I Am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He Is Wrong About Women in Tech
medium.com
medium.com
In any case, Amilia is right to highlight this quote:
> Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks.
This, folks, is a racial (and gender) pathology claim. Unless we interpret Alex as inquiring about the social circumstances that prevent women and 'blacks' from seizing these 'opportunities' (and I don't see how that's a plausible interpretation here), then what Alex is suggesting is that there is something wrong with women and black people, a physiological symptom of their gender or race, that prevents them from seeing or taking these opportunities when presented with them. I find that, if you pay attention, you also see this way of thinking at work behind the scenes in more reasonable-sounding claims about racial and gender politics. Sometimes its overt, but more often its buried in points about, e.g., the corroded norms of "black communities."
I've always wondered if the answer to this was due to the culture and class demographics. The Current crop of tech leaders came from the era where middle class boys were bought computers by their parents as it was seen as a thing for boys to be into and not girls (I think this stereotype is still prevalent but far less powerful now). Computers just were not affordable to working class folks back then. Considering the poverty most minorities families faced then and still do now, it's sadly the case that they couldn't afford computers.
I expect (and hope) that in the next 10 years we'll see the distribution of tech leaders become naturally more diverse. Not because of any activist drive but simply because these kids are much more likely to have access to the tools they were denied in the past.
I don't see much hope of that as the fundamental problem hasn't changed. Lack of STEM training / degrees in pre-K / elementary school teachers and a gender problem worse than tech. We've had a lot of debates about the availability of programmable computers to lower incomes in a lot of threads.
The answer is simple. Women are naturally inclined toward social fields. There are few women who want to do something highly technical and not people-oriented. Men do not have the same strong social inclination. The physiological differences between male and female affect their psychology as well as their superficial appearances; let's not kid ourselves.
These are tools called "generalizations", which means they're not universally applicable, but they are helpful for understanding the world.
b) a loss of interest as a person matures does not necessarily imply that loss is artificial. That unique psychology may emerge naturally over the developmental / maturation process, just as some physical features emerge.
It sounds the same as making up comfortable stories, denying the science that is done so as to absolve oneself of doing anything about the current state of affairs.
Is that a problem to be solved or just the nature of reality?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/24/gender-toys-childre...
Unfortunately, there are so much political agendas and sensitive issues at play here that this kind of science is not disseminated too much.
http://news.mit.edu/2014/research-reveals-gender-gap-nations...
What I am suggesting is that while I agree that these disparities were likely due to class differences that manifested themselves in racial and gender inequalities, we now have a world where the industry is dominated by one gender and a few racial groups. Does the present situation makes it less likely for more women and minorities join tech? Without an activist drive, the answer seems likely.
A lot of what the author brings up here are forces today that makes the reversal you are hoping for less likely, unless an equal but opposite activist force is applied.
You could probably make a well supported case for why this is true for minorities, but what makes the entire hypothesis shaky is if it was a cultural and class issue, what does that say about middle/upper class white women?
Now let's assume that these women were discriminated/discouraged out of tech. How are we sure that in 10 years those same forces won't do the same to minorities?
I don't have a solution, but I don't think the computer penetration problem sufficiently answers the question.
My father bought me (and my brother) a 2nd hand computer in 1988 (ZX Spectrum+), in communist Czechoslovakia, for a price of more than two monthly salaries.
Was the social situation in the U.S. really that much worse? I seriously doubt it.
Now of course my father was an academic, and was very smart, so he obviously saw a value in it. But it seems to me that being poor is really a poor excuse here.
So if you're saying: "You were raised without any sort of education, never had a bank account, are trapped in a cycle of high-interest loans, have never had a good-paying job and don't have the skills to get one, and this is all you've ever seen and all your children have ever seen around them... but it's a really poor excuse for not buying a computer!" then fine. You can certainly have an opinion!
Just keep in mind that it may not be wise to compare those in poverty to a smart, well-educated academic who sees an "obvious" value in computers for his children.
That was my point - the problem here is cultural, not economic. I was specifically addressing the "cannot afford" wording in the parent's post.
