7 ms·

Kixeye fires four after investigation into allegations of racism

65 points by ujeezy 14y ago

tptacek 14y ago
Well, that sucks for the 3/4 of HN commenters on the Kixeye thread who came to the conclusion that the contractor's writing style was damning to the story's veracity.
- humean 14y ago
  Right, because showing power is the best way to prove you're right. Bukharin was fired too, don't you know. Too bad for the woman who lost her job because she thought a pendant was a calculator. The original poster will probably win his lawsuit, and enjoy years of income from a month of work. "Dumbwhite---"
- humean 14y ago
  And by the way, you'll notice that 1/2 of those commenters, like me, created straw accounts to post about this craziness. This is because we knew we'd get slowbanned for our dissent. Sure enough. Vyshinsky is alive and well and living in Chicago...
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  How so? The fact that the company is attempting to minimize legal liability doesn't mean that the contractor was truthful. Nor does it mean that people who estimated that P(story = true | writer sounds racist) < P(story = true) were incorrect.
  - aristotelian 14y ago
    It's not about who's right and who's wrong. It's about who has the power. The Kixeye CEO did exactly the right thing for his shareholders. He's also going to make a large payment to the OP, which will enable this obvious professional victim to live for years off his month of work. This is also the right thing to do - for the shareholders. The lesson for hiring managers is that you have to be very careful when hiring a member of a "protected class." You are effectively hiring them for a different position than your ordinary second-class citizens. It's not illegal to be an asshole to an ordinary second-class citizen. But a member of a protected class is effectively a noble, and a different set of legal norms apply to him. It is illegal to be an asshole to a member of this nobility. America is a nation of laws, and you have to follow the law. Kudos to the Kixeye CEO for realizing this. Why isn't it illegal for anyone to be an asshole to anyone else? A fascinating question. Worth thinking about. (And don't ask me how our country got to have "protected classes" at the same time as it got "equal protection under the law." Actually, the latter is legally derived from the former - believe it or not.)
    - mikeash 14y ago
      If the guy had been white and everybody had been racist toward him because of that, it would have been just as illegal.
      - aristotelian 14y ago
        It would have been. It wouldn't have been enforced, however. If you look at the history of civil rights jurisprudence, in the South before 1960 there were a lot of laws that looked race-neutral. Their actual intent was to keep black people from voting, however. It didn't fool the Supreme Court. Software patents are just as illegal. But what actually happens?
        mikeash 14y ago
        Oh, sorry, when you started talking about "illegal" and all that, I thought you were actually talking about the, you know, laws.
    - cynicalkane 14y ago
      My God. Say what you will about affirmative action and discrimination law, but I assure you that minorities and women do not feel like "nobles" in America.
      - aristotelian 14y ago
        Oh, no, they sure don't! They feel like they're horribly oppressed. But when you look at the actual legal privileges that the actual legal and political system actually affords them - like the privilege not to be insulted, not to mention the 450 free points (blacks over Asians) on their SAT - what you see is almost exactly the kinds of privileges that medieval polities gave their nobilities. I guess there's no sumptuary laws or stuff like that.
      - basseq 14y ago
        BTW, if anyone else was confused by the 450 SAT points comment, here's the detail: "To receive equal consideration by elite colleges, Asian Americans must outperform Whites by 140 points, Hispanics by 280 points, Blacks by 450 points in SAT (Total 1600)." From "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life" by Thomas J. Espenshade & Alexandria Walton Radford (2009) Source: http://80-20initiative.blogspot.com/2012/03/450-point-sat-gap-large-racial.html http://80-20initiative.blogspot.com/2012/03/450-point-sat-ga...
  - tptacek 14y ago
    “While it’s clear that not everything in the blog post was accurate, I did discover examples of embarrassing behavior that I find inappropriate for Kixeye, or any other work environment." It is clear in context that "embarrassing behavior" refers to racially charged conduct, that being the through-line of the whole story in which the CEO is publicly commenting and disclosing employee terminations. If they wanted to minimize legal liability, saying nothing would have made more sense than publicly disclosing "embarrassing behavior" that lead to termination. I know this sounds like more tea-leaf reading and I am myself continually exasperated by the tea-leaf prognostications HN gives rise to in other stories, but the CEO of a large-ish company publicly stating, in the wake of notorious claim of racial prejudice at their firm, that the company fired people for their behavior... that's a Big Deal.
    - aristotelian 14y ago
      Unfortunately, it's not a Big Deal for someone to get fired for mistaking a pendant for a calculator. That sort of thing happens all the time. You know, in the country we live in. It would certainly be a Big Deal if we lived in a country controlled by the Vast White Racist Conspiracy. Actually, San Francisco is especially notable for its deeply entrenched racism. The KKK has a huge office on Market Street, right next to Twitter - you can't miss it.
      - tptacek 14y ago
        Huh? Who got fired for mistaking a pendant for a calculator? Did you simply make that up?
        aristotelian 14y ago
        I counted four "dumbwhites" and four people who got fired. Maybe I miscounted. I don't know. We obviously will receive no more information. Do you think it's implausible that the pendant woman got fired? Would you say, that kind of thing can't happen in America?
        14y ago
  - psykotic 14y ago
