On failing our values, our team, and our industry
blogs.atlassian.com
blogs.atlassian.com
It's not a "sorry if you were offended" non-apology.
It's throwing a particular person under the bus or offering his head on a stake.
It is thoughtful and direct and raises my opinion of Atlassian. Well done, guys.
Second: Since part of having an open mind is attempting to empathize with people even when they make mistakes (And understand the mentality behind the mistake, since we are ALL IN THIS TOGETHER), I would like to try to un-demonize this guy at an individual level -- again, not trying to detract the larger, meta picture: jokes at the expense of women are NOT OK.
I think a lot of the outrage here comes from the fact that we are reading his slide as though he said "Maven is like a woman." He didn't, he said his girlfriend. The issue is that on a public presentation the goal is to say things others can relate to, so the natural conclusion is that he was indeed making a generalization.
I'm curious if we would have read it as a more appropriate joke if he had replaced "girlfriend" with a genderless noun like "significant other" or "schnuckums."
Really, though, next time you're making a slide like this spare yourself and all of us a lot of trouble and say "my cat" instead.
The developer is an Atlassian employee. He gave the talk at an Atlassian organized conference. I would assume his talk must have been approved internally in some way or form (unless any employee was able to give any talk they wanted without any form of supervision, in which case there's a deeper problem here).
So here's my question: why wasn't this terrible "joke" cut out from the slides months ago? Why, when the guy was preparing his talk, presumably rehearsing it in front of his coworkers, sending the PDF of the slide to organizers of the event, etc., did no one speak up and say "Dude, that slide is sexist and doesn't add anything of value to your talk - just remove it"?
The fact that this didn't happen leads me to believe that the internal culture at Atlassian must be quite terrible, and very much the opposite of an environment where acceptance and diversity flourish.
(EDIT: received 3 downvotes on this comment less than one minute after it was posted. Looks like the Atlassian PR department is keeping watch. Hi guys! :) )
I do believe that if you're giving a talk on behalf of your company at a major event organized by your company, and your talk contains an extremely inappropriate slide, then either a) your company is terrible at organizing events (and it's a miracle that nothing worse happened) or b) no one in your company cared about that inappropriate slide, in which case your company has terrible culture.
(here gbog is using the 3rd stratagem from Schopenhauer's "Art of Being Right": "Generalize Your Opponent's Specific Statements")
Kind of shameful that it even has to be said, but I guess it does.
> (unless any employee was able to give any talk they wanted without any form of supervision, in which case there's a deeper problem here)
I think any employee being able to give any talk they wanted without helicopter parenting should be the norm. I think one employee saying once one stupid thing should not be the end of the world. I think everyone should be allowed to say stupid things. We do anyway, right?
If someone didn't sign off on the presentation, then I hope process is implemented that prevent this from happening again, and if it was signed off, it sounds like more employees need some education.
The way the last company I worked for dealt with this stuff was great, all talks and training sessions to be given externally were given internally first, which means multiple employees could give feedback (which was heavily encouraged) and also things like this would hopefully not slip through.
I would detest working at such a place; having to run my technical presentations through a filter would be constricting and off putting.
Unless given by a person in the marketing department, I would never assume a presentation made by an employee reflected the values aims or goals of the company as a whole.
> why wasn't this terrible "joke" cut out from the slides months ago? Why, when the guy was preparing his talk, presumably rehearsing it in front of his coworkers, sending the PDF of the slide to organizers of the event, etc., did no one speak up and say "Dude, that slide is sexist and doesn't add anything of value to your talk - just remove it"?
pfffft, I'm lucky if I've created my decks the day before the presentation. It's not unusual to go to a conference/event and find half the speakers writing decks in the hours before.
I think it can be done without being restrictive or off putting. The place I last worked at required all public talks and training sessions to happen internally first. It was a great way to promote constant learning, share new skills and emphasise company values. It had the side effect of being a great way to check presentations, even if that's just checking for typos, but it would also catch this sort of issue.
As many startups are finding, there comes a time, and a size of company, when you do need some process specifically to prevent things like this. It's annoying, but there way ways to make it a positive thing instead of a negative thing.
> Unless given by a person in the marketing department, I would never assume a presentation made by an employee reflected the values aims or goals of the company as a whole.
Unfortunately that's not what the press think, and even more unfortunately, it's often the press view that matters most.
Quite possibly, but this is one of the lures of an early stage start up for me.
Obviously no one and no company is perfect and this story is a case in point, but I came away from that conversation with a much higher opinion of Atlassian than I had previously. It certainly seemed to me that Mike was serious about trying to cultivate a good culture at Atlassian and he also seemed like a genuine, no bullshit kind of guy.
