The tech industry has a problem with “bro culture” | Hacker News Reader

The tech industry has a problem with “bro culture”

nytimes.com

46 pointsdaegloe87 comments

I love the fantasy that this is in any way unique to tech. Tech's problem is that they are less adept at hiding it -- partially because they eschew normal corporate bureaucracy which does a fantastic job masking these issues. The underlying reality is this is behavior that is seen when you have people with large amounts of wealth and power (and guess what, it happens to people of every gender!).

I quite disagree. Yes these kind of things exists outside of tech. but if you dump tens of millions of dollars on any fresh faced person that shows up at your door, this is what you get.

Elucidate? What's the connection?

Money magnifies character faults. We saw this in the first dotcom bust. Completely clueless people given tons of money do stupid things.

The worst past is many of these buffoons managed to make their bones during the first go around (or the 1.5 go around leading up to GFC). Success is nasty in that it blinds you to your faults - and what actually made you successful.

So now many of these buffoons have won, don't know why or how they won and have started investing in people like them. And we wind up where we are now.

sorry, i thought it was clear.

vc largely trades in the story. because for the longest time they could cash out on the promise of a thing rather than concrete earnings or anything remotely objective.

the silicon valley vc culture has been such a dependable shower of money, with a few minor blips, that its quite believable that some random people, with no particular idea in mind would wander by hoping to get wet.

so if a vc, in fact many vcs, invest very heavily in a story ,largely based on each others faith, and that turns out to be a company run by narcissistic idiots with no real long term economic value, we shouldn't be surprised.

> if you dump tens of millions of dollars on any fresh faced person that shows up at your door

Unless that fresh faced person is Mark Zuckerberg, or Larry Page or Bill Gates or any of the fresh faced persons who were actually the real deal.

Ummm, perhaps you aren't familiar with all the trouble Gates and MS got in back in 90s.

Zuck's record isn't spotless either. Fortunately he got good "adult supervision" early (which this article hit on).

I have been thinking about "Yishan-style" CEOs for a while now.

Care to elaborate? What's a Yishan-style CEO?

I am talking about Yishan Wong, formerly of Reddit.

Go on.

I am referring to "partially because they eschew normal corporate bureaucracy which does a fantastic job masking these issues." of course.

And how does/did Yishan demonstrate this? I haven't really followed Reddit's corporate history, minus the brief episode with Ellen Pao.

Look up "yishan dehrmann"

It's not even that it's unique to tech, it's mostly unique to a specific subset of tech. There's a reason that 'Silicon Valley' is also a comedy, and it's not a compliment. Yes, you can find this behavior elsewhere, in the same way that you can find gold in most rivers and streams. If you want to mine for big fat nuggets though, go to Silicon Valley.

It's not unique to tech, but it's particularly prevalent in tech, and should not be dismissed on the grounds that it's not unique.

People keep saying it's particularly prevalent in tech. Which I don't believe at all.

I'm skeptical too, but very open to change my mind, so I'd love to hear how we're wrong.

> The underlying reality is this is behavior that is seen when you have people with large amounts of wealth and power (and guess what, it happens to people of every gender!).

It happens to the 25% of employees in leadership positions that are women and the 75% that are men. How equitable!

  The bro culture is not unique to tech. Companies and funds willing to put billions into tech startups with such culture is unique though. For most other kinds of startups they would want seats on the board and accounting of every dime. Investors let tech startups get away with too much stuff.

It makes sense though. I'm sure Wall Street is as bad or worse. The thing is, everyone already hates wall st.. SV and startups have become part of pop culture. It's "cool" to have a startup. People are eschewing Wall Street, Madison Ave, and big 4 consulting jobs to work at startups or VC firms.

It's only natural that journalists and media outlets will look to expose the flaws in what's popular. A similar story about stock traders would not raise eyebrows. Actually I think it's a good thing.

I agree with the pretext behind the article of inexperienced, reckless CEOs creating toxic culture but it is incredibly poor journalism and I'm laughing that this made it past NYT editorial board. What came to mind is the scene from Idiocracy "Wanted: for being a dick". There have been much better pieces on excoriating these companies individually and using them as a vehicle to discuss systemic problems. This one is just a bandwagon hack job.

