It's easy to get hung up on the particulars of Pao's story and get sidetracked into defending or judging her, but I feel that is besides the point. I am more interested in the wider notion of why she wrote this article: to point out that sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be.
I'm wondering though: is this just about sexism, or is it about professionalism and maturity? Getting hit on by someone higher up the hierarchy than you can make it impossible to do your job, so that behavior is clearly unprofessional. But getting yelled at by your boss for shipping a bug is also unprofessional, and can also make it a toxic work environment. I'm not saying the two are the same, just that both are examples of unprofessional behavior that many places will tolerate.
Isn't it time we have conversations about what it means to be a professional in tech? Maybe other industries suffer less from these things because they have a longer history and have more guild-like working practices, where professional behavior is more clearly defined. In tech people get away with wildly unprofessional behavior as long as "they get stuff done", and personally I never felt that was acceptable.
Maybe this stuff is also sort of everywhere. Plenty of industries have toxic working relationships. Why isn't professionalism part of standard education tracks? I studied CS and I never learned about what it means to be a professional software developer. How do you have productive conversations with coworkers? How do you organize your work effectively? All of these things you're supposed to figure out on your own, but looking around I can tell that mostly people never do, or only do so after decades of getting it wrong.
I can't imagine anything more unprofessional than raving about meeting a washed up porn star and then talking about sex workers in the company of people you are not intimately familiar with. Although you could say it was a 'social' moment on the jet, not a professional meeting (as Pao seems to believe it was) where there should always be much more latitude on conversation topics, it's still very distasteful.
I normally have a very high tolerance for talking about any topic but anyone who says that stuff in public and not in the small company of close friends has bigger issues than just
sexism.
As others have pointed out most of these situations sound like grown men acting like frat boys or teenagers, not adult males with a singular problem with how they treat women. These are men who need to learn how to act around other adults and how to treat people with respect in public. Or at a very minimum leave it for your off-time among close friends in private.
Software has largely confronted the 'brogrammer' issue publicly, and I believe is working to improve itself, but it's well known that finance is still heavily influenced by untamed frat boy culture. This is a culture where these immature boys don't get their behaviour properly confronted and corrected. Especially when you throw personal wealth into the occassion.
Not to defend frat culture, but who defines what topics are or are not publicly discussable, and where is this list maintained? Aren't taboos sometimes more harmful than whatever harm the taboo is supposed to prevent?
I'm confused. Either you're legitimately asking for a list or you are trying to say since there's no way such a list exists, we should be allowed to "publicly" discuss whatever we'd like in the company of coworkers.
You're probably better off asking your HR for a training if you can't fathom what topics may be appropriate for work or not. But most of it is common sense.
Is it sexual/racial or otherwise offensive to some within earshot? Don't say it.
Is it possibly offensive but you're not sure if they'd like to hear it? Don't say it.
You're there to work, not to push societal boundaries/ maximize discourse.
It's clear that I've been misunderstood, and I'm not sure how to rectify the misunderstanding. This makes it difficult to have actual discussions about this topic that don't devolve into bandwagon parades.
If we had always followed the "don't say it" default, then it would still be considered offensive to advocate for LGBT or religious or gender rights in the workplace. This is what I meant by taboos being sometimes harmful.
Everything I've seen in all the jobs I've worked shows a massive disconnect between "HR reality" and actual reality. I've seen women openly and proudly objectifying male subordinates in company meetings. I've seen men spending extensive time distracting their female coworkers with no consequences. I've seen women objectifying the "hot catering delivery boy". I've seen salesjerks harassing and flirting and getting away with it, while genuine people are slapped down for trivialities. The loudest and most prolific swearing I've ever heard was in a company with a highly religiously conservative employee demographic.
Nowhere have I seen a workplace where people robotically clock in, work silently, and clock out. Never have I seen a workplace free of non-work-related conversations.
People spend a majority of their waking time at work or on work-related matters. A sizable proportion of couples report meeting each other at work. There's simply no such thing as a work-only workplace. The HR-ification of society only facilitates the kind of abuse and discrimination that the devious get away with and the genuine get blamed for.
> If we had always followed the "don't say it" default, then it would still be considered offensive to advocate for LGBT or religious or gender rights in the workplace. This is what I meant by taboos being sometimes harmful.
Again, you're equating social progress with the ability to say controversial things at work. I would argue that most of the progress LGBT/religious/etc. groups have made have been made outside of office cubicles. More importantly, there's a clear difference between "what are we doing to encourage a more diverse group of developers" to "who do you think is the hottest engineer on our team?"
I'm still failing to see what your point is. Yes, some people can choose to violate the rules and risk getting away with it or not.
I'm not equating anything with anything. I'm saying there's no such thing as a realistic hard-line stance, and pretending there is makes things worse, not better.
You can define it by imagining a male co-worker in a meeting with your mother/sister/daughter/other female relative/female friend. Are you comfortable with your male co-worker discussing pornography and sex work in that level of detail with her?
If not sure, ask your mother/sister/daughter/other female relative/female friend.
If you don't have a female relative or friend to ask - random HN user and Ellen Pao advise you that discussing pornography and sex work in business meetings can make women feel uncomfortable.
At a government training, I once had a harassment trainer explain it very similarly. If you would not say it to your grandmother, mother, sister or daughter, do not say it. If you would not want someone saying, sharing explicit details or even joking about personal relations with your grandmother, mother, sister or daughter the same thing that you are saying about a coworker or even a stranger then do not say it. It is not appropriate. It is illegal and it will have a profound and negative impact on your career.
> At a government training, I once had a harassment trainer explain it very similarly. If you would not say it to your grandmother, mother, sister or daughter, do not say it
And this is the crux of the problem. Let's pretend that I do not have any issue having this kind of a discussion ( in passing, as a single comment or even at length ) with grandmother, mother, sister or daughter?
