I made a crack in a leads meeting about another team needing to stop smoking crack.
Later that afternoon, my boss came in and said, "Ry, you don't know what other people are going through in their lives." The lead of the other team (who was in the meeting) had been to rehab for his crack addiction.
This is exactly the sort of joke that I used to make that I wouldn't make now for exactly that sort of reason.
Similarly, I avoid using terms like "retarded". It all feels like shallow political correctness until you realize that there are real people out there with real things going on in their lives.
I grew up in a place where lots of people including some I knew personal literally smoked and/or sold crack.
I tend to groan a bit inside where I hear someone make a remark about "smoking crack" because it's often used to describe behavior that is quite unlike that of a genuine crack smoker.
Guy I know started tweeting increasingly erratic things over the course of a 48 hour bender, followed by to-the-whole-company emails about working remotely from Fiji so the CIA couldn't follow him. Didn't recognize me when I tried to meet up with him to get him some help. Later he apparently tried to light his apartment on fire.
I'm not sure I've met any, but if I extrapolate from the blue-collar folks I was exposed to I'd think it might be hard to tell.
Anecdotally, of course...
You've probably heard of high-functioning alcoholics, it's entirely possible to a high-functioning crackhead as well - at least for a while.
I expect the point of exposure for most people comes not through continued use, but the point when something interrupts their supply. That's where they end up crushingly depressed, violently angry and indebted in ways that will surely screw-up the rest of their previously well-functioning life.
One of the people I worked with used the expression 'We're not saving babies here!' when people were stressing to get stuff done. Until one day someone in the meeting burst into tears and ran out. Turns out they previously had a miscarriage.
Not sure what to think of this. To me, it's a well-used expression that does not imply that you actually smoke crack. What other expressions should we not speak in case they literally might offend someone?
That expression already indicates an ad-hominem rebuttal, and ad-hominems can offend by definition ("against the person"). By using a higher DH-level (src: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html ) in argumentation, you can avoid a lot of problems and have more meaningful discussions.
I'm a man, I can't claim to have experienced the first example specifically, but I've faced no shortage of stereotypical assumptions about my role and abilities. I've experienced the second two examples more times than I can count.
In place of gender, I could easily chalk most of these things up to ethnic discrimination and be done with it, but that would be doing myself a huge disservice.
Likewise, I think the author is doing herself a disservice by seemingly looking for bias as a first and only explanation in each case.
It's exactly this kind of hasty generalizing [1] that is surely the root of much discrimination.
I've never performed interviews, but I've definitely experienced the latter two examples many times. Perhaps it's more common because of gender, but it's certainly not the only factor, or even the most important. It IS the most fixable, though; if it's a factor.
Well, another depressing comment thread. A huge pile on of comments essentially of the form "I'm male/white/straight and have ALSO suffered some of these things, therefore you probably haven't experienced discrimination and you should just lighten up".
Honestly? This is the best you can do? It would be fantastic if people would take a step back for a moment and try and deeply consider why your initial reaction is not disappointment and anger, but an attempt to deflect or belittle the problem, regardless of whether you made a conscious decision to do so. Of course you're not all sexists/racists/homophobes, but tending towards trusting people would probably benefit us all.
One way to read the "this happens to me too!" comments is that they're not belittling her experience, but validating it. All of us have been disrespected. We all hate it. That's a very shallow understanding of her point.
If something is annoying when it happens, it's also extra annoying when it happens just a bit more often because the people around might be just a little bit sexist. Once this community can realize that, without it feeling like an existential threat, we'll all be better off.
Presumably this is only true when you notice that they're posturing. Someone adept at it will do so in a way that conveys the message they're aiming for on a more subtle level.
A force to be reckoned with might be just one notch above the average of the environment. Not so overdressed as to be distracting, but polished enough to create a "don't dismiss me" unconscious message.
I hold my own opinion here at least a little bit suspect. I certainly wouldn't pass it off as truth or even good advice... but my tendency is to think that by the time you're considering dress, you've already lost the battle you're fighting.
Once you've gotten past doing whatever it is that you deserve respect for in the first place, playing these kinds of games for it establishes weakness and enters into a social negotiation of sorts that I haven't seen won from this position very often.
The spoils here tend go to the person who's earned them, and doesn't give a fuck about whether any particular other person thinks that's true.
Yes, I suspected when I wrote that it would seem unwieldy to someone from a startup. It comes about naturally enough when you have multiple thousands of employees though.
Actually dressing too well probably adds to people's cognitive dissonance. If her intention is to exploit this to her advantage, then that's one way to go about it... probably better then the OP's.
The OP didn't say anything about how she was dressed for these interviews. I'd put down good money that she was dressed better than the average SE. Just because some schmucks are tactless enough to blurt their confusion doesn't necessarily make them "sexist".
Honestly? Based on my own personal past experiences, I'm more likely to assume worse of somebody who dresses nicely, at least in a technical field. Consistently all the most intelligent techies I've worked with have dressed completely unprofessionally. Obviously assumptions will get you in trouble, but my instinct when seeing a well-dressed person in a high-tech business is that they're not the one who does the real work.
Yes, yelling out "put down your crack pipes!" will reduce your perf score, and rightfully so.
You are a PROFESSIONAL. A professional does not lose her cool or insult others. When two people have entered into an increasingly intense discussion, they WON'T notice anyone else unless actively interrupted. Once you understand this, the solution to stopping the recursive loop is to force a non-maskable interrupt, like so:
"Uh, guys... Guys. Guys! Hey! Stop! Listen!"
You raise your voice just enough to ensure that they hear you, with no irritation present in your voice. Once they're interrupted, you tell them the news. Insulting them with the quip about crack pipes is absolutely the wrong thing to do, and your boss is right in chastising you.
I agree. One of the things I've learned over time is that when I have lost my cool like this, 100% of the time it has been a direct result of me not being open enough with my boss or coworkers.
"HEY! STOP! LISTEN TO ME!" is frustration in another area "coming out sideways". For her, it might be ambient frustration at this sort of insulting behavior that finally bubbles up to the surface and is expressed poorly. I have made it a habit, when I'm being frustrated or otherwise impacted by something, to bring it up directly and immediately. You're not doing anyone any favors by suffering in silence. Just the opposite. You're hurting yourself, your boss & coworkers, and your company by not piping up immediately.