Also "none of the 15 biggest American tech companies valued over $1 billion has a female chief executive." er, what about the most successful tech company of all time, IBM?

It's an opinion piece, not journalism.

That is completely orthogonal. Journalism includes developing and editing articles to meet expected standards, and you can evaluate that independent of agreeing or disagreeing with the message. Being factually incorrect in the case of the top 15 CEOs is not excusable just because it's an opinion piece. I tend to think of NYT as a high quality paper and was surprised to see this filler.

>"That is completely orthogonal"

No its, not. An Op-Ed is a specific format as distinct from regular journalism, it is not edited other than grammatically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op-ed

Touche

>"but it is incredibly poor journalism and I'm laughing that this made it past NYT editorial board."

Its an "Opinion" piece and clearly marked as such on the page, and it does not express nor is it intended to express the opinion of the publication's editorial board but rather solely of the author. I think almost every newspaper of record has an editorial/opinion section, its been a staple for almost a hundred years.

APA guidelines for writing Ed-Op pieces.

http://blog.apaonline.org/2016/05/23/ten-rules-of-thumb-for-...

Look at Uber, the ride-hailing start-up. It’s the biggest tech unicorn in the world, with a valuation of $69 billion. Not long ago Uber seemed invincible. Now it’s in free fall, and top executives have fled. The company’s woes spring entirely from its toxic bro culture, created by its chief executive, Travis Kalanick.

This is a big assertion. There are multiple forces at play regarding Uber's erosion. The culture is a significant aspect of it, but not the entire reason. Other forces include regulation, Uber's floundering self-driving play, and Uber's inability to continue paying drivers the same rates without running out of money.

I suppose you could stretch it to say:

1. Their optimistic / misguided (or is it? Can we be sure yet?) foray into self-driving cars was a result of arrogance stemming from their toxic bro culture

2. Their problem with subsidizing rides and losing money is due to a win-at-all-costs competitive attitude that demands they run Lyft into the ground, stemming from toxic bro culture.

3. Increasing regulation is due to their arrogant tendency to flout local taxi laws and run Uber anyway (this I might agree with, though I'll note that Uber is often wildly popular when it disrupts a local taxi market, and they have been able to get their way in part due to asking Uber riders and drivers to actively support regulation change in their area)

But, no, I agree with you. The idea that everything Uber's struggling with is directly the fault of the toxic bro culture that Kalanick has (seemingly single-handedly?) created is absurd.

The win-at-all-costs culture is not "bro exclusive". For example, look at how Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are copying stuff from each other in the hope that users do not leave the walled garden.

Or what Google did with gmail and now AMP.

Oh I agree, win-at-all-costs is definitely not bro-exclusive, since it's been around a lot longer than this concept of bro-culture has been.

Are the following statements true?

"despite many studies showing that women run companies better than men" and "none of the 15 biggest American tech companies valued over $1 billion has a female chief executive"

The first seems to suggest I could find studies saying the opposite, or that perhaps increased diversity is the best option and who is CEO isn't as important. Would love to see the source they used for this. For the second I thought HP and Yahoo were both run by women CEO's and as CEO why are they being ignored? Or is it just referring to unicorn startups? On spotty connection so hard to check.

Edit I previously mentioned AMD and IBM having female CEO's but edited out as I was getting downvoted. Not trying to push any agenda just pointing out the statements seemed wrong.

IBM CEO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginni_Rometty AMD CEO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Su former HP CEO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman former XEROX CEO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Burns (still chairwoman, tho)

also worth noting that these are exceptional companies with TONS of companies that aren't unicorns that are highly valuable and well run. Whether women run unicorns better perhaps was not what the stat was about and instead was probably about whether in general women run companies better. Since there aren't that many unicorns that popup annually, wouldn't be surprised if there aren't statistically significant sample sizes to determine which gender runs a company better, assuming you subscribe to gender binaries and agreed upon 'better' conditions of course...

This is an article about nothing. People used to fall for articles like this, not anymore.

Lets deconstruct it.