I've also happened to have dealings of the professional networking/information exchange kind with one of the staff at Atlassian and was again impressed by how helpful that person was and the way they conducted themselves.
So in my anecdotal but first person experience, I would say that the culture at Atlassian is probably above par when compared to other similarly sized companies.
Events like the Github fiasco should not be mentioned in the open allocation debate, because it's not like they're rare in a closed-allocation company. They're just as common, if not moreso. It just doesn't surprise us, when that shit goes down at a closed-allocation company, because open-allocation companies are held to a higher standard-- because open allocation companies are better.
Open allocation isn't a panacea. The Github event established that, if it wasn't already obvious. Open allocation isn't perfect. It is, however, superior to closed allocation is almost every way (at least, in software). Closed allocation only works better under severe time constraints.
"Flat organization" is somewhat different and usually (like "unlimited vacation") undesirable. Just as "unlimited vacation" means the policy is undefined, "flat organization" usually means the hierarchy is undefined-- which is dangerous, because "unofficial managers" are more likely to compete with those below them than official, titled ones.
In reality and perhaps paradoxically, true open allocation requires that people with credibility and leadership skill keep the company open and fair, which means that it requires (lightweight) management. It's not the Traditional Dickhead Management (i.e. you subordinate to this assigned person, whose goals may conflict with the company's and yours, or you are fucked) that you see in 90+ percent of companies, but it's not "flat" either. "Flat" is like "anarchy"; not stable. Open allocation, however, is the absolute right way to go.
"Flat" organization is unstable and therefore probably not desirable. Open allocation (people can transfer freely as they wish) is a good thing and the only way to function at high levels as a technology company.
Well I guess you'd have to take that up with Mike as you're really referencing his opinion not mine. In that instance I was neither trying to praise or criticise the kind of company structure that appears to be represented by Valve/GitHub (if "open allocation" better describes this phenomenon then I'll take your word for that). In fact I only mentioned it because it was the context within which my discussion of Atlassian's culture began on the evening in question.
I personally find this open allocation concept quite fascinating and think it potentially holds a lot promise. Most people working in corporate environments today would be lying if they said there wasn't huge room for innovation and efficiency gains at their workplace. To my knowledge however, I am unaware of any situation where an open allocation culture has been successfully retro-fitted to an existing corporate environment (if you know of one, I'd be interested). I'm also skeptical in relation to how well an open allocation culture would work out once a company grows beyond a certain inflection point. I'm not well read enough on this matter to put a stake in the ground and define that exact inflection point. But for the sake of illustration, let's say I'd be interested to know how such a culture would work out when applied to an organization consisting of thousands of employees as opposed to dozens or even hundreds.
That is hard as hell, to be honest. Paradoxically, I think it requires a top-down commitment. Companies usually want to try this sort of thing incrementally. So they put their best people into an R&D group that has a fair amount of autonomy. However, over time what seems to happen is that it's resented and attacked, and eventually has to spend more time fighting political battles than innovating. At that point, it's often just as underperforming as the rest of the organization, the experiment is judged a failure, and that autonomy is taken away. It's the "fish frying" problem (http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/).
I'm also skeptical in relation to how well an open allocation culture would work out once a company grows beyond a certain inflection point. I'm not well read enough on this matter to put a stake in the ground and define that exact inflection point.
Gore-tex uses open allocation and is large (almost 10,000 employees, if I recall correctly). What I don't think OA can survive is too-rapid growth. I think it can scale to thousands of employees. I don't think it can tolerate personnel growth at the 100-150%/year levels that VCs want to see.
Thanks for the tip on Gore-tex, hadn't heard about them.
> What I don't think OA can survive is too-rapid growth. I think it can scale to thousands of employees. I don't think it can tolerate personnel growth at the 100-150%/year levels that VCs want to see.
So the important thing is to ensure that there remains a solid core of staff of an influential enough size that understands the open allocation process/culture in order to successfully orient new comers arriving at a reasonable pace. That's potentially quite an interesting insight, I'll remember that one.
Your comment hinges on this assumption but it is ludicrous. Especially in this context. It is the antithesis of trusting your employees (and understanding that people sometimes screw up). It does makes me wonder about the kind of companies you've worked at.
It seems that people interpreted my comment as implying that the talk would be reviewed by some pointy haired boss stamping a stack of forms. That is not what I meant at all.
Rather, that a talk presented at such a venue would be given and vetted internally first, if only for the sake of technical correctness. In my career, I have never given a talk (whether while working for a private company, research lab, etc) without it having been given to colleagues first- again, if only for technical correctness/typos/etc.
