Getting free of toxic tech culture

I live in a 2nd tier city (not NY, SF, LA, etc) and these depictions of the "tech industry" are unfamiliar to me. Sure, there's the odd asshole, but those are everywhere. I feel like people around SV and other high competition big cities are generalizing about the industry in a way that doesn't reflect my day to day life.

Also, stories on tech (maybe because of the above?) are trendier. No one cares if a factory or finance firm have toxic cultures (because we all expect them to?).

First thing I thought also. The problem is we have a society where people are dependent on their jobs to keep from being homeless and to maintain their lives. If people had an option to walkaway, the amount of toxic workplaces in any occupation would drop drastically. Any place where people are forced to submit just to keep their lifestyle is an opportunity for someone above them to take advantage.

If anything, then the concern would be "out of the frying pan and into the fire", i.e., leaving tech because of real problems in the industry, but then finding it just as bad or worse in other fields.

Does anyone know of anecdotes where someone says "I left tech because of discrimination, but it was way worse in this other industry, so I returned?"

And yes - I agree that parts of the tech industry are quite progressive. It sounds like (not just from this article) that other parts are quite not.

Yes. It's the 1930's anymore. Especially in the last 20 years even grubby industries have come around to treating their labor with dignity. At least in part because of legal liability.

As in: what every corporation is, by law, required to do. If it doesn't, lawsuits follow.

Of course, marketing sometimes goes a bit over the board, and each release of version 8.4 is the best thing that happened to humanity since v8.3 was released and before it's time to release v8.5. But that's kind of expected, nobody I know takes it as a literal truth.

And of course there are mission statements that talk about improving human condition and expanding horizons and saving the world. Sometimes it happens, at least to a measure, sometimes it doesn't, but that's not usually what you're thinking the whole day about, and even not something you think about every week or every month.

And of course (almost) each startup CEO thinks his (or her) startup is going to change the world, or at least some part of it. That's how you should think if you're getting into a startup, otherwise it's not worth the trouble, the stress and the extremely high chance of failure. Of course the CEO believes she (or he) found some special thing nobody thought of before and some unique vision nobody had before - otherwise how the startup could take off the ground at all?

And really, describing giving up free gym, yoga class and cafeteria as "something horrible happening to you"... I can't even find adequate words to describe how wrong this is.

> The Orwellian mismatch between rhetoric and action feels like cult-like propaganda to me.

Can you list out a few of these actions?

The willingness to take tons of shit from above, and the ability to rationalize the waste of talent seems to be what you’d expect from a glorified casino for billionaires. Variable-Ratio reward training will fuck you up.

Edit: I would guess that fear plays a role too. I recall a poster here saying they wished they could change their circumstances, but they look at the guy delivering their pizza and feel terrified that could be them.

Edit: Or a mod can just minimize this, but sadly it changes nothing, least of the the reality of your situation.

Poor people, regardless of color, have a remarkably similar experience (with education, the police, the criminal justice system), while yes, people of color are more likely to be poor - the harder we focus on race, the harder it is to fix the underlying issue, a lack of educational, and economic mobility for the poor.

Most racism (heck, most "-isms" in general), are born from a lack of familiarity with people who come from a different life background or culture than they do - if we both encourage opportunity for the poor, and encourage mixing of socioeconomic strata, the problem will melt away over 40-50 years.

The racism that will remain after solving poverty, will be of a very different nature I believe than that which exists now.

It's dangerous to fall for the trap that you can adjust for outcomes - but we can do a far better job of adjusting for inputs - or ensuring the poor have equal access to education, and economic opportunity.

Yeah, I was going to say that, in my experience, Stanford/Harvard graduate types are probably disproportionately favored in SV.

Can you elaborate on this? I assume Stanford and Harvard had higher admissions requirements (grades, test scores) than my state university? Or is the comparison relative to other elite educational institutions?