The law does not provide a list of subjects that you can or cannot discuss. The law assumes that you can understand the harassment law and make reasonable decisions regarding appropriate subjects and or statements. If it is necessary to make a list then it would be the responsibility of the employer to make the list and distribute it and hope that such list is all inclusive.
As far as where information is maintained, as I said, the Cod of Federal Regulation states the law for each of us to refer to. It can be found on the US EEOC website. In short, the following is the law:
Harassment
Harassment is a form of employment discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, (ADEA), and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, (ADA).
Harassment is unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. Harassment becomes unlawful where 1) enduring the offensive conduct becomes a condition of continued employment, or 2) the conduct is severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive. Anti-discrimination laws also prohibit harassment against individuals in retaliation for filing a discrimination charge, testifying, or participating in any way in an investigation, proceeding, or lawsuit under these laws; or opposing employment practices that they reasonably believe discriminate against individuals, in violation of these laws.
Petty slights, annoyances, and isolated incidents (unless extremely serious) will not rise to the level of illegality. To be unlawful, the conduct must create a work environment that would be intimidating, hostile, or offensive to reasonable people.
Offensive conduct may include, but is not limited to, offensive jokes, slurs, epithets or name calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, insults or put-downs, offensive objects or pictures, and interference with work performance. Harassment can occur in a variety of circumstances, including, but not limited to, the following:
The harasser can be the victim's supervisor, a supervisor in another area, an agent of the employer, a co-worker, or a non-employee.
The victim does not have to be the person harassed, but can be anyone affected by the offensive conduct.
Unlawful harassment may occur without economic injury to, or discharge of, the victim.
I'd argue it's not about "in tech" though, as another commenter pointed out, this is a completely different world of private jets and deciding where to spend the hundreds of millions these people have on, betting on their 10 million investment becoming a billion. This is the "snorting coke off a model's ass for lunch" world, not tech.
Not directly, but YC and others constantly emphasize how (1) founders define the whole company culture, at least for the years of the growth phase, and how (2) important VCs are as advisers to founders, who are often fairly inexperienced in managing a company.
In the light of those assertions, it sounds fairly hard to believe that the culture of the world described by Pao doesn't have a strong influence in the VC-funded tech startup (and post-startup) world.
Does the distinction matter? Are you saying this sort of behavior does not reach the level of concern inside of the world of tech, regardless of how that is defined?
I don't think it matters in the sense that people with that kind of money can never be reined in--they just spend more money to route around anyone who wants to regulate their behavior.
> I don't think it matters in the sense that people with that kind of money can never be reined in
They can be reined-in using the same money the value so much. If retirement funds stop putting money into their funds (because of bad PR or any other leverage), then they'll start to behave.
Do these people act like this because the money has completely unhinged them? Or do unhinged people enter careers like this and escalate to these levels because, well, they're unhinged and it's easier to act that way if you've got teh cash?
It's definitely a concern in tech and there are definitely problems to fix. However it's just that tech's problems with this type of behavior pales in comparison to finance's problems with it (as well as others such as Hollywood and the music industry). This whole article is about finance; about a financial firm that happens to specialize in investing in the tech sector. It's unfair to pin this one entirely on us when it's not even really our industry but the people financing us.
I've thought since the 90's that programmers need a professional body with teeth.
Doctors have them, lawyers have them, civil engineers have them.
Lots of software written is at least as critical as what the above professionals do.
But software is a young field compared to all the above so I think it'll take time (or several really serious disasters...which is how the civil engineers got theirs).
I have opposed a professional body with teeth because it ends up like a zombie, the original goals look alive but they're really dead. What is left is
a. Protectionism that prevents lowering of wages too much
b. The organization being subverted by its loudest members because everybody else is too busy living their lives.
The examples we see, AMA included, are all plagued with problems. There's a quote about doing the same things and expecting different outcomes but dang made a special request for this thread.
I agree. Professional bodies become expensive self sustaining beauracracy machines run by the very same highly paid idiots Ellen had to work with.
Look at the Australian Computer Society. You pay hundreds per year and have to jump through thousands of dollars of training and such. For what?! That you meet their standards?? What a joke.
I'm a member of the American Association for Computer Machinery instead. At least they charge a reasonable amount and you get a Safari subscription with it.
> Protectionism that prevents lowering of wages too much
This is a really weird complaint from somebody who is (presumably) a developer. [If parent commenter is an owner or executive, then it makes more sense]
Are there other industries where workers actively disdain proposals to secure better treatment at the hands of owners?
If you were ethically opposed to all forms of wage manipulation, this would be an extremely minor factor to get hung up on in the grand scheme of things. So to that point yes, he’s correct, it would be weird.
Yes? Paying someone with American citizenship more than someone with Chinese citizenship for the same work should be regarded as unethical as paying a man more than a woman or a white person more than a black person.
Like it or not, we have nation-states, not a global labor market.
The government of EVERY country in the world is elected to take care of their citizens. Why should the US government worry about wages of Chinese citizens - Chinese people have their own government, no?
BTW, the US is already very open (close to 15% of population is foreign born, the highest in a century). In an economic crisis, it is not unreasonable to slow down immigration a bit.
Also, it is ironic that you use the example of China, perhaps the most protectionist major country in the world.
Is your contention that it is racist for the American government to prioritize the needs of citizens who vote for it and live under its laws over the citizens who don't?
But I do feel that it's wrong to restrict the supply of foreign programmers so that an engineer in Silicon Valley can earn $200k instead of 'only' $150k. The average SV programmer is already in the global 0.1%, they don't need protectionism.
>But I do feel that it's wrong to restrict the supply of foreign programmers so that an engineer in Silicon Valley can earn $200k instead of 'only' $150k.
