Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Which is what I'd expect you to say to your peers on the predominately male-dominated forums you frequent. :) I suspect (based on my own personality) that your personality isn't nearly so confident when you're out of your comfort zone. Now picture a world where that zone outside your comfort is an important part of the career path.

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.

View on HN

> just stay silent until you have something "serious" to say

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.

(late reply to late reply, but I couldn't let this one go)

'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.

I don't think he implied anywhere that all or even most women (mis-) communicate that way, but rather that most people who mis-communicate that way are women. That is a fair observation, and similar comments about men largely pass without comment.

The original post has been edited, but the phrasing was "some women [do this], so I punish them for it". And he went on to use the female pronouns throughout. It was a rant, not an argument. And there wasn't even a tiny nod to the idea that anyone other than a woman would be so afflicted.

The fact that some behaviors are more frequent in one sex vs. the other is a biological one.

True, but unrelated to my point. I was reacting to maeon3's use of a link to a list of sales techniques (!) as a springboard for a rant about "some women" communicating badly and needing to be "punished" for it. It may be true or not, but it's uncalled for and exclusionary.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com