(a) Select for examples where white men (who the tech media has generally decided are evil and always are a problem) have failed in business (b) Now we will identify these people with a codeword (tech bro) because we can't actually say "aggressive white men" without being overtly racist (c) Now lets generalize and blame all the problems of the entire industry on these evil white privileged males who the media has decided to demonize (d) Conclusion: White men aka tech bros are the root of all problems in Silicon Valley and must be controlled and stopped because they are bad human beings, all of them!

Once you see through the superficial dressing the underlying logic is hilarious.

If you read a lot of media you start to see the patterns. Over and over again the urge is to blame the nearest convenient white male CEO for whatever problem just happened. Donald Trump got elected? Lets blame Zuckerberg for fake news. Then lets blame Peter Thiel and then Sam Altman. Note: All white men in positions of power.

In reality:

People get rich frequently in Silicon Valley by being assholes, taking other people's property, customers, business, employees. We call this system "capitalism."

YouTube grew enormous on the back of pirated content. Alibaba and Amazon profit tremendously from counterfeit products. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates spent their careers suing, back-stabbing and stealing ideas form one another and those around them.

Don't even get me started about Larry Ellison.

Capitalism is not really nice, get over it.

And yet there seems to be an awful lot of aggressive white males or Tech bros, or whatever, creating shit culture.

Just because you are offended by it doesn't make it untrue.

"People get rich frequently in Silicon Valley by being assholes, taking other people's property, customers, business, employees. We call this system 'capitalism.'.... Capitalism is not really nice, get over it."

The name of this fallacy is "The Naturalistic Fallacy".

And the name of that fallacy is Libertarianism.

The author is a white male who bases his opinions on his experience working at both a tech startup and traditional companies.

Does anybody else get the sense that the NYT's role in reporting about the tech industry is that of a gossip rag?

You do realize this is an opinion article right

Whoever wrote it, NYT chose to publish it.

Opinions pieces do not carry an implicit approval of the publisher, that's their entire point. Just because the NYT allowed an op-ed reflects little on their journalistic standards.

This does show how perhaps the 'op-ed' doesn't quite work in its current form on this new-fangled internet thing.

I've talked to more than one person who assumed something written on the main domain was a 'proper' article, when in actuality it turned out to be an op-ed, blog (some new site did/does this) by essentially a random person, or something like that.

Maybe people made this mistake before and I'm only noticing it now?

I feel like this is only an issue with people who only skim the title and fail to actually read the article. The page itself makes it very clear that it's an opinion article, and if you're drawing conclusions from the url or title itself it's the fault of the person.

A lot of the "news" coming out of SV is a gossip rag.

Particularly the news about SV that comes out of NY.

Do you really believe this is a East Coast vs West Coast thing? The NYT reserves as much finger-wagging for Wall Street as well. There have been no shortage of similar pieces that have come out of the Mid-West and California newspapers. Additionally most of the S.V giants also have offices and a presence in NYC these days.

SV has a lot of problems. There is a lot to write about.

However, yes, I do feel that I have read a disproportionate amount of poorly reasoned op-eds decrying Silicon Valley culture published by east coast news institutions.

Moreover, no, I don't feel that NYT is remotely as critical of Wall Street. By a long shot, and particularly in regards issues such as sexism and in-group biases. They aren't even as critical of tech offices in New York - the trouble is always 'over there'.

I am guessing you don't read the NY Times daily or on a regular basis then. The NY Times is quite regularly critical about Wall Street shenanigans and its rampant sexism. Here is an article from this past summer specifically specifically calling out "Bro culture" on Wall Street and its rampant sexism in the work place:

"How Wall Street Bro Talk Keeps Women Down":

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/how-wall-s...

Here is another Op piece from a month ago calling out Wall Street on the refusal of its CEOs to put any of their own skin in the game.

"Welcome Back, Wall Street. Now Pay Us Back.":

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/opinion/sunday/welcome-ba...

Such pieces critical of Wall Street are quite regular in the NYTimes.

It's easy to see the NYTimes as singling out S.V. because people regularly submit NYTimes coverage of S.V. to Hacker News. In fact in the last couple of years it seems there's been a perceptible uptick of S.V stories from the NYTimes that wind up on HN.