Do you feel that Yelp paying $200k rather than $150k is a greater injustice than poorer countries footing the bill for educating their best and brightest only to see their best and brightest flee to San Francisco because domestic companies cannot compete with 'only $150k'?
> poorer countries footing the bill for educating their best and brightest only to see their best and brightest flee to San Francisco
Do you imply that "poorer countries" somehow own their people and those people owe them indentured servitude until they "return" the "investment" made into them to their "country"? And until then they are not free to move wherever they please and seek as large salary as they can find? That the only "just" outcome would be for people not to seek better lives, whereever that could be, but to stay where they were born, even in worse conditions and despite their wishes, because they owe "the bill" now?
Because it certainly looks like you do. Moreover, it looks like you claim US has a moral obligation to impose this lockdown and not allow any foreign nationals in until they paid their "debt" to the home country.
This also looks exactly like the argument USSR made when prohibiting its citizens to leave. "The country invested in you, so we can't allow you to move freely outside and benefit those capitalists now". I mean, exactly to the letter. It is eery how closely these match.
Nope. That's a massive Straw man you just lit on fire.
Honestly, I don't even really like the Singaporean approach of educating your citizens and then slapping a bond on them either. I think education should be free.
I think the US owes the poorer country if it takes their citizens though, and in a just world, corporation taxes on the companies that employ these people would foot the bill of the education they are are using.
We live in a world where poor subsidize rich though and the USSR being both very poor and having a great education system was one example of that.
I think it's weird that you used scare quotes around the word "investment". Do you consider the idea that there should be a societal gain for educating ones' citizens controversial?
You obviously don't think it should be free because you think it should come with the obligation to stay in your poor country of birth after graduation. That obligation is worth $100,000s in opportunity cost or more.
You mean college professors should work for free? Or somebody else should pay for your education?
That's not the worst part though. The worst part is where you turn around and say "well, since we paid for your education (with other people's money of course, but let's forget about that), we now own you and you are indebted to us forever".
> I think the US owes the poorer country if it takes their citizens though
So, you think the "poorer country" owns its citizens. Because otherwise how you can owe anybody for something they don't own? Do you owe me for sunlight? For the air you breathe? No, because I don't own it. But if you took something I do own, I would certainly be expecting something in return, you'd owe me. That's directly the idea of ownership, and what you said directly implies ownership of the country (at least "poor country") over the citizens.
> We live in a world where poor subsidize rich
No we do not. It is a completely false statement. Look into any table of who pays most of the taxes, they are widely available online.
> USSR being both very poor and having a great education system
Did you experience that system? Because I did. It sucked. There were a few (half-dozen or so) of good schools per city (if the city is large). The rest were more or less garbage. Even in the good ones, usually some things were taught well (i.e., in one school, math & physics, in another - languages, in another -
chemistry, etc. - the rest again was pretty bad). There was a number (maybe a dozen or so over the whole country) decent higher education institutions, the rest was mediocre at the best.
And for it being free I was forced (literally, under the threat of expulsion) to sort rotten vegetables in the local agricultural storage depot. Do you know how potatoes rotting for weeks smell like? Did you have to go through a pile of them with you bare hands? It was part of my CS curriculum. Tell me more about how education in USSR was the best. Fortunately, I got the idea eventually and left (I was lucky, by then it was permitted) and got education in a place where you can pay for it with money and not forced labor.
> Do you consider the idea that there should be a societal gain for educating ones' citizens controversial?
I consider the idea that the state owns people because it took their money and made an "investment" controversial. Investment implies you own whatever you invested into. And your claims about people leaving the country after being educated being unfair implies you buy into that concept of ownership.
>The worst part is where you turn around and say "well, since we paid for your education (with other people's money of course, but let's forget about that), we now own you
Except I didn't say that.
>So, you think the "poorer country" owns its citizens.
>I consider the idea that the state owns people
How many times do I have to say "I don't believe this" before you stop turning around and telling me that I believe it?
>Did you experience that system? Because I did. It sucked.
Oh believe me, this whole conversation is making me reconsider my opinion.
The injustice is not (just) Yelp paying $200k instead of $150k, it's an engineer in India with the same skillset earning $30k. Or any number of projects not being undertaken at all because the return is less than $200k.
I don't know what the solution to education financing would be in this scenario; perhaps something like Singapore's Tuition Grant Agreement obligating students to stay in-country or pay a big penalty to leave.
I don't really understand what you're asking, but note that I did not even address what is "actually" ethical or not in my comment.
I simply stated that it is not weird (and should actually be expected), that somebody opposes some practice they find unethical even if the practice would benefit them.
Honestly, what's weird is that what I'm saying is even remotely controversial.
> Are there other industries where workers actively disdain proposals to secure better treatment at the hands of owners?
Sure, every market crash there's one story or another about employees desperately fighting their unions for a worse deal so they can stay employed, while the union insists that all staff get high salaries, but also the newest hires get fired outright.
Higher wages aren't bad, but a fairly serious issue with unions is that they're not very rational when it comes to the health of the 'parent' organization. I suspect that it'd become much more relevant in software, where companies often have rapid growth and short lifespans.
As for wages, I am not seeing developers working at hunger wages right now. Giving some bureaucratic body control over who is employed and on what conditions under the guise that only these people can figure out how to get better treatment and people themselves can't - doesn't sound like a winning proposition now.
It sounds like a good idea, but considering how quickly the field moves, it'll become stagnant and irrelevant within a year.
"You must be an ACXXXYA-accredited Node JS 0.12-p125 developer who's earned his NPM 1.01-a B-level cert and can use Visual Studio 2008 SP3 (no other version has been approved by the body) to write the codes at this job".
