Unlike friendlysock, I loved it! We have the data showing problems. We have the anecdotes that talk about specific acts of discrimination or whatever often without solutions past telling people to stop. They’re often dismissed as mere whining which they might be if they don’t give readers a way to act. I really liked that this write-up had a bunch characters representative of the culture the writer operated in, gave not only problems people had/caused but how various characters handled them, showed readers who would try that stuff likely outcomes of doing so, and has some good tactics to emulate in the main character. Women aware of common patterns of behavior and ways to handle them that have worked before might do better than those without this awareness. No silver bullet as main character finds out toward the end but she was very effective overall.
I’ll take a “What Happened, How, Why, What Was Good, and What Was Bad” write-up with plenty of details over a “Why I Hate This Topic/Area/Industry” any day. That the main character is introspective identifying her own weaknesses throughout instead of purely blaming others for problems gives her more credibility for me. The parts I don’t like are there just because she’s human: any piece on people problems will have stuff I’ll disagree with or filter to get what I think is the good stuff. I have no idea if this is a real person’s background or a story made up from anecdotes. If it’s a real person, I’d like to meet her sometime as I’m sure the conversations would be interesting. I’d probably also learn stuff from her on tackling either technical or human challenges in an organization given her long experience doing that. That’s how it played out for me with these kind of people in the past.
Far as Lobsters, yall know I prefer deep tech with minimum of politics. I voted for that rule. There is a segment of community that does want to see write-ups on these topics per community discussions. If we do that, I don’t mind seeing an occasional write-up like this one so long as we aren’t saturated by them. Like any other topic that might lead to back and forth with less substance than usual. So, I upvoted it from 0 to 1 since the good parts outweighed the bad.
(To make clear: I think it was well written. I myself am a huge fan of writing in the second person. That said, I think this sort of thing is ultimately counterproductive as we find our way.)
I think that articles like this, spreading agreeable fiction based on small kernels of truth in the name of cautionary tales, serve to further polarize workers and worsen relations and in general further retard the evolution and equalization of peoples in tech.
I don’t particularly care for the portrayal of women (or men, for that matter) in this, I don’t particularly care for the normalization of backchanneling and backbiting and subterfuge, I don’t particularly care for the caricatures of different pathologies of our industry. I particularly do not care for the implication of common issues in engineering (student loans, unfriendly coworkers, the path from contributor to manager, office politics) as somehow being uniquely gendered.
Further, I think that this article kinda reinforces the popular simple assumptions about our industry: software startups have infinite funding, that software orgs start at 50 people and go from there, that titles matter at all, that having sufficient diversity can be approximated by a process like farming pokemons, that successful businesses have to have a million daily users or they aren’t worth anything, that startups are somehow competing against each other instead of external apathy and internal incompetence, that women of color in tech must speak weird English and are necessarily steeped in progressive politics–those and a score of odd little throwaway lines here and there that serve to paint the One True Picture of the Valley and attempt to deconstruct/critique it and in so doing erase the lived experience of thousands of workers in healthier (or sicker!) companies in the Valley, in places like Europe or Southeast Asia or Latin America or Africa or even the American Midwest, in smaller companies that are just starting out or in software units of banks or insurance companies or oil & gas or other non-startup businesses.
My concern is that things like this further cement a simplified and inaccurate view of ourselves in our own mythology. I say that this is toxic because the things we’re doing and going to do to exorcise this specter are probably going to be also terrible and costly to workers.
If you’ve read the piece and haven’t seen any toxicity, then we must be living in two parallel universes that have touched each other right here in the comments section of this post. To me the post seems like the output from an ML exercise, where they’ve input samples of contempt, snark and narcissism to a text generation system.
What’s not? The author follows up a glowing paragraph about how great X is as a boss with “so why don’t I have your job” It’s like she’s not even self-aware.
I like to hear anecdotes about sexism to learn what people actually consider sexism. In my opinion it is used overly broad. Not all the single stories in the article are, but the article does not claim they are, so that is fine.
I wish people wouldn’t say “tech” when they mean “how we do startups in SV”.