Yeah. I honestly don't care so much about the idiot father's claims but rather just the fact we are witnessing a rather painfully public collapse of a family.
When you combine that with the historical situations that people in positions of power have been white males, you have a much broader variety of role models for white males than for anyone else.
That's not to say people can't or shouldn't choose role models who are a different race or gender than they are, just that it might not naturally be their first instinct.
Yes, we pick up other role models in our teens, but I think a lot of the "damage" is done by then. The expected roles have started to be processed and internalised.
They are likely more influential than teachers.
(That they aren't "further along" doesn't mean that their behaviors and attitudes will not be adopted)
Which is a real problem IMO. I didn't go to school. Most of the programmers I know didn't. So maybe it's part of that culture. But I didn't have much in the way of peers when I started. It was just the most promising career option I had.
But the people I looked up to in tech weren't much like me other than their (mostly) maleness. And that wasn't a factor (for me). Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob, Matz, Roy Osherove, Jon Lam, Jamie Cansdale. They were just names on a page to me. Never met any of them. But I respected their abilities and what they wrote.
I certainly never had a mentor (though my father in law did get me my first real tech job, subcontracting for minimum wage, busting out the less fun HTML side of things for his work for a few months). I'm incredibly grateful to him, but that wasn't going to build a real career. So I picked up a dozen or so books, read them front-to-back, and a year later was a c# developer.
I feel like you have to want it for yourself. I could be totally wrong, and I have no idea how you'd measure such a thing, but for the non-college crowd at least, I've got to think stories more similar to my own are much more common than stories where someone found a group of people who looked like them they could consider mentors.
Many people reach out for "race and sex realism", or, historical-material explanations, but I think the power of media and role models rules in this space.
RULE 1: You don’t recruit and retain male engineers
you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends
* If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone
* If the relationship breaks down the engineer is gone
* The paycheck goes to HER
* Why does SHE want her husband or BF to work for you?// I have no real idea of the history here, I'm just commenting on one rule that can be personally costly not to heed
> Potential money is worth more than actual money.
In very, very rare circumstances, that is true. In the vast majority of cases, it's total B$. It's what company founders tell employees to exploit them, to get them to work overtime as a norm for crap normal-time pay. It's what the founders genuinely hope is true because they own so much of the company, but it rarely turns out that your shares are worth as much as the net-present-value of the delta to an average salary. At least in my experience.
Um, that's precisely his point since he's writing it from the POV of a employer.
>But perhaps the most telling element of all of this is St. John’s own experience. In an interview by Christopher Redner [2], St. John himself suffered burn out at Microsoft to the point where he “got himself fired”. “He would pass out at his keyboard and straggle into morning meetings with key marks on his face. Worked sucked everything out of him; his marriage disintegrated.”
>According to a Shacknews interview from 2007 [3], St. John was going through a “messy divorce” at the time. He wanted to get fired rather than quit, because that ensured he’d retain his stock options for Microsoft.
[1] http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-g...
[2] http://www.informationtechnologyleaders.com/stvid.html
[3] http://www.shacknews.com/article/46338/alex-st-john-intervie...
> RULE 1: You don’t recruit and retain male engineers you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends"
Reading is fundamental
He says later that female engineers will go get promoted into non-engineering roles soon enough anyway. The implication there is you don't need to worry about retaining them as engineers as they won't stay that way.
BTW this isn't an endorsement of either his views or his approach. I mean the general thrust of the presentation could be renamed "ways to stiff your staff".
There are bits of it that ring true e.g. the different motivations between newbies, lifers and the rest. The majority though is clearly intended to be provocative.
There are some rules about male engineers but that doesn't preclude hiring women engineers. It just might have been that it's harder to form rules for them because of historically smaller sample to learn from.
Yes, you recruit and retain the significant other... too. The engineer (who may have a husband or a boyfriend!) actually does have a significant say as well. They both count.
Stuff like "The paycheck goes to HER" is bullshit and demeans both the engineer and the significant other.
