if she didn't feel that other teams didn't work that way. This implies a difference in culture, and I have had this difference pointed out to me by many women in the tech industry.

thaumaturgy 15y ago

> The author, without any evidence, concludes that the manager said this because she is a woman, and is hellbent on "pushing [her] out" of the team. Well, without any evidence that she presented. She's been working with this particular group, and we haven't. It's not unbelievable that there have been numerous other minor instances of some form of preferential treatment or sexism. She did, after all, consult with friends, with some foresight of what was coming. While some amount of skepticism on our part might be prudent, there's also no reason to outright disbelieve her, either. > The reality is that thin-skinned managers and managers overly sensitive to maintaining office decorum exist everywhere, and they don't do this based on your sex. Woah. That's a lot of certainty right there. How are you able to be so assertively positive that managers -- indeed, in this context, no managers anywhere -- do this based on gender? Even subconsciously? Even without meaning to maintain a tight-knit good ol' boys drinking group? This is what never fails to amaze me, that enough people are so certain that there's no such thing as sexism in the technology industry. Meanwhile, someone else on Reddit or elsewhere posts a picture of a co-worker and the majority of the comments are, "she's hot, you bang her yet?"

philwelch 15y ago
The whole point of the blog post was to illustrate an incidence of sexism at work. The blog post failed to do so. It seems willfully perverse to turn around and push the burden of proof on those of us who are simply pointing that out.
- lusr 15y ago
  Indeed. I really don't understand the purpose of the post. What seems to be annoying most people here is that the comments could apply equally to men or women, yet the author assumes the issue is sexism without explaining why. By doing so, the author effectively dismisses the experience and opinions of men who have been in similar situations (based on the description) and believe the issue to have a different root cause. She's making the claim that this would never happen to a guy which is clearly directly contrary to the experience of many male readers, and it's unsurprising this is going to piss people off. Note that I'm not disputing that the post MIGHT have represented a case of sexism, just that since the post doesn't explain how the author determined their position it's useless to myself and other readers. Let's flip the question around: how do you know when your manager is being sexist and when they're just presenting their opinion, which is fair criticism? The post appears to imply the answer is: "If the recipient of criticism is a woman, then it's sexism; men never receive this kind of criticism." This is a bold claim, and if accepted, it's impossible to disprove because any attempt to disagree will see you labelled as sexist - which is the second source of frustration among people with a different opinion on this thread.

pkteison 15y ago

I agree, I see nothing gender based here. I'm a guy, and I've had a similar interaction with another guy on a team. He was pretty terrible, and I eventually decided the only way I could deal with him was to limit my interaction to bare minimum ("give him enough rope to hang himself"). It involved clipped matter-of-fact-no-elaboration exchanges like this example. My manager ended up blaming me for the other guy being terrible, manager said it was because I was not supporting this guy enough. People can tell when you have an issue with someone on a team, even if you are very careful to do nothing 'wrong', because your behavior changes due to the being very careful. And managers don't necessarily assign fault in a manner that you would agree with, such as the terrible person is terrible is the root of the problem. The proper solution is to get out, which I did, and I'm glad to hear the author did. But to look for gender based explanations just seems overly paranoid.

andrewflnr 15y ago
This is interesting. Moving from sexism to generally dealing with crappy coworkers: you can't just limit your interaction and distance yourself from them. Part of giving them enough rope is to make it clear that you're doing your best to help them (without unduly compromising your own productivity), and they're still failing. You have to perfectly walk the line between being nice and not enabling them to come out alive. I'm still in school. This does not encourage me regarding entering the industry.
- mkopinsky 15y ago
  These kinds of issues come up in every issue. It's not just tech. They do not, however, come up in every company. Culture matters.

praptak 15y ago

> I'm pretty sure the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion. I read the article as demonstrating a particular dirty trick and it demonstrated it well. To me the fact that the trick can be used to discriminate against women was just a part of the background, not an essential part of the article. That's why it doesn't bother me that the author omitted the proof of connection between her being female and the trick being used on her. By the way, what kind of proof would you accept?

