Not a Black Chair: racism, sexism, and discrimination at Squarespace | Hacker News Reader

Not a Black Chair: racism, sexism, and discrimination at Squarespace

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So the "black chair" stuff is inexcusable, but regarding the end:

> No matter who you are,

> You deserve to feel loved and appreciated.

> You deserve to be valued.

> You deserve to feel free.

> You deserve the chance to shine.

Actually, you don't. You might "deserve" these from your parents, but in the workplace, these all need to be earned.

It's also really not the company's problem if you get panic attacks at the thought of running into the ex-boyfriend that you slapped -- even if you worked at the same company.

>It's also really not the company's problem if you get panic attacks...

because of the way the company completely destroyed your sense of self-worth and promoted a toxic culture of abuse?

Actually, it might be. I wish it was. Maybe we'd value each other a bit more.

Saying your company is at fault for how you feel is the exact same reasoning as "You made me do it", ie, not assuming any agency at all. Same thing with "toxic culture of abuse."

People who are being sexually trafficked and child soldiers are in a toxic culture of abuse that they can't escape from. We're talking about an adult with a lower management job at a tech company, not the wretched of the earth.

I'm not sure I understand your reasoning here. If a child is bullied by her classmates, your reasoning would suggest that her negative feelings are her fault and not her tormentors? Sure, she might not be locked up in a medieval dungeon (a literal place she can't escape from), in fact, I suppose she can switch schools... Are you saying the student should be tougher or not provoke her classmates or...

You're comparing a child to an adult as if they're the same. That's a pretty leaky abstraction and somewhat disturbing if you can't see the critical distinction.

This is the kind of self-indulgent thinking that tries certain (usually poor or minority) 12 year olds as adults, while treating certain (usually wealthy and white) adults as children who should be forgiven for "youthful indiscretions." Similarly, it focuses on the comparatively well-off but unhappy while completely effacing the experiences of the genuinely exploited.

It isn't "no agency at all" or "full agency", that is a misleading false dichotomy.

The truth is somewhere between those two extremes. Everyone is HEAVILY influenced by the environment immediately around them.

Please don't construct strawmen. She specifically pointed to the idea of seeing her ex-boyfriend as the trigger, not (say) the company logo or office.

To be fair, it doesn't seem like they gave her the chance to "earn it"

I can't believe you're defending someone who physically beats someone because they're seeing someone else.

Look, what she did there was past the line. He clearly wasn't a saint here either, but physical attacks are a different level of wrong. I think just as in any real life story no one is perfect and there are no clear bad guys or good guys.

Still, you can determine whether someone, as wrong and evil as they might be in this instance, were wronged other instances. Did she experience a terrible workspace at squarespace? It does seem so. Was what she did to "The Guy" terrible? It was. Does either what she did that night make what happened to her irrelevant or does it seem to suggest what her employers did to her was "okay"? That probably isn't fair.

Office politics and verbal racism are terrible.

But actually beating someone? Using violence against them and deliberately inflicting physical pain to get revenge? That's a whole different world of moral wrong, so much so that it's not really worth considering anything else.

>But actually beating someone? Using violence against them and deliberately inflicting physical pain to get revenge? That's a whole different world of moral wrong, so much so that it's not really worth considering anything else.

That isn't quite what happened. She saw the guy (who had recently told her that he loved her) kissing someone else. She slapped him out of shock/betrayal/disbelief. In the circumstances, her slap seems entirely reasonable. The guy was clearly a lying, manipulative bastard. I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding "inflicting physical pain" and "get revenge". Did you actually read the article?

Is there any evidence of discrimination in this story? While it's certainly tragic, I think it's very hard to separate what is sexist (or, aside from the one comment, racist) from what is just people being generally terrible. It seemed only implicit that the author's gender or race had anything to do with her treatment at work.

Or maybe I'm missing something. How was this discrimination?

I think that's the main issue here. One plausible explanation for how little of opportunity was afforded her is that she just really wasn't that good of a supervisor (which begs the question, why didn't they fire her?).

Still, what here is "discrimination" and what is people just not liking her perhaps? It's very hard to tell. Regardless of whether racism plays a roll, squarespace doesn't sound like a fun place to work as a supervisor.

"aside from the one comment"

"How was this discrimination?"

You mean, aside from the discrimination, how was this discrimination?

I'm not sure how commenting on the colour of a person's skin is discrimination. Perhaps unwise to say someone "blends in with the chair", but I don't think it was racism and more than saying "when I was driving I didn't see you because you were wearing a dark jacket and it was dark outside".

The issue is that Amelie interpreted the comment as "you're black, and therefore you're worthless/invisible". That's not an unreasonable assumption. The main problem IMO seems to be that Kelly is a bit of an asshole/bitch, with zero empathy. Any reasonable person either would have thought twice about making that comment, or would have apologised and explained that she didn't mean that.