For instance, if 5% of people in category A leave each year, and 30% of people in category B leave each year, and 10% of each of them cite sexual harassment as the reason to leave, I would say that we have a much bigger problem with sexual harassment against category B. (And, at the same time, I would also say that anyone saying that category A doesn't face this problem at all / it's not worth addressing / whatever is wrong!)

This article was more about the effect of teacher bias in education, however I think there is a study showing bias having a cognitive effect on how students perform.

http://time.com/3705454/teachers-biases-girls-education/

"The impact of unconscious teacher bias is long understood and well-documented. This new research confirms decades of work done by Myra and David Sadker and Karen R. Zittleman. Through thousands of hours of classroom observations, the Sadkers and Zittleman identified specific ways in which implicit and stereotypical ideas about gender govern classroom dynamics. They, as others have, found that teachers spend up to two thirds of their time talking to male students; they also are more likely to interrupt girls but allow boys to talk over them. Teachers also tend to acknowledge girls but praise and encourage boys. They spend more time prompting boys to seek deeper answers while rewarding girls for being quiet. Boys are also more frequently called to the front of the class for demonstrations. When teachers ask questions, they direct their gaze towards boys more often, especially when the questions are open-ended. Biases such as these are at the root of why the United States has one of the world’s largest gender gaps in math and science performance. Until they view their videotaped interactions, teachers believe they are being balanced in their exchanges.

The two reports released last week were focused on girls. However, the same biases have been implicated in teachers unconsciously undermining boys’ interest in the arts and language, enabling harmful gender gaps in self-regulation, and tacitly accepting certain male students’ propensity to believe that studying is “for girls” – all factors that contribute to boys’ lower academic performance."

I notice a trend in being demeaning towards people not wanting to do anything besides computing/tech. Why is that acceptable? Is my life worse because I don't do "hiking" or some other stuff? I like spending my free time coding, and I hate hearing I should do "something better with my life".

That's a very high demand. People can leave the industry for a very wide variety of reasons, often mutually contradictory - some want to work as much as possible, provided it translates to $$$$, some are ok with earning less provided they can pursue side interests or family life, some want to make worldwide impact and break paradigms and change the world, some want quiet, predictable and organized workplace, some want high-risk/high-reward environment, some want benefits of predictable income and steady promotion... It is literally impossible to make an industry in which there would be nothing that would cause anybody to leave. Tech industry not special - some people may try it and find it's not what they'd like to do anymore and leave.

Surely, if some things bother people and we could reasonably fix them without bothering even more people in the process, then there's no reason not to do it - it'd be a positive-sum action that would make the world better.

But pre-committing to a goal that no non-zero subset of reasonable people ever wanted to leave tech does not seem like a smart thing to do, because it's impossible.

I used to think like this. After years and years of refining my own behavior, a non-work, non-"tech" friend let it slip that my fiends though I had turned into a non-confrontational, lawyer-sounding, people-pleaser. He wasn't wrong, I had gotten in the habit of always walking on eggshells, navigating every conversation like a minefield and letting myself be treated like a doormat. I did. After all, if I hadn't, I'd be one of those "bros" that only people who have never met a bro say are filling up the engineering departments.

The very next day I got chided about not being empathetic enough or whatever the buzzword was at the time. Maybe I could have kept up the facade if I was simply guilty by association. But it was specifically my behavior that was "toxic." That was it. And I'm out. I'm done.

The never-docile-enough nature of "tech" is what's toxic. I hadn't been able to feel comfortable in my own skin for years out of fear of being off-putting to anyone else. The people who's behavior is worth changing aren't listening anyway, so I'm done letting it be my fault, and I'm never over-correcting to make up for it again.

edit: Want to complain about something in "tech"? Why don't you (not you, specifically, parent poster) start with the ethics of your employer's products/practices.

This shifts from the pseudo-objective, nebulous standard of "reasonable" to a much more clearer standard of what you personally want to support and what you personally don't. For instance, there are people I would easily call "reasonable" who hold religious views that I myself have held in the past but which I now believe are incompatible with the society I want to see. I don't want to work with these people. I am not actively opposed to working with them - I suspect I'm coworkers with lots of such people right now - but I have no particular desire to help those people make money. If they want to start their own business with like-minded folks, great; I support their freedom to do so.

