Comment by iheartpotatoes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iheartpotatoes | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly honest. Maybe it's just me, but it 100% resonates with me. I find myself doing the exact same thing: as soon as I feel myself mounting up on my high-horse I have to talk myself down from being an asshat. I've gotten better at it because I'm now responsible for people's careers, and my pettiness is no reason to make someone's life suck because they are still learning -OR- because they think differently than me and have a different solution that I might not even UNDERSTAND. Being open-minded is really fucking hard for me some times.

These comments stuck out:

"Because I do code review for self-identification."

and

"It turned out that, instead of becoming a good coder, you simply have to convince others you’re a good coder. This behaviour begets a vicious cycle that produces not professionals, but toxic asshats."

One way to nip this culture is stop hiring people who only KNOW THIS culture.

If the author is reading this, there is one solution I have encountered: diversity. If you only hire white dudes in hoodies with stickers on their macbooks you're only going to get the toxic gamergate crowd, which has not gone away at all.

Believe or not there are other kinds of programmers in the world, and the most enjoyable products I've worked on were ones that had more women and more POC on their teams. Toxic asshattery can be minimized by not giving them complete control over the culture of a workplace.

I don't think diversity of skin color and gender will solve this problem in its entirety too. People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be this kind of self-centered egotist. People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be excellent developers who are focused outwards, on developing their teammates and building things well. Diversity is part of the picture, yes, but it's no instant win, either.

> People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be this kind of self-centered egotist

He didn't imply that women and non-whites can't be self-centered egotists, only that they're less so than white men. Despite the author of the article being Russian, a very different culture than the US.

A practice I've become interested in but don't have an opportunity to engage with(doing the solo ISV thing) is "mob programming", since it confronts a few axes of the toxic-developer problem:

* There is some built-in diversity of skillsets, if not demographics, by pushing team communication into a continuous meeting format where non-developers are given space.

* It forces some vulnerability into the mix, which gets you into a less inhibited state: "I don't know, but" is way more common if you literally can't run off and prepare some slick answer to every question or hide behind your ownership of the solution space.

* The I/O bottleneck of having a whole crowd at one screen moves the emphasis away from the lines of code, and towards the broader parts of problem solving and getting feedback. Everyone that's experienced always says that it's not how fast you type that matters.

* Feedback becomes less punishing. Everyone gets a chance to drive, make some minor errors, and immediately correct them, which keeps everyone on the same level and encourages a healthy attitude to learning, vs the anxious/punishing "all-seeing-eye judgment" nature of batch code reviews.

But mostly, I like the idea of a hypothetical mind-melded "superdeveloper" emerging from a mob - a coder that pumps out extremely high quality code solving exactly the right problems in a single iteration, without breaking a sweat. I do think I've seen it in bursts in the past, just not in a systematic fashion. My experiences with pair programming definitely suggest that it adds intensity to problem solving that isn't there alone, and it makes me suspect that we may just straight-up be "doing software wrong" by focusing on quantities of code edits and not the overall communication flows.

> If you only hire white dudes in hoodies with stickers on their macbooks you're only going to get the toxic gamergate crowd, which has not gone away at all.

Um, excuse me? I'm a white dude who wears a hoodie and has a sticker on my macbook, and I am not in "the toxic gamergate crowd." If anything you're the one being toxic.

The problems don't arise with individuals, but with groups. If you create a monoculture, it will be hostile to others that are not part of it.

Oh lord, the stickers. I felt an interview with a local startup turn south when I pulled my Thinkpad out and was asked "where are the stickers?".

You do want to express yourself, don't you?

(Sarcasm, Office Space reference, I'm with you on the stickers.)

Agreed. I'd much rather not advertise for anyone/company, and especially not throwing sticky residue all over my expensive laptop.

In addition to a shared aversion to voluntarily turning my possessions into billboards, I'd like to add there's real value in keeping computing devices generic looking.

By plastering your laptop with a completely unique combination and placement of stickers one can discover in videos or photographs online from conferences or talks for example, you make it a whole lot easier to pick out your unattended machine from a set, a hotel room, or luggage.

This can easily be leveraged by assisting targeted theft, destruction, or sophisticated physical access attacks.

> In addition to a shared aversion to voluntarily turning my possessions into billboards

I know that feel, but you can flair up with whimsy rather than corporate tribalism. For example, I have a strawberry from the game Celeste over my MBP's apple logo. It's even less billboardy than before!

> you make it a whole lot easier to pick out your unattended machine from a set, a hotel room, or luggage.

Laptops get mixed up all of the time in security when you fly. A sticker both reduces the probability of this happening accidentally and also makes it harder for a thief to claim innocence if you keep your eye on your laptop and notice someone nab it.

Now I'm waiting for the next season of Silicon Valley to 100% repeat the "flair" conversation but motioning towards a laptop instead of a uniform :)

I agree with you that one part of the solution is to stop hiring people who only know that culture. The ability of individual agents to sow dysfunction far outstrips any individual contributions, in my experience.

However, I'm not sure that diversity is really a solution so much as a symptom of a solution, which is a healthy professional culture. Adding women and POC may work tactically but it's not a great long term strategy for solving that particularly problem -- it's entirely possible for women and POC to behave in this manner (although it's quite a bit rarer in my experience). Not saying you're suggesting this, but I've seen quite a few orgs where women and POC are hired as tokens and don't get to real positions of power where they have the power and responsibility to truly run things and reform/refactor systems. Reforming your organization so that it's not toxic to women and POC is an indicator that you're not going in the wrong direction, but it's hardly the end goal. In fact, it should be positively mundane, boring, average and the norm (and hopefully, will become that way soon).

Will these problems cease at that point? I doubt it. Callous, abusive leaders exist everywhere, and short of a massive societal shift where nonviolent communication becomes required reading for managers and leaders (which is verbatim what Satya Nadella did at Microsoft to great effect), the high leverage move would be to start there and not paper over the root.

These problems come from the top -- corporate and engineering leadership. If you have a culture that accepts and allows for brilliant jerks, there are a couple root causes:

1) Your leadership aids and abets it

2) Your leadership is apathetic about it

3) Your leadership dislikes it but feels powerless to stop it

If you've got issue class 1 or 2, it's likely more pragmatic to leave than try to wage a cultural coup (of course, more power to you if you can pull that off). If you've got issue class 3, well, maybe you've got some options. You can convince leadership that they've got a certain kind of problem -- easy enough. Then you've got to convince leadership that a given approach could ameliorate it -- doable, but tricky and not at all a guaranteed success. Finally, you've got the hardest part: actually implementing it. The resulting shift in power could result in folks trying to sabotage things, and success will be doomed unless it is unilaterally supported and individually guided through by leadership. This is rare, but possible (again the Nadella reference). But again, the goal should be to create a cohesive, respectful, supportive teamwork oriented environment, and the means should support that.

If you can pull that off, achieving not just diversity but a safe, sustainable place for folks of diverse backgrounds to thrive becomes a real possibility. I think that's why it's worth setting our sights there in the first place.

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