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Comment by ManFromUranus | Hacker News Reader

Why is the lack of gender diversity in tech an obvious problem? Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there. You might say something about discrimination or sexism or some such thing, however I am highly skeptical of that. I have been a programmer for 10+ years and never saw any kind of negative discrimination against women. I have seen many examples of positive discrimination in their favour. I think that people find ways to do the things they want to do, and women don't want to be in tech, so they aren't.

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I've been a programmer for 20+ years. For the longest time I didn't see any discrimination in tech, probably because everybody I worked with was also a young white guy.

Except those over the hill freaks with their comb overs and sandals with socks. Fortunately their skill sets were rapidly obsolete, so we got rid of them.

On the other hand, my wife (a senior Oracle DBA with close to 20 years of experience) sees it on a regular basis. It's disheartening to hear her talk about it because I realize I'm guilty of many of the same behaviours.

I guess I could try to protect my ego and claim it's not sexism, but that's not who I want to be. I don't want to be the guy denying something I know to be true.

I went into an interview a couple of years ago and realized I was about 20 years older than everybody in the company. I don't have a comb over and I don't wear socks with sandals, but it was pretty obvious I was too old to work there. That's the day I realized my job opportunities are becoming limited. I should have seen it coming.

Hmm, maybe it's possible women don't want to be in tech because of the sexism they face.

I think that's the easy answer.

"but it was pretty obvious I was too old to work there"

Who said that? Did they say that to you? If they did that was definitely wrong. However it sounds more like you imposed that criteria on yourself, and then attribute the blame to them.

If gender diversity in tech is a good thing, why not age diversity? Sounds like they needed you there.

I certainly didn't impose that criteria. I wanted the job. I certainly had the experience they were looking for.

And no, nobody came out and said I was too old. They just reacted like I used to react when old people told me they understood computers. Pleasant, but patronizing. How could an old guy possibly handle any modern technology when he's got COBOL and FORTRAN on his resume?

Discrimination is rarely blatant. I'd guess that most people are never aware they're doing it. That doesn't mean it's not happening.

Well for starters, COBOL and FORTRAN are effectively ancient technologies are far as much of modern business programming is concerned. I would omit them from your resume. State them for interest sake only.

Also they are not a charity organization, the business goal is to get value out of you. Perhaps you did not demonstrate sufficient value, or seemed out of touch with current technology. I have found that programmers are a fairly meritocratic group of people, but you do have to stay up to date with tech, and that is a battle that gets harder and harder as you age.

but you do have to stay up to date with tech, and that is a battle that gets harder and harder as you age.

Wait what? That right there is blatant age-ism.

You know what helps learn new technology? When it's the same shit we did 15 years ago repackaged. WSDL is coming back around right now, just in JSON or Protobuf form. Don't you think mobile apps that have to sync with the server are a lot like server/client apps from the 90s?

To think that it's hard to pickup a new language just because you are 50 is really missing the forest for the trees of what it means to be a software engineer.

I think his point is more related to the learning curve.

If you're in your fifties it doesn't mean that you are stupid but it does mean that you're going to have to learn a lot of technologies from the recruiting company's stack.

Now if they can find someone that already know's them, their return on investment will be faster and safer.

The older developer will also most likely not program on his free time for family reasons or because he has more interesting hobbies.

Now this is controversial but I still would say that this is career / life choice which means that not having a very sexy resume won't get you everywhere no matter what your experience is.

This of course sounds very "hipsterish" but if you loot at the kinds of companies that are talked about here (start-ups and ex-startups that grew), it does make financial sense.

I'm not a psychologist but I would also wager that age gap is lowering team performance due to a lesser bond / closeness between the members.

So many bigoted assumptions I don't know where to start...

I tried to formulate a response to it as well, but it was impossible to even figure out where to begin. I'm thankful I'm at a company that proves all of his assumptions wrong.

Apparently having an actual conversation with real arguments is too much.

Fortran, while it might be ancient in computing terms, is still an actively-developed language[1] with multiple open-source and commercial compilers. I started writing Fortran professionally when I was 26, nine years ago. In certain scientific realms it is still used heavily, and it generally still kicks everything else's ass at linear algebra.

Kind of a tangent, but I have a soft spot for that language.

