The Woman in the Facebook Frat House
professional.wsj.com
professional.wsj.com
There is nothing wrong with something "unrepentantly boyish", anything more than there is something wrong with women's only schools. Working class men don't go around apologizing for doing difficult construction jobs, white collar men need to stop apologizing for doing the difficult programming jobs.
This woman was in customer service. She was lucky to be put on the Facebook rocket ship. So too was Sheryl Sandberg, a nontechnical and obviously ultrapolitical operator, placed on third base as COO yet thinks she hit a triple. Both Losse and Sandberg consider themselves "women in tech". They're not. They're "women on tech", women carried on the backs of real technologists, male and female alike.
And, to be clear, there is something unambiguously wrong for a male supervisor to roam the workplace trying to push lesser-ranked employees into sexual acts;
worse, for the behavior to go on long enough until SOMEONE (again, by your analysis, a 'woman on tech') thought it was worth fixing. Even if she had to use all that dreaded 'political operations-ing' to make it right.
As someone who has been in IT for 20+ years programming is SIMPLE compared to trying to get groups of people to work towards (and want to work towards) a common goal.
After all, who really has the power here? Isn't Sheryl Sandberg the billionaire, and those two engineers the ones whose careers were ruined?
One engineer propositions other employees for threesomes and the other calls a fellow employee a feminist and is aggressive towards her. In ANY organisation on this planet both would more than likely have been instantly dismissed.
It is grossly unprofessional to say the least.
Are false accusations or office politics of such an underhanded nature "grossly unprofessional"?
1. Credibility You're take as fact that the accusations are already false, and hence "grossly unprofessional". Which holds pretty much no water, since that this person is making a claim not just about her own knowledge (re: the aggression/harassment in question) but ALSO about what actually was also common knowledge at the time. Let's not leave out, either, that books of length probably don't lend themselves well to 100% fabricated accusations - least of all those which implicate small groups of people and mention them by name. So much for anonymity and character assassination, huh?
On the other hand, the recounted instance the author gives us is being falsely accused of being difficult to work with after a manager refuses to move past aggression.
2. Stated Accusation vs. Perception
"she seemed proud of the fact that the engineers were demoted or reassigned without even having a chance to defend themselves"
You're living in the world of 'seems', rather than the world of facts. Of course, facts can be fabricated, and we can prove that they are in fact false. No one is denying that.
That said, things stated _as facts_ (behavior specified, conversations recalled, timelines constructed, etc -- basically the stuff that makes up this piece and others like it) are going to be better than your world of made up accusations (the stuff that separates conspiracies like the one you're touting here from an actual story). Think _Loose Change_ vs. _All The President's Men_.
But as to the merits of what you've said, I don't know why she 'seemed proud' to you. Joining you - again, temporarily - in your world of impression, you'll find that she had _seemed_ pretty dejected and not the least bit upset that she had to go through her superiors to get anything done about it. The word might be something more like 'relieved'.
3. ASSUMPTIONS
You straight-up assert that these people didn't have the chance to defend themselves, and that's how they were fired. The truth, by your way of thinking, was something that was not let out because they did not have the chance to say it.
And, yet, you insist that others are ranting and, as you put it, 'pointing and screaming'. So let's work out the assumptions you're making, and who's doing any 'pointing'.
I'm not sure that those accused had the chance to defend themselves, that's something you have to admit from the account. But it's definitely not something you can - as you have here - straight-up assume. If that were the case, and these people were 100% innocent as you seem to believe, you can be sure they would have a book deal of their own; although I'm less sure if you wouldn't find some kind of duplicity or targeting then, either.
As well, the facts as given point against you: it's not a conspiracy against engineers. The person who was doing straight-up sexual harassment by her account was a senior supervisor/management or somesuch. It's not, as you put it, the two engineers that this evil woman and her billionaire female ally targeted.
Finally, let's not forget that the account also specifies that Cheryl Sandberg made a point of talking to all the females in the office to make sure things were right. Or could be made right, as was the case here. If you think that any of this points to a world in which the, say, 5% of women in the office lord over the politics and seek to find you and accuse you falsely so that you can be fired, well, no amount of bullshit-detection applied to your posts can save you.
the article makes it sound like sandberg did too and quietly "made things happen" on the strength of that.
that should legitimately concern men in tech.
women have privileges too. women abusing their presumed status as victum in conflicts with men is a very real phenomena.