So no the trouble isn't always "over there" according to the NYTimes, similar problems in their own backyard feature quite regularly as well.

It's an op-ed by Dan Lyons aka fake Steve Jobs.

No I don't think that's an accurate statement. This is an Ed-Op piece and as such they are editorializing. That's the nature of this format. Note the word "Opinion" at the top.

As opposed to their other reporting?

I also don't like bro culture, but I don't think VCs are going to push it out. Venture capitalists are bros. Finance has a bro culture. This is a pervasive problem, not just a tech problem. Zenefits' downturn was because of fraud, not the bro culture. Despite all the recent bad press, I don't think Uber is close to going up in flames.

End of the day, this stuff happens because people prefer do business with their friends, and those friends tend to come from college, so the friend funnel looks like the college recruitment funnel.

That probably also accounts for the dearth of women.

"...they’re boorish jerks who don’t know how to run companies."

Theranos.

Congress.

Office of American Innovation.

We're celebrating an era when skills like "manipulation" and "rhetoric" are more important for success than a passion for doing things exceptionally well.

Only when I finished the article did I notice that the author was Dan Lyons, who also wrote the Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, chronicling his time at HubSpot.

I'm surprised that this article itself makes no mention of it.

Huh, I'd almost call that a 'material omission' considering the context. Usually prior work is a calling card. Well, unless it's something more convenient to ignore. Not saying I'm immune from this, just that I can understand it.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the real reason. The reason is schools.

Elite prep schools to elite Ivies to elite starter jobs to elite opportunities to elite companies. "Elites" tend to be, ancedotally, more bro-ey.

Like all of the social problems on Earth, here's another education parity can solve.

The author of this piece is a white male who, at 52 year old, spent a year working for HubSpot after being laid off by Newsweek magazine. He wrote a book about his experience.

In this article - http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo... he gives a lot of information on exactly the kind of culture he is talking about.

Stuff like, "Later I also will hear a story about janitors coming in one Saturday morning to find the following things in the first-floor men’s room: a bunch of half-empty beers, a huge pool of vomit, and a pair of thong panties. The janitors were not happy. They get even more distressed when, one morning, a twenty-something guy from the HubSpot marketing department arrives wasted and, for reasons unknown, sets a janitor’s cart on fire."

The whole thing is worth a read.

Aside from the similarity to others in the way that it collapsed, and the behaviors that happened within the company, do other people get the impression that zenefits actually a Bro-co? I can't claim to be an expert or claim to personally know the founder/leadership - I didn't get the feeling that it was particularly bro-ish.

I bring this up because while it's entertaining and perhaps a more-true-than-not narrative of the Brogrammer startup, it's a bit facile and may lead people to 1) automatically assume brogrammers are going to be a problem and more concerningly 2) ignore problems at companies that aren't run by brogrammers.

Here's a randomised trial of how rudeness affects teams. The Impact of Rudeness on Medical Team Performance: A Randomized Trial : http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2015/08/...

> the point is to get away with as much as you can.

i.e.

> They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter [to VCs].

-- http://paulgraham.com/founders.html

They may just be acting "naughty," but in the long run, sociopaths tend to get caught.

NYT should be ashamed they posted this, extrapolates examples from a small sample size to make a fake story

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14014993

> What is bro culture? Basically, a world that favors young men at the expense of everyone else. A “bro co.” has a “bro” C.E.O., or C.E.-Bro, usually a young man who has little work experience but is good-looking, cocky and slightly amoral — a hustler.

> Bro culture also values speedy growth over sustainable profits, and encourages cutting corners, ignoring regulations and doing whatever it takes to win.

Doesn't this describe virtually every company that takes investor dollars and then has to focus more on marketing and sales than they do on producing good products or services?

I've been called a "jerk" on numerous occasions, I've also been thanked for standing up to "jerks" on numerous occasions. I honestly don't know what the term means, other than a term that's convenient for the "in crowd" to use to describe someone who isn't a member. Wether someone is a "jerk" depends entirely on where you are standing.