[1] Most recent standards rev was 2008, current draft standard slated for release in 2016.

Fortran is not used at most businesses. I doubt Fortran is used much anywhere outside of possibly engineering. Even then Engineers probably use some type of AutoCad like software that does modelling, and therefore nobody needs to know FOrtran anyway.

Engineer here. I work at a large industrial plant Fortran is used quite a bit. We have numerical simulation code which runs and feeds back into our operating process written in Fortran (mostly Thermodynamics and Chemical kinetic's simulations). Plant Operators make descions based on the output of Fortran models all without knowing or caring that the things are written in Fortran.

You can trace the herritage of the code back to the 80's but it has been more or less constantly maintained since then there is a lot of company IP wrapped up in the code. You certainly don't need to know Fortran to use or understand the models (it's wrapped in a 'modernish' C++ GUI) but the engineers working on improvements to the backend definately need to know Fortran.

I suspect there is a lot of reasons for the prevalence of Fortran in Engineering code. Industrial plants tends to operate continously you can't exactly replace all the infrastructure without large downtime. A large part of our plant was built in 1996, so the technology is very much what you'd expect from that era (RS/6000 Unix boxes everywhere in the control system). The Libraies and compilers etc all have to link against that vintage. It's not slated to get upgraded until 2018 and we will probably try to push that as far back as we can. When the upgrade happens I suspect we will be on Wintel (and in another 20 years that will probably be just as outdated).

The other reason for Fortran is that Engineering processes tend to be stable. A chemical reaction does not change so once some code is written and it works very low incentive to replace it. At my plant our models were first written in the 80's (when personal computers began to become ubiquitous) by senior engineers in the company - these were guys who grew up in the 70's and were raised on Fortran. Eventually the code was handed to the junior engineers to maintain. The juniors passed up the ranks to become seniors and when it came time to write the next generation of models "I'll base it on this existing Fortran Model which I know inside out and works really well" became the mantra and so Fortran become self perpetuating and entrenched across the industry. If it had been a decade later would probably have been C

> Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there.

This is so far from the lived reality of women in tech or any of the data on hiring that you should be embarrassed to open your mouth.

On HN most people get that before opining on the merits of functional programming, they should have tried it. Or at the very least spent a fair bit of time reading about what people who have tried it see as the pluses and minuses. But somehow we get to questions of discrimination in tech, an article can't be up for 10 minutes before somebody feels free to opine based on no knowledge whatsoever.

I find it maddening. Partly because so many of these people seem to think it's somebody else's job to argue them into an understanding. (Rather than, say, their responsibility to do a Google search and read for a whole hour.) And partly because it traps these discussions at a level of "let's explain Discrimination 101" over and over and over.

But to answer your direct point: your hypothesis that "people do what they want to do" is obviously worthless when you look at actual data on what people do. Consider this graph, for example:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

By your interpretation, in 1965, women wanted to be lawyers at 1/10th the rate that men did. But 40 years later women suddenly wanted to be lawyers a lot more. Why? Well, who can know what people want? They just want things. Or they don't. But it definitely, positively, absolutely couldn't have anything to do with the millennia of structural oppression of women or the dramatic changes over the last century in the status and legal rights of women. Nope! Not a thing.

It's ridiculous. Which you would know if you had bothered to put forth any effort. Now ask yourself: why didn't you?

Are you aware that you have not only failed to educate people, but you have only taught them that voicing an opinion that you don't agree with will bring disproportionately furious rebuke?

A serious question: do you think you will change how people behave by acting in this way?

I think the implied ground for your comment is that everybody's opinion is valuable and should be heard. So let me sketch my quick hierarchy of opinions here.

First, there are informed opinions versus uninformed ones. I am happy to talk with people who have informed opinions even when we disagree.

Next, there are naively uninformed opinions versus lazily or willfully uninformed opinions. For example, suppose somebody says, "Hey, I'm a high school student thinking of going into tech, and don't understand all this recent discussion about diversity. Can somebody help me out?" I am also very happy to talk with that person; there's no shame in being honestly ignorant but eager to learn. (Most of the time I'm even glad to give the lazy or mildly willful people a chance, although my experience suggests it rarely helps, at least right away.)