    > How so? The fact that the company is attempting to minimize legal liability doesn't mean that the contractor was truthful. Apparently the contractor was truthful enough to warrant firing four people. What's the likelihood of them throwing four employees under the bus if there were no bite to the charges? A purely propitiatory sacrifice like that would be hell on employee morale. Good on the CEO for taking action. But my applause is diminished by the weasel words in the CEO's posts on the matter. In the first one, he described the person with the allegations as "a former short-term contract employee". The employee's blog post unequivocally stated that he only worked there for the month of August, so the purpose of such a comment on the CEO's part can only be to cast aspersions on his credibility. Now, in these latest comments, the CEO implies that the claims apparently had enough validity to warrant firing a bunch of people while going on to say that not everything claimed was true. Was this just legal ass-covering? In any case, it makes his public apology feel conniving and insincere. It may have been the best legal maneuver (I wouldn't know) but it makes for bad PR.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    While in some cases a company will settle a lawsuit even when claims are groundless, it's really hard for me to read that in here. 1. They don't seem to have settled with the developer in question (although I may have honestly missed that). 2. You settle by giving the quacking duck a bunch of money to shut up. You don't fire 4 people who didn't do anything wrong, or else you have just quintupled your potential legal exposure. I'm glad they did the right thing. I'm sad the bad thing happened in the first place. I am hopeful that this kind of workplace culture will die out. I am worried that it will continue.
    - yummyfajitas 14y ago
      You don't fire 4 people who didn't do anything wrong, or else you have just quintupled your potential legal exposure. You can fire people for anything you want (barring contractual clauses stating otherwise) except for membership in a protected class.
- antihero 14y ago
  That was pretty awkward to watch, wasn't it.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  Oh please, I don't think anyone actually thought that his writing style would matter in terms of the outcome - the facts are the facts, no matter who states them. Moreover, anti-white racism is a well-known and long-time aspect of the black community that most white people have come to terms with as acceptable given the way that blacks have been treated for hundreds of years.
- ender7 14y ago
  Uh, are you including yourself in that 3/4? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4604088 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4604088 > Peppered throughout the post are cultural signs and signifiers that mark the author as an advocate for a fairly specific set of political and social beliefs. A reader could be excused for having concerns that the author was not an objective witness. On the other hand, those signifiers are so obvious that you could also question whether someone who had set out to unfairly tar the company would put them into the post. The guy was rightfully incensed and his reaction is completely understandable. However, the style of the original post does make it hard to distinguish from embittered hyperbole. I think the important distinction is that there's a big difference between saying "I can't tell if this guy is for real" vs. "this guy is definitely lying".
  - tptacek 14y ago
    No, I don't. Read the rest of my comments in that thread. The post you're citing was my attempt to distill the controversy without advocating one way or another, because the author's post was long and easy to get side-tracked on. All you have to do is click that link, then hit "CMD-F" or whatever your search hotkey is, and type "t-p-t-a"; you should almost immediately land on a comment that makes my opinion about the veracity of the story plain. I won't spoil it for you.
    - kshelter 14y ago
      You can't have your cake and eat it too. It came off as pretentious to me.
      - tptacek 14y ago
        I don't even know what that's meant to mean, and I don't care if you think I'm pretentious. I very probably am.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    That actually sounds to me more like devil's advocate, or at the very least an attempt at logically walking through the issue from both sides of the argument. I wouldn't read that and think the author made a conclusive statement. He's toeing the line with reasonable skepticism.
alecdibble 14y ago
I think this story brings up an interesting point about startups and "startup culture". It's nice to have an environment that is friendly and comfortable, but at the same time, lines have to be drawn. Unfortunately, some people see having no HR department as an excuse to disregard inclusiveness or respect.
- kevingadd 14y ago
  To be clear, Kixeye is big and established enough that 'no HR department' is not remotely a plausible explanation for the events that seem to have occurred here.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    My own personal ghoulishness lead me to LinkedIn to see if I could spot the terminated manager from cues from the racism posts. I could not, but what I did learn is that Kixeye is stocked to the gills with people from Ivy League schools, McKinseyites, and veterans of the gaming industry. The sample I got from LinkedIn doesn't refute accusations of "bro-" culture, but it doesn't strongly indicate rampant 4chanism or racism. Without intending undue reverence for b-school, you probably don't graduate HBS and work for several years at McKinsey and retain the belief that a culture of jocular bigotry is an asset to a growing San Francisco tech company.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  I think that this line of reasoning tends to assume that this is a binary decision: either have a fun workplace or have HR and rules. That's not the case though, unless your only idea of run is "joking and acting in a way towards other employees that society finds reprehensible".
  - alecdibble 14y ago