If a sales guy tells a delivery manager, "Buddy, I need you to lower the estimates so we can make this sale..." who is being the jerk? If a manager wants to boot someone off her team because he keeps re-hashing old discussions about technical debt and risks the team already agreed to take on... who is being the jerk? If a tech lead gets bent out of shape on process and rants about how we need to stop doing hotfixes because marketing can't get their work requests in on time... You get where I'm going...

Relationships are complicated, trying to dismiss anyone as a "bro" or a "jerk" won't help you solve the real issue... why did an employee you liked enough to hire turn into a jerk a few months in; is there something wrong with process or culture? (And... do you have bad traits as a manager?) Why does the sales team feel so much pressure... is there something wrong with the product? What is making someone, who presumably is an expert at what they do, gripe and complain so much?

It's rare that a company is successful if the power isn't shared across teams. We horse trade time, scope, and quality all the time to get to launch dates and budgets we need -- if just one person tried to mandate everything the talented people on each team would leave for greener pastures. With transparent leadership, communicative management, and a thorough performance review process in place a consensus can be reached. Without that... everyone is a jerk to someone else.

I like how the persistent ills of amoral, toxic businesses are now "Silicon Valley's Special Problem with Bro Culture." It's just Wall St. in t-shirts. If you let sociopaths run everything, you'll always end up with this result.

Financial companies are also competing for tech talent. Anything that drives away top talent from tech companies is a win for financial ones.

I've seen a trend of the word "sociopath" being thrown around here flippantly. While I understand what this hopes to communicate, the claims are unsubstantiated and it only serves to lessen the argument.

Having had the chance to work with some people I highly expect were diagnosable sociopath/psychopaths, I'd say the opposite is true. People really, really don't want to believe that about 1 in 100 people have absolutely no conscience and thrive on manipulation and sadism. Or that we've created a culture that rewards this kind of behavior. I've watched co-workers bend over backwards to rationalize people who make monotone "jokes" about their desire to harm and kill others.

I understand - it's a horrifying baseline condition for human society. But pretending like it's untrue or limited to some tiny subset of marginal deviants isn't getting us anywhere. Most socipaths/psychopaths are non-violent and still manage to cause immeasureable harm in people's lives, every day.

I think there is meaning to the use of that word. It's not just an ad-hominem snipe, but it's an accusation on the values of these individuals' motivations.

When somebody says a CEO is a sociopath they are essentially arguing that the CEO has little/no empathy, believes their success is due to their own inherent superiority, views morality/law as an obstacles to their success, and defines success as in personal achievement without regard for collective wellbeing.

Moreover, by name-calling the trait (using a derogatory word) one is collectively reshaping the cultural definition of success away from "Make billions of dollars you have no need for and are going to leave to your kids" toward "Make the world a better place."

So I disagree on every level I guess.

The only people the word sociopath has no effect on are sociopaths.

I honestly think it's more a burgeoning understanding, often born from painful personal experience, that some professions draw a disproportionate number of psychopaths and sociopaths. Law enforcement, Corrections, and High finance according to some estimates have a couple of dozens of times the background levels of sociopaths you'd find it society.

It's hardly shocking, when you see what someone like Martin Shkreli can do, and realize that the major qualification is not being a moron, and not having a conscience. A lot of the "brilliant innovation" out there is just a matter of people who aren't fazed by the notion of collecting all of your data and selling it on, or giving birth to Mirai if it means selling more toasters.

When a slick suit, the ability to lie without actually feeling any anxiety or doubt, and a "strong presence" can net you millions before anyone realizes that they made a bad bed... is it a shock? When that person can leverage their titanic failure into work experience that makes them more likely to be funded next time?

>"I like how the persistent ills of amoral, toxic businesses are now "Silicon Valley's Special Problem with Bro Culture." It's just Wall St. in t-shirts"

Except Wall Street makes no pretense of being anything else, whereas with S.V the talk is constantly on about "disrupting" the status quo, "thinking different", "changing the world" etc. There's a hypocrisy in there that's not doing S.V.'s image any favors I think.

I think if you go back to the 80s, you'd find all those things as well. The Regan Revolution(albeit with more explictly religious overtones) was pretty much premised on this idea. Once it was overwhelmed by it's own moral bankruptcy, not to mention being the cause of several financial collapses, it stopped wasting time on these kinds of illusions. Tech industry isn't there yet, but it looks to be headed in the same direction.

