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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting for many reasons.

Tech is not inherently obnoxious. Government research labs don't have cultures that repel women or where microaggressions (also known as "pissing contests") dominate. Tech is this way because it comes from the top (VCs) down, and because it's private-sector tech oriented toward products that mostly don't matter but might make a few individuals rich... and the scramble for position, to be a founder instead of an engineer in one's next gig, dominates any technical focus because most of these startups are actually technically boring and sloppy.

I admire the OP for having the courage to stand up and speak the truth about the state of this industry (to be fair, it's worse in California than almost anywhere else) but the questions that come to my mind are... (1) who's going to stick around and fight? and (2) how do we fix it?

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I don't know about all government research labs - but I do have friends and family doing Ph.Ds (or postdoccing, or even on the tenure track) where the culture is far, far worse than in Silicon Valley. Get close enough to scientists and you'll see that those fields (and it's not just one...I've heard this about molecular biology, physics, and computer science) are doing their own soul-searching about oppressive cultures.

An associate professor at a relatively prestigious university that I worked under had essentially become a manager. His days were dominated by answering calls and emails, writing grants, and going to meetings, with all of the actual scientific research delegated to his grad students. Oppressive indeed.

Academia is pretty awful, too. Scarcity makes people bad. The tech world's problem isn't real scarcity but false poverty (OP's "this is a startup" excuse) and the mentality that you get in a false poverty culture.

> I admire the OP for having the courage to stand up and speak the truth about the state of this industry

I share your admiration to the OP's courage, and while my own experiences are not as extreme as this article, there is a bizarre resonance in it all.

> (1) who's going to stick around and fight? and (2) how do we fix it?

The one problem I see with this is that we are spoiled by money. "Tech" is a field that produces return on investment, so there's lots of money to burn. In more traditional fields, the economic failures caused by this kind of misbehavior would force out the players who cannot do a minimum of self regulation.

Not us I say. It is hard to convince people of these and other structural problems if they are making money hand over fist. The bosses that say "Suck it up, cry baby" don't really have to even pretend to listen to you. Everything is going well after all. If mistreating high skilled people would put their own positions and incomes in jeopardy, they'd at least have to pay attention.

I just finished a blog post on exactly the topic you're bringing up. There's so much money in tech that it permits a criminal degree of mismanagement. https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/can-tech-fix...

>and because it's private-sector tech oriented toward products that mostly don't matter but might make a few individuals rich

That's better than most government research lab projects (in CS) that mostly don't matter and rarely produce anything that the private sector or academia in Universities hasn't already done.

In CS the government research labs are where the washed up post-docs go that couldn't get a tenure-track position and didn't pass interview for a large company with a decent internal research group (e.g. Google, IBM, etc).

"The scramble for position" is probably pretty universal. It's certainly common in academic science, especially since instead of scrambling "to be a founder instead of an engineer," a better mapping would be "to be a founder instead of unemployed."

> where microaggressions (also known as "pissing contests") dominate

That's my most hated thing about coding - alpha nerd pissing contests, especially when it's about technology choices backed by opinion only.

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