    The point I was trying to make is that if there is no HR department, lines have to be drawn about what behavior is appropriate. Sometimes the topic never comes up and then it becomes an issue when there is a misunderstanding or offensive conduct occurs. "joking and acting in a way towards other employees that society finds reprehensible" It really isn't that black and white though. Almost anyone can be offended by any joke or comment, as people come from vastly different backgrounds and experiences. An example is the rape joke made by Notch. Half the people were pissed about it while half couldn't understand why the other half was pissed. It is those kinds of misunderstandings that can create problems in the first place.
kevingadd 14y ago
As much as I was expecting a spineless "a few bad apples" response from Kixeye, I'm still pleased to see them responding openly to the accusations and taking at least some action to correct the issues, instead of just trying to make it all go away. Hopefully this leads to larger reform.
- Lewisham 14y ago
  From what I can tell, Harbin seems like A Good Bloke. It doesn't surprise me to hear of the brogrammer environment given the way they've marketed (the YouTube video, recruitment flyers with Insanity Wolf on), but it's good that he stepped up quickly.
physcab 14y ago
Startups in the valley seem almost by definition, segregated places to work. I don't think it is intentional (or maybe in the case of Kixeye it was), but the vast majority of companies seem to have straight white males in their 20's as employees. What this means is that people who do not have "critical mass", ie any few numbers of minorities, are going to count the number people just like them. It will also mean stereotypes will be at their worst. Do startups hire programmers in their 50's? Do startups that make products "for women" try to hire women to work on that product? Why is it that black engineers and non-native English speaking engineers are in positions like QA and testing, but not program management? These are just a few of the trends I've noticed.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  Why do you assume that "stereotypes will be at their worst" in a workforce that is mostly male, young, and white?
  - wonderzombie 14y ago
    It seems reasonable to suggest that more diversity would inversely correlate with comments/behavior which targets non-white, non-young, and non-males. Furthermore, working with a wide variety of people from a variety of backgrounds naturally encourages you to think about people outside of your own culture. It's a counter-example to the idea that whiteness is "normal" or "American" and (e.g.) black culture is "black" and, by implication, "not-quite-American" nor "normal."
- rmc 14y ago
  One theory is that the lack of diversity is the result of, not the cause of, much subtle racism/sexism/etc.
famousactress 14y ago
“...I did discover examples of embarrassing behavior that I find inappropriate for Kixeye or any other work environment." I don't like that he leads with the word "embarassing". It suggests a focus on how this makes Kixeye look. I would have liked to've seen a word like "horrifying", "unconsciounable", or "evil" in it's place.
- tptacek 14y ago
  He can't use those words. They incur further exposure to lawsuits.
cityhall 14y ago
What a terrible article. There's no reference to the actual allegations, not even a link to the original post. Nothing but repetitions of the company's press release.
- Anechoic 14y ago
  There's no reference to the actual allegations, not even a link to the original post. Did you actually read the article? There's a link to the original article describing the allegations in the second sentence: http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/kixeye-takes-substantial-corrective-action-after-black-contractor-calls-out-racist-behavior-at-social-gaming-firm/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/kixeye-takes-substantial-c... That article in turn links the post that started everything (although the post has since been removed to the link is dead).
dreamdu5t 14y ago
"Hipster racism" is exactly the right word to describe it. Suburban Internet culture is infested with it.
gavanwoolery 14y ago
Well, there may or may not have been racism occurring (sometimes it is difficult to distinguish a joke). Now if you are the type of person who thinks a racist joke is a "bad" joke, then I guess you also hate South Park and love to bathe in politically-correct self-righteousness. I have friends of every race, and we joke openly about our respective races/religions/ethnicities. The one thing I will say is that the author is clearly racist towards white people (yes, this is possible), or at the very least grossly lumps all white people into the same category. A few quotes from his article (linked below): -- "Beyond culture = hipster racism = neoliberal white supremacy" -- "Dumbwhite*" -- "A brief moment of clarity only to be again submerged in the sea of white privilege and supremacy" -- "white men always telling which way is up because they feel they are the “authority” when it comes to any and everything, most often when they don’t know shit about shit except how to protect their privilege by telling me my life experience is false" The author takes (at most) minor infractions, and uses them to demonize the entire white race. On the other hand, it would be stupid for a company with a culture like this to hire a gay black guy, they are just asking for a lawsuit. http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/kixeye-takes-substantial-corrective-action-after-black-contractor-calls-out-racist-behavior-at-social-gaming-firm/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/kixeye-takes-substantial-c...
- geoka9 14y ago
  Now if you are the type of person who thinks a racist joke is a "bad" joke, then I guess you also hate South Park and love to bathe in politically-correct self-righteousness. I don't know much about South Park. Not sure about self-righteousness either. But I like to bathe in the feeling that I don't accidentally insult people I have no intent to insult. That's why I try to be careful with my jokes (racist-wise or otherwise).
  - gavanwoolery 14y ago
    Good policy. :) Here is a good joke: Q:"How does every racist joke start?" A:[Looks over both shoulders]
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