Beneath that we have willfully uninformed opinions presented in a way that actively harms the discussion. When somebody doesn't know what's going on, doesn't want to, and perhaps doesn't even want people talking about the topic, then yes, I actually don't want them in this discussion right now.

For the record I believe my reply is proportionately angry. It's a serious problem that harms both the field and actual individuals. We have been discussing it for decades. (Note also that quibbling about tone itself has a long history in these discussions: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument )

So, serious answer: Yes I hope that a) I will reduce the frequency with which the last category of opinion is deployed to halt or degrade useful discussion, b) more people will be able to recognize a particular dumb argument as a dumb argument, and c) some of the lazily or willfully ignorant will actually try to understand the context before opining.

So, serious response: you are perpetuating the notion that it's acceptable to attempt to silence an opinion that you disagree with sufficiently. Is this the norm you wish to encourage? That it's OK to exclude people who don't think sufficiently like you?

Please, do not attempt to answer. I would like you to contemplate this. It's not senseless navel-gazing and is quite significant.

Also, tone matters because we're dealing with real human beings who respond to tone as well as substance. To say "That's a tone argument!" as a form of dismissal is to miss that the whole point is supposed to be persuasion.

I like your presumption that I couldn't possibly have thought of this before. As well as your ridiculous assumed superiority in ordering me not to "attempt" to answer. Gosh golly, anon, please point out more of what's truly significant. Without you I would be lost.

I think any opinion is welcome in honest dialog between people who are pursuing sincere understanding and are acting with sufficient empathy toward all participants. I also think that is about 1% of public discussion, and that it takes an immense amount of effort to create the proper preconditions for that.

Outside of that, no, I think there are plenty of opinions that merit social opprobrium for their straightforward expression. And I'd bet you do, too. If you can't name 5 in the next 30 seconds, you aren't trying. Speech has consequences. And I think it has to. [1]

I also think that regardless of opinion, there are ways to engage in dialog that are so harmful that they should be called out. And you think that too, or you wouldn't be giving me your more-in-sorrow, think-about-what-you've-done routine. The only difference is that we have different standards for what merits objection.

I agree that tone matters, which is why I chose the tone I did. If your goal is to personally persuade every sexist goof to come to a considered realization that they have made a deep mistake, then godspeed. (If that is your goal, though then your recent comments history doesn't show you working very hard at that.)

But that's not my goal. My goal is to fix the goddamn problem. It's hurting my field, it's hurting people I know, and it's hurting a lot of people I don't know. I want the ongoing harm to end.

History suggests that a lot of people never get over the idiotic opinions they grew up around. This is true even for very smart people; Planck wrote, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

So consider today's KKK. Do I want everybody to be not racist? Yes. Would I like every member of the KKK to realize that they have been assholes all their lives and start making up for lost time? Sure. If some rando starts talking to me about the inferiority of black people, am I going to patiently talk to him about what the research really shows? Fuck no. I am going to tell him that he's an asshole, and that I don't want to hear his racist bullshit around me. If he ever wonders why, he can hop on Wikipedia and read a little history. He won't, of course, because the problem here isn't primarily his ideas; it's his biases.

[1] See, e.g.: https://www.popehat.com/2013/09/10/speech-and-consequences/

I was being charitable and attempting to offer food for thought. I now understand that both were in error.

I happen to entertain the fringe belief that call-out culture is unhealthy and serves to further the problems it purports to address. I can see that you do not share this belief.

Good day to you.

Oh, please. We both believe in using words to discourage expression of certain beliefs and limit particular behaviors. Which is why you're talking to me in the first place. Saying that you don't believe in "call-out culture" while calling me out for calling somebody out just means that you object to it being done by people who you disagree with politically. "Call-out culture" is only novel to the extent to which previously marginalized people can collaborate and talk to people in dominant group as peers.

Also, your claim that you were being "charitable" is obviously disingenuous. How kind of you, so rich in thought, to donate your pearls of wisdom to the impoverished thinkers with regrettably different politics than yours. I only hope you have more time in the future to condescend to me while ignoring my actual points.

If you were all that serious about addressing the problems that you see "call-out culture" as attempting but failing to solve, I expect you'd be doing something about it besides tsk-tsking and making tone arguments. Otherwise, though, the simple explanation is that this is garden-variety concern trolling on your part. So yes, feel free to good-day yourself right on out of my replies.

