Ellen Pao: Has Anything Really Changed for Women in Tech? | Hacker News Reader

Ellen Pao: Has Anything Really Changed for Women in Tech?

nytimes.com

21 pointsrbanffy24 comments

This has been said over and over again, but companies should always be able to hire and promote the best available candidates. Unfortunately large tech companies especially in the bay area are hiring/promoting to meet a quota and prevent any social justice backlash even though it continues [1][2]. They are looking for a perfect 50/50 balance, missing on talent and ultimately what's best for the company. Truely disconcerting.

Look at what's happening at Google, perhaps the most inclusive and liberal ideology company. Entitled and outraged employee still end up suing[3]. Employes who have different political views and try to perhaps explain why there are traditionally more men than women in technology are just fired.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/28/uber-first-diversity-repor...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/technology/google-gender-...

I think quotas are a bad idea, but there is some space between quotas and not being sexualized at the workplace. Women seem to be asking for more of the latter than the former. And luckily, things seem to be changing in that regard.

Quotas may turn out to just be a fad. Once people see the destructive effects (like that no woman hired through such a program can escape undertones of "should she really have been hired here?") they'll probably fade.

Or, y'know, we could both be wrong and quotas will turn out to be a good thing. It'd be nice to have an objective test.

Aka my book just released so remember to buy it!

> Before her post, others who spoke up publicly and privately about their experiences of harassment were at best ignored. Some of those people — whose names are unfortunately not well known — include Adria Richards

Seems like she's just trolling at this point.

Mm, how so? I know nothing about that person specifically, so if there's substance to it then it's better to hear the full details.

I worry about opening the door to a low quality conversation though, so let's try to keep it objective and substantive.

She's the woman who got a developer fired for a comment she overheard between two other people that did not have sexual intent (relating to forking a repo) but which she interpreted sexually and flipped out over, accusing them of targeting and harassing her.

Does Donglegate ring a bell?

A bunch of guys make "dongle" jokes at PyCon, Richards tweets their photo. As a consequence, one of the guys gets fired during the surrounding shitstorm, counter-shitstorm, Richards gets fired as well.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/donglegate-adria-richar...

It's actually a good piece. If you have some second thoughts just because Pao wrote it, I think it was easy to misjudge her. I got caught up in this myself at the time, believing a lot of the stories on Reddit and such.

You should read her court case. After that her Reddit story looks completely natural. Greed, incompetence, extreme narcissism and indifference... No surprise that she is trying to high jack the cause she has nothing to do with and ride other people stories.

Anything specific you'd care to highlight, or is this just hate?

We're in a flagged thread now, so it's just us. But you could still change my mind.

I especially liked how she b!tched against co-worker for using company fax to send MRI of the brain cancer suffering mother.

In the past, discussions on this topic on HN have historically devolved quickly into flamewars. Anyone choosing to discuss this please reflect on why you want to do so: are you looking to truly understand what others think on this? Are you truly open to having your opinion changed? Are you hoping to convince others of your position? Just let people know the truth of the matter? Shout down those you disagree with? If you're looking for something other than truly productive, respectful, thoughtful, charitable discussion, please refrain from commenting here.

I mean, I'd love to, and the answer is a resounding yes. But it was buried off the front two pages.

No one respects the moderation more than I do, and how hard it is to make good decisions. But from a commenter POV it does get a little tiresome writing comments that get cut off due to shuffling around the front page. But meh, it's not a big deal.

EDIT: Welp. After looking over the other comments, it seems they made the right call. I wish people would behave themselves.

From what I've seen as a member of HN, one of the actions both members and mods take is to flag and downweight (respectively) submissions that are likely to lead to flamewars. I find it frustrating (but understandable) that discussion so often degrades so quickly. There are a lot of important topics that I would love to see discussed earnestly, but that takes a lot of effort on behalf of those discussing.

If you're frustrated, do your best to help make the community the best it can (which is why I commented above). Make good comments, submit good articles. Member and mod reactions are indeed that—reactions to the behavior of the members on the site. If members discussed hot topics civilly and charitably, members and mods wouldn't flag and down weight. From what I've seen from the mods' comments, they'd like nothing more than to let that happen.

Completely agreed. By the way, who are you? I remember when you popped up, and at first I was convinced you were tptacek on an alt. You use 'foo to talk about HN user foo, for example, and you have the principle of charity in your profile. And most of your comments have been about moderation. You've clearly been here a long time, so I'm quite curious.

I don't disagree with any of them, and frankly if you were a mod I think you'd do a fine job. Your judgment is better than mine.

If you don't care to answer publicly, you could indulge me privately. I'm a good steward of secrets. Or just tell me to buzz off. :)

Thanks for the kind words. I certainly admire 'tptacek's commenting style (and to be explicit, I'm not 'tptacek, nor am I 'dang, which has come up in the past). I hack Clojure a bit (and find little use for Twitter), so when I noticed the ' prefix used here, I happily picked that up. I've read HN for quite a while but this is my first account.

Over the past couple of years I've been increasingly concerned about the severe political and cultural polarization (in general, not just on HN) and the increasing role the internet plays in people's social lives. I think it's really important that we figure out how to resolve the first and how to healthily integrate the second. HN is a great place to look at both, and one I value. It's also more tractable than others (for example, I recognize your handle as well :).

I also think that the community should play a role in maintaining itself. By far members here do want to participate in good discussion and we're only held back by our own human psychology. Often we just need to take a step back and a breath and observe what's going on. If we can help each other do that, I think we'll be in a much better position to resolving all kinds of human issues (if you'll permit a bit of naïve grandiosity). So, that's why you see the comments from me that you do.

Well, good job navigating the choppy waters. Presumably if you were mistaken people would've asked you to stop by now.

I'm a fellow Lisp hacker, so maybe you could throw an email into your profile and we can keep in touch or swap projects.

> it seems they

Mods didn't touch the post; it was flagged by users.

We sometimes turn off flags in such cases but there needs to be substantive new information. In this case the article was an opinion piece (though a well-written one).

The story was buried off the front two pages first. Then the flag happened.

Maybe caching was involved, so the "[flagged]" was delayed. But the story definitely disappeared before "[flagged]" showed up.

Just reporting what I saw. Either way, it's no big deal. It would've been a bad idea to have it on the front page.

As I understand it, the behaviors are related but independent. User flagging affects ranking even before the [flagged] tag appears. There's some threshold before the latter happens, which I suspect is what you observed.

Nah, that causes a story to move from page 1 to page 2, for example. (Or more precisely, to drop in rank by ~10 to ~20.) I made certain to check the front two pages for this story, and it wasn't on them, immediately. Then [flagged] popped up later. It was a sharp step function, not a gradual change.

If flagging caused a story to disappear from the front two pages, there would never be a need for [flagged] -- a story would be as good as flagged without it. It'd be a clarifying signal, but it wouldn't have any material impact on the story's rank.

Again, none of this really matters, but it's fun to talk about. :)

Maybe it was buried via a torrent of flags. If three flags showed up within a few seconds of each other, that might have caused the behavior.

EDIT: see http://hnrankings.info/15267221/

I'm sure the moderators have nothing better to do on weekends but engage in elaborate dastardly schemes to move stories from page 2 to page 4 without [flagged] appearing and keep us down.

I didn't mean to insinuate anything. It's just fun to talk about, like trying to unravel the dynamics of the stars in ancient times.

Diff the data with http://hnrankings.info/15150237/ and you'll see this one completely disappeared. It wasn't moved by flags -- it was completely erased by them. It's a mystery! Pointless mysteries are fun.

rbanffy submits a ridiculous number of articles.

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