Lawyer lawyer lawyer LAWYER lawyer LAWYER
micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com
micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com
This is bizarre, because her objection does not seem to be with the idea of consulting with a relevant expert and being guided by their opinion, but with firing without doing so, which isn't what Patio11 recommended. From other things in the post, its clear that the real issue is that the poster has a personal animus for Patio11 because of some ancient personal drama the two apparently had on HN in the past, and her perception that that interaction resulted in the eruption of negative treatment of her by others in the HN community. And, it really seems like she is mistargeting Patio11's response as a pretext to resurrect drama over that and, simultaneously, make some vague implications about gender dynamics at HN based on Patio11 being a high-karma-rank male poster and her being a high-karma-rank female poster and the relation that has with the old drama.
My comment about "A younger, stupider me" does explicitly repudiate advice that I had given before to people, because I had come to realize there are much better ways to freelance; it is in no way a commentary about other people.
That is all I intend to say about this.
Yes, but here's the way I read it: "I am [a] female" and you provided one anecdote for us to consider. (E.g. Working relationship turned out fine for you in the end.)
Nonetheless, I don't read it as "I represent females". My experience behind closed doors with HR about harassing males is to err on the side of termination.
Sure, if a man makes 2 offers for a "drinks after work?" and the woman refuses... it's reasonable to take him aside and say, "dude, cool your jets, she's not interested. Pursuing it is not good for your career. Are you getting what I'm saying??? Great! Now get back to work. (smile.)"
However, sending a comment with MILF Mother I'd Like to Fornicate is a totally valid trigger for the company to go nuclear and fire you.
I guess we have different thresholds for what is hapless romantic ineptness and what is bad behavior. I respect Mz's perspective but I disagree with it.
That said given the guy is getting sexual harassment complaints his first week there one could argue he is far from an ideal hire and simply fire him on that basis. "I'm sorry Bob, you just don't mesh well with the team"
Turn that around ... if the woman is making the offer and the man refuses, he's likely to still feel flattered but the woman is likely to get the signal and move on.
But ... many men are absolutely clueless and will never get that signal. On the other hand, if the man asks every day but goes no further, is that really sexual harassment or is it just an expression of interest? I can't speak as a woman, but I'd imagine she's thinking "this guy is truly clueless". Does she also get irritated by it over time? Probably?
So I think part of this discussion needs to acknowledge that you can't write HR policy that will satisfy everyone. What you can do is put absolute limits in place, and provide a way for positive feedback - my favorite part of the story is that the woman and man eventually rebuilt trust and had a good working relationship. In my experience, this will never work with some people - it becomes an obsession for them and policy is irrelevant.
I've had the opposite experience. I didn't feel flattered and she didn't get the hint.
>But ... many men are absolutely clueless and will never get that signal.
Weasel words. We're in Anecdote City right now.
>So I think part of this discussion needs to acknowledge that you can't write HR policy that will satisfy everyone.
The HR policies exist to prevent sexual harassment and to optimize for "safe against lawsuits." They're not supposed to make people satisfied or happy, they're there to protect the company.
"Broad generalizations"? - Certainly. I'm not surprised at all that you've experienced exactly the opposite interaction (and I've seen extreme cases of that twice). But I also worded my post carefully to convey really loose values - "the woman is likely" and "many men are".
I haven't collected statistics, my experience is that men are more attuned to what's appropriate than "in my distant path" and that women are less tolerant of it (both good things IMHO). So you can disregard my opinions, but if we're going to require double-blind studies to post in HN comments, this place is going to get very quiet.
I do agree with your paragraph about HR policies and lawsuits. Isn't it nice on those occasions when HR is better than that?
Which is irrelevant to the existence of sexual harassment, a hostile work environment, or the employer's tort liability for failing to address those things, and so not particularly relevant to what the employer rationally should do in the situation.
> So I think part of this discussion needs to acknowledge that you can't write HR policy that will satisfy everyone.
HR policy isn't intended to satisfy everyone, its intended to maximize benefits and minimize costs to the employer of its relation with its (current, past, and potential future) employees, and an important area of cost minimization it deals with is costs of litigation and ensuing legal liabilities.
