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.
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.
From a managerial perspective I'd love to hire more people from underrepresented groups because it would mean a bigger pool to hire from, so I'm all for recruiting efforts, outreach/education programs, etc, but at the end of the day the yes/no on the candidates coming through the door is in my hands, and even if I wanted to abuse that, I can't hire people who aren't even applying. :|
In what manner is that twitter link "off-topic" in the context of this article?
Has the twitter link ever been discussed here rather than killed?
I, for one, found it quite surprising. Based on news coverage and personal interactions with Googlers, I had no idea people were writing such things without reprimand from HR. In fact, I'd go so far as to say this link is the most substantive and thought-provoking comment in the entire thread.
I was responding to the question:
> Could you elaborate on the form of the attacks on white people and men you're seeing in SV companies?
What could I have done to answer that without posting some evidence?
I can see why, before reading that, you might think this was a double standard, but it isn't. The reason is that adamsea hasn't been using HN primarily for political battle (though I grant you his account history is close to that, and a different moderator might have called it differently). The key word here is 'primarily', which is the test we use, as explained in that comment I just linked to. I didn't reply to you on the basis of one isolated comment but rather on your use of HN overall, which is what we care about.
It's false, of course, that you're "only allowed to discuss one side of this topic without getting kicked off HN". If that were true, we wouldn't have flamewars, and boy do we have flamewars.