jamesbritt 15y ago
To me the fact that the trick can be used to discriminate against women was just a part of the background, not an essential part of the article. I saw it as a tactic that can be used against anyone; there's nothing sex-specific about it.
- jtheory 15y ago
  Sure. But it's going to make women on the team much more uncomfortable, because of the stereotype. If I were a blond man, and my manager would reel off a string of blond jokes whenever I made some mistake, it'd be pretty irritating. If I were a blond woman, it'd be probably be still more unpleasant. That's the point of the article. She found her particular string of experiences (and all of the other similar experiences not listed in the post) frustrating enough that she needed to leave the job, and the team suffered her loss (probably without ever understanding why she left, or how they could retain another equally-talented female techie). This is not going to be intuitive to every manager or techie. It's worth discussing.
fleitz 15y ago
It can only be used on women who give a crap about being viewed as emotional. The proper response to such a thing is more long the lines of: "Why does your job description list that you're looking for passionate (or whatever other BS they are feeding people to get them to view the company as anything more than a source of income) people? Passion is an emotion, you've preselected for emotional people and are now complaining about it, you really need to make a decision as to what kind of people you want at your company and act accordingly." The work environment sounds screwed, good on the OP for moving on.

radicalbyte 15y ago

"W" is being a bit unreasonable by going off on one at "S". Both of them kludged a fix, although "W" was a little smarter. But it sounds like "W" is the kind of antisocial geek who just has to explain how stupid their colleague is, and how much better they are. From what I've read, this sounds more like it's related to "W" being a bit of a jerk than it is "W" being female...

ecdavis 15y ago
Er, really? She gave direct, (presumably) factual answers to direct questions about a colleague's solution to a problem and that's "going off"? Perhaps her tone was snide or condescending, but that information is not supplied in the post, so you can't really judge based on that.
brown9-2 15y ago
If S's fix is a temporary solution and he/she doesn't notify anyone else - especially the next on-call shift - there is a large bone to pick with S's actions.

npc 15y ago

Okay, you do realize that: - the point of the post was not to prove that there is sexism in technology, but rather to show how sexism can drive away women - that the existence of sexism in tech is one of the assumptions of the article, which is pretty reasonable given: - sexism exists everywhere and there's no reason to think tech would be excluded - the small number of women in tech - the numerous other women who work in tech who have /said/ they've experienced sexism - that she worked with these people for however long, and there's obviously numerous other encounters she's had with them that aren't relayed here because that wasn't the point of the article - that just because men have a problem as well as women doesn't mean women cannot have that problem worse - that there is definitely a range of social responses that are culturally permissible for men and not women, and that tech workers are not some sort of hyper-enlightened übermenschen who have utterly cast off the shackles of their culture and now see everything with perfect clarity I'm not saying that we can know for sure that there was sexism involved here, but to call thinking that, "entirely fallacious and baseless" is complete and utter bullshit. edit: gosh darn markdown

anigbrowl 15y ago
If you claim sexism then you need to show sexism. None is shown here that I can see.
- protomyth 15y ago
  Very few if any articles on dealing with situations such as disease need to prove the existence of the disease. It seemed to me that the existence was pre-assumed given the need to consult with others before the meeting. This looks to be the story of the end and not the beginning.
  - anigbrowl 15y ago
    There's nothing gender-specific about that. Men also have personality conflicts at work and are subject to being called out for over-reacting or displays of bad temper. Sometimes such conflicts are isolated and quickly resolved, other times they fester and create a headache for the team's supervisor. I've been in all these situations during my career, as have most people I know. The writer seems to think that men never need or want to consult their friends about how to handle problems in the workplace, which is just nonsense.

inopinatus 15y ago

Contrary to your claim (6) there is plenty of evidence for the likelihood of (5) being higher if the party is female e.g. see [1]. This is management 101 knowledge, so the "thin-skinned manager" (TSM) should've known it. Which leaves two possibilities: incompetence or malice. However, the former option equates to a discriminatory position by default, so either way the TSM is guilty of sexual discrimination and is party to the constructive dismissal. Interestingly that is independent of the gender of the TSM but the fact remains that women are more likely to be negatively treated with respect to emotional behaviour. My disappointment is greatest to see the production of the old canard that "anyone can be treated like this", as though it is somehow acceptable to be an incompetent manager. It isn't. Systemic and thoughtless sexism is alive and well and thriving in the IT industry. Stamp it out and reap the benefits of a huge and highly competent workforce segment. Ignore it and lose talent. Your call. [1] Brescoll, V.L. and Uhlmann, E.L. (2008). Can an angry woman get ahead? : Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace. APS. http://socialjudgments.com/docs/Brescoll%20and%20Uhlmann%202008.pdf http://socialjudgments.com/docs/Brescoll%20and%20Uhlmann%202...