I can come up with at least four reasons why people want to be lawyers in 2005 more than in 1965, without caring what is between their legs. These may or may not be their actual reasons, those are known only to the individual.

Honestly you don't deserve any reply though, after the way you treated OP. It is always the person who makes a claim who has to provide evidence for it - it is NOT the person who disagrees with the claim.

>Partly because so many of these people seem to think it's somebody else's job to argue them into an understanding. (Rather than, say, their responsibility to do a Google search and read for a whole hour.)

That is exactly what the rules for civilized debate proscribe. You have to argue your case, I don't have to.

1)Lawyers were (assumed) to be a safe career in 2005, in a world that did have that many safe jobs left. In 1965 there were a lot of other jobs that seemed safe, but didn't require you to work as hard to obtain them.

2)Lawyers have high earning potential - unlike most other jobs you can get with a college degree today. In 1965, this would have mattered less, because most jobs were relatively high paying (boom time does that).

3)In a world that changes rapidly, lawyering seems relatively safe, again the world changed less rapidly in 1965, with fewer obsolete jobs.

4)A safe, high paying job gives a high prestige. With fewer such types of jobs, more people will want to join those that exists.

So those would explain a higher amount of applicants to law schools, but not necessarily a higher amount of women, right? The thing is that law schools are limited in how many can be accepted and in how many new law schools can be created. You can't learn the law on your own in your bedroom and then get a job as a lawyer.

Is this what happened? Hell I don't know. I do know that it is at least possible it went this way and the explanation is as good as there were a large amount of sexism in law. After all if there were that much sexism in law in 1965, but not in 2005 why would there be so much sexism in computers today?

> It is always the person who makes a claim who has to provide evidence for it - it is NOT the person who disagrees with the claim.

You miss my point. Suppose I turn up and say, "The Earth is flat!" And maybe I even provide some evidence. Is it your job to argue and argue until I admit you are right? No. You are free to go about your business. If you don't take the time because you think I am a lunatic or a troll, does that prove me right? No. It is my job to know what's going on, not your job to convince me of it.

I make this obvious point only because many people like ManFromUranus seem to believe that anybody who says, "Hey, maybe several thousand years of blatant sexism didn't end on Jan 1" is obligated to argue with them until they are convinced. They aren't.

> It is always the person who makes a claim who has to provide evidence for it - it is NOT the person who disagrees with the claim.

Yes, and the claims being made in this case are that "women can do whatever they want," and "women are not in tech because women don't want to be in tech." When women were legally second class citizens in the US as recently as 100 years/4 generations ago (i.e., suffrage rights), I think that the burden of proof has to fall on the people making the aforementioned claims. Where is the evidence that there is absolutely no friction for women to choose whatever field they want? Where is the evidence that social norms have completely leveled the playing field for women in terms of salary, career advancement, workplace harassment, etc.?

This raises an interesting question: Do we think that discrimination in technology is worse (or more entrenched?) than discrimination in law, medicine, or finance? These other fields were almost entirely male within living memory (my mother was one of two women in her law school class) and are now approaching gender parity (at least at most levels, I'm sure that senior partners are still mostly men). Why has there been such a dramatic turnaround in medicine, but not engineering or technology?

> Why has there been such a dramatic turnaround in medicine, but not engineering or technology?

AFAIK, there's been a fairly dramatic turnaround in some areas of engineering and technology (biotechnology particularly), modest turnaround in others, and substantially less turnaround (even compared to other engineering and technology domains in general) in computing, both hardware and software, domains.

Biotechnology, like medicine, may benefit from the fact that the early preparation overlaps substantially with the early preparation for traditionally female-dominated fields (e.g., nursing) such that early interest isn't socially discouraged even in contexts where gender stereotypes about appropriate careers remain significant social influences.

Just a thought: Adolescents can start self-learning programming far earlier then you would start learning formal law or medicine. So if there is a gender divide among the adolescents self-learning programming/engineering skills, then I'd expect to see that trend exacerbated into adulthood. That dynamic doesn't happen with law or medicine.

Certainly with law (perhaps less so with medicine), early self-learning is quite possible. (As, for that matter, is early organized learning targeted to adolescents, such as middle/high school mock trial programs.)