The preponderance of comments that "this has happened to me and I'm a guy so the world's not sexist" is so discouraging. It's logically inconsistent and a giant sign of a defense mechanism.
It's a problem and you might do some of these things inadvertently, so maybe listen a bit more and figure out how to keep yourself from not doing things like assuming women at a tech conference are in marketing instead of engineering.
The fact this thread is filled with a bunch of guys mansplaining how this wasn't sexist behavior is very telling.
In the first part she asks male co-workers if the same thing had ever happened to them. It seems to me that she's prepared to consider if phenomenon X happens due to sexism or it happens to everyone.
It seems that out of the 3 episodes she mentioned, the first one rarely happens to men here, while #2 and #3 happens sometimes do. Of course it might as well be that #2 and #3 happen more often to women, but I don't think anybody is doing a scientific investigation here.
Maybe she just dresses much better than the average SE. Some people might be equally confused if they walked into the room and where greeted (without introduction) by a guy who was better dressed than they expected.
Uh, but why is it so terrible to make these assumptions? Stereotypes are a major part of how the human species has gotten as far as it has, or even how, as individuals, anyone of us efficiently navigates the society of strangers.
What really matters is what happens AFTER sufficient introduction, ie. how quickly mental crutches are thrown out the door.
I'm sorry, nothing in her story, except the HR bit, sounded sexist. Even the HR bit is more an observation about how tactless some people are when re-evaluating mistaken preconceptions.
Regardless of whether they are wrong or not, the fact that you would use a gender-specific word to tell us why all men who disagree are incorrect is very telling.
I'm a dude, and I can't even count the number of times that I have demonstrated my technical ability, and was subsequently ignored. Happened all the time.
Yes. Actually I recently experienced something very odd.
I was recently quite angry with someone, and I told them. I was noticeably, noticeably angry at the time.
Ever since then, that person's taken my professional opinion more seriously.
I suspect that people don't take rational data (like observed technical competence) and apply it to their subconscious reasoning and attention systems. It's a failing of theirs for mis-prioritizing input. To get across it, you've gotta get priority on other planes.
What you are basically saying is that they can observe you knowing your shit plenty of times, but they don't actually put a little checkbox in their head next to "this dude know what they are talking about" until you yell at them and say "I have demonstrated plenty of times that I know my shit, and you need to put that checkbox in your head" ?
Actually I was pissed at them for something else. I think the act of chastising was what changed our interactions, not the content of said chastization.
I've had very similar situations to the poster. It's incredibly frustrating. This week I tried:
"I'm sorry, I don't understand. We just saw a demo showing the Facebook JS SDK was taking X minutes to load, and then masonry took a second. My understanding is that you want to concentrate on optimising masonry. I certainly agree with you that we can and should make masonry as fast as possible. However it seems to me that resolving the thing that's taking minutes rather than seconds would benefit us more."
In other words:
- restate the situation as you see it
- highlight the areas in which you believe common values exist
- rather than saying 'you're not listening to me' - even when it seems like they're really not listening to you - ask what their opinion of the matter is in light of what you've just stated.
This at least got us further: my colleague thought that resolving FB JS SDK performance wasn't possible. I disagreed and thought that with the massive amount of Facebook apps FB either have to know about the performance degradation or we were specifically doing something to interfere with the JS SDK performance.
(1) Part of it is about choosing whom you work with. Be careful about choosing a job that might have fun work, but is with repressed people. (2) If they are ignoring you in a meeting, there is a good chance that they have their self-image caught up in the conversation, and don't want to back down, and are getting emotional. The emotion behind rationality is humility.
Our interview process tries to filter out people that can't collaborate.
So wait, somebody asks you for an advice, you give advice that they don't like, they don't believe you, go around for more advice and then when everybody says them the same advice they finally realize the advice was right in the first place - you then assume that they didn't accept the advice in the first place because you are "women in industry", not because it is common for people to resist advice they don't like? Well, I don't even know where to start with it...
Maybe you could start by dismissing their experience (provided as an example, not as a sum total of the problem) and asserting that they need to provide more data and evidence? It's a pretty good way of marginalizing women in tech if that's what you're shooting for.
I don't "dismiss" anything. Dismiss is defined by Merriam Webster as "to reject serious consideration of" (among other, irrelevant, meanings). I am doing quite the contrary - I seriously considered it and arrived to the conclusion that attributing a common, if unfortunate, occurrence in human interactions as a proof of special, discriminatory treatment of "women in industry" is wrong. Just as wrong as assuming anybody disagreeing with you just didn't consider your arguments - instead of entertaining the possibility they did seriously consider them and found them lacking.
I see lately more and more of examples where common problems - from petty nuisances to serious problems between people - are harvested to find various "isms" in them instead of treating them just as problems between humans - and I personally don't like it.
>>>> It's a pretty good way of marginalizing women in tech if that's what you're shooting for.
Of course that's what I am shooting for. Marginalizing women in tech is my lifelong dream, and every step takes me a bit closer to it. No way it could be I actually want to discuss the particular article and share my thoughts about it - you can easily see thought this ruse and reveal my true and terrible goal. Me pointing out it is a common experience not suggesting any "ism" is just a wheel in the huge oppression mechanism I am constructing. Now you have subverted my plans to oppress women everywhere, but I will retire to my dark fortress and come back with even more evil plan of marginalizing women in tech by pointing out maybe not everybody actually tries to marginalize women in tech. Watch out!
> dismissing their experience (provided as an example, not as a sum total of the problem)
I think a lot of my problem with any sort of social justice commentary is exactly this: providing singular anecdotes with the implication that they're "proof enough" of a trend. I don't want to hear examples--all they do is incite emotional debates[2]. What they obviously are aimed at is getting people thinking about the solution (and being part of it.) Anecdotes, as a tool, are the worst possible means for this; without a better reference frame, other people can only compare a single anecdote to their own anecdotes (which have extremely different context), so conversation devolves in the most literal Babylonian sense.
If you want your example to serve a purpose--if you really, really want to change things--then go out, find other people with similar examples, and wrap it up into a study. Then you can cite it, and people will actually derive useful conclusions--because you've now created a reference frame within which the anecdotes will be compared to one another.
Otherwise, admit to yourself that (at least insofar as you are a rational being whose desires can be introspected), you just wanted to rant, and you just wanted to rile people up, without causing change to happen. (This is more directed at the generic "social justice blogger" than Rachel, who is a noncentral member[1] of that group.)