After watching committees by the "best and brightest" of us come up with amazing ideas like SOAP, WSDL, and Annex K of the latest C11 spec, I shudder at the thought of giving someone like that authority over my work.
Well there is the BCS but it is completely irrelevant and it's a mystery how it still exists. It does absolutely nothing for working engineers and seems to be just a front for large employers to perpetuate the skills shortage myth while unemployment among CS grads hovers between 10 and 13%.
I dimly recall we were pitched something about joining the BCS when I was doing my master's - I'm not sure if it was a full presentation or just some pamphlets that were passed around. I don't think any of us joined because it was quite expensive (£139 annually now) and it was supremely unclear what the benefits were.
Since then, I don't believe I've ever heard it mentioned.
2) This is purely anecdotal, but I've had no problem finding jobs as a self-taught programmer in Canada. I'm paid nearly 6 figures with 3 years of experience in a field where I don't have formal training. If that's not sign of a skills shortage, I don't know what is.
> In tech people get away with wildly unprofessional behavior as long as "they get stuff done", and personally I never felt that was acceptable.
As a decent software developer, if my less talented co-workers, or, god forbid, some HR-type, started telling me constantly about how I needed to be more "professional", I would hand in my resignation the next day and go somewhere that didn't absolutely suck to work.
This is very true. Workplace regulations make it very hard to just get people to own up to their true emotions, so there's this HR dance that happens much like you described
I think you don't understand it correctly, and I wonder how you can interpret it that way.
I read the point that being "professional" is also about being able to do good programming work and take responsibility for what you do technically - not just appearing at the office at the right time, being courteous to other people and accepting HR buzzwords and policies and opinions without question.
My definition of professionalism is about treating your coworkers and customers with respect and empathy, and doing the work with dedication and craftsmanship.
Appearing at the office at the right time is unnecessary just for appearance's sake, but can be a factor in respecting and empathizing with coworkers, for example to be available for questions. It is usually not that important in the grand scheme of things.
> treating your coworkers and customers with respect and empathy
This can be as subjective as the word professionalism. People always use their own value judgement in these things - whether it's deciding if something is professional, or not, or if something is respectful, or not.
Sometimes, you do have to just follow rules, for the sake of it, because there is no standard in personal value.
I don't think anyone would disagree that being respectful is a "professional" quality. "The staff was very professional." What imagery does that illicit? If you're like me, or just about anyone else I've ever heard use the term, polite is one of the first words that springs to mind.
It doesn't matter if you get your work done. There are a hundred other people who can get your work done and do it without being a dick.
Note: I'm not calling _you_ a dick. I just vehemently disagree with anyone who thinks they get to be a dick (or, more generally, act however they please) just because, to borrow terminology from earlier comments, they're "talented".
Again, we just shift to the meaning of "being a dick", another subjective term.
If you want to pin down a concept, you can't just deal with easily categorised instances - the real distinctions exist in the grey areas.
There's a multi-dimensional gradient between polite and impolite, and where the thresholds lie is determined by personal value. Pick points far enough to either side, and most of those thresholds will fall within - but it is in the "grey area" that they disagree. That is why an arbitrary, but unambiguous threshold is needed as a standard.
There are arbitrary, unambiguous, agreed upon standards of politeness. You don't curse people out. You don't sexually harass women (or men, for that matter). You don't show up for work late every day, smelling like a brewery.
However, those are all things that I've personally seen these so-called "talented" individuals do, because they think their talent makes them immune from criticism. And, sure, that's just my own, anecdotal experience, but the very fact that it's also a widely-held stereotype of these types of people, I would wager that I'm not alone in having been confronted with these types of people.
This isn't a gray area. This is the basic idea of being professional, and it holds true between places where a suit and tie is mandatory and places where you can bring your dog to work every day.
And to be absolutely clear, this is a very Western-centric view. I simply _don't know_ enough to comment on how this applies to more Eastern work environments.
There are arbitrary, unambiguous, agreed upon standards of politeness. You don't curse people out.
This are unambiguous when you are interacting with people before you have established your own norms. It's possible for a healthy team to have a dynamic where cursing out bad code is completely acceptable, while cursing a person is not. The camaraderie built around breaking a social norm (cursing) can offset shock at violating the norm. However, that should change or be re-evaluated every time that norm is disturbed.
It's also possible to go 'too polite', to the point where criticism goes unsaid because you don't want to offend. That's just as toxic of a culture, it just leads to a much slower demise than the flame-outs you get from more visceral bad behaviors.
The thing is, I don't disagree. It_is_ possible to be too polite. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about people who, generally speaking, rub their workmates the wrong way. People who would rub just about _anyone_ the wrong way.
>There are arbitrary, unambiguous, agreed upon standards of politeness. You don't curse people out. You don't sexually harass women (or men, for that matter). You don't show up for work late every day, smelling like a brewery.
...
>This isn't a gray area.
Argument from extremes.
Whenever the topic of "Well, what do they mean by professionalism?" you'll invariably get a response stating something really obvious, and pointing out people who violated those obvious norms.
Since I didn't, and don't expect to, violate them, this kind of comment is almost useless. Why? Because in no place where I've worked is the use of the word "professionalism" limited to those domains.
You will get people who do everything you said still be called unprofessional. Which is why the question becomes "Well, what does professional mean?" and invariably someone will give your response and we get nowhere.
I worked for a tutoring agency once. Our boss was trying to tell us that we should be careful not to make the student feel like a moron because they couldn't solve a problem we tutors found easy. What does that mean? He demonstrated it to us by saying "Well, when someone asks you an easy question, don't say 'Wow! You really can't do such a simple question?!'"
That demonstration was really helpful. We all went back and occasionally said to a student "Sure I can help you solve this trivial problem".
(No, of course we didn't. The point was to someone who wasn't aware, this approach would be totally appropriate for a tutor to do because he's not making explicit fun of the student).
