To tickle the startup thing: picture a site where a bunch of VCs sit around talking about money stuff. You want to get into that world and you know you need to be part of this site to do it. Yet half the time you start posting you find the people you want to interact with complaining about how infuriating "tech people" are to deal with. Think hard about what you'd do: jump into the conversation anyway or just stay silent until you have something "serious" to say? I know what I'd do.
That's my MO on any new forum. I only stopped following that rule on HN as HN itself got increasingly sillier.
And really, your VC example, in reverse, is in full display on HN. There are always articles complaining about unfair shit that VC's pull, and VC's probably talk about unfair shit founders pull. The proper response, assuming you're a VC that doesn't pull unfair shit, is to say "yeah, I hate that shit and I never do that." Look at how Peroni (a recruiter) contributes to the perennial complaining-about-recruiters threads.
The OP is about using indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques to close sales. I think it's fair game to complain about indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques and the people who use them, and if someone observes that it tends to be women more often than men, so be it. If you're a woman who doesn't use indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques, you come into this thread in the same position that Peroni comes into the multitude of threads about how useless recruiters are.
'I think it's fair game to complain about indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques and the people who use them"
Good grief. No. Just no. Not when the "people who use them" are generalized (maeon3 didn't even hedge with "tend to" like you did) to half the species.
Sorry, that's not objective argumentation, it's plain bigotry.
Would you have stepped up in the same way if he had jumped into to say the darkies are lazy and dumb? That the muslim faith is evil?
I'll just repeat my original "yikes" and leave it at that. People like you make me sad for humanity.
It's the moral equivalent of walking around telling every german you meet that the Nazis killed six million jews and that the holocaust is the worst thing in history. Might be true of "some germans" but it's not something polite people do. And in the context of underrepresented demographics like women programmers it's really hurtful to all of us.