If you ignore all the crazy shit, then yes, what's left is true.
I'm sure the guy wrote a lot of worse things but this one is not particularly deranged.
Anyhow - the purported direct benefit, according to Alex St. John, is for "the wife or GF" as the whole point is to make her happy (from the linked presentation: "If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone").
Hence, my question: how does it help the wife to directly interact with her husband's boss? Put differently, what is it about directly interacting with her husband's boss that makes her happier than directly interacting with her husband?
His VentureBeat article was pretty horrific but that pdf seems to reflect a certain ground truth. Not saying it reflects a reality anyone should be happy with, but if I was paying him to consult on recruiting and sat through that presentation I wouldn't be asking for my money back..
If the partner of the employee is unhappy with the job, it will make the employee much more likely to find another job and so as a manager, it's smart to take into account the girlfriends, wives, husbands and boyfriends of your employees.
1: http://www.geek.com/news/developer-bro-alex-st-john-want-a-g...
If anything he has to say upsets you, ask yourself "why?" Because he's a brilliant game dev ala Carmack? Because everyone wants to work for Wild Tangent? Because of those lovely AAA titles Wild Tangent cranks out one after another? The answer to all is "no". So why do you care? Hell, his own offspring doesn't want anything to do with him. You can't stop VentureBeat and TechCrunch from writing it, but you don't have to read it.
That is obviously not true. She even wrote blog post about him. That is a clear indication that, as a minimum, she cares a lot about him.
And Alex is proud of his daughter:
http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/21/i-apologize/
Daddy is very proud of her. She’s no millennial slacker that’s for sure.He picked an unflattering photo of his daughter and used it as a visual example of a "woman in tech" without her permission? What on earth?
My college experience was quite different. I never tinkered with computers or electronics during my childhood, and I had no problems getting up to speed. In fact, I'd say most of my peers at the community college I went to had zero programming experience. The instructors didn't assume any prior knowledge, either.
I knew much less than many of my peers and our school specifically had an introduction to CS class that was geared towards 0 knowledge students. A lot of the CS majors skipped it and went straight to the 2nd class, which I took the following semester.
This isn't to say that your statement isn't true, but I would bet it is just an anecdote.
[edit]grammar and more ideas[/edit]
And this was back before the internet was ubiquitous so if you wanted to program you had to spend real money on books and developer tools. No free/open source resources at your fingertips.
My first real exposure to programming came after I bluffed my way into a temp gig building spreadsheets in Quattro Pro.
Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.
Working in the tech field has almost nothing to do with CS. Many/most developers don't study CS in college, and technical ability is only a very small part of what makes a good developer.
Come on, there are assholes everywhere who use this tactic to make themselves feel superior or to get rid of potential competition, men and women alike. This is not exclusive to CS. A lot of people are worried that they put so much time into something and that someone 'fresh' could make them look bad by picking it up quicker. It makes it that much more satisfying when you beat them.
One thing I noticed in particular, was that a hell of a lot of "diversity initiatives" (stuff like code camps, scholarships to diversity conferences, etc) set up by companies like Square and Google and nonprofits like Grace Hopper gave their opportunities mostly to minorities who were already very successful, with internships in prestigious companies. If even the programs explicitly meant to increase the percentage of women/minorities in the industry go largely to very experienced people, I thought at the time, then there's really no hope for me at that point.
In any case, none of this is what led to me deciding I didn't want a tech career, it was just a contributing factor. I probably could have pushed through it, but I realized I didn't like tech enough to do so- I liked coding well enough, but I didn't like or value the work most tech companies were doing.
If you have any interest in staying in the field--and I hope you do--don't limit your view of potential jobs to just the high-profile companies. Talk to some of the smaller shops around, you might really like what you find.
I hope that you've found something you enjoy to go into a career in. I know I studied tech and now work tangentially to it, and sometimes I feel like I made the wrong choice.
I fit the programmer archetype exactly, and it took me three years of near constant engagement before I felt I could even begin to fit in (culturally) with experienced programmers. I can easily imagine the task is considerably harder if you don't fit the archetype.