However, I do want to work with good engineers of various demographics underrepresented in my industry, because I want to work with the best engineers my company can hire (a secondary goal to "I want society to work in certain ways," so the desires in the previous paragraph would override this desire, but hopefully that happens rarely). If someone from one of those groups says, this behavior bothers me so much that I'll leave over it, then yes, absolutely, I'm going to trust them and what they say they care about.

(And if you say "Actually, I don't particularly want to work with people of this demographic?" That's fine, in the sense that it's a free country. But you would fall into the group of people that I no longer want to work with because I think that politically/financially empowering you would not build the society I want to see; I would much rather compete with you.)

Isn't the problem here that there is really no global (or even industry-wide) consensus on what's reasonable and what's not?

What feels perfectly reasonable to one may look absolutely and intolerably insane to someone else. And vice versa.

I think this linked post is pretty good, specifically with this bit showing a nuance that is lacking in more mainstream-media regurgitations of "tech is bad, news at 11": "We say “toxic tech culture” because we want to distinguish between leaving tech entirely, and leaving areas of tech which are abusive and harmful."

I do understand the sort of "righteousness fatigue" that makes people tired of hearing about how they, their coworkers, their employer, their friends, are so terrible. Lose too much nuance and the reaction gets defensive, which from a purely practical point of view is a problem (this might get labeled as a "privileged" thing to be concerned with, but it's tough to reconcile wanting change but not being concerned with accomplishing it). I think a lot of the mainstream coverage of this is starting to poison the well, and then you end up with "sure, it's not your responsibility as non-white-male to fix the behavior of assholes, but it's not my responsibility to fix that asshole either."

Which leaves me back where I started. If my company seems pretty good in this respect - the ratio isn't great, a factor of our incoming applications/recruiting, but retention is high among the relevant employees, and no complaints have been raised (at least at my level of visibility). We try to broaden our candidate pool, and have widened it a LOT in the last five years, and are definitely hiring more candidates who do great despite not being run through the 5-algorithms-on-a-whiteboard gauntlet, but that doesn't translate directly into women and minorities...

So other than continuing to work at attracting a broaer pool of candidates... What else should we do? Even if only from the "name and shame" perspective of "god, it's annoying seeing the gender ratio published"?

Asking seems like a good first step, since another pervasive issue in tech is too many people who try to solve problems without ever thinking of talking to someone about it. :)

Maybe.

But why don't those same people build companies that don't have this behavior and out-compete the companies that do?

It's not enough to eliminate the behavior, you have to eliminate the incentive.

To that end, founding a "service" to help me be diverse doesn't convince me. Founding a company doing something and blowing your competitors out of the water because your diverse employee base simply outperforms them convinces me.

a) People will not want to acknowledge just how oppressive, racist, and sexist, our society has been in the past and the demonstrable ways in which we are still dealing with the aftereffects of that.

b) People will not want to acknowledge that there is systemic sexism and racism, with extremely negative and unjust consequences for those discriminated against, within our society, and that consequentially ....

c) People will not want to acknowledge that there is systemic sexism & racism within business, including tech, with negative and unjust consequences for those discriminated against, particularly, and relevant to this article, women.

Think that it wasn't until 1919 that women got the right to vote; it wasn't that long ago. It's logical to extrapolate from the sexism of the past that there is sexism (not as pernicious but still here in a big way) in the present.

But reasonable people were offended by Brandon Eich donating to an anti-gay marriage proposition, and other reasonable people were offended that he got ousted from Mozilla.

Some people are offended by Damore and been quite vicious towards him, others are saying he's right about things (including you pretty much can't be a conservative in Silicon Valley).

Isn't reality more complex than this idea? Its easy enough to say "don't comment on a coworkers physical appearance" or something equally stupid, but "any non-zero subset" offended by any particular behavior doesn't seem reasonable.

