Hacker News Reader

Comment by hasmolo | Hacker News Reader

this feels a little disingenuous. the dude is a public facing exec that said shitty stuff about women, working at a company that heavily signals it won’t be like that. it seems like a lower level employee with the same views wouldn’t write a book including them or be liable for those views.

context is important

View on HN

> context is important

Funny you say that while clearly knowing nothing about the context of his comments!

It shouldn't matter what his role is. Saying some off the cuff stuff a few years ago in an obscure book doesn't make a workplace unsafe. That is disingenuous.

I've seen people fired for similar "unsafe" bullshit. Literally anything can trigger these deranged individuals. They're just out to play victim and get attention.

And no, I don't think all toxic workplace behaviour is like this, many places have narcissists and similar types roaming the halls making things extremely traumatic for many people. That stuff is real and I feel for the people that get out through the ringer by these environments.

But a book? 6 years ago? In the context of a zombie apocalypse hypothetical? Get the fuck outa here.

“ They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”

so this is ok because he’s saying they’re only useless in an apocalyptic scenario? he’s literally saying that the core of women is useless in the “real world”.

i understand that it can feel like there’s a group of anonymous “woke thugs” wondering the internet trying to get people. if you feel that way it might be useful for you to try and empathize with why someone would feel that way.

If I recall, the context was that he was dating a woman who was a bit of a tomboy and saying how cool it was that she was better at power tools and such than he was, and this comparison to typical SF tech women was part of that extended riff. It wasn't part of an incel monologue about 'femoids' or something.

Ultimately, if we let this continue, it becomes a war on flavor and humor, where no rhetorical fun is allowed lest someone take it the wrong way.

your point is fair. i agree with the idea that allowing outrage to drive all conversations is terrible.

at the same time, i feel like i’d have known better than to generalize like this and publish it. i understand there’s context about how/why it was said.

i’d really love to be able to express my thoughts that border on “anti-woke” but i don’t. i feel like the only way for us to be honest about our feelings is to be anonymous.

i guess at some level i would hope this person would’ve been smart enough to know that. there’s a social game we all have to play, and just because it sucks we can’t not deal with it.

In a modern social media world, it's generally a pretty bad idea to make over the top controversial statements even if they have a context and you don't intend them to be taken seriously. And it's probably worth noting that in this case, it became an issue because the person in question wrote them in a published book and was being hired for a fairly high-profile position. But it can just as easily be some 20-something who posts something on Twitter (or gets captured for YouTube)that goes viral, given they're essentially disposable from the perspective of their current (and potential future) employers.

And I don't even blame the companies. They're just looking out for their own interests and individual current or potential future employees have pretty much zero weight as balanced against any public PR hit.

Dude was hired as a senior exec. Part of the job description is being a public persona representing the company. And the majority of the public disagrees with him. What are we taught to do as engineers when we don't agree with the majority? Disagree and commit. What did he do? Throw a temper tantrum along the lines of "how come Dre gets to be sexist and I don't". Forget opinions, he screwed up a basic job requirement. It's OK, we all make mistakes, and his was big enough to get canned. Life goes on.

Only part of 1 passage was in the context of an apocalypse hypothetical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com