On the flip-side - the desire to "catch up", and the solitary nature of the challenge lent me considerably more motivation and creativity than I seem to have now that I have "acclimatized".
----
I'm very interested to see how it is going to turn out for my sister. She's a very talented programmer, but she doesn't try to immerse herself in the culture of it at all, rather she is treating it as an auxiliary skill to her studies in GIS. I feel some smug satisfaction knowing she is coding circles around most of the guys in her classes, despite not taking on the identity of "I am a programmer".
No one in my family or peers really knew much about computers and while the Apple IIe at school were much more impressive, that was just playing trivia games and such. Not writing anything ourselves.
It wasn't until I was about 16 that I touched a computer again. Built my own eventually to play DOOM. I didn't know anything "technical" at that point beyond autoexec.bat and... config something. I forget the other one.
It wasn't until I was 21 that I did my first real "programming". Which consisted of reading a book on HTML and being paid $5/hr by my father in law to write some truly bad markup while he did the real work.
I picked up some books on c#, ASP.NET 1.0, MSSQL Server and did my best to absorb what I could. My father-in-law didn't know/work-with most of that (he did help me figure out some SQL basics though) and I didn't have a peer group or support system or anything. About a year later I had a job paying about as well as Home Depot might writing c#.
Almost 20 years later I'm writing Scala and make a good living.
I don't say this as advice exactly. Just saying the "you can't start late" stuff is bullshit. I've often regretted not having access to college so I could answer "write a binary tree on the board" questions. So I didn't feel inadequate in those ways. But it hasn't stopped me getting a job and I'm overall pretty satisfied with my career (well... there was a dark time when I attempted to manage that was pretty cringe worthy) and accomplishments.
I wish I had something more to offer people who think a career in tech is out of their reach because they couldn't afford college, or they started too late. All I really have to offer is this:
Pick up a book. Remember how practically no one actually read a text-book from front to back in grade school? If they had they'd have had a huge advantage right? Pick up a book. Those that say "I learn by doing" will never ever ever be exposed to the same depth or amount of knowledge as you'll get from the condensed, edited brain-on-paper of accomplished authors. Be well read. It's like cheating. And it's cheap. Often even free (Not talking Blogs. Those are mostly only useful for very specific questions/topics; I'm talking about the free Ruby book, or beg for a copy of haskellbook. Or torrent if you must and pay them back for it later).
My 2c.
People get offended by the idea that "if you find first year COSC courses difficult, then programming is probably not for you" - but in my experience that's completely how it turns out.
All the programmers I know who started at university with no prior experience and went on to happy and successful* have this in common - they found first year COSC courses an absolute breeze, and went way ahead of the coursework in their own time just for the fun of it.
(*includes myself and my sister)
Now, I'm doing quite well as an engineer and I thoroughly enjoy programming.
I have no prescriptions for women; all I'm suggesting is that we do not over-generalize about the experiences that men have in CS.
[0]Well, I did try to teach myself programming a couple different times, but I failed utterly and concluded that I wasn't cut-out for it. If anything that experience put me in a worse starting position. I started out college studying philosophy and literature.
edit: removed formatting issue.
> In fact, only 5% of U.S. High schools even offer the Computer Science AP exam in the first place. As a result, many women...
I don't understand why this affects only women. Or more importantly, affects women (and minorities) more than other groups.
There are social stigmas and the like we could examine, but this particular quote as written reads as a non-sequitur to me.
Edit: Just to clarify, I don't want to belittle the very real disparities we are facing in the tech industry. Also worth noting, I thought she was articulate and I appreciated her sources and statistics.
> "I can’t begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work"
I cannot speak for developers in Silicon Valley or other places, but I suspect the feeling of disgust when hearing such things is similar. The problem is that solving design, engineering, computer science and math problems every day can be stressful and exhausting. Do that for more than 8 hours per day and maybe also multitask between projects everyday, in an environment that has toxic management and it's a recipe for burnout, burnout being that deep sense of tiredness, emptiness and helplessness, being nothing less than depression out of which some people never recover.
