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.
One easy rule is that if someone says "Only talk to me about work." then the other person has to respect it. No forcing of social acceptance , no shaming the other to believe what you believe, just focus on what you were hired for. This is a standard taught to many managers to keep the company out of harassment issues , its very robotic unemotional but its clear and will allow different groups to work together as long as this rule is enforced.
Basically we should not have to worry about a toxic culture because you should not be forced into one when you work. You should just be able to work and separate yourself from your task in any emotional way.
[California dev, 8 years, have held manager position]
Isn't the problem here that there is really no global (or even industry-wide) consensus on what's reasonable and what's not?
What feels perfectly reasonable to one may look absolutely and intolerably insane to someone else. And vice versa.
That's a very high demand. People can leave the industry for a very wide variety of reasons, often mutually contradictory - some want to work as much as possible, provided it translates to $$$$, some are ok with earning less provided they can pursue side interests or family life, some want to make worldwide impact and break paradigms and change the world, some want quiet, predictable and organized workplace, some want high-risk/high-reward environment, some want benefits of predictable income and steady promotion... It is literally impossible to make an industry in which there would be nothing that would cause anybody to leave. Tech industry not special - some people may try it and find it's not what they'd like to do anymore and leave.
Surely, if some things bother people and we could reasonably fix them without bothering even more people in the process, then there's no reason not to do it - it'd be a positive-sum action that would make the world better.
But pre-committing to a goal that no non-zero subset of reasonable people ever wanted to leave tech does not seem like a smart thing to do, because it's impossible.
Where I work, even though there are some titles that have the word "manager" in, the organization refers to anyone that have people report to them as "people leaders".
They are responsible for the well being of the those that report to them. If you take away the part where you are responsible for your people, what is left?
Even if you take the most clinical and robotic view of the role, you still have to effectively allocate your resources. This means balancing strengths and weaknesses, allocating team members to places they are more interested in to improve performance. All this boils down to getting to know your people and making sure they are happy...
> You should just be able to work and separate yourself from your task in any emotional way.
This is also a crazy statement coming from someone who has people report to them. People don't turn off their emotions just because they are getting paid to perform a task !??!
I used to think like this. After years and years of refining my own behavior, a non-work, non-"tech" friend let it slip that my fiends though I had turned into a non-confrontational, lawyer-sounding, people-pleaser. He wasn't wrong, I had gotten in the habit of always walking on eggshells, navigating every conversation like a minefield and letting myself be treated like a doormat. I did. After all, if I hadn't, I'd be one of those "bros" that only people who have never met a bro say are filling up the engineering departments.
The very next day I got chided about not being empathetic enough or whatever the buzzword was at the time. Maybe I could have kept up the facade if I was simply guilty by association. But it was specifically my behavior that was "toxic." That was it. And I'm out. I'm done.
The never-docile-enough nature of "tech" is what's toxic. I hadn't been able to feel comfortable in my own skin for years out of fear of being off-putting to anyone else. The people who's behavior is worth changing aren't listening anyway, so I'm done letting it be my fault, and I'm never over-correcting to make up for it again.
edit: Want to complain about something in "tech"? Why don't you (not you, specifically, parent poster) start with the ethics of your employer's products/practices.
The idea that tech employees are docile compared to the accounts receivable group at a major US insurance company seems pretty hard to support with evidence.
So there's no fixed rule, just a dialectic where people who are offended by things speak up, and people who run organizations listen and ban things that offend the most people. The process is always frustratingly slow, but it seems to be mostly moving in the right direction.
Maybe.
But why don't those same people build companies that don't have this behavior and out-compete the companies that do?
It's not enough to eliminate the behavior, you have to eliminate the incentive.
To that end, founding a "service" to help me be diverse doesn't convince me. Founding a company doing something and blowing your competitors out of the water because your diverse employee base simply outperforms them convinces me.
The two are somewhat correlated; kind people are often nice. But it's easy enough to be nice without being kind at all, and sometimes being kind requires being visibly not nice. As an example, if you see a coworker being abused, confronting the abuser is a kind thing to do, but you probably can't be nice doing it.