If you mean she was paid in shares that turned out very valuable years later, thhen she has absolutely no reason to be grateful for them. The only reason she was not paid in cash was that the value of Facebook was uncertain. It could be a success, or it could flop. As with any stock market deals it was a gamble, and she was lucky.
Also, she was apaid employee. She would not have been hired if she didn't contribute to the success of the company. Therefore she made "those engineers" millionaries just as much.
Therefore she made "those engineers" millionaries just as
much.
Doug Edwards, Google Employee 59, is more self-consciously reflective about this, recognizing explicitly in his biography that the company would have become successful if he weren't there. Losse and Sandberg only pat themselves on the back about hobbling the careers of engineers for their sins, real or imagined. If Losse could turn her own drunken donning of a bearskin rug into some bizarre cause for resentment, who knows what innocuous remark could have gotten transmogrified into cause for demotion or transfer of some hapless, apolitical engineer.
> No. All contributions aren't equal. It takes someone
> special to write HipHop to compile PHP into C++.
> Engineers can (and do) do customer service in a pinch,
> customer service reps can't do engineering.
You don't have to point this out as an engineer unless dealing with someone who doesn't realize how relatively incapable they are, like Losse.
With that said... It still surprises me that people in HN are quickly to point out misogyny but completely misses the man bashing, "boyish" shaming misandry from this article.
The article was not just sexist but also generally demeaning or condescending.
"...my first day at Facebook, the young, plain-looking guys in T-shirts..." "...woman in the office—an administrative assistant—was more animated, smiling toothily as she welcomed me in...."
The bad types of feminists seems to think that all man have power and/or privileges and are oppressors of woman and woman are always the oppressed victims with no privilege or power. The following quotes made her seem like she might be this type of feminist.
"...slight mocking disapproval that was my new colleagues' default tone in response to anything that resisted their power...."
"...Facebook album that Monday I was struck by the loaded nature of the image, ripe for interpretation, in which Mark appeared to be commanding a female employee to submit..."
"...photo was taken and posted on Facebook is that it didn't occur to anyone in the office that there was anything wrong with it, or that it revealed something unattractive about the culture of Facebook."
"...As Mark wrote on his business card with boyish hubris, "I'm CEO, bitch." The image of me in the bearskin was saying that power wasn't something to be questioned; it was something to collect and brandish..."
IIRC the "I'm CEO, bitch." business cards had to do with developers not becoming CEO of the company and not making as much money from their own creation.
"When I met Sheryl, the first thing I said was that she had really good skin," Mark continued, "and she does," he said, gesturing toward Sheryl, whose face had an admittedly creamy tone.
Was Mark talking about the actual skin or that she had good thick skin? It's pretty ironic if this is criticism of Mark considering she writes about peoples appearances in a condescending way.
A. Enter male to female ratio of 1:50
B. Experience some things that felt wrong/daunting
C. New manager entered scene and "fixed things"
Would a different manager have done the same? Possibly not unless either they thought about it from reading about an article or having been in a similar position at say Froogle.
Really interesting and I think it brings up the something that we as people should start doing more. Ask questions if something seems wrong or potentially off. Even if we're not a "manager" or not female. To at the very least try to promote `good`.
It's good for stories such as these to circulate as hopefully it will speed up the dilution of sexist issues we keep hearing of. And by dilution I mean the hopeful removal of this problem entirely.
Lord of the flies.
Most companies start silo-ing waaaaay too early, everybody breaking up into little "that's not my job" cliques. It's just much less painful that way. Sounds like FB actively resisted, whether through design or chance.
Not sure that's the word for it. Seems more like engineering naivete.
The thing is, I have a similar functionality at my company and the solution I came up with is conceptually simple but also a lot more secure.
There's an is_staff flag on every user account. If you have it set to True, you can log in as one of our customers for debugging purposes.
If you leave the company, you lose the flag. Simple as that really.
All the same power necessary to really get down and dirty with whatever problems our customers encounter, but with less potential issues.
I don't consider the above to be the end-all be-all as eventually it'll have to become more elaborate and locked down. For now, however, it seems to work well for a company of roughly seven people. :)
[1] i.e., someone mature, responsible, sober-minded.
Also when you work in a place that has too many 'adults', they can discount you because of your youth.
That doesn't sound very mature and responsible, the top level posts definition of "adult".
Master password.. shocker. I'm sure there are still ways, just not as simple anymore.