Now I'm sure that this is way better than digging for blood diamonds to feed your family, as Mr. Alex St. John is saying. But I can't believe that somebody born into privilege can even think to suggest that such jobs aren't so bad compared to African slavery.
WildTangent offered me $35K, less than I had made as a post-doc before leaving for industry.
#$%& you Alex...
the stress, the hours, the burnout, it's not for passion, it's for MONEY. you can go work on your passions in absolute leisure on a beach in southeast asia and never worry about money, but for the kids out there reading this, don't be tricked into thinking developing throwaway shitbox games for some asshole ex-microsoft millionaire is your passion.
35k is a very different kind of 'fuck you' money.
In-between, Craig Venter offered me $45k, so glad I have standards. Everyone should have standards, no?
Edit: +1 for "35K is a very different kind of @#$% you money."
> (2015-10-16) The people behind the scenes at Hacker News now hand pick stories they want on the front page. It's not a user-generated voting-controlled news site. But it pretends to be one and tries to look like one. It's deeply dishonest. http://www.curi.us/1612-anti-israel-bias-at-hacker-news / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10402465
This is outrageous, and I will find a way to create a front-page list that is "unadulterated".
Here's the moderator commenting about the many factors:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20rank&sort=byPopulari...
(not all the results are applicable, enough are)
True, however the HN front page has always given me the impression that votes matter the most, and that the front-page is largely reflective of the interests of the HN demographics. The question I'd ask is: why is there no explicit indication (written in the footer, perhaps) of the front-page being vetted by a handful of moderators?
A subtle form of pretense is not speaking of the truth.
Also, HN is pretty open about being more heavily moderated than other parts of the net, it's far from secret. And while I don't necessarily share the view that moderation of discussion is a GoodThing™, I find it acceptable since no one is trying to pretend that it's not happening.
> HN is pretty open about being more heavily moderated than other parts of the net [...] I find it acceptable since no one is trying to pretend that it's not happening.
A subtle form of pretence is to not explicitly state the fact. Why is there no explicit indication (written in the footer, perhaps) of the front-page being vetted by a handful of moderators? Why is the 'active' page kept hidden (it is not in the navbar)? Why all this secrecy?
I don't really see any of it as secrecy, as that implies actively and intentionally hiding, to me it seems more like not going out of the way to show/tell people. The Guidelines and FAQs go into it a bit IIRC, and dang has written comments on it as well. I'd describe it more as unintuitive than secretive. It seems like the same reasoning behind keeping HN minimalistic and not webapp 2.0 bloatware. It might chase some people away but it also keeps an eternal september at bay.
Also the front page is not vetted by moderators (if it was they'd be doing a terrible job as dupes and blatant linkbait are common), but there's code in place to mitigate flamewars and such. If you want to see what stories and comments are actually getting killed (by users, not the mods) you can enable showdead in your profile, which imo should be enabled by default but I can understand why it's not.
Generally if you see a story drop off the front page quickly, it's getting comments a lot quicker than it's getting votes. I do think mods will occasionally remove the penalty for this on stories that triggered the flamewar protection without there being a flamewar. Additionally some domains and topics are penalized, and there seem to be filtered words that will auto kill your comment. Try leaving a comment with (Im sorry, gotta avoid it somehow) m@$tur b@t3 in it. But again that's all automated, just unintuitive.
I guess I'm not a real engineer, cause I care about money. I sell a skill, provide a service, this service has value, pay me.
Now, TBH, a few good advice in this presentation, but often weirdly worded. Making sure the spouse/family is happy is a good advice, but doesn't have to be presented as "the wife/girlfriend".
Some people might think "Well, it's a terrible thing to say like that, that women should get the more social jobs, but society/culture/genetics/hormones -- perhaps a grain of truth, right? Women are just social!" You might even think it's a good thing to promote them, or make them the "communicators" or put them in architect positions.