As someone who has worked through a lot of social anxiety, I definitely encourage you to throw off the yoke of your fears about not being nice enough. But that doesn't entitle you to be unkind.
People have jobs because they have to work, not because they would like to do it. If they leave the industry, it's because they don't find jobs in the industry worthy enough to endure. I'm sure more would stay for better rewards.
Isn't that what we expect professionals to do? I mean yeah professionals still have feelings and emotions but they learn to detach them from their job. Like how we expect police officers to conduct themselves... Like trained professionals.
(Note, however, that the contrapositive is "if you're doing something important, you'll make someone angry", not "if you're making people angry, you're doing something important"!)
If I ran a company and I was losing good people because of a toxic culture, I wouldn't say "Oh well, I guess those people I lost will start their own companies and out-compete me, and everyone will be happy." I'd want to fix my toxic culture and keep the people and win.
I used to think (terribly naively) that a company having a particular type as a founder would ensure that all such people would feel welcome there. But I have seen that not be the case.
But if nobody likes you and wants to hang out with you, you have a problem. And if the people who like what you're doing are people that you yourself don't really like, you're probably not being true to yourself. You want to be in a situation where there's a core group of people you like and respect who also like and respect you. If you've got that, who cares what other people think?
So maybe step 0 is: find people who know about them, before you can do the talking and reading. The New Yorker is my general go-to for measured introductions to new domains: the authors biases are fairly simple to spot when relevant (leftish-intellectual-in-US-terms) and the level of detail is usually high.
Sadly, I don't have a ton more at hand, other than one rule that I'd highly recommend to use as a filter: if you get the feeling the person is trying to make you angry, find something else. Polemics are rarely the best way to be introduced to a topic.
At a very small startup, people are going to expect to have to work hard. While I disagree that this absolutely necessitates a lack of work/life balance, let's say for a moment it does. Sure, you're probably only going to be attracting people who are interested in working as much as possible, in a high risk/reward scenario. In some cases that's also going to be selecting for single people who have no children.
And that's fine, for the most part. What's not fine is engaging in exclusionary behavior related to diversity of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. E.g. it's not fine to have a bunch of white employees who make racist jokes at work, or a bunch of men who talk at work about their sexual exploits, or a bunch of straight people who marginalize homosexual candidates during interviews.
My initial reaction to the parent's assertion of "any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it" was also negative, because it sounds super absolutist, and PC (in all the actual negative ways "PC" has been used), and an indictment of being your genuine self. But really it's just about keeping stuff out of the workplace that has nothing to do with work. If work is about building products and figuring out how to sell them, and you focus on that, it eliminates a lot of problems. That doesn't stop you from being friends with people at work, but it does mean you might want to keep certain conversations away from the workplace, and instead have them on your own time. It really isn't that hard, as long as you're committed to examining your unconscious biases and eliminating behaviors that stem from them, at least in the workplace.
The reality is more that they are moderately to highly offended by a series of behaviors. It's usually not one single thing that someone runs into and says "that's it, I'm out", it's a long list of often smaller things that ultimately adds up to an intolerable experience.
> People have jobs because they have to work, not because they would like to do it.
Why can't we have both? Given that most of us spend the majority of our waking hours for the majority of our lives working, wouldn't we prefer to actually like what we're doing? Perhaps we'll never get there, but moving in that direction seems like a worthwhile goal.
a) People will not want to acknowledge just how oppressive, racist, and sexist, our society has been in the past and the demonstrable ways in which we are still dealing with the aftereffects of that.
b) People will not want to acknowledge that there is systemic sexism and racism, with extremely negative and unjust consequences for those discriminated against, within our society, and that consequentially ....
c) People will not want to acknowledge that there is systemic sexism & racism within business, including tech, with negative and unjust consequences for those discriminated against, particularly, and relevant to this article, women.
Think that it wasn't until 1919 that women got the right to vote; it wasn't that long ago. It's logical to extrapolate from the sexism of the past that there is sexism (not as pernicious but still here in a big way) in the present.