Unlike friendlysock, I loved it! We have the data showing problems. We have the anecdotes that talk about specific acts of discrimination or whatever often without solutions past telling people to stop. They’re often dismissed as mere whining which they might be if they don’t give readers a way to act. I really liked that this write-up had a bunch characters representative of the culture the writer operated in, gave not only problems people had/caused but how various characters handled them, showed readers who would try that stuff likely outcomes of doing so, and has some good tactics to emulate in the main character. Women aware of common patterns of behavior and ways to handle them that have worked before might do better than those without this awareness. No silver bullet as main character finds out toward the end but she was very effective overall.
I’ll take a “What Happened, How, Why, What Was Good, and What Was Bad” write-up with plenty of details over a “Why I Hate This Topic/Area/Industry” any day. That the main character is introspective identifying her own weaknesses throughout instead of purely blaming others for problems gives her more credibility for me. The parts I don’t like are there just because she’s human: any piece on people problems will have stuff I’ll disagree with or filter to get what I think is the good stuff. I have no idea if this is a real person’s background or a story made up from anecdotes. If it’s a real person, I’d like to meet her sometime as I’m sure the conversations would be interesting. I’d probably also learn stuff from her on tackling either technical or human challenges in an organization given her long experience doing that. That’s how it played out for me with these kind of people in the past.
Far as Lobsters, yall know I prefer deep tech with minimum of politics. I voted for that rule. There is a segment of community that does want to see write-ups on these topics per community discussions. If we do that, I don’t mind seeing an occasional write-up like this one so long as we aren’t saturated by them. Like any other topic that might lead to back and forth with less substance than usual. So, I upvoted it from 0 to 1 since the good parts outweighed the bad.
Good read, very stirring, rather toxic.
EDIT: More than just toxic.
What is toxic about it?
(To make clear: I think it was well written. I myself am a huge fan of writing in the second person. That said, I think this sort of thing is ultimately counterproductive as we find our way.)
I think that articles like this, spreading agreeable fiction based on small kernels of truth in the name of cautionary tales, serve to further polarize workers and worsen relations and in general further retard the evolution and equalization of peoples in tech.
I don’t particularly care for the portrayal of women (or men, for that matter) in this, I don’t particularly care for the normalization of backchanneling and backbiting and subterfuge, I don’t particularly care for the caricatures of different pathologies of our industry. I particularly do not care for the implication of common issues in engineering (student loans, unfriendly coworkers, the path from contributor to manager, office politics) as somehow being uniquely gendered.
Further, I think that this article kinda reinforces the popular simple assumptions about our industry: software startups have infinite funding, that software orgs start at 50 people and go from there, that titles matter at all, that having sufficient diversity can be approximated by a process like farming pokemons, that successful businesses have to have a million daily users or they aren’t worth anything, that startups are somehow competing against each other instead of external apathy and internal incompetence, that women of color in tech must speak weird English and are necessarily steeped in progressive politics–those and a score of odd little throwaway lines here and there that serve to paint the One True Picture of the Valley and attempt to deconstruct/critique it and in so doing erase the lived experience of thousands of workers in healthier (or sicker!) companies in the Valley, in places like Europe or Southeast Asia or Latin America or Africa or even the American Midwest, in smaller companies that are just starting out or in software units of banks or insurance companies or oil & gas or other non-startup businesses.
My concern is that things like this further cement a simplified and inaccurate view of ourselves in our own mythology. I say that this is toxic because the things we’re doing and going to do to exorcise this specter are probably going to be also terrible and costly to workers.
If you’ve read the piece and haven’t seen any toxicity, then we must be living in two parallel universes that have touched each other right here in the comments section of this post. To me the post seems like the output from an ML exercise, where they’ve input samples of contempt, snark and narcissism to a text generation system.
What’s not? The author follows up a glowing paragraph about how great X is as a boss with “so why don’t I have your job” It’s like she’s not even self-aware.
I like to hear anecdotes about sexism to learn what people actually consider sexism. In my opinion it is used overly broad. Not all the single stories in the article are, but the article does not claim they are, so that is fine.