People who leave with 2 week's notice have been called unprofessional.
People who don't reply to pointless emails have been called unprofessional.
Just open up an "Ask HN" thread and ask people what crazy things have been called "unprofessional" in their work place.
Sorry, but I have to agree with the others. Saying "Be professional" is as useless as "Be cool" or "Be good".
If a company doesn't have proper guidelines and training on what they expect their employees to do, then that company doesn't value professionalism. Not providing guidance and then pointing fingers is pretty low.
Is it really that hard though? Being professional and polite is the LEAST that you can do. Just say hi to people, don't talk over them, make some small talk, shake their hands when you meet. LISTEN to others. Don't make 'jokes' involving anything remotely sexual. If you follow these steps you are almost certain not to get in trouble, and you will be liked by most people in an office setting. It is not hard to be nice.
Figuring out what behavior is appropriate, understanding the corporate culture, and finding the best opportunities for you to help set and advance the agenda are all big parts of being a professional.
They are skills you have to develop though and young people will make mistakes as they figure out what the boundaries are. If you are fortunate enough to have a mentor in the business, you have a huge advantage.
Ignore the air quotes and you've got a clear picture of reality. The more people need you the more you're able to leverage that need for financial or social capital.
For better or worse at the forefront of your field and at the top of the social ladder the rules are different.
> If I understand your reply correctly, you mean to say that it's acceptable to be a total douchebag as long as you are "talented"?
It's a sliding scale. The better one's results are the bigger douche one can be and get away with it. And that's a very good thing because it ensures that most people who know that they are not that fantastic at producing great results go out of their way to avoid being total douche bags.
If you are told you need to be more professional, or in other words that your less than professional behavior (if it rises to harassment or discrimination) has resulted in a complaint or worse a lawsuit against the company, you may not have the opportunity to hand in your resignation.
What about your current behavior makes you think people will feel the need to constantly tell you to be more professional?
I'm assuming you don't intend to defend mistreating coworkers, so you must think that there is unprofessional behavior that is nonetheless acceptable in the workplace.
Because I avoid meetings that exist solely to stroke manager egos. If it's not related to what I'm doing I don't go no matter how mandatory it is.
Because I avoid war rooms (getting people from every team into a room for days on end to troubleshoot some issue; but where it's not your problem and everyone just does normal work because it's not their problem either - again it's another management ego stroking thing).
Because I don't attend team building sessions especially if they involve sports or touching other people or being touched.
Because I refuse to travel. I generally don't travel for myself, so I don't travel for the company - spending days and weeks in a foreign place with nothing to do away from my family and in an unfamiliar bed teeming with potential nasties. No thanks. Had bed bugs once and it led to me losing everything and becoming homeless for a while. Never again.
Lots of people will think one or more of those are "unprofessional" and that your company owns you. I have bills to pay too but I want to live what little crappy life I have on my own terms and do my job - not the ancillary bullcrap.
> Had bed bugs once and it led to me losing everything and becoming homeless for a while. Never again.
This sounds like an extraordinary tragedy, and one that really ought to have been considered a workplace accident, in the same category as people who lose fingers to power tools. I'm sorry this happened to you.
> team building sessions especially if they involve sports or touching other people or being touched.
The dark side of team building sessions; they can be both disturbing and extremely exclusionary if they're lead by well-meaning but clueless people.
> Because I don't attend team building sessions especially if they involve sports or touching other people or being touched.
I had never put together quite how awful your average "team building seminar" could be for someone with autism or other physical-touch issues. I've never been in a position to call one, so I've always just left it at "those are annoying". But on reflection, "a room full of people openly pressuring you to let people touch you without warning" sounds like hell on earth for several people I know. And yet it's quite common to make them mandatory and expect everyone to act like they had fun...
> sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be.
To play devils advocate, sexism is a thing everywhere. In some cases, there are good biological reasons why men and women are treated differently, e.g. child care (mostly women) versus hard physical labor (mostly men)
Where those biological differences aren't effective (e.g. typing on a keyboard), then yes, men and women should be treated the same.
But even with that, there may be biological reasons why men and women are interested in different things. Which may mean more women in job A, or more men in job B.
> Maybe other industries suffer less from these things because they have a longer history and have more guild-like working practices, where professional behavior is more clearly defined.
Any job which has "guild-like working practices" is very likely going to be male dominated. Because most guilds were based on men working. e.g. construction, stone masons, electricians, etc. And those jobs are rife with sexism, because of their historical roots.
> I studied CS and I never learned about what it means to be a professional software developer.
Because schools teach concepts, not social skills. They should probably teach social skills and social practices, IMHO. Everyone would be better off for it.
Just to nitpick an issue that some people mix up. On average more interest does not equate on average more skilled within the interested population. Also this gender diff does not play out so starkly in other sciences, eg biology, physics, etc. And, some decades ago in the west, and currently in other countries/civilizations, this gender difference does not pan out. This seems to point to other factors beyond genetic differences.
> On average more interest does not equate on average more skilled within the interested population.
But it might impact supply and demand of applicants with a certain background (either educational or self-study). Companies can take responsibility for the demand, but not the supply of human capital. Solutions are more likely found within education, family and youth culture. The top tier companies (like Google) can't hide behind that fact, since they generally get first pick, but that would make it even harder for lower tier companies to uphold an effective diversity policy.
There may be a strong business opportunity to exclusively invest in and hire minorities. If you have (a lot of) money and believe minorities to be discriminated against due to culture, hiring policy or financial rewards, it logically follows that you should invest in minorities. You would get, on average, better people that are more competitive.
Nothing argues quicker than profit. And the end of the day, we live in a capitalistic society. The economic arguments are the only types of arguments that will change anything.
