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[return to "Getting free of toxic tech culture"]
1. leroy_+I6[view] [source] 2018-01-18 23:46:11
>>zdw+(OP)
The tips in here on topics like building relationships outside work, being financially prudent and learning how to say no are all good nuggets of advice.

With that said, I thought that the article's title was kind of ironic because in my opinion, the intersectional identity politics espoused by the authors is itself one of the most toxic aspects of contemporary tech culture. It's the part of working at a mature venture-funded startup in SV that I miss the least, by far.

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2. adamse+A9[view] [source] 2018-01-19 00:16:16
>>leroy_+I6
A) With respect, your experience and the author's experience may vary, for a variety of reasons, so I'm not sure it makes sense to pit one set of experiences against another, so to speak.

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.

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3. malvos+Ca[view] [source] 2018-01-19 00:24:42
>>adamse+A9
The answer is and always has been to judge people by the output of their work and nothing else. As soon as you bring identity politics into to equation, you’ve lost because many people will (rightly) take attacks on white people and men as racist and sexist respectively.
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4. geofft+Dc[view] [source] 2018-01-19 00:43:58
>>malvos+Ca
> The answer is and always has been to judge people by the output of their work and nothing else.

Should it not be to judge people by the output of their work relative to their working conditions?

I'm much more interested in hiring someone who operated 5 servers in a culture of manual configuration over ssh by introducing automation than someone who operated 500 servers by following existing procedures and using Ansible playbooks that they didn't contribute any improvements to, even though the second person produced quite a bit more output.

(If by "output" you mean to count in this way, then sure, but a lot of people don't—for instance, lots of people want to see GitHub activity without asking whether the previous employer had onerous IP rules, or the candidate has a family they're busy with on evenings and weekends, or whatever.)

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5. buster+of[view] [source] 2018-01-19 01:18:40
>>geofft+Dc
> Should it not be to judge people by the output of their work relative to their working conditions?

If you keep firing people for poor performance who are not performing because of poor working conditions, then eventually you won't be able to retain anyone and the problem takes care of itself.

Meanwhile those folks have likely moved onto better jobs.

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