I just want to say that these are the good intentions that made my first few years of out of college job experience absolutely awful, which makes this slide especially upsetting to me. I was an engineering major with a strong CS background, but also a 6' tall, beautiful, outgoing, well-spoken woman. Obviously, I'd be perfect working with clients, or acting as a liaison between developers and designers, or as a technical sales engineer, right!?
So, I was "let go" twice, the first time, just 5 months after graduating, and then again a year later. I missed meetings, told clients their ideas were bad, was a terrible diplomat, didn't prepare very nice-looking reports, complained about using MS Office, constantly forgot to log billable hours, spent too much time writing code... I hated it, I was terrible at it, and yet I kept drifting towards these types of jobs! It was what recruiters showed me, what college counselors showed me, what everyone said I should do, and what I thought I should do!
It took me way too long (to my credit, I was young) to realize that I'm much much happier "just" writing code, and working on a project that I can really take the time to get into. If I'm going to do "collaboration" I'd rather do it with other engineers that share a common(ish) technical background, where we all bounce ideas off of each other and have similar goals for the product or feature. And I'm so much happier not having to worry about what I'm wearing to work every day, or if I need to prepare for a customer meeting in the morning!
So, even if you think that it might be true that women are more social on average (whatever your own personal reasoning is, doesn't matter) PLEASE don't automatically try to lead women into roles like this, or assume that she'll be great at bridging gaps between clients/developers/designers/god-knows-what (because she's a LADY! Amirite!?). Some are, some aren't. Some men are, some aren't. But using these social/cross-discipline positions as kneejerk suggestions for a woman to "move up", or "do something more interesting" may be doing more harm than good to her career if she takes the advice.
>"Sex, violence and debauchery were all hallmarks of a great Roman “orgy” and I wanted to come as close to capturing that experience as I could get away with."
>"The slave auction was also a special occasion. The Roman guards were rounding up the losers from the gladiatorial events and anybody who was offending a “senator” or Cleopatra and throwing them in the slave pit. Once a sufficient number of slaves had been collected from the party, Gillian returned to the stage to auction them to the audience for the gold they had won in the games. Gillian could set any base price she wanted for a “specimen”, if the audience wouldn’t pay the price the slave would be “thrown to the lions”. We had configured a “pit” full of foam to one side of the stage and directly in front of the first caged lion. A failed slave would be marched to the edge of the pit at spear point and pushed in by the praetorian guard where they would fall into box full of foam below the audiences line of sight. Then a huge video clip of lions tearing up a wildebeest and roaring would be played on the big screens on either side of the stage accompanied by the sounds of screaming. Down in the foam pit we had a collection of fake bloody body parts that somebody would toss up in the air during the lion feeding. Of course the “victim” was then allowed to sneak out the back and return to the party."
There are so many incredibly insulting and poorly thought out half-truths in the original presentation referenced that I'm shocked it was given in the context of a professional environment.
Negativity begets negativity, but thinking positive and thinking big is just as contagious.
http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pd...
{Dad, if you use my face in an offensive slideshow again I beg you to please at least throw me a bone and put in a more flattering picture. As a self absorbed millennial I have provided the internet with a profusion of selfies in a rainbow of sepia tones. Please choose any of those.}
This is some sort of weird public spat between a father and a daughter, it's not newsworthy or even constructive.
If you're running a business and Alex's tactics give you even a 10% edge - take them.
1/ use children as Labor in 3rd world countries since they are cheaper and more pliable
2/ cheat in environmental tests (eg: Volkswagen)
3/ dump toxic waste into poor countries since they don't have environmental protections, and it's cheaper than processing/dispoaing them correctly
Basically you can get an edge by doing a lot of ethically wrong things. But should you? And should we celebrate anyone who wins by doing such things?
1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force. They're not allowed to work anymore because companies get too much flak for hiring them. Instead they starve on the street and resort to crime. It's easy to say 'no work for children!' from your comfy home.
2/ Looking after an employee's wife and trying to find Asperger graduates to employ is not illegal. The environmental test cheating is only having a negative effect because it is illegal, dishonest and fraud. None of the things mentioned by Alex are any of those. He's very up front about it - he's giving presentations on it while his employees are present.