There is a fairly clear legal standard; any coworker who isn't in a position of higher power is allowed one bite of the apple. IANAL, but this situation is unlikely to qualify as protected speech under that standard.
Also, if you suggest only females are getting harassed at work, you are wrong :)
Firing someone is generally not something that is done to help the person change, help the industry, or anything other than limit costs to the firing firm resulting from continuing to employ the fired person.
MILF became a really popular term in the early 00s. Back then, it was obviously vulgar. I think the term has been thrown around so casually, that to most people, it has lost its bite. Hell, morning zoo shows will drop MILF (even though the "F" is blatantly vulgar) without batting an eyes. To a lot of people, I don't think MILF generates the same reaction as outwardly saying, "She looks good. I'd like to fuck her." To him, it was probably analogous to saying, "You look good. Really good. We should go out sometime," with the subtext of sex after the date.
Again, I don't think he was right. Just trying to provide a rationale.
Holy fuck don't say that to people at work, especially if when you ask for private communications they say "sure, so long as it's work related".
I think its kind of odd to see this as a defense of the acceptability (even subjective from the POV of the speaker) of a comment after a rejection, in a conversation between coworkers, that originated in a work-related forum even if it had an intervening change of venue.
That's, at best, only marginally less problematic in context than the original statement. So, yeah, it is basically analogous to saying that -- which is exactly the problem.
So if an action is so egregious, why risk your career over it? I figure it's because he didn't equate MILF with crossing any line. Otherwise, why would he bother to regroup and try again after getting rejected? I cannot fathom why someone would act in such a way that they'd get fired if they knew beforehand that they were in the wrong . Which, as you said, is the issue: he (not me) didn't think that there was anything wrong with what he said.
And for the umpteenth time, his words and actions were NOT acceptable. I just want to reason through something that seems so obviously wrong to me.
How do we know the complaint was legitamate? Where is the scientific doubt? Where is the investigation?
While I don't approve of the OP raking another HN user over the coals this publicly. She does make a GREAT point.
Seek mediation, don't fire right away. She isn't saying don't get a lawyer, that's what HR would do in almost all cases. They'd probably have independent mediation where they spoke with both people in an attempt to see if things could be worked out.
But that is in fact what adults do. They mediate, they don't act without doing research, finding context and getting both sides of the story. If the male says, "Well I never said that!" and you terminate his employment how is that an appropriate reaction? What if he DIDN'T actually say she was a milf?
For all the sanity I see here on HN a little discretion and taking a little more thought before an action would be something I'd EXPECT this community to applaud. She isn't saying don't fire this guy, she's just saying don't fire him right now.
I also want to go on record saying I do think that the female who filed the complaint was not lying at all. I would suggest that you implicitly trust her statement, but you also need to talk to the other employee. You should get a lawyer involved. BUT you should also get HR involved. If this is something you outsource to a company that does HR then great, but don't just nuke the guy.
Sorry, but that isn't true all too often.
We have seen both radfems and rad-MRAs starting shitstorms on the Internet over all kinds of stuff where a reasonable adult just thinks "what the fuck have they all been smoking", including SWATting, shitstorming employers, death threats, vile behavior etc.
I desperately wish that everyone calms down a lot and thinks before typing, but unfortunately, this is no longer possible: only maximum brutality will ensure publicity, no matter the costs.
In this case maybe counseling/training could fix the behavior in the harasser, maybe it wouldn't. The other thing is, sometimes there is conduct that merits firing outright, without counseling. For some people/companies that line would have been crossed with the 'milf' comment.
From the standpoint of making the world a better place I do think that incidents like these can be turned into teachable moments so that people can understand better what is, and is not appropriate. But really, companies should make that part of their training when people are brought on so that situations like this can be avoided in the first place. If someone still crosses the line after that, then they won't be surprised when they are fired.
I disagree, there is something called respect and politeness, if you need to learn it at work ,then your parents did a bad job raising you.
Calling a woman "a milf" is inappropriate, period. I'm black, if a colleague called me "n__gger", would he need training so he can learn to interact at work with black people ? that's not serious.
If the male employee was just a bit pushy and insistant, while it is inexcusable, I would give him a warning and training. But you can't make up excuses for someone who call a female employee "a milf". There is no training that can fix that. That's not being "insensitive", that's being straight out macho in a professional context.
