I hear about this pattern across companies and industries. It's awful. Quit systematically downplaying it. It's real and needs fixing.
In this article she complains about guys prospecting for dating opportunities at company social events. Depending on the exact nature of such, it is likely poor form, but is it really sexual harassment?
Or her complaint that "men stare at women working".... what are women like royalty you have to stair at the ground lest you accidentally "stare"?
You cannot and should not punish anyone for using their goddamned eyes to look at anything in their surroundings anymore than you can or should punish thought crimes.
If it is really obnoxious staring, the mature thing is to confront it and make it clear. Beyond that I don't have a solution against people being assholes. I mean if a woman is bitchy to me in a way that doesn't cross the line of breaking company policy, there is nothing much I can do except manage the situation.
BUT: as soon as any real line has been crossed, consequences should get real.
But this woman has so many complaints that seem marginal, mixed with complaints that are very serious like inappropriate touching, that I think she probably burned her credibility.
I mean, if the same person kept coming in to HR with very marginal complains, someone looked at me and I didn't like it, someone asked if I would like to for lunxh and I said no and then nothing further happened... this stuff seriously dilutes and detracts from actual sexual misconduct.
"Some of the men who work at SpaceX [..] stare at women while they work"
That struck me as a rather odd thing to say.
"a fellow intern approached me in our intern housing and grabbed my butt"
That is definitely unacceptable, but if I understand things correctly, she was living together with other interns to save money. So that was her roommate, doing bad stuff in his free time. I'm not quite sure if SpaceX should manage their employee's life at that level.
"learn from our colonial past and incorporate indigenous expertise"
That sounds to me like a dog whistle for her subgroup of social justice warriors. In any case, my boss would also be pretty surprised if someone used that word choice for arguing their case.
Similarly, she mentions "very small group of women and nonbinary people" the latter of which seems hyperbolic to me because nonbinary people are rare in general, so it's not unexpected that they would be as rare at SpaceX as they are in overall society.
So while I agree with her statement in the abstract that SpaceX should have a better work culture, there's too many little oddities in that letter for me to agree with it.
"I found my way through an abusive upbringing, leaving home at a young age, subsequent homelessness, and sexual assault in college"
That is horrible, but in the context of the letter I would be surprised if it will not affect how one experiences the world. It's easy for me to assume that people are acting in good faith if they do stupid things because I have never had any of those negative experiences. So the same people doing the same action might be interpreted as "stupid fun" by me and as "abuse" by her.
"I had to continue living in the residence with this man."
That sentence reads weird to me because I assume that SpaceX will not require you to live at any specific house. So based on my experience of the world, it should have been easy for her to move. I can fully understand if she wants that guy to move instead of her giving up the apartment, but then she should say so instead of claiming that it was impossible to move.
"Elon Musk’s behavior bears a remarkable similarity to the behavior of a sadistic and abusive man who had previously been part of my life."
I do feel sorry for this person, because she clearly had many bad things happen to her, which never happened to me. So maybe that's just me noticing how privileged I am. But if her goal is to push SpaceX towards objectively improving their work environment, I wonder if it would have been better to not mention this. Because like I said in my first comment, this makes it very easy to misinterpret her (probably valid) criticism as a personal vendetta.
And yes, I was trying to find examples for how this specific article could be misinterpreted in bad faith.
If you see a post that ought to have had some moderation but hasn't, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Or in the alternative, perhaps we should not have any discussion on this topic at all until SpaceX offers a formal response, at which point you can chastise everyone for failing to acknowledge BOTH the strongest parts of this article and the strongest parts of SpaceX's response.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Not to mention:
"Eschew flamebait."
And I think we could add this one too:
"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."
I'm not saying people have to accept everything that gets said in every such article, but there's an art to addressing these things without blowing up the thread. Many of the comments in this thread are on the wrong side of that line.
My original point (such as it is) is only to note that no debate is one-sided and that if we are setting a high standard of discussion in the Hacker News guidelines, it should be respectful of all, not just the views of the article being linked to. If we are obligated to acknowledge the strongest parts of the complaint, then it seems fair to obligate equal acknowledgement of the strongest parts of any response/rebuttal/defence.
It's so much more complicated even than that because (1) the debaters are often themselves the ones setting the place on fire as they make their points; (2) they're most often doing it unintentionally; (3) there's no agreement about what the solid points are and what the flames are; (4) anyone in the audience is free to add any new point or any blast of flames at any moment.
Now try to be a theater operator with the goal of having good debates, a happy audience, and not burning down.
(And for what it's worth, I don't agree that the post qualifies as flamebait.)
1. She feels sexually harassed and is upset that HR apparently did not agree with her, or at the very least they did not take the action that she wanted them to take.
2. She has strong personal feelings about Elon Musk and is comparing him to her own past abusive relationship. She also has a history of very negative experience with family and relationships.
I'm guessing you would have wanted to hear "she was sexually harassed" but the entire point of my comment was to argue that the step from "she feels harassed but HR did not agree" to "she was harassed and HR didn't act" was not convincing to me. In my opinion, the letter contains many other complaints that to me appear unrelated (such as the "colonial past and incorporate indigenous expertise" plan) which gives me the impression that the person writing it is likely to complain in general.
Also, please consider that I originally wrote this as a reply to a comment which said "I already see comments downplaying this issue. [..] Quit systematically downplaying it. It's real and needs fixing.". That's why I finished my comment with agreeing in the abstract, but not the specific letter. So my intention wasn't to dismiss the letter, but to argue that if her goal is to improve the situation, then this specific letter and its phrasing might not work as well as a different way of reporting the same facts.