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Comment by treeman79 | Hacker News Reader

Personal experience.

Got hired into a company that did everything possible to avoid hiring straight white men.

Everything was completely dominated by not offending anyone over anything. Unless you were the aforementioned group.

Turns out there simply isn’t a lot of the right race/gender/sex. I’m sure that’ll be different as time progresses, but for now there is clearly some catching up to do.

So it was all jr developers. A couple of which truly cared about technology, and I see good things in their future.

The rest were the most arrogant sexist bigots imaginable.

Most days were filled with hatred. Full rant fest about how evil “my kind” were. But it wasn’t personal as I was clearly one of the good ones...

So yeah, n=1 personal experience. But crude that echo chamber was scary.

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That's one of the reasons I left tech and went to work for an investment bank. At least here no one pretends to be in it to "make the world a better place" or whatever agenda tech companies are selling nowadays. YMMV

Ugh, that's one thing I really hate about much of tech: supposedly everyone is in it to make the world a better place, somehow, by actually making it worse through advertisement and destroying privacy and getting people addicted to social media.

It's because they only want the world to be a better place for themselves.

I’ve come to see it as people naturally tend to an US vs Them attitude.

Sports is a fairly safe outlet for this sort of thing.

Religion is a bad one to have that attitude. Holy wars, etc.

Race is dangerous, as history is full of exterminations.

The idea that "race is dangerous" is dangerous.

They're saying it's dangerous to have an Us vs Them attitude when it comes to race.

Treeman is surely a he ... and a singular person... gosh this rape of language is so ugly

I assure you we are a natural born Pine-tree.

Personal experience.

Worked in a group that did everything possible to avoid hiring, acknowledging, and rewarding women's contributions.

Everything was completely dominated by one-upmanship and crude jokes. Unless you were in the in-group, you were screwed.

I don't doubt your annecdote. I guess all I can say is, welcome to the club? Being part of the "out group" in a toxic workplace sucks. I've had men come up to me and say, "Wow now I get it." Because in their entire lives they had only worked on male dominated teams, and working on a toxic non hetero non male dominated team made them really uncomfortable, they were fine working on toxic hetero male dominated teams. All the norms had changed and they didn't know what to do. But until they experienced it themselves didn't get "what the big deal" is.

I stay in tech because I don't want to be forced to take a lower salary because of cultural attitudes that women being around "ruins the atmosphere". But yes if I had a pile of FU money, I would bail in a second, not because I'm busy taking care of children or whatever excuse, but because people are insecure, emotionally immature and create a great deal of toxicity.

Had a brief stint in a place like that. Bunch of good ole boys club. Yes all young white males

Got out of their as fast as possible. It’s disguising to see how they treated woman. I’m trying to raise my daughters to never put up with that.

Thank you.

> Got hired into a company that did everything possible to avoid hiring straight white men.

Same here. Like you mentioned, anecdotes are not data.

But likewise - I was pressured to specifically hire a female / non-white developer for my team.

That your post is on the top shows the "white male" bias in hackernews audience. People are up-voting your personal anecdote and your "I am a white male victim" post more than the discussions about the actual results on the original article.

The demographic working in CS nearly reflects demographics that study CS or other relevant degrees. Ever asked yourself if it may be your bias that is the root of the accusations for discrimination? Because with the evidence available you can make that case.

The post reveals the hackernews bias against discrimination in all forms, regardless of whether it is targeted at minorities or white males. Meritocracy baby!

I totally agree. But shouldn't we trust the data more than one person's anecdote? The original article clearly did not find any discrimination against white male. Rather than discussing that result, we are here commenting about one person's anecdote.

>The original article clearly did not find any discrimination against white male.

How do you interpret women getting 10% more callbacks if not as discrimination against males?

All hatred needs to stops.

So what you're saying is that.. I am responsible for my happiness, and that other people are not to blame for the choices I made in regards to my behavior and life, especially straight white men?

Wow, that's a hard cookie to swallow.

(for the ones who read this far, what I wrote is sarcastic).

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