Somehow I think that analogy just confuses the issue.
> Over the weekend... He asked to take the conversation off Slack (moved to Whatsapp) and asked if they could hang out (she said, "sure as friends in work context"), referred to her as a milf (ugh...), and asked if he could tell her a secret (she refused)[0]
In the context of the original post, I believe this is one of those cases. To tie this into the analogy to which you're responding, if one of my employees asked another to move off work-chat so he/she could assail him/her and was acting genuinely sleazy, I'd pack up the offending employee's desk, lock down accounts and access on Sunday night, and make sure I was there first on Monday to escort him/her out of the building.
The language that my team uses would make a drunk sailor blush, but I think this is a pretty clear case of justified firing. It's damn hard to hire a great team and nothing will destroy it faster than interpersonal issues.
Do you fire both instantly the next day? Physical fights and insults are both unprofessional, and as a zero tolerance policy, that means they need to be let go instantly. Do you only fire the insult throwing employee? Do you talk to either one of them before issuing the boot?
I will say that the scenario that you've created is markedly different.
With that said, I worked with very stupid people. Great programmers but under-socialized. These people have no idea how much harm they are causing but will snap out of it if reproached by HR or management. I know that doesn't sound fair but there are a lot of dumbasses in our industry.
The original post was by an owner/founder ("just hired a new biz person", "my existing employees", "my employee", "I'm one of the founders"), had they been big enough to have a dedicated HR department with any possible expertise in that (rather than, say, one person in charge of hiring and payroll) they'd naturally have gone through that rather than asked how to handle it on HN.
I thus assumed — and I think most others readers including patio11 did as well — that there was no such HR with any expertise on the subject which could handle the situation.
If (probably "when") the behavior continues--or worsens--now you're responsible for keeping an employee that has a known history of sexual harassment. I would posit that there is not a single employee so valuable as to be worth this risk.
It's worth having a talk first to try and fix things, warning the employee that it won't be tolerated again. It's not like once you have the talk you lose all future opportunity to fire them.
Seems to me that doing this would deepen one problem (...please do not use final solution/terrorist tactics. This only hurts women in the long run.) but I'm not sure it deepens the actual problem the poster from yesterday had (a potential lawsuit).
Firing the individual without an investigation by HR sends a message of zero tolerance to intolerance (an intolerance of intolerance) to every other employee in the company, that any employee faux pas is utterly unacceptable. This would create a guarded work environment and have negative impact on the culture.
The two employees agreed to take the conversation from a work platform (i.e. Slack) to a personal platform (i.e. Whatsapp). To me this is akin to asking someone in the Office break room if they'd like to get coffee at Starbucks, it's asking to broaden a relationship beyond the scope of coworker. At this point the scope of their relationship (i.e. work related vs personal) is nebulous and I would argue broadens the scope of acceptable conversation.
From what little we know, it sounds like it wasn't unreasonable for him to think the bounds had been extended and also the guy grossly overstepped his bounds. In that regard, firing him summarily might be grounds for a lawsuit.
"Men and women need to learn to interact at work" stuck out to me as well. I think they should learn that... around the age of 12 after getting over their fear of cooties. Not the first few weeks at a new job.
It's fine to be trained on "How to speak to investors during a conference call." or "How to speak to other companies during a sales call or trip.", skills related to the job. But not "How to speak to someone attractive in a professional setting."
If you bring on a new dev, it's expected that you'll have to teach them internal stuff, in-depth details on your current stack. It's a little annoying to have to teach them how to use Git properly, pull, branch, push, but sometimes you pick someone that really doesn't know. But I would certainly want a dev to be fired if they asked me what a for loop was. This feels that elementary to me. I would expect every developer to know what a loop is, and I would expect every single employee to understand at least the basics of human decency.
Also, all the emphasis on gender in the blog post and author's profile. Why is this a gender issue, it's just an etiquette issue. What if it was two men, or two women in this scenario? Why does it matter the gender of the two people involved? And what does it matter the gender of the commenter? For me, everyone on HN is a genderless construct, and I almost never read. I saw the patio11's comment in the other thread and agreed with it most. I had no idea it was patio11 that wrote it.