[2] Well, these articles also serve to give me heartburn in the middle of reading my morning tech RSS. I read HN to get into an aesthetic (commonly thought of as "hacker") frame of mind--I find that it really does increase my mental "elasticity" to read about things like 3D printing and quirks in the Win32 API before starting work for the day. But stories with a moral quality knock me out of it. It's sort of like interrupting a flow state, but emotionally. I have a feeling that establishing this particular hacker emotional state ("aesthete state") is the true service that HN provides for a lot of people, and that this may be the reason posts like this rile people up more than anything else. I really do wish HN would split, like MetaFilter, into separate "focus on hacker ideas" and "focus on the hacker community" subforms; it'd clean a lot of this up.
Yelling "PUT DOWN THE CRACK PIPES!", while effective perhaps the first time, is not a sustainable means of interacting with people, even problematic people. Once you've done something like this a few times, people will begin to associate you with negative outcomes in group discussions, and will thereafter try to ignore you so as not to encourage you. This is a subconscious reaction to shocking behavior.
I don't think this is exclusive to women, I've known soft-spoken male engineers that I would need to speak up for and say, "I think $X has something to say about this" or "I'd like to hear what $Y thinks about this" in meetings.
Part of a manager or leader's job is making meetings constructive and inclusive. I'm not speaking as a particularly experienced leader of teams, I've only had one year-long go as a startup CTO and a previous stint as a team lead.
Very strange that this isn't practiced more consistently.
I'm a guy and people interrupt, ignore, or talk over me all the time. It's got more to do with the communications protocol. E.g., I usually make a small sound before I start talking, as a form of reservation. Usually just a loud intake of breath. That fails with some people. They just keep going.
The culture in software discussions in my experience is simply that the loudest, most assertive person dominates the conversation. I don't know if this affects women more negatively than it affects men, but it wouldn't shock me. It certainly harms the quality of the discussion and how fast you can arrive at the right conclusions.
That second example - not being listened to until it comes from an outside source as well - happens frequently. Not saying the gender angle couldn't exacerbate it, but it really is common.
(And I bet I would say something like "Put down the crack pipe")
I can certainly believe there would be managers (and companies) that might take exception to this, but it would be justified only if their meetings were exceedingly well run. I'd hate to work for a manager or a company that took exception to that though to the point of dinging me on a performance review.
Most people work at their company's location 8, 10, 12 hours per day. It's one thing to ask employees to not harass other employees. It another thing to demand of all employees they act like robots or be accused of unprofessional behavior.
That whole thing where your opinion is overlooked for a second (usually white male) opinion happens to you if you're not white or Asian or ridiculously gifted in programming too.
The first few time it happened, I thought it was just kind of odd and my fault in someway, but after 10 years in the industry, I can tell you categorically that its not a fluke.
Reminds me of this quote ...
"White men have to prove their incompetence.
Everyone else has to prove their competence"
--- Mike Perham
That is not to say that everyone in tech is racist and/or sexist, I think its more of an unconscious bias, much the same way someone (even women) might walk into a car parts store and walk right past the female attendant to a male one to ask a question about car parts or how a white kid on a basketball court might be picked last because there are black kids on the court.
I think it is pretty insidious and eventually I think we will figure out a way to help our industry get rid of these unconscious biases
For some reason whenever I read something like this I always imagine the workplace being like the environment in Office Space.
I mean, what's a perf score? Why does everyone bureaucratize everything?
We have such finite lives, why are we putting ourselves through this?
Join a startup, go freelance, take the pay cut and enjoy life.
You have a skill that is highly sought after, you'll find a job where you're happier, if you don't, move on.
I swear, I know of so many notable startups (that are real companies with real revenues, with real benefits, great locations) that are dying to have more tech talent.
What I'm saying is that if you're going to be miserable in your work place, move on with your life!
I've asked both men and women that have interviewed me if they are engineers.
The OP's anecdote sounds genuinely sexist and in a really bad way, but I can also imagine a situation where someone says he has never been asked if he's an engineer because the question was not confrontational e.g. casually at the beginning of an interview "So what's your role at COMPANY X, engineer?"
I've gotten that question, but I've never gotten it until I ask if the interviewee has questions. And it's never been in the form of questioning my credentials.
The reason why she got pulled aside was because she wasn't coming across as alpha. Sounds stupid?
Having to use drastic measures such as saying: "Put down the crack pipes" shows insecurity. If she had simply stood up, maybe consistently told the guys:"Hey, hey we don't have these...EXCUSE ME!" and then explained in a calm manner what was wrong, she would have earned respect.
However, this way she more looked like a hysteric, loose cannon.
You have to really be confident (full) of yourself as a woman with a massive personality to guide men in a male-dominated environment and that takes lots of practice and time.
In my experience, all a man needs to do in order for someone to ask if they are, in fact, an engineer, is to dress well. Nice leather shoes and a well fitting suit worn casually will instantly create doubt about engineering interest and capability.
That being said, it's pretty common for the female engineers I know to not be taken seriously, especially at the start of their careers.
I've never been asked if I was an engineer, but I've definitely experienced the latter of your two anecdotes. Sometimes it just depends on the person you're talking to.
At one point I learned that the best way to get a certain coworker of mine to finally get what I was saying was to pull another person in front if them, explain myself to the third party, let them acknowledge that I'm right, and then finally ask the original coworker once more if their plan was reaaally the right way to go. Only then would they realize that I had a point. It sucks, but if you have to get someone they trust to repeat what you're saying, you might as well have a reliable backup ready.
As for speaking up in meetings, I was recently told in my review that I needed to be more assertive, because I feared I'd experience the same thing you did. Hopefully I can find a good middle ground between meekly watching people march down the wrong road, and shouting about crack pipes... I haven't found it yet, though.
I'm a fairly loud guy, and my input used to get ignored all the time. I know it's gut-wrenching to see things going down the drain where you could stop them if only anyone would listen.
In my experience it's not a curse of being a woman or even being a quiet person, it's a curse of being the most competent person in the room. Congrats on that.
I think Rachel's point is not that it only happens to her because she's a woman, but that she feels that it happens to her more often or more acutely because she's a woman.
I don't dare presume to know her life enough to tell her she's wrong about that feeling. Saying that it happens to you as well doesn't exactly work as a refutation.
OP is trying to do her job, and prevent issues. They ignore her to the point where she has to do something extreme to pay attention, and then have the nerve to be offended?