If the invisible hand of the free market has a bias where it does not properly allocate its resources for maximum profitability, go bet against it and get rich.
I do believe it's notable that in other sciences (including subsciences of biology, psychology, and others), these differences do play out - in the opposite direction.
There's a useful graph somewhere of various degrees earned by gender split. The numbers run the gamut.
It spends a while at the beginning on credentials and the importance of using citations (something damore failed at), and starts getting into the science at 'universal across all cultures, are we sure?'
Damore didn't fail at providing citations. You did apparently fail at reading the original document, however. References were deliberately stripped out by Gizmodo, and then republished by everyone else.
>Damore didn't fail at providing citations. You did apparently fail at reading the original document, however.
Maybe read the medium post he linked to? (The irony of your comment is killing me). If Wikipedia, The Atlantic, and the NY Post appear as citations more than primary literature, it is absolutely a failure to cite (as described in the medium post).
Please don't do this. There have been many take-downs of his full document (that include the so-called citations).
The one legit paper he linked to (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.173...) didn't reach the conclusion he was claiming. That paper demonstrates that in egalitarian developed societies men are less oppressed by other men, not that there are innate differences. In all cases women's behavior is the result of being oppressed to a greater or lesser degree. In other words in less developed societies many men are just as oppressed by the powerful as women and use the same coping strategies.
He also failed to address the fact that interest doesn't necessarily correlate with ability. Research shows men and women don't differ in empathy unless men know they are being judged, which suggests it is a culturally-imposed trait and definitely not universal.
He makes a lot of assumptions without bothering to explain them, eg: assuming effective meritocracy and blindly ignoring his own caveats, never resolving the conflict with his own arguments. He never once presents ANY evidence that cognitive differences between men/women influence performance in software engineering.
One interesting result is if you can get women to picture themselves as men most of the cases where we do see differences disappears, again suggesting the vast majority of differences are cultural:
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...
Honestly it doesn't take much effort to stop with the confirmation bias. Do some actual research on your own and don't just look for sources that reinforce your existing biases.
James Damore wrote a document mostly describing his feelings and sprinkled in a few footnotes to make it look like he had done some research. He is woefully out of date with the current research (because he obviously didn't do any). That's pretty much what everyone does regarding this topic, both on HN and elsewhere.
It has become a demoralizing slog to repeatedly attempt to educate people when they are both a) so ignorant on a topic and b) so absolutely certain they are correct despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I suppose this issue falls into the category of things that "everyone knows" so people Dunning-Kruger themselves into a position without giving it any thought.
The question of whether there are biological differences that make men and women suited for different tasks has been studied for decades. There are mountains of data. Brilliant men and women have written extensively on the topic. For the love of God, please take the time to educate yourself.
Even if you want to cling to the idea that women aren't as suited to programming (despite the evidence to the contrary) you could at least avoid doing an incompetent job by being aware of the research in the field.
There have been many opinions in favor of it as well, many from psychologists. So I too suggest you take the time to educate yourself of that part of the opinion spectrum.
>>But even with that, there may be biological reasons why men and women are interested in different things. Which may mean more women in job A, or more men in job B.
You say biological reasons, I say social programming. The whole nature vs. nurture debate has been going on for ages.
Basically, we have no way of knowing what portion of women's tendencies to gravitate towards certain jobs and careers can be attributed to biological factors vs. to the way they were raised by their parents and conditioned by society.
Consider this: back in the 50s and 60s, women dominated computer programming. It was seen as an obvious career choice for young, talented women. This article explains the history much better:
I'm not sure why this was down voted. I would say other than lifting heavy things and childbirth, every other difference would be social programming, or just societal norms. I mean read about female Russian snipers in WWII. Read about Confederate women during the Civil War running their farms by themselves while their husbands were off to war. Hell the whole pink for girls and blue for boys is a recent social phenomenon of the latter 20th century. FDR had his baby pictures wearing a dress. The person who programmed the Apollo guidance system (it was 100% guided) was a woman.
My point is women aren't into programming because lack of biological ability.
> Basically, we have no way of knowing what portion of women's tendencies to gravitate towards certain jobs and careers can be attributed to biological factors vs. to the way they were raised by their parents and conditioned by society.
That isn't true, either.
Let's look at Sweden, which is a modern egalitarian society. If society is largely gender-blind, then people should overwhelmingly make "free" choices. i.e. choices which are strongly influenced by biology.
And we see that. Jobs in Sweden are still overwhelmingly split by gender. Engineers are overwhelmingly male, and people-oriented jobs (nurse, etc.) are overwhelmingly female.
To deny that men and women are psychologically different is to claim that evolution / biology works on the physical attributes, but does not work on the corresponding mental attributes.
Counter devils advocate - let me remap what you're saying to race:
>> racism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be.
>To play devils advocate, racism is a thing everywhere. In some cases, there are good biological reasons why blacks and whites are treated differently, e.g. basketball (mostly blacks) versus swimming (mostly whites)
If the above doesn't sound insane to you, I don't know what to tell you.
White men represent only 23.3% of NBA players despite white people representing 63% of the greater population of the US. Clearly this is evidence of systemic discrimination against whites and the NBA needs to step up their diversity efforts to balance it out. In addition, blacks need to rein in their offensive and exclusionary 'hip-hop' culture in the NBA as it is making whites uncomfortable and reluctant to join or remain in the league.
> If the above doesn't sound insane to you, I don't know what to tell you :)
it would be interesting to actually look at various aspects of human history and the touted expert contributors to various fields...
We, on HN, are keenly aware of Turing's contributions - the fact that he was gay has literally no bearing on our appreciation of his contributions;
Wifi as you know it (frequency hopping) was invented by a female
Many people with many contributions to the advancement of modern civilization were... human!!!!