65 points by ujeezy 14y ago

Well, that sucks for the 3/4 of HN commenters on the Kixeye thread who came to the conclusion that the contractor's writing style was damning to the story's veracity.

humean 14y ago
Right, because showing power is the best way to prove you're right. Bukharin was fired too, don't you know. Too bad for the woman who lost her job because she thought a pendant was a calculator. The original poster will probably win his lawsuit, and enjoy years of income from a month of work. "Dumbwhite---"
humean 14y ago
And by the way, you'll notice that 1/2 of those commenters, like me, created straw accounts to post about this craziness. This is because we knew we'd get slowbanned for our dissent. Sure enough. Vyshinsky is alive and well and living in Chicago...
yummyfajitas 14y ago
How so? The fact that the company is attempting to minimize legal liability doesn't mean that the contractor was truthful. Nor does it mean that people who estimated that P(story = true | writer sounds racist) < P(story = true) were incorrect.
- aristotelian 14y ago
  It's not about who's right and who's wrong. It's about who has the power. The Kixeye CEO did exactly the right thing for his shareholders. He's also going to make a large payment to the OP, which will enable this obvious professional victim to live for years off his month of work. This is also the right thing to do - for the shareholders. The lesson for hiring managers is that you have to be very careful when hiring a member of a "protected class." You are effectively hiring them for a different position than your ordinary second-class citizens. It's not illegal to be an asshole to an ordinary second-class citizen. But a member of a protected class is effectively a noble, and a different set of legal norms apply to him. It is illegal to be an asshole to a member of this nobility. America is a nation of laws, and you have to follow the law. Kudos to the Kixeye CEO for realizing this. Why isn't it illegal for anyone to be an asshole to anyone else? A fascinating question. Worth thinking about. (And don't ask me how our country got to have "protected classes" at the same time as it got "equal protection under the law." Actually, the latter is legally derived from the former - believe it or not.)
  - mikeash 14y ago
    If the guy had been white and everybody had been racist toward him because of that, it would have been just as illegal.
    - aristotelian 14y ago
      It would have been. It wouldn't have been enforced, however. If you look at the history of civil rights jurisprudence, in the South before 1960 there were a lot of laws that looked race-neutral. Their actual intent was to keep black people from voting, however. It didn't fool the Supreme Court. Software patents are just as illegal. But what actually happens?
      - mikeash 14y ago
        Oh, sorry, when you started talking about "illegal" and all that, I thought you were actually talking about the, you know, laws.
  - cynicalkane 14y ago
    My God. Say what you will about affirmative action and discrimination law, but I assure you that minorities and women do not feel like "nobles" in America.
    - aristotelian 14y ago
      Oh, no, they sure don't! They feel like they're horribly oppressed. But when you look at the actual legal privileges that the actual legal and political system actually affords them - like the privilege not to be insulted, not to mention the 450 free points (blacks over Asians) on their SAT - what you see is almost exactly the kinds of privileges that medieval polities gave their nobilities. I guess there's no sumptuary laws or stuff like that.
    - basseq 14y ago
      BTW, if anyone else was confused by the 450 SAT points comment, here's the detail: "To receive equal consideration by elite colleges, Asian Americans must outperform Whites by 140 points, Hispanics by 280 points, Blacks by 450 points in SAT (Total 1600)." From "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life" by Thomas J. Espenshade & Alexandria Walton Radford (2009) Source: http://80-20initiative.blogspot.com/2012/03/450-point-sat-gap-large-racial.html http://80-20initiative.blogspot.com/2012/03/450-point-sat-ga...
- tptacek 14y ago
  “While it’s clear that not everything in the blog post was accurate, I did discover examples of embarrassing behavior that I find inappropriate for Kixeye, or any other work environment." It is clear in context that "embarrassing behavior" refers to racially charged conduct, that being the through-line of the whole story in which the CEO is publicly commenting and disclosing employee terminations. If they wanted to minimize legal liability, saying nothing would have made more sense than publicly disclosing "embarrassing behavior" that lead to termination. I know this sounds like more tea-leaf reading and I am myself continually exasperated by the tea-leaf prognostications HN gives rise to in other stories, but the CEO of a large-ish company publicly stating, in the wake of notorious claim of racial prejudice at their firm, that the company fired people for their behavior... that's a Big Deal.
  - aristotelian 14y ago