...I'm assuming there's something subtler and importanter to it, because it seems Michele/Mz has a damned decent brain going on. I mean seriously, how often do you find someone with this nuance of opinion:
"I loathe the expression "The Patriarchy" and I think it mostly does not fit the issues of gender disparity seen on HN. I can think of one or two men there who strike me as staunch supporters of "The Patriarchy," but I think most men there are not actively trying to keep "little women" in "their place." They are mostly just human beings, who happen to be male, who don't know a better answer than the crappy situation we currently have. But, then, most women don't have better answers either and have much more vested interest in finding such answers. I see no reason to vilify men for such a prosaic shortcoming of happenstance." [1]
It also misrepresents his actual advice, which was not "fire the guy immediately", but "consult with an attorney (and, parenthetically, my guess is that the attorney will say to fire the guy.)"
The difference is important, because Patio11's actual advice leaves open the possibility that the attorney might recommend something else, including, presumably, not firing the guy and instead using internal counseling managed by HR to try to resolve the situation and ensure it isn't repeated. Patio11 isn't pretending to be an authority here, he's recommending consulting with someone who actually is an authority on the issue.
Outside of YC employees and maybe tptacek, Patrick is one of the most prolific commentesr on HN, consistently provides a lot of objectively correct information, and is a pretty nice guy to boot.
It's fine that you think "that's probably it". Posting that as if you knew it for sure is unjustified and rude.
Obviously I don't have any details about this interaction (and he's declined to share), but I'm not especially persuaded by the dark allusions here.
No two situations are the same. If the behavior can be corrected go for the HR route. If the guy seems like a pretentious idiot, then lawyer up. Its the managers job to assess the situation and act accordingly. If its affecting the team, then something has to be done, which course of action he takes is on him to see if anything can be done.
No one here has all the pieces to judge what the guy should have done. We can give advice, or different perspectives but this michele girl is just about as qualified to give advice as this alleged patio11. This blog is less about the actual situation then just trying to up one patio11 it looks like.
"Men and women need to learn to interact at work."
While I think it is very true the question I asked myself is, should my company be the training ground for people to learn to get along ?
The answer I came up with is a resounding no. I think that knowing how to interact with the opposite sex is something the individual is responsible for before even entering the work place. If they want to pay me to teach them manners then so be it, but I am not going to pay them to teach them manners.
Side note on patio11, I don't know or care who the dude is, from what you describe he sounds a little sketchy but you know how internet rumors etc are. Sometimes internet fanboys rush to support their hero, I didn't want to be confused with those :)
My opinion is, Nuke em from orbit, its the only way to be sure! but I do think your approach can be valid as well, just not the one I personally would take in this day and age.
Side note - I don't like the term terrorist being used so lightly.
As for patio11's being sketchy, I think I've read everything he's written (starting on the Joel-on-Software forum) and while I don't agree with him on everything, I do believe he's got reasonable ethics and morals. Why use the word sketchy when you simply don't agree with his opinion? And bear in mind it was an opinion based solely on what was written in that Ask HN.
I don't just take her opinion on him as fact, I have had no personal interaction with him nor do I draw the conclusion he is actually sketchy, I just take it as one persons opinion about another and know either and or both can be skewed because of past history.
The post described a pretty different situation that just disagreeing with him. Not that I'm taking it at face value, since it wasn't described in enough detail to evaluate it for myself.
Yet oddly, you're happy to use 'nuke them', and don't mention a problem with 'final solution' used in the exact same context as 'terrorist' was...
I think (hope) it's being used in that playful way.
Eh. It sort of confused me in the context. I think that something like "zero tolerance policy" would have been better.
> The answer I came up with is a resounding no. I think that knowing how to interact with the opposite sex is something the individual is responsible for before even entering the work place. If they want to pay me to teach them manners then so be it, but I am not going to pay them to teach them manners.
60 years ago, that would be spot on. Back then there was a very clear distinction between work life and social life. Furthermore, there was much more separation of job by sex so that even if you were engaging in a social relationship with an opposite sex coworker you would probably not have much interaction with them while at work.