Now, if we really want to be inclusionary - who are the undersung animals? The jelly fish, lab rats, telomeres of the immortal, Pavlov's dogs?
This whole argument is quite stupid (stupid that it is even an argument)
Fighting over merits is bullshit; hey Sur Gregor Clegane, squeeze through that doggy door. Hey Gary Coleman, bring me that 500 pound axel!
Physicality surely has its pigeon holes, mental capabilities do as well: clearly gender does not.
Brianne of Tarth could dig a bigger ditch than theon or Tyrion...
The sad thing is that Google has built itself on an interview process of supposed meritocracy - and witha single memo exposed themselves as not being such... wage fixing etc...
Human judgement is the real culprit. Bias. Where is it learned, innate or developed? How do personal, professional,psychological, physiological or familial bias occur and present?
Well, they clearly just present all around you! They are everywhere - so how to judge another?
The problem with the issue at hand is that we are using professional/physiological situations to judge psychological/other factors...
Bias silos exist. I'll defer my time to the gentleman with better articulation ability than I.
>In addition, blacks need to rein in their offensive and exclusionary 'hip-hop' culture in the NBA as it is making whites uncomfortable and reluctant to join or remain in the league.
Wow. You realize that you, or whoever you read or heard this from, has absolutely no evidence to back this up, right? Not to mention we're talking about passing up millions because someone played Future in the locker room, if there's a white dude that'd do that, I dunno what to say. But best of all is when you listen to white players in the league and how they've picked up black colloquialisms in the speech (listen to Dirk Nowitzski talk), or are rather comfortable doing shit like that time fucking Doug Collins and Jalen Rose were quoting "What happened to that boy?" by Baby and Clipse.
Just because you can substitute words doesn't invalidate the point.
Replace with religion and blacks and whites with Jews and muslims, sure the paragraph can still be written as such, but still doesn't change the original meaning.
Perhaps you'd like to expand on what "the original meaning" was to you?
If it wasn't obvious, one of my points was that being good at swimming is just that - it has nothing to do with software engineering. The whole "inherently different" argument is a red-herring if it has no provable bearing on the ability to do the (software engineering) work.
edit: my main point though, was that differences in statistical sport affinities are not, and do not explain "racism" - just as difference in statistical career-affinity is not, and doesn't explain "sexism".
The person you replied to already pointed out that the difference has no bearing on their ability to do the work in question, and that, as such, men and women should be treated equally in that area.
>Where those biological differences aren't effective (e.g. typing on a keyboard), then yes, men and women should be treated the same.
While I appreciate your point of view, I do think there are more differences between men and women than there are between the various "races" of humans.
That being said as long as a job/role's requirements are appropriate and fair, there should be no reason a senegalese (black) woman, philippino (asian) man, or danish (caucasian) woman can't be a software engineer, soldier, nurse, or nanny.
The jump from sexism to racism made perfect sense to me, they're pretty analogous; an entire group of people has significant and pervasive adverse experiences over a part of their identity. ..We don't have a systematic cultural problem over people born with red hair, but if we did there would be a word for that too. Your analogy sounds insane and his doesn't because his stays within the domain of cultural issues.
More importantly, your original point dodges the issue of sexism altogether. Obviously there are biological differences between men and women, but sexism is not an issue over who is able to bear children and who has more estrogen in their body. Sexism is about an unfair social power dynamic. Nobody is denying that there is a biological reality to it; the conversation is over how to work with that knowledge to give both men and women an even playing field.
Take one example that men will sometimes fall in love with women they work with, or vice versa. Without any rules or precedence you can end up with seriously messed up power dynamics, like a man in a more senior position pressuring women into unwanted sexual situations in which rejection puts them at fear for their jobs. Sexual harassment laws exist to try to protect against this, and inter-office relationships are generally forbidden as a preventative measure.
Sexism is a really difficult and nuanced issue, and to say "yeah but this will always be an issue because men and women are biologically different" trivializes it and takes away from the discussion.
> The jump from sexism to racism made perfect sense to me, they're pretty analogous;
Except I wasn't being sexist. The re-phrasing of my comment as racism was offensive and demeaning, and entirely not analogous.
> Sexism is about an unfair social power dynamic
Such as men dying earlier than women? Such as 80% of homeless being men? Such as 93% of "on the job" deaths being male? Such as never-married childless women earning more than equivalent men... going back to the 1960's?
I could go on.
My point is that everyone touts the party line of "OMFG women are oppressed". Very few people look into the facts. And when all the facts are presented, it's a whole lot more nuanced than "think of the Women!"
> to say "yeah but this will always be an issue because men and women are biologically different" trivializes it and takes away from the discussion.
You're reading a whole lot more into my comment than I said. That shows rather more projection that reality-based discussion.
> In tech people get away with wildly unprofessional behavior as long as "they get stuff done", and personally I never felt that was acceptable.
Which is completely false and not based on any facts. Businesses have different policies. You can't reduce all IT in world to a few businesses in the Silicon Valley. That's preposterous. And I doubt IT has anymore "unprofessional behavior" than any other industries. There is absolutely no data that demonstrate that.
> And I doubt IT has anymore "unprofessional behavior" than any other industries.
My girlfriend works for a major company in corporate real estate. The stories she tells put most stuff I've seen leveled at IT to shame. Managers that scream at employees in front of everyone else and bring them to tears, constant bickering, backstabbing, and general refusal to do their own job or help you do your job in any possible way, even though you're on the same team, people getting thrown under the bus constantly, people getting panic attacks and taking leaves from the company because they've been verbally abused so much, you have to have a high level of assertiveness and a fighting attitude to get anything accomplished. She's gone from men in charge of her to women, and she thinks it actually got worse with women in charge, because they pretend to be friendly but are secretly doing everything they can to undermine you.
