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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

> I'm also concerned by reports of abuse, harassment, and discrimination in our community, particularly toward women and other underrepresented groups. Even I have experienced harassment and abuse myself. This may be common in the tech industry but it is not OK.

I find it hard to imagine other professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants, even other engineering disciplines) behaving like this.

Is that a failure of imagination on my part or is IT/CS particularly toxic?

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If you think there is no "abuse, harassment, and discrimination" in the medical, legal, accounting and non-IT engineering professions, you are not paying attention. These are global human problems not restricted to IT/CS.

I didn't mean to imply that there is no "abuse, harassment, and discrimination" in other professions. Of course there are bad people in every field.

But are there death threats, rape threats, doxxing, etc, against total strangers?

Serious question. I just haven't heard of that, except perhaps in the military and police.

> But are there death threats, rape threats, doxxing, etc, against total strangers?

These kinds of things are much easier to perpetrate on the Internet, so they are endemic in communities that are mostly Internet-based. That explains their prevalence in the tech community, but note that they occur in many other online communities (see: computer gaming).

See, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence#Murders

I've spoken to my wife who is a lawyer about this a lot. There are still a lot a abusive lawyers in the world but this abuse has shifted from overt racism/sexism over the years to more subtle forms of abuse and well basically torture. The individuals in question also have to be very high earners or else they are gone quickly and even then quite a lot of them have to move around frequently.

There is also a lot more diversity in those professions these days. That wasn't always the case so it's a good sign we will grow towards that in technology as well.

It could be made worse by the anonymity that is common in our profession. There tend to be trolls in any online forum, regardless of interest, and much of the work in our profession is done via similar channels.

And let's be honest, many of us (myself included) grew up hacking on computers instead of developing typical social skills. Some people grow out of that, some people grow into jerks.

edit: one further thought, there are many cases where someone is a brilliant programmer precisely because they're borderline mentally ill, and that causes some social problems as well.

I think it's just because of internet. I bet they would be much nicer IRL.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect

Medicine and law both have a fair share of abuse and unprofessional behavior, least of all because of the strict experience hierarchies they tend to impose in their practicing entities.

Failure of imagination, unfortunately. You could look up recent scandals and discussion around Australian surgeons for some examples of pretty terrible behaviour in medicine.

No, it's inconceivable that brain surgeons could act as crazily as programers do:

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2015/05/25/4239823.ht...

Oh yes doctors are true saints. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2987558/Young-female...

This is a property of specific communities, not everyone who works with computers.

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