Seriously, if you want your company to do well, you don't punish people who speak up to prevent problems. I don't care if it's discrimination, because of her gender, whatever. It's bad for the business.
In general, discrimination is bad for business because it means people do things they shouldn't, like ignore engineers who know their shit, or take extra time to get a second opinion when the first was from a knowledgeable source.
Discrimination costs your business money, and not because of some theoretical lawsuits.
Now, sure people will get ignored when they shouldn't be. People will get second opinions for a variety of reasons when they don't need to. There is no perfect company.
But we know logically, WE KNOW, that it's stupid to discount someone because of their gender. So while we may not be able to prevent all such screwups where smart people aren't heeded, here is an obvious case where this shit shouldn't happen.
And that's the lesson to take away from this. Here is something that is fixable that hurts the business, leads to pointless meetings and the cause is known. If it was an engineering problem in your stack, you'd be fixing it by now.
This is probably going to get buried, sadly. Maybe it deserves it's own post.
Been there, done that, got the perf review to prove it :-)
A small anecdote. An acquaintance related a story of fixing the 'drainage' in their back yard. They were trying to grow some plants that were sensitive to excessive moisture, and the plants were dying. Not watering them, watering them a little, didn't seem to change. They died. A professional gardner suggested that their problem was drainage. So they dug down about 3' (where the soil was very very wet) and tried to build in better drainage. As they were on the side of a hill, water table issues were not considered. It turned out their "problem" was that the water main that fed their house and the houses up the hill, was so pressurized at their property (because it had maintain pressure at the top of the hill too) that the pipe seams were leaking and it was pumping gallons of water into the ground underneath their property. The problem wasn't their garden, the problem was that the city water supply was poorly designed.
While I have never been asked if I was an engineer on the phone, I have experienced similar things to Rachel in meetings and with regard to suggestions. Co-workers will create an internal assessment of your value and then respond based on that assessment. If they have written you off they will ignore you, if you prove their assessment wrong in a public forum they will attack you. These are management issues, and something which was sorely lacking in the stories.
If you are the "owner" of a meeting, and someone is trying to be heard and isn't. It is incumbent on you to let them be heard. By your position power as "the boss" you can naturally interrupt a discussion to collect more data from other members. Its also important to ask questions like "does anyone have any concerns?" to draw out people who have valid input but are too timid to share it.
In a highly political environment there are two ways to create change, one is through overt manipulation, which is to collect political power to yourself and then exert it to enact change, and the other is covert manipulation, which is to enact change subtly enough that the political organism doesn't react. (sometimes called "triggering the antibodies").
The problem with the latter is that if you help make positive change while keeping everyone not pissed off, no one attributes it to you (which is good for the change agent because if they knew the anti-bodies would react, but bad if your manager doesn't recognize it). I asked my manager what change he wanted to be 'true' yet he (or others) had been unsuccessful making true, he gave me one, and 18 months later that change was in place. He didn't believe that I was the one who had made the change. I suggested he pick a change he wanted to happen and not tell me, then in 18 months we could see if that one happened :-). But he also didn't understand enough about organizational dynamics to know that making change without having the source of that change point back at you was even possible.
The point is that one of the very important jobs of managers is to make sure that people who work for them are contributing as much positive to the company as they can, and when they are being held back from that contribution by people who are oblivious, willful or otherwise, they jump in and fix that.
Just another way that "managing" is different than "engineering" I suspect.
In my career I have found a way that has worked for me really well, especially when I am the manager and even more especially given that I manage SMEs with far greater knowledge than I have in their area of specialty.
I have used the following to provoke thought and discussion around problems in a way that does not call anyone out:
Ill recap the decision, design or plan. Putting it on the whiteboard or in print or whatever format the succinct plan is in.
I then ask everyone on the team or in the meeting to look at it and specifically look for why it wont work or what is wrong with the plan.
Not what is wrong with WHO designed what - but tell the team why it wont work.
With the important distinction: Anyone one who brings up a reason why they think it wont work is not only heard, but if their reasoning for why it wont work is incorrect, the team explains why that risk or issue is mitigated by the plan.
For example, you have a design where one person perceives a single point of failure due to X. "well, we'd lose service if this device went down"
Then the team explains "well, actually that doesn't matter because we stay up due to [this design element over here]"
This brings everyone up to speed and educates them as to why the plan is such.
If something is brought up that is a valid miss - then its addressed and a plan on how to redesign for that condition is met.
The point is beat the design to death - not the person or team.
The team is supposed to put all their irons in the fire and forge out a solution together.
I like this idea, but I've also seen situations where it's become 1 or 2 holdouts against a chorus of yesses, and then the ensuing resentment against them. And the holdouts had some very good points. I think it can work if the leader/manager is good at this kind of approach, but it can also lead to a lot of conflict as well.
Well, I didn't type this in the original post, but I should clarify: When the question of "tell me what is wrong with this idea" - I specifically make the point of being the one to ask the question.
If you make the discussion directed toward the manager/team leader, then the conversation is much easier.
Again, the team needs to put all their irons in the fire to forge a decision. The plan/ideas of the team is the metal to be forged. The fire is the funding and backing for the project. The hammer is the effort of the executing team and the tongs are the skill of the overall project management.
As a man, I can say I've experienced all the issues described by the OP. Regarding the first one, I was made senior when I was very young, having clients and even certain co-workers at the time respect my opinion was very tough. I got where I was in no small part because of my hard work and my choices, and that was pretty frustrating at first.
The other issues I think are relatively common and apply to most people, at least at some point in their careers. Having constructive arguments and listening to others' is a pretty rare skill, generally speaking.
Now the article seems to present these issues as if they were solely caused by misogyny. I think it's more about general stereotyping, but also about affected people not knowing how to stand their ground. I got pushed around and ignored for a while, like most people will endure at some point. Getting bitter won't resolve anything, it'll just give people around you a wrong justification for their behavior, making you even more frustrated and bitter.
Standing your ground in my opinion is being able to show you didn't get where you are by mistake. And if you happen to be the victim of stereotyping or any kind of discrimination, making a firm point of it will make people think that's all you're about, not your skills or your hard work. It's sad but I guess you can only rise above the bickering, and that in itself can be quite empowering.
And if that sort of behavior is common-place in your workplace (as opposed to isolated in which case simply ignoring it works wonders), then you most definitely aren't working for the right people. I despise ignorant discrimination but I can't support people who make it the source of all their problems either.