How these people stay employed and these companies stay in business I have no idea. I know the turnover is really, really high at her company, and they've lost a lot of bids recently.
It's not true of everyone or every company in corporate real estate, but the nature of it seems to foster and encourages that type of behavior. Big money, high stakes, if you win the company millions of dollars in business they let you be a total asshole. Well, at least if you're high enough on the totem pole.
She's been trying to get out of it for years, but she can't find anything else that pays as well for her skillset.
> I studied CS and I never learned about what it means to be a professional software developer.
This is a shame. As part of my CS degree I was required to take a "management" module that covered a bunch of legal aspects of the job, and a professional skills module that covered a bit more of what it means to be a professional engineer. The modules weren't great and many (myself included) looked down on them a bit while taking them, but looking back I know they helped and I would advocate for more education like that in CS degrees.
I think an interesting issue is that the higher you are in a hierarchy the more rules don't apply. It's impossible to govern with rules because they are the source of rules themselves.
Some rules transcend companies and are socially tethered like ethic, morals, maturity, responsibility, etc... But disregard for social judgement is actually a strength in achieving power.
This may be why grassroots true change takes so long. The upper levels needs to pass away because they can't be convinced because they aren't bound by anything.
Most people think they can handle power, but the "true" freedom it provides will corrupt almost anyone because most people are unaware of just how much they delegate thoughts and outlooks to outside frameworks. ("Culture")
"Isn't it time we have conversations about what it means to be a professional in tech?"
Many cultures and subcultures in many times and places have had cultural protocols for people to indicate that they are interested in each other and would potentially like to do whatever, and protocols for acceptance and rejection of said advances. Perhaps tech (and to be honest the office workplace in general) needs to work something out for that. Most "nice" people end up holding themselves to restrictions that turn out to be grossly stricter than what the actual law says, so the "nice" people feel stifled when they actually aren't, and the not-so-nice people have no real guidelines and just do as they please.
It would at least give some guidelines to people on how to act, because right now the guidelines are all mostly negative... don't do this, don't do that, don't do the other thing, but I don't know the positive guidelines. That's sort of difficult to navigate through.
So, caveats. First, please don't read into my first paragraph anything that isn't there. I am not endorsing any particular set of protocols nor claiming that any particular set was perfect. I am simply saying it might be helpful if something existed; feel free to craft it to your sensibilities. Second, I'm married with no intention of changing that, not in SV, and psychologically and politically not a match for SV culture anyhow, so I'm not trying to suggest any specific protocol because anything I'd suggest wouldn't stick anyhow. (Or possibly there is a clear protocol and I'm just so out of it that I don't know what it is on account of not caring, but I'd expect more people to be discussing it in these matters and I don't see that, so I assume this is not the problem.) Third, I make no claim that the mere existence of such protocols would suddenly magically make all harassment go away, but having something, especially something with positive suggestions about how to go about courting, would be a good start. It's hard to referee a game with no lines on the field. (That may be the most important sentence in this post.)
My only specific feedback is that "nobody should ever be approached for anything ever and anyone who is approached has all rights to go arbitrarily ballistic on social media" is simply unrealistic; humans are gonna human. Part of the eventual contract would have to be that whatever an "approach" is, you do get one chance, and if you get the "go away and never raise this again" then yes, you are obligated to do that. The protocol could include some way of opting out entirely; without an argument that this should be used by tech, as an example, I would point out this is one of the purposes wedding rings serve.
It's an interesting suggestion, but it may also distract from the sexism issue.
For instance, the company in question discriminates against women when it comes to promotion of employees. I have a friend who worked at a very well known company where she experienced the same problem.
I think these apparently structural problems should receive continuous attention, otherwise maybe they will never be solved. So, I think it might not be a good idea to shift the focus away from that discussion.
I disagree with the "many other industries" part--I'd say maturity level overall is pretty low and incompetence among men and women in the US is pretty high. There's not enough emphasis on business ethics, but that isn't the true problem, it really goes back to basic education and how most people don't really have one. Business itself is simply toxic to humans and it doesn't help that it drives people insane.
"I'm wondering though: is this just about sexism, or is it about professionalism and maturity?"
I don't think it has anything to do with either one of those things, but everything to do with some people just being sociopaths. It seems to be concentrating on people with power over others.
Why would you defend false allegations by Pao? They hurt women that actually do experience it. They also give more evidence to the fact that women do use the system to get rich quick by suing in hopes of getting a massive settlement.
She should be condemned and her claims should not be used to demonstrate sexism, which is what you're trying to do.
This crosses into personal attack. You don't have anything like the basis you would need to credibly post such inflammatory claims, so this comment breaks the HN guidelines. We ban accounts that do this, and I'm sorry to say you've done it repeatedly in the past. Please fix this if you want to continue commenting here.
I'm wondering though: is this just about sexism, or is it about professionalism and maturity? Getting hit on by someone higher up the hierarchy than you can make it impossible to do your job, so that behavior is clearly unprofessional. But getting yelled at by your boss for shipping a bug is also unprofessional, and can also make it a toxic work environment. I'm not saying the two are the same, just that both are examples of unprofessional behavior that many places will tolerate.
Isn't it time we have conversations about what it means to be a professional in tech? Maybe other industries suffer less from these things because they have a longer history and have more guild-like working practices, where professional behavior is more clearly defined. In tech people get away with wildly unprofessional behavior as long as "they get stuff done", and personally I never felt that was acceptable.
Maybe this stuff is also sort of everywhere. Plenty of industries have toxic working relationships. Why isn't professionalism part of standard education tracks? I studied CS and I never learned about what it means to be a professional software developer. How do you have productive conversations with coworkers? How do you organize your work effectively? All of these things you're supposed to figure out on your own, but looking around I can tell that mostly people never do, or only do so after decades of getting it wrong.