I think this linked post is pretty good, specifically with this bit showing a nuance that is lacking in more mainstream-media regurgitations of "tech is bad, news at 11": "We say “toxic tech culture” because we want to distinguish between leaving tech entirely, and leaving areas of tech which are abusive and harmful."
I do understand the sort of "righteousness fatigue" that makes people tired of hearing about how they, their coworkers, their employer, their friends, are so terrible. Lose too much nuance and the reaction gets defensive, which from a purely practical point of view is a problem (this might get labeled as a "privileged" thing to be concerned with, but it's tough to reconcile wanting change but not being concerned with accomplishing it). I think a lot of the mainstream coverage of this is starting to poison the well, and then you end up with "sure, it's not your responsibility as non-white-male to fix the behavior of assholes, but it's not my responsibility to fix that asshole either."
Which leaves me back where I started. If my company seems pretty good in this respect - the ratio isn't great, a factor of our incoming applications/recruiting, but retention is high among the relevant employees, and no complaints have been raised (at least at my level of visibility). We try to broaden our candidate pool, and have widened it a LOT in the last five years, and are definitely hiring more candidates who do great despite not being run through the 5-algorithms-on-a-whiteboard gauntlet, but that doesn't translate directly into women and minorities...
So other than continuing to work at attracting a broaer pool of candidates... What else should we do? Even if only from the "name and shame" perspective of "god, it's annoying seeing the gender ratio published"?
Asking seems like a good first step, since another pervasive issue in tech is too many people who try to solve problems without ever thinking of talking to someone about it. :)
It doesn't matter if that is impossible because it's also not what was proposed. The proposal was to stop reasonable people leaving because the are OFFENDED by a particular BEHAVIOR.
This isn't to say that some solutions offered to reach that goal won't offend even more reasonable people for different reasons. But even that doesn't mean that this isn't the goal we should be aiming towards.
And police offers have to deal with stuff like PTSD and emotional trauma from their job, because of how intense it is. To a lesser degree than that, our (less intense) jobs have an unavoidable emotional impact on us.
but, worked with, not at, but generally about equal in raw numbers - it really depends where the docility comes out - in fortune 500's being weird in general is strongly discouraged, but the penalties for stepping out of line are small usually, the big benefit is, cultural norms are clearly established, and generally followed - in a SV company, being weird is strongly encouraged, cultural values are somewhat more nebulous, and the penalties for stepping out of line are often much more harsh.
But reasonable people were offended by Brandon Eich donating to an anti-gay marriage proposition, and other reasonable people were offended that he got ousted from Mozilla.
Some people are offended by Damore and been quite vicious towards him, others are saying he's right about things (including you pretty much can't be a conservative in Silicon Valley).
Isn't reality more complex than this idea? Its easy enough to say "don't comment on a coworkers physical appearance" or something equally stupid, but "any non-zero subset" offended by any particular behavior doesn't seem reasonable.
Reading posts here often feels like I'm in bizzaro world where I've never actually worked in "tech". Yes, my current job is more laid back when I'm not on site at a multinational client's office, but it's not that much. It's still a desk job in software. The scale I use to judge workplaces extends into back into my time in restaurants, retail, admin, music, and mechanics' shops. Now, if you want to talk culture, I could tell some stories about those places (and pardon that expression, I could obviously never tell those stories here).
That seems rather ridiculous.
Or how about, I'm trying to learn rust and it's pretty neat but also pretty hard. I don't use rust at work. Is that work related enough since it's tech?
If I walk up to a coworker and say "You idiot, this damn bug is ridiculous" am I not responsible for them getting upset at that?
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.)
For me the following hits home for me recently
>One easy rule is that if someone says "Only talk to me about work." then the other person has to respect it. No forcing of social acceptance , no shaming the other to believe what you believe, just focus on what you were hired for.
