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Comment by hammerzeit | Hacker News Reader

Please, before this degrades into the inevitable shouting match, let's please consider that there are two things that can both simultaneously be true:

1.Tech is less bad than many, many other industries. I can personally speak to overt, even illegal sexism in the field of medicine at a level that would cause riots in tech. I’ve heard similar stories in academia, to say nothing of fields like manufacturing. We live in a sexist society, and the professional world reflects that.

2. Being “less bad” than other industries does not mean we don’t have an obligation to do better. We as an industry need to be doing more to make sure that the vast majority of stories are like this one. We’re not there yet.

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In Hollywood, men at certain levels throw tantrums and break things when something isn't to their liking. It's changing a little and the film industry is ready for a comeuppance.

But in IT and many other industries this kind of behavior would get you flat-out escorted out of the building. What's considered OK on a film set is not tolerated in most offices.

> In Hollywood, men at certain levels throw tantrums and break things when something isn't to their liking.

How is that a gender specific thing?

Uh, it's men doing it. Male directors. Male cinematographers. Male Unit Production Managers.

I think you'll find that narcissistic violent temper tantrums are an equal opportunity game in Hollywood. It comes with the territory, due to the "tormented artist" trope having some basis in reality.

I think your second point is the thing that is it always so easy to gloss over. "better" or "less bad" are very relative. In the end, the Golden Rule is the target but the reality is that there are a lot of people that suck and have no concept of self reflection.

I think the article highlights one of the good points about tech. The meritocracy.

It's not perfect but it's there.

The problem with "meritocracy" culture is that it often values only 1 form of meritocracy and that is direct, technical, individual contributions.

IE, it values the brilliant asshole.

Sure, the brilliant asshole is very smart, and makes good individual contributions. But thats not really what matters.

What matters is the TOTAL contributions of the entire team. And the brilliant asshole, often brings a lot of INDIRECT negative value to that entire team, as he creates a toxic culture that negatively impacts the other people that he is supposed to be working with.

Whether or not a "meritocracy" is good or not depends entirely upon the definition of meritocracy that you are using.

> The problem with "meritocracy" culture is that it often values only 1 form of meritocracy and that is direct, technical, individual contributions.

I haven't witnessed this, but maybe I've just gotten lucky with the companies I've worked at. The companies I've worked at seemed to value both your individual contributions as well as your ability to make others more productive.. being a toxic asshole to your coworkers would absolutely not fly, even if you were hyperproductive. There were certainly some people who were highly valued that were highly productive that didn't seem to particularly _care_ about making other people's lives easier, but they also weren't toxic - they mostly kept to themselves.

Positive stories are just as important as the stories of sexism and harassment. One tells us the problem exists, the other reassures us that something can be done about it.

A reasonable concern is that "doing better" to some metric or agenda pushed by outsiders or johnny-come-latelies will result in the degradation of the ability to foster diversity and merit.

For example, how would the relatively sterile and sexless HR policies of Big Co. handle the pole dancing the author refers to? How long before that had to go too?

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