    Unfortunately, it's not a Big Deal for someone to get fired for mistaking a pendant for a calculator. That sort of thing happens all the time. You know, in the country we live in. It would certainly be a Big Deal if we lived in a country controlled by the Vast White Racist Conspiracy. Actually, San Francisco is especially notable for its deeply entrenched racism. The KKK has a huge office on Market Street, right next to Twitter - you can't miss it.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Huh? Who got fired for mistaking a pendant for a calculator? Did you simply make that up?
      - aristotelian 14y ago
        I counted four "dumbwhites" and four people who got fired. Maybe I miscounted. I don't know. We obviously will receive no more information. Do you think it's implausible that the pendant woman got fired? Would you say, that kind of thing can't happen in America?
        14y ago
- psykotic 14y ago
  > How so? The fact that the company is attempting to minimize legal liability doesn't mean that the contractor was truthful. Apparently the contractor was truthful enough to warrant firing four people. What's the likelihood of them throwing four employees under the bus if there were no bite to the charges? A purely propitiatory sacrifice like that would be hell on employee morale. Good on the CEO for taking action. But my applause is diminished by the weasel words in the CEO's posts on the matter. In the first one, he described the person with the allegations as "a former short-term contract employee". The employee's blog post unequivocally stated that he only worked there for the month of August, so the purpose of such a comment on the CEO's part can only be to cast aspersions on his credibility. Now, in these latest comments, the CEO implies that the claims apparently had enough validity to warrant firing a bunch of people while going on to say that not everything claimed was true. Was this just legal ass-covering? In any case, it makes his public apology feel conniving and insincere. It may have been the best legal maneuver (I wouldn't know) but it makes for bad PR.
- danielweber 14y ago
  While in some cases a company will settle a lawsuit even when claims are groundless, it's really hard for me to read that in here. 1. They don't seem to have settled with the developer in question (although I may have honestly missed that). 2. You settle by giving the quacking duck a bunch of money to shut up. You don't fire 4 people who didn't do anything wrong, or else you have just quintupled your potential legal exposure. I'm glad they did the right thing. I'm sad the bad thing happened in the first place. I am hopeful that this kind of workplace culture will die out. I am worried that it will continue.
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    You don't fire 4 people who didn't do anything wrong, or else you have just quintupled your potential legal exposure. You can fire people for anything you want (barring contractual clauses stating otherwise) except for membership in a protected class.
antihero 14y ago
That was pretty awkward to watch, wasn't it.
w1ntermute 14y ago
Oh please, I don't think anyone actually thought that his writing style would matter in terms of the outcome - the facts are the facts, no matter who states them. Moreover, anti-white racism is a well-known and long-time aspect of the black community that most white people have come to terms with as acceptable given the way that blacks have been treated for hundreds of years.
ender7 14y ago
Uh, are you including yourself in that 3/4? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4604088 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4604088 > Peppered throughout the post are cultural signs and signifiers that mark the author as an advocate for a fairly specific set of political and social beliefs. A reader could be excused for having concerns that the author was not an objective witness. On the other hand, those signifiers are so obvious that you could also question whether someone who had set out to unfairly tar the company would put them into the post. The guy was rightfully incensed and his reaction is completely understandable. However, the style of the original post does make it hard to distinguish from embittered hyperbole. I think the important distinction is that there's a big difference between saying "I can't tell if this guy is for real" vs. "this guy is definitely lying".
- tptacek 14y ago
  No, I don't. Read the rest of my comments in that thread. The post you're citing was my attempt to distill the controversy without advocating one way or another, because the author's post was long and easy to get side-tracked on. All you have to do is click that link, then hit "CMD-F" or whatever your search hotkey is, and type "t-p-t-a"; you should almost immediately land on a comment that makes my opinion about the veracity of the story plain. I won't spoil it for you.
  - kshelter 14y ago
    You can't have your cake and eat it too. It came off as pretentious to me.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      I don't even know what that's meant to mean, and I don't care if you think I'm pretentious. I very probably am.
- freehunter 14y ago
  That actually sounds to me more like devil's advocate, or at the very least an attempt at logically walking through the issue from both sides of the argument. I wouldn't read that and think the author made a conclusive statement. He's toeing the line with reasonable skepticism.