3/ Not necessarily evil. A company could pay $100 to dump some waste in their own country with full regulations, or pay a poor country $10 to dump the waste there. If that $10 means better schooling for children there, then I'd say accepting a bit of waste that can be cleaned up later seems satisfactory. It's actually worked out quite well in some countries.
Basically - you're applying 'justice' that makes you feel better, and not justice that really solves anything. Making people like Alex stop bringing together teams that create things we use every day isn't helping us.
So, maybe fix that (being on the streets, hungry, etc), instead of fixing the laws against having children work?
Starving children (even as young as 10 or less) also willingly have sex with sex tourists for money, in Asia, Africa and elsewhere -- but those pesky laws also forbid them to do so. Instead of proposing we change the laws to enable them to make money this way without issues, how about we fix their situation?
So sure - fixing their situation would be the best! Please come help! We desperately need more real help here.
But barring people jumping on planes to come and help, which from experience doesn't seem to happen terribly often, it's better for these children to be able to survive.
My point is: you're doing this the wrong way around. First you fix their situation, and then you make child labour and sex tourism illegal. If you do it the other way around, you're just hurting people. You're just condemning children who had no other choice to survive to having no means of survival. Sorry to say it, but it's reality.
EDIT: To put it in a more clear example: a village is eating disgusting looking seaweed that tastes horrible because there is no other food nearby. You think nobody should have to eat this seaweed, so you make eating this seaweed illegal so that they can't eat it and offend you. End result? They starve because you didn't provide them with better food before making seaweed illegal.
And my point is, it's rather the inverse. Legal child labour and an allowed sex tourism industry creates great private interests and political manipulation (legal, developmental, etc) to ensure things do not change.
They're neither "short term problem fixers" not "stepping stones to something better", but part of the reason why the people are held down.
I agreed with your point of view years ago. I think everyone did. But the experiment failed. Pretty sad really. Yet another good anecdote on the infamous "don't fix what you don't understand".
I'm not sure where you had this experience. In the US and Europe, when child labor (and children prostitutes) was abolished, circa late 19th - early 20th century, the lives of children improved greatly.
In countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America where it's still either allowed or authorities turn a blind eye, not so much.
Moreover, the very idea of "let the kids be raped for money, lest they starve to death, it's the least we can do" is sick.
It's not by any means the "least" we can do.
There were no aliens who forced that child labor abolition on the US and Europe.
We have 3 choices:
1) Provide opportunity for street children to survive, and then ban exploitation of those children.
2) Ban exploitation of children, and ignore them as they die.
3) Leave it alone.
I'm saying we must choose 1 or 3. We must not pick 2. It is criminal. However, in developing countries in Africa, we have picked 2! Picking 2 is the "worst" we can do out of all possible options. It's sickening, and far too many people are still advocating for it.
Authorities in Africa and Asia no longer turn a blind eye because of grant money linked to abolishing child labour. People like you have forced that on them. And the children are now suffering far worse than before. You've made yourself feel better at the expense of those you wanted to help.
1 year out, maybe. 10 years out after the children have had the benefit of education? Dead wrong. Remember also that the local economy scales with prevailing wages. They would experience a period of deflation but that's fine as they have virtually no assets to speak of.
> Remember that this is not a power game played by a group of companies on the one side and a bunch of laborers on the other; there are many other factors including mechanization, productivity, consumer demand, etc.
In sub $10/day situations mechanization is a tiny factor at best. That machine has to be built in a factory in Germany by highly skilled and expensive engineers it's going to have to be amazing efficient to pay for itself. Then you need skilled labor to work on and maintain it.
Adults are more productive than children, and consumer demand would likely go up if you did not use them to produce your goods.
The western nations didn't get rid of child labor for altruistic reasons. It's a fools errand.
If you go deep in the supply chain if you will find all the above.
I am not condoning his advice, nor do I practice these. But reality is not that pretty.
