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Comment by LeoJiWoo | Hacker News Reader

Susan Fowler is a great person but this reeks of a clickbait agenda.

She is important but Xi, Bezos,and Musk are radically changing the face of the world in a much much greater capacity.

EDIT:

Musk has the hyperloop, tesla, spacex. These are what I consider revolutionary technologies that could change the face of our global civilization.

Bezos is eating the world with amazon, whole foods, and washington post. Amazon is leading so many new industries drone deliveries, cloud, and so many are cities are competing for hq2. What isn't amazon doing lately ?

Xi is changing the face of silicon valley by making SV more like china which has huge global implications.

I think Fowler is great, but she isn't on the same level.

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I can assure you its not clickbait.

Fowler's post created ripples, at least in tech. It was a brilliant exposition of how not to run a company. Bullying happens in every company, what makes a company special is how you deal with it.

Uber dealt with bullying by pampering its odious alpha-shits and creating a structure around them that legitimised and encouraged it, in the guise of "culture".

Musk, Bezos xi et al, are uber rich engineers. Most moderatly intelligent people with >60 billion can change the world. Getting there in the first place is the hard part.

writing honestly about an abuse of power, knowing that it will most likley end your career and result in more persecution, takes a fuck tonne more courage than ordering a bunch of top people in thier fields to build a rocket/shopping empire.

in terms of impact, a nobody unseated Kalanick, something the US legal system never managed to do, despite his companies many legal transgressions.

>writing honestly about an abuse of power, knowing that it will most likley end your career and result in more persecution, takes a fuck tonne more courage than ordering a bunch of top people in thier fields to build a rocket/shopping empire.

If you grow up with little to lose it's hard to un-learn that.

African Americans have a particularly eloquent way of describing that behavior but it isn't appropriate to repeat here.

You don't notice most of the time when someone rage-quits their job for moral/ethics reasons because usually it doesn't lead so something like this.

>Fowler's post created ripples, at least in tech.

Has it, though? I see giant names in Hollywood go down. Senators in DC. I'm not seeing tech figures, though.

I saw Uber do the very definition of a classic ass-covering report.

Is silicon valley really cleaning house?

For what it's worth, I remember there were several high profile VCs accused of harassment, with several of them resigning or being pushed out. Scoble was also accused.

So yeah, I think tech is changing for the better.

Nope; and it's not going to until someone forces the issue externally.

Perhaps it is to be expected in Hacker News, but focus exclusively on the technological and totally ignore the cultural at your peril.

If you accept the premise that Susan Fowler has opened (or helped open) a door for women across the world to be more successful and freer of sexual harrassment, you could absolutely make the case that will have as big of an impact as whatever Bezos is doing with Amazon - women are quite a large portion of the population after all!

To put this another way: even if you are fixated on industry and finance, all of those companies have employees. The issues raised by Susan Fowler are very important to these employees. That makes this issue very important to industry and finance.

Ya know, your comment might leave something to discuss had you left out the “clickbait” part. Instead it leaves me impulsively want to downvote. But, hey, happens to the best of us, so let’s move on. I suppose it depends on one’s gender to some degree. Musk is the epitome of “boys and their toys”, because nothing he’s done has had any impact on my life yet (well, except the oodles of dosh made off TSLA). Bezos? Eh, modern day Sam Walton that impacts the lives of more than a few, but in the end a retailer. But if you’re female, I could see how one might view the Fowler situation as “good, maybe I’ll have to put up with creepy men just a little less than I did last year.”

OP's comment is exactly right, and I've noticed a trend in the Financial Times over the past several years to jump increasingly on social activism bandwagons. The way they've lionized Ellen Pao, for example, a figure who has turned exploitation of these bandwagons into a personal brand, has been incredibly frustrating to watch.

What Susan did and the other women and men who have come forward this year will have a massive impact on the business world and the types of people who read FT need to know about it. It will affect HR policies, compensation, career paths, job assignments, and the manager/employee relationship in general. Having your business outed as an "Uber" will destroy billions in shareholder value and may end up with you, the C-suite guy, getting canned, even if you're a "nice guy". You can be damned sure that all these C-level guys are reviewing policies and having internal discussions about this and making sure that they're not going to be next.

New rockets and computer products come every year and have been since 1969. Wholesale cultural shifts in business are more rare, more impactful, and more complex.

I would say that there is a social activist moral panic that we are in the midst of, some of which has been spurred by social media mobs and deliberate narrative reinforcement. Fowler is just one example of it, along with Pao.

Another example would be the horrible way Denise Young Smith was fired from Apple, and James Damore from Google.

This pick signals more of the wagons circling, fanning the flames by the Financial Times.

ah, a Damore stan; that explains it

"speaking honestly is only acceptable if it fits the narrative"

…and your shitty attitude, shared by too many, is a huge part of the problem; you contribute to already bad situation

do you really think that shining the light on the fucked-up situation in tech world is something people do for fun and profit?

Everytime sexual harassment by comes up from women, they are demonised in HN. And this is the reason these issues are coming up. What's wrong with Ellen Pao taking about it? You very skilfully changed it into her "personal brand". Past presidents make it their brand to give speeches and earn millions just for that.

Rape and sexual harassments are most under-reported crimes. Everyone who faced these issues should talk about it. And HN being mostly men's place, it's obvious they don't like it.

> Xi, Bezos,and Musk

Xi has been around for ages, as has Bezos. It's not really their year. Musk has done very little to impact anyone's life; maybe some of his stuff might in the future (though I would argue probably not), but at most it's unrealised potential. Save it until there's an impact. The change in culture around sexual assault and harassment in the US and more broadly the west in general is already having a large impact, and going forward its impact may be dramatic.

You could certainly argue to what extent Fowler was involved in that, but if you take the position that she was key, and there's certainly an argument to do so, then it makes sense.

Much of the FT's output is about the business of business, and they've covered Uber and the fallout from Fowler's revelations extensively. It's not a stretch.

(A very cynical person might mention the FT's recent trouble with gender pay gap, but I'd say Fowler's impact remains clear.)

Leading a shift in the workplace dynamics for 50% of the population could arguably have a much bigger impact than decreasing the cost of rocket launches

unfortunately HN has been using downvotes as disagreement for past couple of years.

Downvotes should be reserved for offtopic comments not disagreement.

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