I'm a guy, and while I've never been mistaken for HR, the other things have happened to me from time to time.
The guy that listened to someone else before accepting the OP's opinion might have done so because he knew the other person better or respected him more for a non-gender based reason. Or maybe the idea didn't sink in until he heard it twice.
Getting attention in a meeting where several loud confident people are pontificating can be difficult if you are not a loud, self-confident person, or if they don't already respect you.
But I don't think the OP needed to escalate to crack pipes right away, although it's a great line. A "Guys, we don't use type-two data!" loud enough to be heard over everybody else's voices and repeated until it worked probably would have done the trick without affecting perf scores. It depends on the culture of the group. There is usually some accepted way in a group to interrupt conversations that are going nowhere. My guess is that anyone would have been dinged by that boss for the crack comment, just because that's his way of dealing with things.
Also, filling unappreciated and oppressed can become a self-fulfilling prophesy in men as well as women. If you go in there unsure they will pay attention to you, they probably won't. If you go in there thinking, "I'm not going to say much, but when I do, they had better pay attention, because I know what I'm talking about," they will sense it and listen, no matter who you are.
One thing I think isn't understood by the women who post things like this is that men are always in competition. It's like a wolf pack where a pecking order must be established.
In any meeting some guys who are trying to be alpha are going talk over or ignore other people they perceive as beneath them, or who they want to put beneath them, men as well as women. It's not a gender thing as much as it's a power thing. The way to overcome it is stand up for yourself and to establish your competence in whatever the group respects whether it be fisticuffs in the Army or technical skill in a company.
I suspect that the crack pipes remark, coupled with her obviously correct understanding of the problem at hand, won her respect points with her co-workers that will make them more likely to listen to her later on, no matter what the boss thought.
In the same way, having her opinion confirmed by another respected person probably made the coworker in the second example more likely to accept her opinion without confirmation the next time.
Basically, nobody gets respect right away. It doesn't come with a title, or even because you are a man. If you don't have the type of personality that immediately commands respect, you'll have to earn it step-by-step. Even if you do immediately command it, you can lose it very quickly if you don't show yourself worthy of it.
Also men test each other and especially newcomers by teasing or pointed jokes. The ability to "take a joke" is highly respected. It's not an attractive trait, but it happens. You can just ignore it (recommended), or you can do it better than they do. Depends on your personality. It usually stops after a while. Complaining about it usually makes it worse. In one sense, if men are doing this to a woman among them, it means they have accepted her to some extent. Now all she has to do is start working her way up the pecking order. A sardonic smile and a comeback (even a dumb one) can work wonders in this situation.
None of this, however should be taken as a reason to accept actual sexual harassment by word or deed. If that happens, a clear, sharp "I'm sorry, what did you just say???" or "Get your hands off me!" is called for, followed by a trip to that person's supervisor or higher until the matter is resolved.
"One thing I think isn't understood by the women who post things like this is that men are always in competition. It's like a wolf pack where a pecking order must be established."
Not understood? Always in competition? Erm...I think that might be part of the underlying problem she's describing. The whole "boys will be boys" thing is horseshit. Civil, adult people don't want to play the game. I'm a man, and I hate it as much as anyone.
There's no inherent reason that people have to be total pricks in the workplace. Build a social structure where childish behavior isn't rewarded, and childish behavior will be diminished. It works with preschool kids, so there's no reason that adults -- people with fully formed brains and a full cohort of emotional tools -- can't have the same response.
There's no inherent reason that people have to be total pricks in the workplace.
there's some economic theory that's inconsistent with that claim.
in short, in the absence of an ability to concretely measure work product, firms are forced to default to tournament style pay. e.g. a > b > c ... a gets paid more than b, b gets paid more than c, etc etc.
where work product can be quantified (e.g. installing windshields) and you can explicitly tie pay to performance (i.e. you get paid per windshield) you don't have a problem. Top performers get paid more, poor performers get paid less and maybe go do something else.
As soon as measuring the value of work product gets murky that no longer works. Hello, tournament pay.
This also explains why backstabbing work environments are so typical. Nothing evil, just normal incentives at work.
It's life amongst a slice of immature people. It's not inherent, and there are plenty of work cultures where it doesn't happen.
Unfortunately, in an industry of anti-social children who have never been valued for much more than their code, it's the default developmental pathology. Which brings us back to the point of the article: why don't women work in tech? Because tech's culture blows, and nobody does a damned thing to change it, for fear of upsetting the apple cart.
Let's assume that the author's perception of the meeting situation is completely correct, and that things went down exactly as described. Who failed? The other "engineers" failed, of course...but more importantly, the manager failed. It was an epic fail, in fact: the manager should have stepped in when he noticed that one of the quieter employees was being closed out of a discussion. The manager should have done something to control the tenor of the meeting to help ensure that it wasn't a ridiculous, shouted free-for-all. The manager should have pulled the other participants aside and told them that their performance scores would suffer if they continued to behave like a cage full of juvenile howler monkeys.
Did the manager do that? Not even close. The manager scolded the marginalized employee for asserting herself so that she could make her (correct!) point. That's just incredibly fucked up, and it doesn't sound like a productive work environment for anyone. I've been on her side of the table more than one time in this industry, and nothing is more demotivating.
Exactly. In my eyes, this is grounds for dismissal. As a manager, allowing all competent voices to be heard is your fucking job. While the gender issue complicates things, it's really just a red herring - the core problem is this "alpha male" culture within IT, total lack of humility, disingenuousness, selective memory, outright dishonesty, etc.
I've seen this chronically in at least 50% of the places I've worked, without females even being involved in the situation. Technically, it's by no means restricted to IT, it's just especially common there.
I tend to think of this as dickheads are always in competition.
Facetiousness aside, this might be more of an American thing. When I was on a Dutch airbase on a joint exercise with various US and European military personnel (anyone else here from IJOLDS 2005? I'm so old :( ), there was a noticeable difference in styles. US was high competition, European was high cooperation. Is it the same in civil society?
You may be interested in the work of Geert Hofstede, who attempted to map different cultures. He gave the USA a score of 62 on competitiveness over comfort, which he calls masculinity, and a score of 91 on individuality over cooperation.