alecdibble 14y ago

I think this story brings up an interesting point about startups and "startup culture". It's nice to have an environment that is friendly and comfortable, but at the same time, lines have to be drawn. Unfortunately, some people see having no HR department as an excuse to disregard inclusiveness or respect.

kevingadd 14y ago
To be clear, Kixeye is big and established enough that 'no HR department' is not remotely a plausible explanation for the events that seem to have occurred here.
- tptacek 14y ago
  My own personal ghoulishness lead me to LinkedIn to see if I could spot the terminated manager from cues from the racism posts. I could not, but what I did learn is that Kixeye is stocked to the gills with people from Ivy League schools, McKinseyites, and veterans of the gaming industry. The sample I got from LinkedIn doesn't refute accusations of "bro-" culture, but it doesn't strongly indicate rampant 4chanism or racism. Without intending undue reverence for b-school, you probably don't graduate HBS and work for several years at McKinsey and retain the belief that a culture of jocular bigotry is an asset to a growing San Francisco tech company.
brown9-2 14y ago
I think that this line of reasoning tends to assume that this is a binary decision: either have a fun workplace or have HR and rules. That's not the case though, unless your only idea of run is "joking and acting in a way towards other employees that society finds reprehensible".
- alecdibble 14y ago
  The point I was trying to make is that if there is no HR department, lines have to be drawn about what behavior is appropriate. Sometimes the topic never comes up and then it becomes an issue when there is a misunderstanding or offensive conduct occurs. "joking and acting in a way towards other employees that society finds reprehensible" It really isn't that black and white though. Almost anyone can be offended by any joke or comment, as people come from vastly different backgrounds and experiences. An example is the rape joke made by Notch. Half the people were pissed about it while half couldn't understand why the other half was pissed. It is those kinds of misunderstandings that can create problems in the first place.

kevingadd 14y ago

As much as I was expecting a spineless "a few bad apples" response from Kixeye, I'm still pleased to see them responding openly to the accusations and taking at least some action to correct the issues, instead of just trying to make it all go away. Hopefully this leads to larger reform.