About the things that "suburban boys from Harvard would find cool" so that's why they were there, um, duh. They were suburban boys from Harvard who didn't really have a lot of women around the office. Obviously they're going to put things like that on the walls. Speaking from experience, the only thing dumber than a guy is a guy who is still in college. These aren't mature individuals yet, and while that's unfortunate, they have to be treated differently sometimes.
Here's my problem with the bearskin thing. We have to remember who picked it up and put it on. Everyone was drunk, everyone was having fun. She picked it up and put it on her head and was being funny. I challenge you to find one drunk person, guy or girl, who would tell someone to stop doing something that is funny. The picture sounds like an issue of most pictures that wind up on Facebook after a party. They were taken at an inopportune moment and you wish that no one would have taken it.
Long story short, some guys are dicks, and they have to work somewhere. When they get out of line, the issue should be dealt with like it was. Its unfortunate that the tech world still seems like a boys club, but it's a difficult problem to fix when the people working in the industry don't always see themselves for what they really are.
1. In the author's eyes, the majority of early Facebook employees acted in a juvenile masculine manner[1].
2. Some of those early Facebook employees weren't nice people.
Am I missing something more subtle?
[1] I.e., the manner young males are stereotyped[2].
[2] I'm not accusing the author of stereotyping.It's less that the 'employees weren't nice people' and more that this employee was powerless to reign in patterns of offensive/illegal/errant behavior.
Still it wouldn't be so necessary to focus on, _except_ for all the crap being thrown in here to accept/defend it.
It's too bad that the author chose to put the "male" spin on things[1][2][3][4]. I found that offensive enough to distract me from understanding the main point of the article on my first read.
(Also, the bearskin part was far-fetched. As another commenter here said: unless there was more context involved, she was probably reading into that too much.)
[1] "[...]young, plain-looking guys in T-shirts, gazing at their
screens, seemed startled—if not displeased—to see a strange new woman
in the office."
[2] "[...]it seemed like the kind of thing that suburban boys from
Harvard would think was urban and cool."
[3] "[...]or the unrepentantly boyish company culture that it
represented[...]"
[4] "As Mark wrote on his business card with boyish hubris[...]"Yikes!
Also, other discussion possibly going on here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149731
Replacing the role of female entering FB's workplace - how would a conservative or devoutly religious _male_ would respond to the machismo described? Likewise: a feminist male, a homosexual male, a father, a grandfather.
The article offers another voice calling for an increased awareness of serious problems in our industry.
Depending on your level of cynicism you could consider the article an "advertorial" seeing as how these are few anecdotes from her book coming out next week.
- for a female employee to be aggressively pursued by a supervisor for a sexual act, nor can you fathom
- the powerlessness of being one of those women who have all noticed this behavior and, worse,
- knowing that they can't do anything about it.
Nor, as your comment indicatese ... should anyone think it's important.
Some people might consider this worth discussion, even if they think that the issue's overblown (either this instance or generally 'women in tech'), but not you.
No, instead, you thought it would be fucking clever to do perhaps the stupidest, tritest 2003-era joke to convey your callous - in response to a pretty even-handed account, no less. It's beyond saving to be upset about the stupid shit which runs through this site, but what I am having trouble with is trying to decipher what the fucking point of your comment here is. Does mine have one either? Not really; guilty as charged. In any case - your stupid response deserves at least mine in kind, and probably also the revulsion of anyone who thinks things this-article-related should matter.
And, fuck, a tiny violin joke? Really? That's the icing on the human-shitstain cake.
Edited for emphasis, I am sorry that my infuriation has distracted you by way of cursing. But not apologizing for total derision - I'll stand by conveying how _completely fucked up_ this is. Let's take this seriously.
If it is such an important issue, perhaps treat it a bit more professionally.
You can be assertive and "professional" without sounding like a shriek.
The only acceptable response is to forcefully smack it down. I thought pnmahoney's reply was exactly the right tone.
"I'm having trouble reading this one . . . can someone else help me?" is NOT-equivalent to "I am so closed to this issue that I'd rather demean the point, let's make the industry look bad AND lame. here ya go. <idiotic joke>."
...or at least there is a conceivable difference between the second and the first BESIDES just the idiotic joke. That said, I don't mean to imply that you can't actually mean the latter and dress it up as the former.
I don't think that aheilbut was necessarily closed to the issue. If I had to guess, he was probably just distracted by the presentation, like I was.