Are you talking about deregulation? If so I'm not sure I see the parallel. Who would Wall Street have been disrupting other than their formerly more-regulated selves? But maybe I've completely misunderstood your comment?

> sociopaths

Using this term glibly breaks the HN guideline against calling names. You refer below to "people I highly expect were diagnosable sociopath/psychopaths" (emphasis added). "Highly expect" is a way of saying "don't know". Slinging provocative labels is great for emoting but reliably degrades substantive discussion, so please don't do it here.

The graphic on the article is quite sexist

How is it sexist? It shows the rational people running away from the sociopaths. The graphic thereby puts women in a favorable light. Or is that what you meant -- reverse sexism?

OH MY GOD, REALLY!? </sarcasm>

> Toxic workplace culture and rotten financial performance go hand-in-hand.

Implying the culture at top-performing American companies is acceptable.

> going to an escort bar with your colleagues, as Mr. Kalanick did in South Korea ...

So?

> ignoring (unenforceable) regulations ...

So?

> Uber’s public downfall began ... sexual harassment

This has really nothing to do with their core business.

> the poor treatment of women ...

What poor treatment of women? Because of the odd sexual harassment case popping up?

> Without “adult supervision” ...

Mr. Travis Kalanick is doing absolutely fine. The issues mentioned, that need to be dealt with, have been dealt with. Next.

The author is quite sensationalist and horribly uninformed.

> Bro culture also values speedy growth over sustainable profits, and encourages cutting corners, ignoring regulations and doing whatever it takes to win.

> As this was happening, Google’s self-driving car unit sued Uber, alleging it had stolen its ideas. Then word leaked that Uber had been using a sneaky software tool to deceive regulators in cities around the world. All this is as much a part of “bro culture” as the poor treatment of women; the point is to get away with as much as you can.

Blatantly false bullsh.t. This is called capitalism in its raw form, profit first and everyone/everything else be damned. (edit: No, this was not intended as a pun on "America first", but indeed "America first" actually resolves to "profit first" once you dig a bit)

Corporate trickery of regulators ("using a sneaky software tool to deceive regulators"), corporate espionage ("alleging it had stolen its ideas") etc. is nothing new, and it has zero to do with "bro culture". In fact, regulations were created to rein in capitalism. Capitalism needs regulation or otherwise it naturally evolves into a form of "anarchy", but unlike the ordinary definition of "anarchy", this one means "corporations can do whatever the ... they want, and the workers are exploited as far as possible".

Also, excessive partying, going to brothels on company accounts or wasting company funds on stuff like private jets is nothing new. A decade or two companies were even able to legally declare bribes as expenses, it's only a recent development that excesses get punished by the public. And because the public does not want to blame the real culprit (capitalism and individual greed, whereby the greed is the foundation for capitalism), the mentioned behavior got labeled as "bro culture" instead.

I'll be risking being contrary to popular opinion saying this, but can we go back to focusing on tech? I'd rather leave these types of 'floor is lava' social discussion to the philosophy majors of the world who enjoy it. I feel like we, as a community, get sidetracked by the bloodlust for drama and the media respondeds to that demand by pandering to the lowest denominator. So-called justice porn has no place in a productive society.

Your whole comment is indicative of why SV is now in the situation it's in, where disruptive apps aren't enough to overcome idiocy that the rest of us outgrew decades ago.

"So-called justice porn has no place in a productive society." I'm screencapping this as a warning sign on the road to downfall-by-hubris. Seriously, shake your head. Productive society without justice is every dystopian nightmare we've been imagining since we started wondering what tomorrow might be like.

I'll be risking being contrary to popular opinion saying this, but can we go back to focusing on cotton production? I'd rather leave these types of 'floor is lava' social discussion to the philosophy majors of the world who enjoy it. I feel like we, as a community, get sidetracked by the bloodlust for drama and the media respondeds to that demand by pandering to the lowest denominator. So-called justice porn has no place in a productive society.

The tech has impact on a lot of areas. I don't think ignoring them is particularly healthy.

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