In fact, all of the big name American companies all started out with terrible practices until they earned enough money and enough ire to hide those practices away from the public eye. And judging by my downvotes, far too many people really believe the world is a much nicer place than it is, and where you can really compete without getting a bit dirty yourself.
Running a business in a residential area. Shipping electrical products that were not UL tested for fire hazard. Paying owners in stock rather than taxable income. No diversity in hiring practices. Lead in products without a product recycling program in place.
The gist is that you generally have to cut corners somewhere to start up any business unless you already have lots of money.
This is ignoring the fact that effectiveness is not the only metric for a company. In Tim Cook's words, "if you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock".
Tim Cook was all about ROI when he implemented Apple's global supply chain.
Not just the easterners, methinks.
Come on, you're free to hate him, but putting DirectX together - which is the foundation for so much - is just holding a grudge against someone who says things you don't like.
And he didn't "make" DirectX or "put it together". He just advertised it. He's an "evangelist" not a "designer" or "developer" or "programmer". That's marketing, not engineering. And it was successful marketing because it was dishonest, heavy handed, well funded marketing, with no hint of self awareness or irony, which he kicked off by throwing a party that cast Microsoft as the Empire, and developers as slaves to be auctioned off and fed to the lions. The early version of DirectX he was evangelizing was a piece of crap. Look up "Direct3D Retained Mode" some time. [1]
[1] Direct3D Retained Mode removed from Windows Vista: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/969150
The alternative to "Retained Mode", "Execute Buffers", were just as bad if not worse in their own way [2]:
>Direct3D initially implemented "retained mode" and "immediate mode" 3D APIs. Like other DirectX APIs, such as DirectDraw, both were based on COM. The retained mode was a scene graph API that attained little adoption. Game developers clamored for more direct control of the hardware's activities than the Direct3D retained mode could provide. Only two games that sold a significant volume, Lego Island and Lego Rock Raiders, were based on the Direct3D retained mode, so Microsoft did not update the retained mode after DirectX 3.0.
>For DirectX 2.0 and 3.0, the Direct3D immediate mode used an "execute buffer" programming model that Microsoft hoped hardware vendors would support directly. Execute buffers were intended to be allocated in hardware memory and parsed by the hardware to perform the 3D rendering. They were extremely awkward to program, however, hindering adoption of the new API and prompting calls for Microsoft to adopt OpenGL as the official 3D rendering API for games as well as workstation applications. (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D#Direct3D_2.0_and_3.0
Was it not meant to be satirical? Was he genuinely advocating squeezing what you can out of people until they burn out and then tossing them aside?
I guess from the tone I thought he was trying to poke fun at the POV he was espousing? But the only thing I know about him was that he went around evangelizing DirectX at Microsoft Developer conference a long time ago so I could've completely misread.
> Was he genuinely advocating squeezing what you can out of people until they burn out and then tossing them aside?
I don't see this in the presentation at all. Do you mean where he says to churn through employees until you find the ones which fit? Seems like what all companies do, they just don't word it like that. Why else do we have trial periods? He's saying that you get in some employees, give them too much work, get rid of the ones that don't cope and reward the ones that do. Sounds like standard practice in every company I've ever been at.
I guess that should be obvious at this point. I thought there might still be a discussion until you pointed it out. That does pretty much settle it. Thanks.
As far as the rest, maybe I didn't read closely enough; it's just one of the impressions I walked away with with the "wage slave" language.
If this is how he actually does treat employees in a serious fashion then I take back everything nice I said about him. You can create a high performance culture while not being inhuman. I still stand by harsh tactics being important in business, but harsh tactics end where someone's health and well-being begin.
[0] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/17/wage-slaves/#comment... [1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rCVIzSi...
I mean, come on. Mr. Burns couldn't send that email seriously.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rCVIzSi...
tarage> This is the type of person you are. Just so everyone is aware.
TheSaint> Yes it is, and Selle is an amazing guy. That’s EXACTLY who I am.
In reality Alex does not really work all the time (for example he spent quite some time on his blog) and he does not require his employees to work all the time too.