I'm a guy, and I've never been mistaken for HR, but I always start interviews by telling people who I am in the company and what I do, so they have an understanding of what level we should be communicating on. As an interviewee, I don't want to talk shop with an HR person, and I don't want to pull punches with a technical person, so when I'm interviewing, I get it out of the way up front.
You are right. It might be sexism. So you have a choice. You can act on that belief and sit around pining for a world where nobody judges another based on anything external, or you can get to work winning respect in the culture that exists. I think the second choice will be better for your career, and meeting a competent, confident female is a lot more likely to make the neanderthals rethink their sexism. Whining just reinforces the stereotype.
I'm 55. I guarantee I've suffered age discrimination when looking for work, and it obviously sucks. But once I'm on the job, it doesn't take long for people to see what I can do and forget the grey hair and wrinkles.
Or you can note it, hope that people try and do better, and simultaneously work on doing interesting things (which, incidentally, Rachel seems to be doing).
Rachel sounds like a smart-ass know-it-all whiner. Saying "Put down the crack pipes" in a professional environment? Yeah this person sounds very stable :)
The problem with "noting it" is that people never just "note it". They complain and then everyone thinks they're a complaining complainer. Instead, if you just do a good job without complaining, people will give the deserved respect.
I find it extremely unlikely you'd make the same judgement about a male engineer who behaved the same way – I've seen so many guys with similar resumes who routinely act like that and it almost universally gets excused with something like “well, he really cares about doing it right” or “engineers are just like that”
I would think "that was the wrong thing to say", no matter who said it, including myself. Naturally, I am and have been an asshole before so I know about these things, but I learned that tact and working well with a team is more important than being right. There is stability in that knowledge. Creating drama and division definitely doesn't work for me. Too stressful.
It may be generally more difficult for a woman to fit into an all-male group. I think women sometimes conflate normal team-work challenges with gender problems too though. It's easy to be blind to your own shortcomings and blame others. I think the only thing you can truly change is yourself and your own reactions to things. I find it easier than trying to change others which can be risky.
In any case, the sales and business people regardless of gender, never listen to the technical people...so at the very least we all have something in common :)
He didn't say you can't work for a fairer system. He said that complaining won't work. He also said what would work.
More power to you if you feel that you can change society... But if you do nothing more than complain about it...fuck you! (and I say that with a smile :)
He said that pining/whining is not even really a choice because it won't work and he's right in my opinion. It would be a false dilemma if he said that "you cannot work towards a better system and have a good career". He did not say that though. Instead he gave a specific example of something that wouldn't change the system and also wouldn't be good for anyone's career.
You actually agree with him because then he says that in order to have a good career AND change the system, just be a confident, competent female engineer (and remember to not complain and point fingers even if you're right).
He says "You have a choice." And lists two possibilities, one of which is dumb, and the other of which he wants you to pick. There are more than two possibilities, but he ignores those. That is a false dilemma.
And no, he and I don't agree. I think it is fine to be a confident, competent engineer. But I think one should then use that power to create a fairer world. The notion that to get respect you can't point out problems with the existing system is a sign that the system is sick.
"The notion that to get respect you can't point out problems with the existing system is a sign that the system is sick."
"pointing out problems" is vastly different from what this woman did. Saying something like "Put down the crack pipes" is not "pointing out problems". Do you agree?
Saying things like "Put down the crack pipes" will not work. Do you agree with that too?
If you agree with both of those things, I think we're all on the same page here.
Because I'm not really interested in doing Hacker News Defends Patriarchy Vol MCCXVI right now, especially with some random anonymous argumentative dude. "Someone is wrong on the internet" is a game I find less and less fun as I get older, in that it's generally a negative-sum game.
Was your original comment made in the spirit of "having fun"? I was pretty sure you came here with a disagreement in mind.
How did a discussion about your mis-identification of an informal fallacy suddenly becomes "Hacker News Defends Patriarchy"? This whole ridiculous argument is really pretty simple and it has nothing to do with gender. It has to do with Honey vs Vinegar and you think that people can complain their way to success! lol
Alright, sorry you were wrong. You should be happy though, maybe next time you decide to start a game of "Someone is wrong on the internet" you'll come better equipped to play :)
If you'd like to discuss the fallacy, go ahead. Take a look at his text, take a look at the definition of the fallacy, and explain how in your view it doesn't meet the definition. I'm still not interested in a broader discussion with you.
And here is an article by a feminist at xojane discussing why she will never use the word "mansplain" http://www.xojane.com/issues/why-you-ll-never-hear-me-use-te... I do appreciate your femsplaining why all the men here have been wrong to disagree even mildly with rachelbythebay
If we used a word specifically invented to tell women they cannot participate in a discussion because they are women and they don't agree with us, you would be quaking with rage. You are a misandrist.
When managers tell us implementing this feature, which they have never done themselves and have no possible way to experience, is super-easy and we're just lazy whiners for taking so long, we laugh them out of the room. Perspective matters.
> "As a man, let me explain to you why this thing you've experienced as sexism isn't really sexism."
> Thanks, Hacker News, that's so helpful.
It is helpful.
Rachel explained her experiences and her interpretation of those experiences. That's her right.
David has that right too. Got it?
Look—I realize it's trendy for feminist men to declare (or to passive-aggressively imply, in your case) that other men aren't allowed to discuss certain issues unless they express compliant views. I realize men are supposed to myopically defer[1] to women in every discussion about gender, even when those discussions can result in policies that could negatively affect large demographics.
But we need to stop giving in to those (male) bullies and realize that it's okay to have and share your opinion.
What an obnoxious reply. What they said was almost precisely what I would have said. Someone went to get someone else's opinion after you told them what to do? We all deal with that. People didn't immediately silence when you peeped in a meeting? Happens to everyone (indeed, capturing attention in a meeting is a difficult skill that most -- including most males -- don't have. Despite being extremely avoidant in my youth, somehow I gathered the skills such that I almost always end up dominating, to the point of feeling guilty afterwards).
Life is unfair sometimes (and others it is simply fair and we are unwilling to accept it). Attributing that to fundamental grievances isn't necessarily useful.
And it is bullshit to simply assume that is sexism. It may be sexism, but it might not. And from an anecdote perspective I think back through my career and many of the most powerful, final-word people I've worked with were women.