The workplace nowadays, especially in many tech companies, is quite a bit different than the '50s tech workplace. Companies now often deliberately try to mix work life and social life, often aiming for an environment that is more like college than like a workplace. Startups often keep employees so busy that they must spend long hours at work, leaving little time to maintain an outside social life.
How this strange mix of work and social is handled is often quite different from company to company.
It is very nice that in your instance and outcome that was so mutually agreeable was reached by all parties. However, it could have easily gone differently, and can go differently in the future. As other commenters in that other thread noted: if the individual who was harassed was on a PIP, if the individual harasses an external vendor/contractor/customer, if he or someone else harasses another employee in the future, if the harassee leaves the company under circumstances that are not mutually disagreeable... all of these are very likely to result in material civil settlements to the company (and possibly the CEO personally) if this is not handled in a way very close to what patio11 described. Raising with HR vs contacting a lawyer will certainly result in the same outcome, regardless.
Exactly. It was a big risk and her company frankly got lucky that it worked out.
Not only that but sentences like "I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member there" appears to be a person obsessed with points, giving validity to clickbait.
I have enough points, go ahead a downvote. They do not translate into money.
However, it looks like majority of comments are focusing on the "right" way to deal with a MILF comment. Some members express that it is a zero tolerance offense. Some other members express that something like that should only be a warning and the person given a 2nd chance.
I think it's a productive conversation because even if neither side changed the others' opinions, at least we learned what others' thresholds were. I was surprised to learn that MILF is not disrespectful enough for some folks to terminate the employee. Now I question what others think is within the boundaries of not firing. What about a quick butt grab in the hallway? How about sending a nude to a coworker's phone/email? In any case, the only thing that taints the discussion of this important topic is that it was begun by the soap opera article submission. Some of us ignored that part.
It's less useful here, hanging off this poisonous blog post. Mean dumb things shouldn't get upvotes.
I suspect that some people are unclear of, or have suppressed in favor of the colloquial use, the definition or expanded form of MILF. If you think of it as "very attractive mother and/or mature woman", which I think the meaning has shifted to somewhat over time, then I can see how some people might have differing interpretations for the severity of the remark. That's not to say it's acceptable, it is not, but I can see how someone could be somewhat surprised initially the severity of the negative reaction to their comment, through ignorance or carelessness.
Comparing e-penises is an adolescent exercise and waste of time.
I've had run-ins with "high profile" people here on HN, as well as a tiff with Ycombinator. Turns out, the high profiles can be disgusting, nasty, brutish, and rude: the same way you gain status in the 'Valley. How do you defend against it? Well, you can't here. Your account is shit-canned, hellbanned, modded to death, or openly insulted and berated.
So yes, users take to other channels. That's what I did when I hacked the Thalmic Myo. Didn't know it was a YC venture. Company was crippling hardware for getting more money (surprise!). Posts here went poof. Fortunately Hackaday took it and ran with it. Took around 5 hours for Thalmic to make a statement and change their whole viewpoint, for that I am glad.
But no user Ms, don't expect much changes to be made here with regards to bad policy and bad discussion; for they will turn around and do the opposite they recommended just days prior.
The answer is, social power and the threat of in-group reprisals. If you challenge an extremely popular person's opinion, the in-group will attack you, because you basically just challenged their whole group mentality that this person is implicitly trustworthy and correct no matter what.
However, both of them have potentially bad advice, because they have a very small portion of a much longer story, and they both think they have the solution to something which may be much more complex. patio11's is more "nuclear", while the open mic author's is more "hiring is difficult and the incident may not be as horrible as it sounds so let's see if disciplinary action helps". Neither may apply, depending on all the left-out details.
She had to leave HN for 18 months because she couldn't even form a civil response to any comment by patio11.
This post really has no place linked on HN - it skirts the letter rules of the site by being an offsite link but violates them in spirit.
Just because someone other than the original author posted an item to HN does not mean the original author should be held to account for some perceived slight to this site.
Whether her blog post is exclusively for HN or not, her post is definitely for/about HN.
I can't see anywhere in the guidelines where there is any rule about not posting anything off-site relating to HN, or not identifying members of the community.
There isn't even a rule against what you are choosing to label a 'personal attack', but looks reasonably civil to me.