It just looks like a typical company with dysfunctional management/HR rather than any kind of discrimination.

Squarespace really sounds like a nightmare, and also very rough on people who work a support/call center role rather than a dev role. I say this having experience with both, as only the call center involved handling tickets as a primary activity, and having a regular night shift (rather than being on-call every few months).

On the other hand, this sounds pretty grandiose to the point of being delusional:

"Squarespace, you hoped I’d be another black woman in the tech industry who would quietly watch as you grow in power while I wither away. You are mistaken."

Squarespace: a company actively dedicated to the withering of black women in tech. That's a pretty extraordinary claim, so it needs some pretty extraordinary (ie, non-anecdotal, verifiable) evidence. The adjectives used to describe literally every other person in the story are mostly if not completely negative, and this ultimately weakens the writer's claims.

This is a cautionary tale on why it is so often a bad idea to start a relationship with someone at work. In addition to that, though, it really shows how terrible management was (maybe still is?) at Squarespace. I would not want to work there based on what I've read here.

I only read up until "September 2013" but (except for the one comment about the chair) it seems like just bureaucracy and office politics.

This is one area where having an MBA is beneficial to working in startup - basic management training at least.

Too many nightmare stories of bad management incidents out there. This one, for example, should have been dealt with a lot sooner.

We could say that we're only seeing one side of the story here, and that the manager in question has a completely different version of events.

But the point is that the manager is responsible for the entire situation, and is given the authority over it in order to prevent bad outcomes like this. If an employee walks away with a bad impression and a story like this to tell then that in itself is a management failure.

having left a job after three months with a verbally abusive boss, i have to commend you for being career minded and staying so long. Looking for a job now, I'm wondering where there is a significantly different dynamic. We have a long way to go in this industry, like many others.

"i have to commend you for being career minded and staying so long"

I don't. People who don't leave encourage abusive bosses.

When large part of your team quits, it will be a painful but efficient lesson. When they don't, it sends a signal that wrong behavior is okay.

That's same as not reporting rapes or turning blind eye on "inconvenient" crime. It really really encourages crime in my opinion.

I had an awful boss. K was easily the most obnoxious person whose presence I've ever had to tolerate. Besides incompetence, he was eventually fired after he was ordered by the cto to give me a good review and a raise in my annual review; he gave me neither. When he was fired (and there's a long and funny story here involving property destruction), he assaulted a coworker, was removed by the police, and given a restraining order. He was delusional enough that he called the ceo late that night and suggested that, upon receipt of a written apology, he'd consider returning to work.

There's some amazing detail in the court documents from his 5 years of multiple lawsuits against our former employer, including him assaulting the videographer at a deposition and being removed by the police. Again.

I didn't leave because I was worried I'd never get another job and no one would believe me. After all, what are you supposed to do in an interview when asked why you're leaving after 3 or 4 months? Do you really want to tell a potential employer you're leaving because your boss is verbally abusive and slapped the back of your head because he thought you were being stupid? I worried -- and I think it's true -- that I could easily be written off as whiny or entitled or difficult or even just too much trouble to deal with. I also had just left school and couldn't really afford to repay the relocation bonus they gave me (protip: always write into your contact that repayment is prorated over the first year of employment. And remember relo bonuses are taxed when you decide how much to ask for. oops on both counts.)

It's hard.

Now I'm mature enough, and have a string of successful jobs behind me plus savings, that I can joke about it. And if anyone doubts what working with him was like, pull out the description of the deposition that lead to him being declared a vexatious litigant.

Hm, what's going on with this article? There are stories with fewer points that have been around longer and are on the front page while this one is dropping like a rock...

Get it together, HN...

Maybe people are getting tired of being told what to get angry about.

That's the problem isn't it? Some people are forced to repeatedly ask for the basic human decency and empathy that others receive as a matter of course. Then those being asked get 'tired' because they are convinced they treat everyone equally and are totally objective.

Unbelievable. This parallels to my experience working for a local startup long time ago. The amount of abuse people, the bullying, useless HR seems to be a pretty common theme in an industry without a union.

I still don't get why people who would benefit most from a union would be against it. The explanations are usually self serving but a union is protection for the collective. Classic divide and conquer strategy by employers.

Why? Because many of us have experience with the bad side of unions and we don't want to see programming become anything like that.

You'll end up with mountains of regulations and specialties and not be allowed do anything outside of those bounds. Imagine being told "you're a front end programmer. You are not allowed to submit code for the back end, that is for certified backend programmers only. Also you are not allowed to edit CSS or HTML. That is for certified web designers only" Why? Because that threatens the backend guys and web designers jobs). Check out some union rules sometime and look at all the crap. I don't want any part of that to come to programming

There are some problems that a union can solve which seem to be unsolvable otherwise, such as age discrimination, which is rampant in private sector tech but not so much in public sector tech (surprise).

You would just be trading corporate abuse for union abuse.

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