I'm male, and have had all of these things happen to me. To me this just screams "I'm looking for a reason to espouse my reasoning for my feminism at people". yawn
Here's a potentially troubling question: Is it considered Xist, for whatever variable X you're concerned about, to infer anything about some proposition Y based on the observation that X = x? That is, is it Xist to rely upon prior knowledge that X and Y are correlated? Or is it just Xist to make stronger predictions about Y than are supported by the data?
Another way of asking the question: If we constructed a perfectly unbiased Bayesian robot and fed it the true distributions of X and Y, would we observe its predictions about Y based on given values of X and conclude that the robot is Xist?
Yelling AND saying something insulting at the same time was overkill. Just repeating "Hold on here" or something similar at increasing volumes until other people finally shut up would have had the same benefits. Still insulting, but less so.
I interrupt people all the time, male and female alike. (Hey -- if you're paying my rates, you might want to actually hear what I have to say. :D) It does seem more necessary to then go back and ask the women afterwards what they were trying to say; the men generally don't need that kind of prompting.
I fully accept that sexism could be driving all of the incidents laid out.
But ...
If one person tells you r=2 is a bad idea, maybe you listen. If two people say it, then three. Well at some point you are an idiot if you keep ignoring. And Google(?) is not known for employing idiots.
If you have to interrupt your co-workers discussion with "put down the crack pipes", I would like to suggest that it might be worth considering that being blanked in the aggressive and frustrating way described is really unprofessional. I mean deeply revealing of a lot of anger and problems. Which means her team is made of of men who have some serious issues, life-crippling levels of sexism.
Or
Well, maybe being prepared to shout that the team is so wrong they are smoking crack, indicates that it is worth looking at the glass house around us.
Getting on with others is hard. In a high pressure work environment it's very hard, in one where Aspergers is just next door for most of the industry, then its even harder.
Running good technical teams is hard and we get it wrong more often than not. Which is why "don't flip the bozo bit" is a vital piece of advice.
But I would also suggest that don't flip the -ism bit without looking deeply at our own behaviour is important.
We live and we die. I was born in 1971, the year of a sitcom called "Love thy neighbour" where the 'joke' was a black family moved in next door. The range of deep seated -isms in my head is vast. But it is a fallacy to think that my head is the only broken one on the planet.
I take my steer from a man with a truly broken head - John Nash was right - we live in a Game Theory world, where actions breed reactions and re-reactions.
In some egregious cases the -ism is so bad it is clearly offensive, and clearly intolerable. Let's say it's order of magnitude out of whack.
In other cases, less so. Women, ethnic minorities, LBGTG and others are at disadvantages because of who they are thats got to be wrong. But we are in a ever shifting game. And the secret of winning the game is not winning, it's improving - changing us.
Want my opinion on the best path to business success. Therapy. Seriously.
I have met billionaires and tramps, people who sold all their possession dn people who have ten of everything, the ones I am jealous of are the ones who have peace. They were not the ones with the money.
There is sexism, racism and every other ism around. It seeps into every day life and it is never acceptable to just let it lie. But just as challenging something there and then is cause for for ing those responsible to look at and question their base assumptions about how they behave, there is always room to look at our own assumptions, for we are all playing a game called life, there is no umpire, no final score, no second round play offs.
Sometimes other people's problems are an opportunity for us. Sometimes just move on.
The first example, the HR one - where you just assume the women are the non-technical personnel and the men are the technical personnel? That one I believe because I know I've done it myself numerous times.
Too often this debate is painted as a battle of good vs evil, either derisively by its detractors or heroically by the firebrands. It's not good versus evil. It's just natural habits we've built up because technical women are really freaking rare. When I'm being interviewed by a woman, I assume she's HR and not tech because I think less of women... but because 90% of the HR people I've been interviewed by were women, and 100% of the technical people I've been interviewed by were men.
It's not some evil decision to keep women down, not even any kind of sexism of thinking less of women... just subconscious assumptions because we're used to the fact that the ladies in the room aren't really part of the technical side of the discussion.
Spot on about a lot of it being unconscious assumptions, not premeditated evil.
But that doesn't make it any different from the point of view of the recipient of such treatment. In some ways it's worse, because people don't even _realize_ how they're treating you, which they sure would if they were doing it on purpose.
This sort of subconscious cultural assumption is _exactly_ how discrimination can easily happen even when no one is explicitly out to get anyone else, and is one of the most important things to try to address...
And that's what the author is exactly outlining in her post: everytime someone brings those things up, a lot of the answers are like yours.
"What if it was just a misunderstanding or a coincidence?"
That's bullshit. You weren't there, OP was.
I love the innate nerd skepticism, but at times like this it really is our worst enemy.
Who would you rather listen to- a sane, reasonable and relatively smart person (based on her credentials and accomplishments) giving you their take on things for which they were physically present; or the little voice in your head that says "but it was probably just a coincidence!", even though you have zero knowledge of the situation except for what you just read of it?
If there were two blogs, written by sane nice sounding engineers, and they gave two different sides to an unpleasant story?
I ammcoming at this from the point of view of a ex-manager who has had to deal with situations where, yes, something and someone has gone too far, but it is far from obvious that there is a guilty party and an innocent party. Just a seeping morass of grey and you get to play referee.
I think I am saying that it's the tiny daily cuts that really deeply wear people down, but it's the big obvious infractions that we can actually spot, call out and deal with.
So as far as I a middle aged white guy understand it, the -isms are mostly background radiation, in some teams and organisations there are great people who act as boron rods, soaking up the crap and turning things into a pleasant place to work. At other places not so much. Work at the former.
I've had my fair share of assholes who want to monopolize the discussion in my life. But in a team setting, even the most know it all, egocentric douchebag amongst them would not ignore me or disallow me from contributing after multiple attempts and gestures indicating I had something to say. And I'm generally not that assertive. Nor has anyone every questioned my recountings of them as "did you really have input relevant or were you just misunderstanding the boys talking?".
I've never had an interviewee doubt my credentials or question the role I claimed. Especially not regularly.
Sure I too will ask around about settings or capabilities if I'm not geting the answer I want, but I sure wouldn't go grudgingly back to the team's expert after I asked some random guy in the next cube over, and say "oh random guy said to do it the way you suggested too, so let's do that."
Finally, that there is a pattern here is suggestive of something. Given the other posts rachel has written, I'm not so sure that any of this is her just coming across some way, she seems like a pretty competent engineer, which according to everyone in these discussions of sexism seems to be all you need to not experience these issues. It really does seem to me like the type of bullshit that women generally report encountering, so I suspect it isn't just that she is the only woman who never experienced sexism, and instead has a rare personality type which results in symptoms identical to sexism.