Even if there were such a rule, attempting to silence dissent outside the communities own spaces is behavior typical of a cult or authoritarian regime. A healthy community isn't afraid of people thinking and saying things that some of its members don't like.
I'm not saying silence dissent outside HN. People are free to post on their blogs whatever they want. If they are making a personal attack against someone on HN on their personal blog, the link to that blog post should be blocked from this site and the user absolutely warned/banned if they themselves share it.
Not that I'm sticking up for Patrick. I frequently find myself in (often silent) disagreement with him, but the post was extremely flimsy to me and not much more than an offsite meta-discussion that contributes neither to the original discussion nor this community. I flagged the link but since it remains I think this is worth discussing.
You may not be sticking up for Patrick, but you are sticking up for something. In the absence of an attack, it's unclear what.
And I didn't say gender had anything to do with harassment. We're discussing the article, which happens to be written by a woman.
And just so I can get really pedantic: gender is inferred as a context of speech. If you are calling a cis-woman "guy" or "dude", it is inferred you are speaking colloquially. If you call a transwoman "guy" or "dude", it is inferred [by the subject] that you are mis-gendering them, and is offensive.
And more to the point of the context of the (now-deleted) comment: if you say "guy", "he", "him", and "dude" all about the same subject, you are calling the subject a man. You can't argue your way around blatantly misgendering someone multiple times.
Collectively we decide who wins. Nobody is right or wrong in the present because it's a never-ending battle over an idea. Words change over time - always have and always will. You can only be right historically in context. 'Guy', _historically_, does not mean 'man'. What it means now is your interpretation. You should not get so bent out of shape because other people disagree with you.
There is an inherent problem with basing gender-politics around the meanings of words. How do you deal with people coming from languages that do not have gendered pronouns that are trying to translate their language into English? Do you beat them over the head for how wrong they are (before you say no, I've seen it countless times)?
Also hey, guess what. 'He' has seen use as a gender-neutral pronoun well into the 1960s.
Note this is not the same as ignoring someone's expressed choice (when being directly addressed) if they have an issue with certain words.
Because I personally know people who see 'guy' as a gender-specific word - and because the dictionary says "guy" means "a man" - I know i'm not going to ever call a woman "guy", because it may offend them. I think this is a pretty simple concept...
I believe this is the disconnect between your argument and the prior commentor's comment. This falls under "Note this is not the same as ignoring someone's expressed choice (when being directly addressed) if they have an issue with certain words." The issue is whether the person speaking should know and consider guys to be gendered, and possibly offensive. The fact some people are saying it's not gendered is evidence that's it's ambiguous to some people. To assume someone was purposefully misgendering you without knowledge of whether it's an honest mistake, as we've seen it might be, is not conducive to communication.
> Because I personally know people who see 'guy' as a gender-specific word - and because the dictionary says "guy" means "a man" - I know i'm not going to ever call a woman "guy", because it may offend them.
Which is fine, but you've been presented with evidence that all people don't necessarily have that same knowledge. You can continue to assume that this knowledge must be universal and people that act in opposition to it are doing so purposefully and without regard for the feelings of others, or you can extend the benefit of a doubt, and assume until further evidence to the contrary that they are misinformed about what you believe to be true. I believe giving the benefit of a doubt it more useful and leads to better outcomes in almost every respect.
Linguistically, "man" is still gender neutral in many contexts and even any dictionary recognizes this. Oxford, Cambridge, take your pick! Usually cited as #2 or #3 in the list of definitions.
>If you call a transwoman "guy" or "dude", it is inferred [by the subject] that you are mis-gendering them, and is offensive.
To 'some' and I prefer that 'some' do not speak for 'all'. In case I need an example: I do not take offense at this. I prefer people continue to use whatever gendered pronoun they're more comfortable with. I don't need or seek their validation and I'm not so fragile that their choice of word bothers me.
When I was at my first job when I was 16, I had a female manager. I didn't think anything of it. Well, she had a thing for tall men (and high school boys). I wanted nothing of it.
So when she laid it on thick, I told her I appreciated the attention and compliments, but I want to be single for the time being. She didn't quit.
Well, she did it around the district manager. Fired on the spot.