Comment by mtrimpe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtrimpe | Hacker News Reader

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I know it's anecdote and not data but I for one became much more active in agitating against such cases after having been inappropriately dismissed after raising a complaint with HR about a colleague being discriminated against.

I rationalize it as becoming more active in human rights issues after realizing their importance first hand but based on my externally observable behaviour the PTSD explanation could be considered just as valid... and to at least some degree also rings true to me.

So I would say that there is indeed a good chance that a lot of these are caused by PTSD related to previous 'similar' workplace incidents and that indeed preventing those original events will go a long way towards calming the current storm of outrage. Not that I have the slightest clue as to how to do that though...

Did you raise your complaint in a public forum and did you ask for the discriminators to be fired?

I fail to see how this is relevant. Could you explain?

That's roughly the context of the case at hand here.

The initial shots were fired over twitter and included a threat of a boycott unless the 'offending' party was removed from the roster.

I was responding to the hypothesis that many of these 'overreactions' are essentially the result of PTSD symptoms... not the specific case at hand since I wasn't even aware of it.

That a mere comment about a personal experience with this dynamic manages to garner a bunch of downvotes is all the more indication that awareness about such dynamics is sorely lacking in large parts of the IT community... which of course only reinforces those exact same dynamics.

My statement said, and maybe it wasn't clear enough, was that in cases (such as the OPs) where people found offence _and_ the vast majority of others didn't that _maybe_ the majority cause is stress related. So in other words what I am saying is that maybe in these types of really unusual cases there might be this particular unusual cause.

In that case I think your root cause analysis is probably quite accurate but that you're drastically underestimating how common of a driver for this kind of behavior it is.

> not the specific case at hand since I wasn't even aware of it.

It could be the downvotes are because you're off topic, not because of any other links. It's quite hard to assign reasons to downvotes without commentors explaining their vote reasons.

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