I don't think of my company or coworkers as family. I have my life outside of the office and prefer to keep it personal and private for the most part. Likewise, I not that interested in talking about what happened in everyone's 16 hours out of the office. I am interested in discussing the problems we are facing at work and getting work done, which ironically can involve this very topic and conversation we are having right now. I want to put 8 honest hours in, not 6 honest and 2 talking about outside matters, not 8 honest and 2 talking about outside matters. What sucks is culturally I seem to be a misfit because others apparently think I am anti social. But I don't believe I am. I don't come in in the morning and say hello because I don't believe my arrival is so important that I should interrupt people that I assume are hard at work focusing and concentrating. If you're at your desk, YOU need to say hello to me as I walk in so I know I'm not interrupting you. But also not get mad if I all I say is hi and blow off any small talk. On my commute in I am thinking about what I want to accomplish within the first hour of work so I'm already focusing on doing that. Want to chit chat? Catch me at lunch.
To explain further - in F500 Culture, only a narrow band of self expression is possible - but what is and isnt is clearly defined - in SV Culture, a much wider band is acceptable - but the unacceptable is much less clearly defined.
Maybe it isn't, but it's a pretty good yardstick to hold things up to. If you can actually say that no reasonable person would be offended by something you want to say, then say it. If you're not sure, or maybe can think of a few people who might be offended, then you can make a choice. If you still decide to say it, and then someone comes to you and says they were offended, you'll probably want to apologize. Or not; that's also up to you.
At the end of the day it's about recognizing that the things you say and do can affect people in different ways, and being thoughtful about that.
I meant more like, Uber is one particular example (of which there are many) of tech companies or startups where the behavior of their employees is clearly not "docile."
I suppose you could use, perhaps, Google or Github (I'm making some assumptions about what you mean so forgive me) as examples of "docile" tech employees.
Possibly. However, when it comes to companies what they claim is that they want "kind" when what they actually demand is "nice".
I can't make a fucking comment without you up my fucking ass about it. I was illustrating the point that I think the standard proposed is not a good hard rule.
The moderation here has become truly ridiculous.
If you're saying that some people with power use that to demand conformance to social codes, sure, I agree. But I disagree that always prevents us being kind.
Sure, but that doesn't convince. Anyone who has ever been in a big company has lots of stories of HR "initiatives" that have been utter garbage. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-07
The path that these women pursued can be countered with "They were actually those icky, squishy HR types to begin with and our failure was in not detecting that. We need to change our hiring procedures to make sure that we don't make this kind of mistake hiring for a "hard" tech position again."
> I used to think (terribly naively) that a company having a particular type as a founder would ensure that all such people would feel welcome there. But I have seen that not be the case.
And that's the crux. Why should that be the case? Apparently that founder believed that their behavior was going to be more successful.
Until someone takes a "diversity" touchstone, founds a company, and blows people's doors off, most offenders will never take these kinds of "squishy" things seriously.
And, if the "diversity" advocates can't do this, well, that's data, too ...
I'm actually in the camp that they probably can't.
Practically all of the biggest successes in any industry which has a schedule component have stories of the carnage of divorces, health problems and relationship damage left in the wake. Probably the only counterexample of a continuous, plodding, sustainable success is the space shuttle software.
Consequently, the diversity advocates need to change the narrative and start focusing on changing the conversation as to what constitutes success in broader society.
Right. And fixing what you described is a good thing. But - if you think there would be no reasonable people disliking tech and leaving it - that's not going to happen. As for "offended", this word is used now pretty much in any context - one seems something he doesn't like, he's "offended". Maybe once it had some special meaning, like being sexually harassed at work, or being fired or disregarded at work for having skin of wrong color... But now people are "offended" by Shakespeare, by algebra, by clapping hands, by Christmas, by marble statues, by Thomas the Tank Engine, by burritos and by hoop earrings (all real examples, I can find links) this no longer has any distinctive meaning that can be singled out. So we can just accept some people would dislike some stuff and leave, and that's fine. Not everybody in the world should work in tech. We should strive to provide environment free of obviously bad behavior - like harassment or racism - and then if other stuff that happens in tech does not work for everybody, it's fine.
> it's just about keeping stuff out of the workplace that has nothing to do with work.
That'd be nice but I'm afraid that ship has sailed - tech is getting politicized, and if you believe what you hear about companies like Google, Facebook or Twitter, you can replace "getting" with "has been". It's not a good thing, but it's a thing. That's not the reason to dig deeper and make the situation even worse, though, by undertaking unachievable PC-driven goals.