Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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So, a potential employee decides not to work with your startup and you immediately jump to the conclusion that it's because you're female?

No, she immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was her fault and she then sacrificed her own future with the company in order to get this person onto the team. Some time later her coach pointed out that she overlooked the possibility of an age/gender issue.

Why, I wonder, did you choose to completely mischaracterize the content of the article?

On top of this, this was not your boss, this is someone you were trying to hire. You can turn down a job for any reason and it has nothing to do with the "glass ceiling".

Backing out of an accepted job offer is a bit different from 'turning down a job'.

Aren't we allowed to have opinions these days? If I don't like you and you just happen to be black, a woman, gay, etc..does it always have to be because of these traits..and not because you're an asshole?

Nobody forced the candidate to accept the job offer before backing out of it on a rather flimsy pretext. He hadn't even started work yet, so I wonder what basis you think he had for deciding that his then-future boss was 'an asshole.'

Why, I wonder, did you choose to completely mischaracterize the content of the article?

That's a little unfair. The article's title frames the story in reference to the glass ceiling. That the grandparent comment used the word "immediately" does not change the fact that this entire article is about sexism; even if it was only explicitly mentioned at the end, it is the author's point that sexism caused these events. It's not as though she wrote an article detailing these events and then threw in what her coach said because it's thought-provoking -- she actually believes it, factual or not.

Backing out of an accepted job offer is a bit different from 'turning down a job'.

While this sentence is true, it doesn't answer what the grandparent said. You can turn down a job, back out of a job, quit a job - whatever, for whatever reasons you want, and they don't have to remotely involve the glass ceiling.

Nobody forced the candidate to accept the job offer before backing out of it on a rather flimsy pretext. He hadn't even started work yet, so I wonder what basis you think he had for deciding that his then-future boss was 'an asshole.'

Similar to how rejection letters from a company are almost always form letters and not personal details about your interview performance, I don't see why you'd expect anything other than a flimsy excuse from a candidate turning down the job.

And the grandparent wasn't saying the author is an asshole, just that it is an equally plausible explanation to her being a woman, young, gay, a dominatrix, diseased, whatever.

I get what you're saying, anigbrowl, but I have to disagree. I fully believe sexism exists in tech, and most of the stories on HN about it are probably the real deal. But this doesn't have enough evidence to give me that impression. If anything, I'd say it's more that he didn't want to be the subordinate of an unassertive young person (ageism), not a female.

I have my doubts about how much sexism was in play, but I also accept that the writer of the article necessarily has more first hand experience of the situation than can be adequately laid out in a short column (which may in turn have been edited for length by a copy editor). Note as well that she is going out of her way to be circumspect about the identity of the person in question; I am perfectly willing to believe that there's more to the story but that she is choosing to exercise some discretion to avoid impinging on the person as an individual and also to avoid the possibility of a libel accusation. I don't think ageism is a big issue here since the star hire was apparently happy to end up reporting to the author's (then) 32 year old cofounder, and the author appears to be of a similar age.

The point I'm making above is that the grandparent poster seems to have some need to make up facts that are not present in the original story in order to justify his angry tone. In short, I think he has a giant chip on his shoulder.

What I think you and a lot of other posters are missing is the import of her paragraph about how diversity costs; when they were a freewheeling write-the-r-own-rules startup they could afford to blow off or ignore anyone who tried to leverage personal biases such as sexism, ageism, or anything really. Once they were funded and had investors whose expectations they had to satisfy, they were also obliged to deal with suppliers (of skills in this case) whose economic apparent economic benefit outweighed the ancillary costs in terms of team cohesion and founder status. She's pointing this out as an example of systematic discrimination - not in the casual but incorrect sense that most people use the term, involving some villainous type whose primary goal is to disenfranchise others, but as an unfortunate consequence of the laws of supply and demand.

If you need to hire a hotshot in some specialized field and the expected value of that person's economic contribution is greater than the cost of buying out a cofounder, then said cofounder is at the mercy of any personal biases that the hotshot might have. And being a hotshot is absolutely not correlated with any kind of superior moral development. I have met plenty of highly skilled people who were leaders in their field but who were markedly undeveloped in other respects, and indeed I could say the same of myself in some respects.

What I think you and a lot of other posters are missing is the import of her paragraph about how diversity costs; when they were a freewheeling write-the-r-own-rules startup they could afford to blow off or ignore anyone who tried to leverage personal biases such as sexism, ageism, or anything really.

I had missed this, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

She's pointing this out as an example of systematic discrimination - not in the casual but incorrect sense that most people use the term, involving some villainous type whose primary goal is to disenfranchise others, but as an unfortunate consequence of the laws of supply and demand.

I can see how this makes sense, okay, fair point. In other words, a far more subtle type of discrimination based on the circumstances. I probably missed this because the title seemed a bit more straightforward.

As for everything you said about "hotshots", yeah, I agree.

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