For the record (and I hope this is clear in the context of the rest of that paragraph), I think getting bigoted views out in the open can be better than the alternative. Open views can be criticized and corrected. Subversive hate or discrimination is much harder to address.
"I say change begins at home," is meaningless. If you want change, go downvote (and possibly reply to) *ist comments in order to set them straight. Form a group of others to help you. Don't get on a soapbox and demand for everyone else to make the world the way you want it without being part of the solution. Taking public figures to task for what you perceive to be their shortcomings (as opposed to their wrongdoing) is not a solution.
Before that, though, try to give people the benefit of the doubt before you respond with venom to them. Mischaracterizing people's positions and attacking out-of-context quotes (as I feel you did with me) are not going to change minds or win over anyone.
Let me know when you want to stop speaking in metaphors or empty platitudes or unrepresentative, cherry-picked snippets, and then we can have a discussion. So far, I see no actionable suggestions for how to solve the problem, or even a clear definition of the problem.
> I see no actionable suggestions for how to solve the problem
Here are a few actionable suggestions from OP's article:
* "[Create] a Code of Conduct for Hacker News." This helps all community members share clear expectations of appropriate & inappropriate behavior.
* "After providing clear guidance for what kinds of comments are acceptable to its values, YC must fund a means of consistent enforcement when content is posted outside those bounds."
* "[YC] must publicly accept its complicity in building and maintaining a business asset with these negative externalities."
* "YC must submit to accountability for improvement."
> "[Create] a Code of Conduct for Hacker News." This helps all community members share clear expectations of appropriate & inappropriate behavior.
Hacker News has a set of guidelines that provide clear expectation of appropriate and inappropriate behavior as it regards submissions, comments, and flagging.
Presumably, the author of this piece isn't just complaining that the "Guidelines" aren't titled "Code of Conduct", and actually prefers different specific expectations than those that are currently specified. But, to make an actual actionable suggestion, concrete changes need to be identified.
> "After providing clear guidance for what kinds of comments are acceptable to its values, YC must fund a means of consistent enforcement when content is posted outside those bounds."
Heavy handed centralized moderation rather than relying primarily on community moderation is an actionable suggestion, but there is no concrete evidence presented that (1) community moderation isn't working, or (2) heavy-handed centralized moderation would work better.
> "[YC] must publicly accept its complicity in building and maintaining a business asset with these negative externalities."
Except for handwaving at vague anecdotes and stating the authors personal opinion, there's no support for the existence of the asserted "negative externalities". But, yes, while it lacks justification for action, this is certainly an actionable suggestion.
> "YC must submit to accountability for improvement."
This is a vague statement, not a specific, actionable suggestion.
That's fair. The first two are pretty good suggestions. I wish he hadn't buried them at the end of an article that was very one-sided (e.g., "Hacker News is a cesspit"). I wish he had made a nice summary like the one you provided.
@_danilo: The sad thing is that I actually agree with your goals and the first two suggestions. I disagree with your tactics. I apologize if my viewpoint sounded like, "There is no problem." That was not my intent. I only intended to offer a counterpoint to what I felt was a misrepresentation of the overall character of Hacker News. I definitely agree with you that there are issues.
But in the process of responding to me, you attacked me. I literally feel like a victim at this point. You took the conversation to Twitter, where I don't even have an account, and aired your grievances about me at my employer.
Please consider your actions in the future. You are not helping your cause when you alienate others and make them feel helpless. You could have tried a little bit harder to convince me instead of attacking me (cf. this post).
I'm not here to have a "discussion" with someone who's desperate to defend the powerful from facing their own malfeasance. Your remarks and lack of self-awareness show that you're part of the problem. I don't see any benefit to investing meaningful time in reaching you.
I've provided a case and actionable suggestions here, at a length of 745 words. I'm not going to give you 745 more.
I'm not here to convince you. Your education is your job.
But I am thrilled to continue documenting how, say, software engineering leaders at startups contribute to a culture of exclusion and alienation by making it the jobs of marginalized people to "educate" their more privileged counterparts.
Google and Facebook are kind of extreme cases - I would not be hired by Google in spite of my Master's degree - in most of these companies one may have to look at the CS degrees from Elite Universities. An A.S degree from Collin County Community College or BS from TAMU-Commerce is not same as Stanford or UT-Austin.
You can cherry pick the data all you want, are there biases - apparently not White Engineer Bias for sure, if there is.
