Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1_2__3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but none of this story makes any sense at all and I feel like I'm living in some kind of weird alternate reality. Sit down, look at the world around you, and ask yourself if the account seems plausible at all. The number of people not just indifferent but actually full to the brim with malice for this to have gone down at claimed is staggering. Literally dozens of people would have be outright evil - to no benefit of their own, just caricatures of masculine evil - for even half of it to be true as-written. It's just such a cartoonish version of villainy it's what a collective Tumblr mind would spit out as a novella.

View on HN

Sounds like someone who has never worked in this industry or talked to any woman working in this industry. These people are not "evil" even though their behaviors are extremely harmful and reprehensible. What is happening here are extremely privileged and ignorant people (generally white, straight men) operating within a context where there are no consequences for bad behavior.

Your reaction here is also a part of the problem—these kinds of behavior have been extensively documented inside and outside this industry for nearly a hundred years now. You deny and belittle these people's lived experiences with no data of your own to back it up besides banal theories and "cartoonish" ideas of how people operate in the world.

Another thing for you to think about before you respond to this with your poorly researched screed is that there are literally no upsides to Susan for reporting this stuff. All the data we have show that women who report these kinds of behavior get blacklisted from the industry, shunned by their peers, and perhaps face legal action. This doesn't even count the tidal wave of harassment, death threats and worse that comes along with exposing men in power for doing bad things (depression, suicide, paranoia, etc). Think about how awful your own situation would need to be to open yourself up to that sort of thing. No one does this lightly and without cause, and yes this stuff happens all the time and even worse.

Another good read to improve your ignorance of the matter: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace...

>these kinds of behavior have been extensively documented inside and outside this industry for nearly a hundred years now

Holy crap computers have been around for 100 years?

> (generally white, straight men)

Citation needed. Also, think about this. What other sort of adjective used to describe people or sexual orientation would be acceptable to describe people fitting a bad image? If you said the same thing about hispanic bisexual women, would that be socially acceptable?

> Holy crap computers have been around for 100 years?

I'm guessing you weren't able to read the "and outside" part of the sentence you glibly quoted. If anything, claiming that it's less than 100 years is the major failure of that statement.

> If you said the same thing about hispanic bisexual women, would that be socially acceptable?

Can you name an environment where hispanic bisexual women are extremely privileged?

> I'm guessing you weren't able to read the "and outside"

I guess then it's just a rhetorical flourish for no added benefit? 100 years ago there was no inside or outside of the industry - what's the point of that statement?

when Hispanic bisexual women take over this world and start abusing their privilege like the cishetero patriarchy then we will criticize them. Until then, please sit down.

> If you said the same thing about hispanic bisexual women, would that be socially acceptable?

Your PC censorship won't work on this forum. It doesn't matter if it's "socially acceptable" as long as it's true. It's true that it's white, straight men that are generally privileged and ignorant here, and (speaking as a non-white straight man) it's relevant, because the way you're ignorant about things is not having to care about them. I'm much more aware of how my race affects how I interact with the world than about how my gender does.

> because the way you're ignorant about things is not having to care about them.

Bear in mind this discussion is all about people leaping to action on the unsubstantiated claims of one person on their personal blog.

Exactly. As a non-white person, you don't have to care about calling other groups racist, privileged or ignorant. And if somebody is a woman, you don't have to care about calling other people sexist.

And censorship is a strong word. If you want free speech and no censorship, all opinions should be welcomed, and you should not be able to shut down arguments by using identity politics and privilege.

For instance, if you were a male, would your unsubstantiated blog post have had similar impact? That is privilege in a nutshell, that who you are determines how much attention and belief you get.

>All the data we have show that women who report these kinds of behavior get blacklisted from the industry, shunned by their peers, and perhaps face legal action.

Things are far, far better for people who speak out in the contemporary tech industry as opposed to fields like banking, finance, big law, big pharma, and oil. Being blacklisted from a company in one of those industries is a death sentence for your career. That simply isn't true for tech (as of right now). The deeply entrenched connections that exist in the aforementioned industries between competing firms and also with the government simply aren't there in tech.