One easy rule is that if someone says "Only talk to me about work." then the other person has to respect it. No forcing of social acceptance , no shaming the other to believe what you believe, just focus on what you were hired for. This is a standard taught to many managers to keep the company out of harassment issues , its very robotic unemotional but its clear and will allow different groups to work together as long as this rule is enforced.

Basically we should not have to worry about a toxic culture because you should not be forced into one when you work. You should just be able to work and separate yourself from your task in any emotional way.

[California dev, 8 years, have held manager position]

My partner left finance to work in medicine. She makes a lot less money and likes it a lot better. I dunno where you live, but becoming a physician assistant can be a pretty good gig: much less school, pretty good salaries, pretty defined hours, very little debt.

Personally, I worked at a series of toxic startups and needed two years away to not loath programming. I regret nothing about leaving tech the first time, and after returning, my biggest regret is waiting so long to start my own company. Closely followed by tolerating so many shitty bosses. It helped me to have friends that did things besides work; workaholics are very common in sfbay. Dunno if that helps, but good luck.

B) Would you be willing to clarify what was toxic about your experience with SV startups as you described?

C) Realistically, without denying the problems which probably do exist with "intersectionaly identity politics", etc, it seems pretty clear (as in there are studies, etc) that sexual harassment is one of the most toxic aspects, not only of tech, but of contemporary business and American life. Discrimination based on the color of one's skin is up there as well. So it does seem a bit disingenuous to point out the flaws in ways in which people are trying to ameliorate these problems without acknowledging the problems themselves, and/or to imply that said flaws are more pervasive than the damaging behaviors which they are a response to.

That said though, the developer-oriented tech conferences definitely skew towards "rockstar" in terms of who is popular and I mean that word in the most negative sense possible. I have found this especially true of the "inclusive" ones. I feel sick around personality cults and avoid more and more of these.

As someone who develops for a non-technical industry, I've gotten a lot of sneers from other developers when I explain my company and role. At the end of the day though, I have 10x as much responsibility and appreciation at my job than they do in theirs. I'm leaving my job in ~2 weeks and I've had half a dozen exit interviews with people in different roles here and even a C-level (a real C-level, not a startup C-level) from another office across the country flying in just to have a meeting and say goodbye to me. How many "average developers" (because that's all I am) get to have that level of impact?

GREAT question.

I've often pondered this. Shooting from the hip I would wager this question is easier to answer if one considers the source of one's income.

I'm a political science graduate, who fell into tech early in his career. For me, tech is just a job that's paying for my continued studies. It's a means to an end. It's why I absolutely loathe talking about work when I'm not at work, and in general talking about what I do for a living. Not for a lack of pride, I am definitely proud of where I am and how I got here given the circumstances, it's just not my passion and no I'm sorry I don't want to troubleshoot your tech issues at 6:30 on a Thursday or any other time.

It's nothing personal, it's just I do this sometimes upwards of 60 hours a week and outside of those hours, I'd rather have a normal life where I can do things that appeal to me. No offers of buying me a six pack or a free dinner can really change that.

Different strokes for different folks, though --and that's perfectly OK if other folks DO want to live this way through their chosen professions.

The answer to your question is probably ultimately answered by YMMV.

--Solzhenitsyn

I think there's probably more to your observation than meets the eye. Specifically, there is a kind of dilemma that faces most workers these days. They can either A) get a nice, safe, "boring" career, or B) do something on their own (which is risky).

The people who choose A) are the kind of people who want stability and comfort while the people who choose B) typically do so because they have some kind of goal or motivation that they're willing to endure some resistance and risk to achieve. I personally suspect lots of programmers are joining startups expecting A, when the culture is closer to that of B (since the founders of any given startup have, almost by definition, chosen B.)

This is not true. Color lines were reinforced in ww2. It didn't recede. Black soldiers were routinely attacked by white soldiers. And japanese american soldiers couldn't serve in the pacific for a variety of reasons ( including being killed by their fellow white american soldiers ) and in europe, japanese soldiers were essentially killed off by their own white commanders in suicide attacks. Feel free to look up the death rates of japanese american soldiers in europe. It's horrendous. Pretty much a war crime.