I do not know all the variables, but I prefer uneven organic growth over over-curated even growth that sucks resources and energies from vital parts of the company.
The point is that reading something like this, the least interesting topic is what the complainant could have done differently.
The principle discussion is: never shoulda happened. Inappropriate, unacceptable. Not second guessing the strategy of someone in an impossible situation.
I have to disagree that it's the least interesting topic. A relationship is never a one way street and while in this situation one of the party clearly seems to be at fault, it's not always the case. Of course it never should have happened but it has and so the discussion about damage mitigation is still a valid one.
I wish I was taught any kind of disengagement skill when I was being bullied as a kid, even though it never should have happened (and since I can foresee the uproar here, I'm in no way implying the two are equivalent but merely noticing similarities).
It's a shame that "here are some tips to protect yourzelf from assholes" only come up after a case like this. Because in this context it does feel a little bit like victim blaming, even with all the caveats.
That's because it should read "here are some tips to avoid being an asshole". "Here are tips to protect yourself from assholes" is very much victim blaming no matter the context.
Sure, some of it - most of it - might be good advice (e.g. don't date cofounders/coworkers) but in the end that advice in itself won't do anything if the other person is an asshole. Whitney could have avoided a relationship and tried to defuse things as best as she could, but Justin could still have been an ass and harass her for rejecting him.
Victim-blaming implies someone has blamed someone else for their circumstance. Telling someone how to avoid assholes is not victim-blaming, its education that all [young] adults should receive, because it helps people make informed decisions and be responsible adults.
All adults maintain responsibility for their own actions. That goes for both the assholes and the victims. Ideally, everyone would get exactly the same training, because everyone has the capacity to be either an asshole or a victim.
Of course we know that in our particular society (as in many others) women are at higher risk for being abused, and men are more likely to be the abuser. So it seems like there should still be an equal amount of education, but that men should probably receive greater feedback about how (and why) not to be an asshole, and women should receive greater feedback on how to protect themselves from assholes.
So are police victim-blaming when they give advice about the number of cars stolen from petrol station forecourts (because people fill up, then go and pay, but leave the keys in the ignition and the doors open) and suggest that people should be a bit careful?
Certainly in this thread any advice is victim blaming.
But that doesn't make the advice useless or pointless or harmful.
And it's certainly on topic for HN - psychology of dealing with difficult people applies to work and suppliers and customers and regulators and yes, unrepentant assholes.
maybe not so much 'least interesting' as 'not the right moment'. It's kind of like bringing up that one should avoid dangerous neighborhoods right when someone got mugged and killed.
It's a valid point, and it doesn't mean you're blaming the victim, but it's perhaps not the best time bring it up, and people might easily misconstrue what you're saying.
"If I had to guess, I'd say Silicon Valley would be among the easiest for women to penetrate"
This is not an opinion grounded in any sort of reality. Attrition for women in technical roles is nearly double that of other industries. In finance, women make up around 20% of corporate boards. Not so in tech. Not by a long shot.
This is Scott Adams saying "hey guys, here's some stuff I think but haven't really tested even a little bit."
> This is Scott Adams saying "hey guys, here's some stuff I think but haven't really tested even a little bit."
For non-regular readers: that's exactly what Scott Adams' blog is about - throwing ideas into the wild and discussing them in the comments. It's a feature, not a bug.
The problems come when people read it without knowing that, and assuming he's advocating for <issue>, while he's more of a "what do you think about this crazy thought?" kind of writer. Check this post[1] (specially the disclaimer) for an example.
That may be so, but I think it's not a little pernicious for someone with standing and reach to say "Hayyyyy, so, I'm sure everything's FINE" when everything is not at all fine. Sloppy and counterproductive.
Nice straw man. Most of those actually produce something useful, and there is a direct relationship between money given and product delivered.
I mean Jesus, earlier I saw Ashe Dryden complain that Gittip "doesn't care about her safety" and that she's now in a precarious position because she's "locked in" to it. Pretty sure she's the one who asked people to give her all that money. If she doesn't like it, she can go back to actually working for a living, like the rest of us. I took one look at Gittip when it opened up and said "Nope".
> If she doesn't like it, she can go back to actually working for a living, like the rest of us.
The rest of us turn up for 8 hours on a good day, turn in shitty code on our horrifically-factored, monolithic Rails app that some other poor shlub will have to maintain, break off at 2pm on a Friday for craft beer and convince ourselves we're changing the goddamn world with our latest social widget.
