Hacker News Reader

Comment by rinchik | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried therapy? The fact you are not able to concentrate and perform when "'Zuck' white guy personality type" (whatever "Zuck" type means) is present, suggests a deeper personal issues and biases that you need to work on and resolve.

If there are no personal issues then your comment, honestly, comes across as a bit racist.

View on HN

Please keep internet psychiatric diagnosis off HN.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not psychiatry, it's psychology. Not even remotely I'm making an attempt to diagnose a psychiatric pathology as in no way I'm qualified to do that. You are giving me more credit than I actually deserve.

I mean "psychiatric" ironically rather than literally—adding "internet" to a word is sort of an instant ironizer. You can read it as "psychological diagnosis" if you like. The point is that making remarks about someone's psychological issues as you perceive them, suggesting that they need therapy and so on, is unduly personal. It crosses a line that is better not to cross, even if you're right, because it frequently lands with the other person as a kind of violation or attack.

We don't know nearly enough about each other from an online text forum to be able to make personal statements, so making them is presumptuous. If there's a substantive point beyond that, it should be easy to express in an impersonal way, and if there isn't, not posting anything is a better option.

If you read the comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... you'll see a history of explanations about this.

Ah that's a well written and thoughtful response to my comment. Thank you for that! However I can’t say I agree with the trigger premise though, even if suggestion perceived as personal. Psychological problem suggestions, gentle nudges if you will, are inherently beneficial even if those generate a defensive response. Defensive response is a response! That response is a deliberate thought in itself, an analysis. In modern, developed societies, it seems that the only appropriate time to suggest therapy is when the following sentence includes a suicide hotline phone number, how crazy is that? Therapy or any psychological self-care should be normal, and not in any way different from a regular, scheduled visit to the dentist.

From my perspective this line of thinking makes more sense for in-person contact, where it's possible to read the other person's state more accurately and get a feel for whether or not one's helpful suggestions are actually helpful or not. What matters is not the message you send, but the message the other person receives, and a lot can change from one to the other.

Here on an internet forum, we have almost no information about each other. The risk of such comments doing more harm than good is much higher, partly because the potential for misunderstanding is so high, and also because people have often used this language in snarky ways, for personal attacks, and so on.

That doesn't mean you can't reach out to someone you're genuinely concerned for, but the burden in that case is on you to disambiguate your intention from anything presumptuous or malicious, and that requires a different communication style—much less generic and casual.

I agree with the sentiment that maybe therapy would be helpful for the OC, but speaking as a woman, I have a similar problem. Growing up my dad used my thoughts and emotions as weapons against me so "showing my thought process" to strangers that are men in a high stakes environment like an interview is incredibly crippling. I tend to disassociate once I'm uncomfortable and I'm not able to recover in the span of an interview session. I do attend therapy myself, but it's a very slow process to heal from years of emotional abuse.

I recognize my own experience is more on the extreme end, but SWE and related interviews could be more mindful of different life experiences in general.

You deserve better and I wish you as speedy a recovery as possible. It's going to be quite difficult for interviewers and coworkers to work around an injury that you and the professionals you work with have been yet unable to heal.

Your cultural beliefs and intuitions ARE personal issues and biases. They are challenging to overcome. Racist people don't get to being racist by reading a blog post or two; they develop and internalize it over time like any cultural trait. Same goes for these anxieties people of color feel.

It's ignorant to not realize that all of these things are mental. Duh, therapy helps. Trust me, every single person of color who works in tech and sees a therapist talks through all this stuff with their practitioner.

Also, people of color are often racist, and white people often have anxieties.

I’m not sure I follow, I don’t think that if a white guy is present during your interview, he is automatically racist? What I got from your post is that you are having problems during interviews because you are not comfortable with white people conducting your interviews. It’s sounds like you are automatically assume that white interviewers are racist? You are broadly generalizing people who happened to be white which does not sound good any way you look at it.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Everyone on HN deserves that, but considering how even-keeled and respectful sbilstein's posts have been in this thread, on so sensitive a topic, I'd suggest 10x.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Huh? I'm not sure where you are reading that.

I'm saying that any internalized biases, anxieties, etc are deeply personal whether you are of an in group or an out group. It's totally a mental thing for me to get psyched out in an interview so of course therapy helps.

It's deeply personal but it's also something I know anecdotally is common amongst my peers of similar background. I'm pointing it out as one of the ways an interview can be unintentionally biased.

'Stereotype threat' anxiety is a well-known and well-documented phenomenon at this point. https://www.apa.org/research/action/stereotype

It is very well documented. In fact, it is the shining example of the replication crisis in psychology.

Here's from Michael Inzlicht, one of the people who started stereotype threat research in the first place:

> I edited an entire book on stereotype threat, I have signed my name to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States citing stereotype threat, yet now I am not as certain as I once was about the robustness of the effect. I feel like a traitor for having just written that; like, I’ve disrespected my parents, a no no according to Commandment number 5. But, a meta-analysis published just last year suggests that stereotype threat, at least for some populations and under some conditions, might not be so robust after all. P-curving some of the original papers is also not comforting. Now, stereotype threat is a politically charged topic and I really really want it to be real. I think a lot more pain-staking work needs to be done before I stop believing (and rumor has it that another RRR of stereotype threat is in the works), but I would be lying if I said that doubts have not crept in. ...

http://michaelinzlicht.com/getting-better/2016/2/29/reckonin...

It only got worse since 2016.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com