Lewisham 14y ago
From what I can tell, Harbin seems like A Good Bloke. It doesn't surprise me to hear of the brogrammer environment given the way they've marketed (the YouTube video, recruitment flyers with Insanity Wolf on), but it's good that he stepped up quickly.

physcab 14y ago

Startups in the valley seem almost by definition, segregated places to work. I don't think it is intentional (or maybe in the case of Kixeye it was), but the vast majority of companies seem to have straight white males in their 20's as employees. What this means is that people who do not have "critical mass", ie any few numbers of minorities, are going to count the number people just like them. It will also mean stereotypes will be at their worst. Do startups hire programmers in their 50's? Do startups that make products "for women" try to hire women to work on that product? Why is it that black engineers and non-native English speaking engineers are in positions like QA and testing, but not program management? These are just a few of the trends I've noticed.

brown9-2 14y ago
Why do you assume that "stereotypes will be at their worst" in a workforce that is mostly male, young, and white?
- wonderzombie 14y ago
  It seems reasonable to suggest that more diversity would inversely correlate with comments/behavior which targets non-white, non-young, and non-males. Furthermore, working with a wide variety of people from a variety of backgrounds naturally encourages you to think about people outside of your own culture. It's a counter-example to the idea that whiteness is "normal" or "American" and (e.g.) black culture is "black" and, by implication, "not-quite-American" nor "normal."
rmc 14y ago
One theory is that the lack of diversity is the result of, not the cause of, much subtle racism/sexism/etc.

famousactress 14y ago

“...I did discover examples of embarrassing behavior that I find inappropriate for Kixeye or any other work environment." I don't like that he leads with the word "embarassing". It suggests a focus on how this makes Kixeye look. I would have liked to've seen a word like "horrifying", "unconsciounable", or "evil" in it's place.

tptacek 14y ago
He can't use those words. They incur further exposure to lawsuits.

cityhall 14y ago

What a terrible article. There's no reference to the actual allegations, not even a link to the original post. Nothing but repetitions of the company's press release.

Anechoic 14y ago
There's no reference to the actual allegations, not even a link to the original post. Did you actually read the article? There's a link to the original article describing the allegations in the second sentence: http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/kixeye-takes-substantial-corrective-action-after-black-contractor-calls-out-racist-behavior-at-social-gaming-firm/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/kixeye-takes-substantial-c... That article in turn links the post that started everything (although the post has since been removed to the link is dead).

dreamdu5t 14y ago

"Hipster racism" is exactly the right word to describe it. Suburban Internet culture is infested with it.

gavanwoolery 14y ago

Well, there may or may not have been racism occurring (sometimes it is difficult to distinguish a joke). Now if you are the type of person who thinks a racist joke is a "bad" joke, then I guess you also hate South Park and love to bathe in politically-correct self-righteousness. I have friends of every race, and we joke openly about our respective races/religions/ethnicities. The one thing I will say is that the author is clearly racist towards white people (yes, this is possible), or at the very least grossly lumps all white people into the same category. A few quotes from his article (linked below): -- "Beyond culture = hipster racism = neoliberal white supremacy" -- "Dumbwhite*" -- "A brief moment of clarity only to be again submerged in the sea of white privilege and supremacy" -- "white men always telling which way is up because they feel they are the “authority” when it comes to any and everything, most often when they don’t know shit about shit except how to protect their privilege by telling me my life experience is false" The author takes (at most) minor infractions, and uses them to demonize the entire white race. On the other hand, it would be stupid for a company with a culture like this to hire a gay black guy, they are just asking for a lawsuit. http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/kixeye-takes-substantial-corrective-action-after-black-contractor-calls-out-racist-behavior-at-social-gaming-firm/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/kixeye-takes-substantial-c...

geoka9 14y ago
Now if you are the type of person who thinks a racist joke is a "bad" joke, then I guess you also hate South Park and love to bathe in politically-correct self-righteousness. I don't know much about South Park. Not sure about self-righteousness either. But I like to bathe in the feeling that I don't accidentally insult people I have no intent to insult. That's why I try to be careful with my jokes (racist-wise or otherwise).
- gavanwoolery 14y ago
  Good policy. :) Here is a good joke: Q:"How does every racist joke start?" A:[Looks over both shoulders]
- deleted 14y ago
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