"Working for a living, like the rest of us"? Don't make me laugh.
The most half-assed Ruby dev, and oh my goodness there's some competition for that title, would easily be earning an integer multiple of what Ashe gets on gittip. You quite clearly know absolutely zilch about how much work Ashe does, and you so very obviously have no idea whatsoever how to value it, so how about you quieten down and go take a look at yourself, eh?
For Christ's sake, are you incapable of making a coherent argument? Your own list is inconsistent, lumping together ineffectual platitude salesmen and corrupt politicians with product developers.
If you'd manage to extract your head from your ass for 5 seconds, you'd realize these spoiled princesses have set back the cause of "marginalized tech professionals" more than a dozen titstares combined.
And as a guy not on the margins, who has been repeatedly educated and informed by these "spoiled princesses", I can't say I agree with him either. I find their work incredibly valuable, so I'd be interested to hear why joaren believes they're setting back their own cause.
Well, maybe "interested" is overstating it a bit. "Morbidly curious"?
> I find their work incredibly valuable, so I'd be interested to hear why joaren believes they're setting back their own cause.
I don't have any data or guesses, but it's conceivable that for every person like yourself who are educated toward their cause, a dozen others are turned away, in which case their actions would hurt the cause.
Right, "educated", on their false statistics? Like Shanley Kane's claim that men have a much easier time getting a 6 figure job out of college... except that unemployment among male college graduates is 50% higher than women's, and women already earn 60% of all college degrees. Let's ignore all that, tell guys to "shut the fuck up and listen", because the patriarchy is propagating systemic inequality.
Or how about Ashe Dryden's ignorance of the Norwegian Gender Paradox which shows that the more gender equal the opportunity, the less equal the outcome? See Richard Lippa of Fullerton's research, which shows this trend applies worldwide with an enormous sample size (i.e. gender is not a societal construct) and shows that the countries where there are more women in IT are the ones where it is a disproportionately lucrative career. I could also point to her hypocritical call to get people fired for starring the satirical Feminist Software Foundation github repo, a tweet so low even she eventually deleted it.
How about Noirin Plunkett's defamation lawsuit, for which she is soliciting money on Gittip? I'll just quote from the legal documents shall I:
> Plaintiff Michael G. Schwern was a leader for gender equity and a campaigner against sexual misconduct in the open-source software community. Complaint ¶2, Schwern Decl. ¶9. When plaintiff and his ex-wife, defendant Nóirín Plunkett, divorced, defendant — for reasons best known to her — chose to salt the earth by deliberately and maliciously spreading the lie that plaintiff had raped defendant. Complaint ¶¶8, 9, 13-23; Schwern Decl. ¶¶2-4, 8, 9; Exhibits 1-3. The criminal justice system rejected defendant’s allegations.
Yeah, these are the people who are "educating" the wider tech world with their informed opinions. Also, remember, false rape accusations never happen, no matter what Charles McDowell (1985) and Eugene Kanin (1994) found.
> Like Shanley Kane's claim that men have a much easier time getting a 6 figure job out of college... except that unemployment among male college graduates is 50% higher than women's
"A study of more than 400,000 graduates who left university last summer showed that 9% of males were unemployed six months after quitting compared with just 6% of women.
However, when it came to salaries, those men who had found their way into work were earning higher salaries than women with 32% earning more than £25,000 a year - compared with just 18% of women." [1]
Men are more likely than women to be unemployed or employed full time, while women are more likely than men to work part time at one or more jobs. [2]
Your statement is accurate, but so is hers.
> I'll just quote from the legal documents shall I
You quoted Schwern's accusation, which you seem to think bears more weight than Plunkett's accusation, despite neither being legally substantiated.
I have no time for someone who claims to be quoting "the legal documents" when he is in fact parroting one side's case in a domestic violence dispute to which he is not a party. Thanks for clarifying what you are, though; that's useful, albeit hardly surprising.
https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=%23hnwatch&src=typd
> I actually think it's good that short-sighted individuals express their bigoted views.
There's a word for this kind of viewpoint.
> It gives others a chance to provide them with some perspective.
While alienating entire groups of underrepresented backgrounds.
Sam Altman says tech needs to fix its exclusionary nature. So he actually agrees with me on this.
I say change begins at home.