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[return to "Getting free of toxic tech culture"]
1. tlb+h7[view] [source] 2018-01-18 23:52:04
>>zdw+(OP)
I predict people will claim "our culture isn't that toxic. Some of those things happen, but they don't bother me much."

If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out.

So don't ask "would this bother me?" Ask "would it bother someone?" And since you can't predict this from inside your head, you have to rely on firsthand accounts of people being bothered. This seems like a good overview of such accounts.

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2. geofft+vl[view] [source] 2018-01-19 02:25:27
>>tlb+h7
Let me propose an alternative to "non-zero subset of reasonable people": "any people you want to work with."

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.)

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