So again, here either no one from Atlassian saw the talk until the day of, which is terrible. Or people from Atlassian saw the talk beforehand and no one objected at the slide- which is even worse.
So in your mind, presentations that are not made 6 months in advance and are not thoroughly vetted means there is a bad culture problem at a company and not a place where diveristy can flourish? That's just ... I wouldn't want to be anywhere that you would find ideal; it sounds like a horrible place.
It would be no less wrong, but I believe reaction would be very different.
I feel like this isn't really a "the thought police have rejected your slide" moment so much as a "fucking hell, dude, that was dumb" moment.
Still, as a thought experiment, I'd love to see how different the reactions would be. It seems that gender discrimination is, sadly, influenced by gender.
It isn't sad that we are training ourselves to be more sensitive to things that worsen that divide.
That being said, it is perfectly natural for him to impose his specific preferences when talking in the first perspective (a way of story telling). Eg. You always say gf/bf instead of significant other if you were making any other statement about them (good/bad).
The above discussion is purely since we are at the edge of what we would consider sexism, and although I don't know the presenter personally, I would assume his point was to compare a clingy relationship to maven (some software), and not to compare to girls in general or imply that girls are more prone to (clingy?) relationships. (I am assuming the best in him)
Given the context and mood of society though I can see how this can be perceived in the way it is being perceived. (Context being clingy seems to be associated with girls, I cant think of any other reason why one gender should be offended if it is perceived to be equally prevalent in both genders.) It seems unfortunate that this is the case, but all in all he should have kept in mind societal perceptions when making his slides. (Rule 1 of making presentations, always keep your audience in mind).
I personally would not condone such a slide since it seems to be exploiting to be exploiting a particular gender stereotype. We as a society are guided by our history and perceptions. (A quick example, asking a female chef to return to the kitchen would be considered sexist versus asking a female software engineer to return to her computer which might be insulting but would never be construed as sexist). We must take care to avoid sensitive stereotypes.
First off; technicalities: he didn't say "Maven is all women". He said "My girlfriend". Presumably referring to a specific person. His girlfriend has the right to be pissed off, I suppose.
Second off, if mild gender stereotypes are worth so much hate you might as well cancel every sitcom on TV.
Does nobody get the benefit of the doubt anymore because bored social justice warriors are looking for a fucking witch-hunt?
Downvote away.
(Also: do you seriously think that women have such fragile psyches that they can't take a simple joke? What does that say about your view on women?)
I think that plenty of people, men and women, have such fragile psyches that they can't take a joke - or, at least, that taking a joke requires extra effort which distracts from the matter at hand.
For the record, I don't think the slide was as bad as some people are making it out to be, but to dismiss concerns over it as motivated by sexism is rhetorical prestidigitation and not an actual argument.
Up voted.
Many people (including, of course, feminists) do indeed think that virtually every sitcom on TV is unacceptably sexist. And while I don't know that the slide justifies "hate," I do think that it justifies widespread criticism since it perpetuates an unfortunate pattern of gender discrimination in the industry. (Or, if you prefer, it perpetuates an unfortunate pattern of complaining and arguing about gender discrimination. Even if you think that there is no gender discrimination in tech, it seems like you ought to agree that inviting that critique is itself a mistake.)
And, no, I don't think it's presumable that he is just referring to a specific person since everything he lists is, as you note, a well worn gender stereotype.
Some people just love being victims I guess.
Whether he's referring to his girlfriend or women in general, he's perpetuating a stereotype. This has less to do with sexism, and more to do with offensive stereotyping. You could replace the girlfriend example with anything from this page (first link i found) - http://examples.yourdictionary.com/stereotype-examples.html - and it's equally wrong.
He's doing it as a representative of his company, and so Atlassian needs to acknowledge that it's wrong, and they're going to do something about it. An employee made a mistake in a public forum - simple as that.
>The definition of a stereotype is any commonly known public belief about a certain social group or a type of individual.
That definition kind of contradicts your point. He wasn't referring to women in general (certain social group) or to girlfriends in general (type of individuals). He was referring to his girlfriend. For you to accuse him of perpetuating a stereotype, you would have to claim that his girlfriend represents all women or all girlfriends (which is sexist).
it is you who perpetuates the stereotype by forcefully projecting/extending his reference to his girlfriend onto women in general.
Your brain is the exact place where the generalization from his girlfriend to all women happened, and you hold him responsible for that action of your brain.
If the slide reflects his values _less_ than it does Atlassian's, that's pretty bad, no?
But I got a chuckle from what you said.
* Looks Good * Complains a Lot * Demands My Attention * Interrupts Me When I'm Working * Doesn't Play Well With My Other Friends