I personally know three women who have been unfairly blacklisted in some of those industries, and it's not right or fair for you to use that as a talking point here, because the consequences are so much more severe when you are unfairly blamed in those cases.

Massive support networks exist for women in tech, and the powerful people in tech don't have the influence necessary to completely bury things like this under the rug. You can still stand up to a company like Uber or Airbnb without them crushing you and everyone who supports you underfoot.

There are people right in this thread who seem to be arguing that it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Edit: the definitive comedy sketch on the subject "Are we the bad guys?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU

Yes, 100% this kind of thing happens all the time. I think the split is in attributing it to "masculine evil", what I've seen firsthand is more like simple neglect or thoughtlessness.

I attended a small local conference a couple years ago that had forgotten/didn't bother to order any women's t-shirts. It wasn't like the organizers had a meeting and said: "lets exclude women" - they just kind of assumed that everybody could wear the same mens cut of shirt and it would be fine.

To their credit, they were fairly mortified when it was pointed out.

The point of the article is that the managers at Uber were very aware of what they were doing. And that it is a symptom of the culture there.

When I first watched a movie about the slavement of africans and their marine trade, I was just as flabbergasted as you seem to be about this story.

I kept asking myself: how could something like that (people being transported on the basement of a ship, chained to one another) possible?

For someone who was not part of that culture and time, seems impossible that so many people could act in such an evil way.

A community culture can shape peoples minds. A company is just a community.

Gender discrimination is real. Very real. What makes this story appear unbelievable is that very few women will risk their careers to speak up against it.

Just out of curiosity, were you really "flabbergasted" by learning of a particular instance of a practice which had existed in almost every society since prehistory (as even a semi-educated person would have known)?

Everything is new to somebody at some time.

Not the commenter above, but as a kid I knew about slavery, and about "people owning other people". I even knew about how long it had gone on for, and that slaves were transported in ships around the Mediterranean.

That said, I was wholly unprepared for the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade. Due to the higher round trip times, and lack of mid-trip provisioning, there was a requirement to be more "efficient" than the slave trade across land or sea previously.

At least speaking for myself, my compulsory education only really focused on slavery as an American institution and didn't really address it in a broader context. I obviously picked up a little here and there, particularly since I took Latin all through high school and learned a little bit about Roman culture, but it was only recently I learned how widespread slavery really was.

As an example, it was news to me that slavery was still practiced in parts of the Middle East until the 60s, and probably still exists in a less obvious manner today. I was really horrified to learn that tons of slaves left Africa via the Eastern trade routes, and the brutality of those owners is why there's little to no visible evidence of slavery in those parts of the world. Evidence meaning descendants of said slaves.

Slavery still exists in essence in India and East Asia, with domestic servants working for families as soon as they're old enough to wash dishes.

There's a world of difference between

1) being captured by your neighbors, sold to some tribe of slave traders, then resold to ship-owning slave traders, then resold at auction on a different continent, and finally landing on a plantation where the intentional and systematic removal of your human dignity is completed over years in squalid conditions, and

2) not having your company buy you a leather jacket while you're being paid a salary that puts you somewhere in the top 2% of all of humanity.

It's this sort of hyperbole that makes the problem less likely to be solved, since it makes it all seem relatively trivial.

You weren't aware of the cruelties of African enslavement until... you first watched a movie?

This is what's wrong with American education.

There are two options:

1. Everyone is lying about their experiences just for pageviews / attention

2. You haven't experienced the described culture first hand, and are rejecting something you haven't seen as "weird alternate reality".

Is it that implausible that a manager would not want to pay $200 for women's jackets when he is getting the the men's jackets for $100 (numbers made up obviously). That's not Tumblr novella cartoon evil, it's not even "evil", it's just stupidity.

> Sit down, look at the world around you, and ask yourself if the account seems plausible at all.

OK: Yes, it does. Absolutely.

Have you worked in tech?

Just to point out - there are good workplaces in tech too. Really.

I just want to point out that 150 years ago, a huge number of Americans thought that slavery was perfectly moral. That is not very many years ago.

"A lot of people need to be evil for this story to make sense" is not an Occam's-razor counterargument, it is the unfortunate truth.

Makes sense to me. Looks like discrimination against women.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com