Race riots occurred between american white and black soldiers in australia, britain, etc. Feel free to google battle of bamber bridge or the battle of brisbane.

The civil rights movement happened because ww2 WORSENED race relations, not made it better. And with the advent of tremendous economic wealth, people were more willing to confront the race relations.

The civil rights movement was a result of more racism, not less and the wealthy post-ww2 country which provided the environment where people were willing to consider civil rights. You could argue that the post-ww2 economic prosperity had more to do with the civil rights movement than anything else.

What indications do you have that those are the reasons you are unemployable?

I have many well respected, senior coworkers who fit this description so at least personally I don't understand why people would be hesitant to hire you based on that description alone..

I get the ageist comments too, and contract work has really been dwindling. Web Dev really seems a young person game. If my husband didn't have a stable job, I'd be in a lot of trouble.

Edit: Not to discount your experience with ageism. Ageism does exist and is something we need to be aware of. Just that it's not this way everywhere.

It wouldn't have helped if you were a minority either: in fact that can be even harder - at least around here.

But it is annoying in a special way to hear about that male privilege thing and know it means next to nothing - and still be told you should feel bad about it.

Do you think you'd want to be a part of such a hostile crowd who assumes less of your ability and that none of your credentials are deserved due to handouts?

You having pesky distractions like children, however... how can you be trusted to put the company's deadlines first in a situation like that? It's just that... the thing is... you're just not a good culture fit.

In this particular case, it is natural that people that believe they are treated unfairly leave, and conversely, if somebody left, one of the probably reasons is because they were unhappy, and one of common reasons of unhappiness is that they don't believe they were treated fairly. The question pertinent to the purpose of the article is do e.g. women have it worse? For that, one needs more than one number, so any claim that includes only one number is automatically disqualified from providing proper information - it provides no more than half of it.

(Anyway, personally, I think that toxic tech culture selects against "people who don't fit the stereotype," which includes lots of men, and lots more women, and I don't think framing this as either "it's terrible for women and not for men" or "actually men have it worse" is particularly productive.)

EDIT: I see that the article links the Kapor report with the sentence "Staying silent about the unfairness that causes 37% of underrepresented people of color to leave tech helps no one," which I think is the same misreading of the Kapor report. 37% of underrepresented people of color who have left tech have left because of unfairness - it is not that 37% of underrepresented people of color in tech have left because of unfairness. The previous sentence from the author, about the 50% retention rate, looks like it better supports the narrative point being made (although the source is about STEM as a whole and not just tech).

And as people who refuse to see other viewpoints go—would you say the same about posts from people who believe that, say, mass surveillance is bad, or net neutrality is good, or Apple should not cooperate with subpoenas for user data? The authors of those posts are also very unlikely to see opposing positions.

Proof?

> Moreover, this particular point of view is from a radical organization

Define "radical."

> you can't really have intellectual discourse with people who refuse to see any other position than theirs.

How does one tell if this is the case? How does one tell _which_ party refuses to see things from another position? How does one tell if it is in fact miscommunication, or lack of a shared understanding? How does one tell if in fact one of the parties is not discussing in good faith?

Your first point is empirically false, though I'm too lazy to look for links. The second point seems circular, but doesn't matter in any case, since the idea here is to have good conversation with each other.

I know it disappoints some of the systematizers here, but IMO there's no substitute for human judgment being in the mix. HN functions best as a complex system with many feedback loops between community, software, and moderation.

(We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16182520 and marked it off-topic.)

It's a common misconception, but Hacker News really isn't identified with or immersed in Silicon Valley. Those of us moderating it are largely on the margins of SV and always have been, and the community by no means has its center of gravity there. It's globally distributed and on the whole rather anti-SV in orientation.

(The parent was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16182520 but I detached it to contain this offtopicness.)