When I'm being interviewed I ask everyone involved where they are coming from. It's de rigueur for a number of reasons. First, one of the best ways to understand someone is to listen to their perspective. Second, it's good etiquette and people will like you more if you listen to them talking about themselves. Third, how am I supposed to sell to you if I don't know you?
How could you not ask this question of your interviewer and expect it to go well?
edit: looking back on how many interviews where I've done this. I hope I've not offended anyone by not assuming they were a certain <status_jobtitle>. Frankly, I just don't know enough about them to guess. So I have to ask. If they're the type that gets bent out of shape because I couldn't tell job title from their halo then perhaps we aren't a good fit anyway.
If you want to convince someone who doubts the existence of the "cat food factory", these examples suck. Okay, the assuming the woman is from HR but that the guy is from Eng, yeah, we all believe that one. It hasn't happened to us guys, maybe we can imagine making that mistake (and regretting it), etc. But the other two stories? That shit happens to guys all the time.
Yeah, sometimes people won't believe you. And then they'll ask someone else. And eventually they'll believe someone else, maybe. And that someone else will probably be a guy.... because almost everyone in tech is a guy. I'm constantly getting ignored, and then some guy gets listened to (I'm a guy). And as for the "crack pipes" story, we don't really have enough details, but it's VERY easy to read that story and think "damn right you screwed up". And I've been ignored and talked over (I'm a loud guy). So, yeah, that stuff happens to men.
Of course, the real question is not "do these things happen to women and not men". That's like saying "[all] men are taller than [all] women", it's obviously false, because sometimes I meet women over 6' tall. But of course we know that both mean and median female heights are lower than male... the whole curve is offset by like 5" in the USA. It's totally plausible that the distribution of respect at technical skill discriminates in favour of males. It's plausible that it doesn't, or that the effect is pretty small. If you want to convince an unbeliever, a few examples of moderate disrespect are like pointing out a few examples of 5'6" guys (taller than the median US female). It's just not persuasive!
And, in fact, in my opinion, it's worse than non-persuasive. It gives the people who don't believe you (and don't want to) a straw man to fixate on. "That shit happened to me too [and it did!] and therefore her claim about privilege is wrong [wait, what]." If you want to advance a cause, you would do well to make sure you only emit Grade-A arguments.
I don't know whether there is a "cat food factory" chopping up "fish" in the tech industry. I would guess rachelbythebay knows better than me (she's closer to the issue, and IIRC she's logged more time in the industry), but I am skeptical about whether or not she really knows either. Maybe I'm wrong and she has attempted to do science on the subject. But if she has only her own experience (as I have only my own), then her interpretive bias will be a huge factor in her conclusions (as mine is in mine). Just as my ego benefits when I fool myself into believing that my privilege plays only a tiny role in my success (mock me here, please), her ego would benefit if she were to fool herself into overstating the benefits of the privilege that she does not have (and understating the benefits of the privileges she does have).
It should have materially affected the perf score; you saved them how much trouble by eventually getting them to notice this? That should be a 10-20% bump at least.
Google is big. Big companies are usually run by bureaucracy and policies. Leave and go work in startup, which are usually run by people. I know, working in Google is cool and pays well. But there's no free lunch. I've always preferred smaller companies where you can actually talk to the CEO (and all people in between) and it's not that bad a place to be.
> Leave and go work in startup, which are usually run by people.
Keep in mind that, in full cynicism, the "CEO" of an SV startup is the VC; the guy who calls himself "CEO" is a product manager. If you actually want to work at a place where you have any chance of influencing things, make sure you can talk to the investors, not just the folks in your own office. (In a bootstrapped startup, the CEO is the investor, so this just becomes tautological.)
I try to leave out the cussing but cutting through smarmy corporate BS to actually accomplish stuff with minimal process is a valuable skill and one that should be cultivated by everyone.
Well, being ignored is something that should never be done in a business model, be it a coffee shop or the biggest tech company in the world. However, that statement was completely out of line.
Assuming she doesn't have a glass and a fork, or a convenient lightswitch... I might suggest knocking loudly on the table before mentioning crack pipes. But I can't really fault her for missing out that step.
Well, a more neutral response is always better if you are being ignored. Even if you have to stand on the table, then yell, "TIME OUT EVERYONE", then proceed.
Seriously, get together with Michael OChurch and do a YouTube/podcast show "Everyone in Tech is Evil and Dumb". It would be super entertaining, and you could sell premium ad space for those techie eyeballs.
This woman is just an extremely negative and hostile personality. She's technically competent, so she can justify her behavior in her own head, but she's basically a female bully who thinks people don't like her because she's female. No, they don't like her because she is an unpleasant and caustic personality. After leaving Google, for years she writes stories about how smart she was, how irrationally they discriminated, how dumb they all were, and so on.
Yet last I looked Google was still standing up on its own hind legs without her. Just a little more than that, in fact. Maybe they just didn't want to work with a smart asshole with a perpetual chip on her shoulder.
> This woman is just an extremely negative and hostile personality.
I've been wondering what to say to you to get you to wise up for the last half hour, you usually have some pretty interesting stuff to say but this is such a personal attack that I give up. Why? What are you trying to achieve other than profiling yourself as nasty, negative and hostile yourself?
I've never met Rachel, but I read her blog fairly regularly and have never gotten the impression that she's unpleasant. On the contrary, she sounds like she'd be a fun person to work with.
Looking through her logs[1], Some of her posts are a little off.
one[2] ,for example, berates other programers for stupid solutions to a simple problem, then uses sin and cos for simple discrete calculations.
That's well within acceptable hacker irritability levels, however. In fact I think it might be a bit lower than normal, so I'm not seeing what the parent post is talking about.
Seriously. Had I been in the same position, which I have, I would have just silently observed the heated discussion, identified the linchpin, and approached them afterwards.
On one hand she describes these guys as loud, wrong, assholes. And then she takes action to interject the correct answer in a way that just proves she's the loudest asshole there (but RIGHT!). Then all of a sudden, the whole episode is ascribed to sexism? She must have left out a lot of details, cuz I don't see it.
Later that afternoon, my boss came in and said, "Ry, you don't know what other people are going through in their lives." The lead of the other team (who was in the meeting) had been to rehab for his crack addiction.