Comment by 4bpp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 4bpp | Hacker News Reader

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The question what kind of harassment we are talking about seems pretty relevant here. Stories such as http://tech.mit.edu/V136/N9/harassment.html seem to suggest that overbearing, desperate romantic attention (often followed by lashing out when the advances inevitably turn out to be futile) generally is counted as such. In that light, I find the fashionable narrative about boys getting angry about cooties in their club to be somewhat questionable - what if the "unwanted attention" rather than the "sheer malice" type of harassment constitutes the bulk of it?

I imagine the typical perpetrator in that case is a man with negligible romantic experience, who is not particularly attractive, lives in a social environment with a 10:1 M:F ratio and statistically may well be encountering someone of the opposite sex who actually nominally has something nontrivial in common with them for the first time. The "something in common" part is contingent on actually signalling being a capital-p Programmer culturally (e.g. by blogging about programming), rather than someone who appears to be closer to a social activist who just happens to have a job in programming (and might as well be the secretary staffing the front desk for the purpose of commonalities, as far as the would-be harasser can see).

Grasping at straws inevitably ensues, and there are sufficiently many around that some don't react gracefully when the straws snap.

Perhaps the elephant in the room is the large number of young men in our profession that feel desperately lonely.

It's not related to the job per se though, it's more about personality / character (and there was another word but I forgot, er, words); people in IT and software development tend to lean more towards the introvert spectrum, the socially awkward, the physically less fit, etc. That + choosing to spend more time at a computer instead of interacting with people IRL (doesn't have to be that much even) causes a gap in development.

Of course, #NotAllDevelopers; I feel like I'm somewhere in between (but in part because of some effort on my own), and my company has quite a few developers that lean towards extroversion.

The problem in this case is that when someone steps upon a soapbox on the internet, they reach an audience of potentially millions; even if 0.00001% is a bit er, maladjusted, that's still enough for a few people to start making that kind of comment or show that kind of behaviour. Even if 99% of people were well-behaved, the 1% could still cause shit. And that's not easy to deal with.

Lots of people feel desperately lonely, not just in programming.

But one of the modern expectations of a professional work environment is that people can manage how they express their emotions. Screaming and hitting because of anger is not permitted; similarly, harassing and touching because of lust is not permitted either.

I actually don't think that programmers are that much worse than other professions in this respect. We just talk about programmers more than lawyers or soldiers here, because most folks here are programmers or interested in programming.

Harassing and touching shouldn't be and isn't permitted, but asking someone out on dates is pretty common (even if maybe it shouldn't be). The problem is that a mere question can seem like harassment when the ratio of askers to askees becomes too skewed.

There is also the issue that what is socially acceptable behavior depends upon characteristics which we do not want to admit. The difference between creepy and acceptable behavior is sometimes not found in the behavior itself, but in things like the race or appearance of the one engaging in the behavior.

Asking someone out on a date is not harassment, and it's fine if done maturely. Generally that means you take one, at most two shots and then if the other person turns you down, you drop it.

What's not ok is constantly commenting on a person's appearance or clothes, making sex-related jokes or comments in front of the person, staring at them constantly, questioning them about their love life or sex life, etc.

A lot of that stuff falls into the "harmless in a social situation" category, but is on the wrong side of the line for a professional environment. But, that is the sort of stuff that is often permitted, tolerated, or insufficiently discouraged by managers, especially folks who perceive work as a social setting, or want to believe it is a social setting.

Let me say that I agree with you, but that being lonely doesn't excuse their behavior (nor am I trying to say that's what you were implying).

Yes. I am definitely not excusing the behavior.

Really? And that's anyone else's problem but their own because...?

Sorry, learning social skills, learning to manage your time so you can meet people, etc. is not the job of an employer or a profession as a whole.

I'm sure there's plenty of lonely garbage men (purposely phrased as "men"), but no one's suggesting that the public works departments should be ensuring there's more women in the departments for their men to hang out with and fall in love with.

>Sorry, learning social skills, learning to manage your time so you can meet people, etc. is not the job of an employer or a profession as a whole.

Didn't learn job skills, wasted a free k to 12 education, made bad financial decisions? Here, let society help you. We'll tax people to help fund a social safety net because there should be a basic standard of living.

Didn't develop social skills? LOL, LOSER! Why don't you try to teach yourself some social skills. You deserve to be alone until you improve yourself.

Crass and perhaps too blunt, but people should be able to get the basic idea of this double standard.

That's a good point. It only applies if you know your blog's audience in real-life (university, workplace, meet-ups etc), but I guess that's actually the common case. I wouldn't know, I'm not a blogger :)

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