I'm not certain how you can structure your argument such that it does not also imply that professions that are majority female discriminate against men.

Your introduction of that graph appears to be an attempt at making an improper inference based on conditional probabilities. You can't just flip-flop between probability of woman, given job, and probability of job, given woman. There's math involved, based on additional data not necessarily obvious from the visualization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_probability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_of_the_inverse

To make an inference about what women want, you have to remove the men from the data. It doesn't matter one little bit what the female numbers are in proportion to the male numbers. And what the female numbers show is that around 1985, women generally stopped wanting to earn CS degrees, preferring medicine, law, or physical sciences. The graph does not say why. It just suggests that women very abruptly reversed the previous trend and started choosing other careers. It also happened before the vast majority of people now working in the field had graduated from elementary school, which suggests that it is an institutional bias, and not a personal one.

It's easy to guess at the reason why, but those guesses would not be supported by anything short of surveying actual women with college educations, asking them "why not computer science?"

My hypothesis is that for those answers that cite the composition of the CS classes and faculty as a contributing factor, it wasn't because they were full of men, but because they were full of nerds. For a variety of reasons revolving around the capricious cruelty of adolescents, females are less likely to be in the nerd social caste, and possibly also strongly conditioned to avoid it.

That social dynamic fuels a lot of nastiness later in life. Sex balance in the workplace may be just another symptom of it.

But really, it's all useless speculation until someone actually goes out and asks some people about their reasons for doing things, in a manner that avoids known biases.

I think the only relevant argument I made here is that "women just don't want to tech" does not usefully explain the data.

If you're saying what careers people choose is a complex function with many inputs and interactions with the social context, I agree. I am arguing against the view that career mainly driven by a simple, stable, gender-based biological intrinsic, which is the usual thing meant by "women just X", as in "women just can't science" or "women just want want to stay at home with babies".

Why don't they want to be there though?

There's gender imbalances in lots of places now between executives, teachers, prison, the military, some of those are positive places to have a gender balance in.

I've seen lots of discrimination against females in the places I have worked, behind their back for the most part. I have also seen examples of positive discrimination in their favour, but not as much.

Personally, I think it's a manufacturing line of institutions that lead to a hireable tech worker - and if you go back each step along the assembly line, the female involvement is higher percentage wise.

So I think the lower representation is a product of women opting out of maths and science based subjects at an early stage, and later choosing the medical profession over engineering.

It would be interesting to get some statistics over the span of a career, do a higher percentage of women change career away from tech once they start?

Anyone that doesn't think there is a problem should try asking a female dev about her experiences in her career. Besides typical societal problems like calling 35 year old women "girls" and forcing them to choose between having a family or a successful career, they face all sorts of discrimination and sexism that men don't even realize they're doing. My SO on multiple occasions has been told things like "You're the best female dev I've ever seen", "It's so nice to have girls on the team!", and "Don't worry you'll find a job because companies always want female devs". Add on top of this any sort of general sexist behavior that is rampant in offices like unwanted advances, inappropriate touching, etc. It becomes really painfully obvious why there aren't more women in tech.

I am in complete and total agreement with what you are saying. I once heard an undergraduate female dev be fed the "companies always want female devs" and a female colleague my junior having self doubt over getting promoted. The whole thing stinks.

To be honest I'm sure I've transgressed a few times myself! Like many things you just have to be vigilant.

>and forcing them to choose between having a family or a successful career

This is not true. There are always trade-offs in life, even for men. Almost everything has an opportunity cost. You focus on your family the career suffers, focus on your career family suffers. The same is true of men except they don't have a biological clock.

>Add on top of this any sort of general sexist behavior that is rampant in offices like unwanted advances, inappropriate touching, etc.

I hear this, but have honestly only ever been present for a single awkward comment in my 10+ year career. I think "unwanted advances" is going to be a continual problem because most of the guys in tech are socially awkward, unnattractive nerds, so any advance they make is going to be by definition, unwanted. However these guys have no way of knowing that before-hand, unless they make "nobody wants me" their default assumption.

>they face all sorts of discrimination and sexism that men don't even realize they're doing

this is what bothers me the most, there is no concept of "mens rea" in issues of discrimination, you are guilty even if you try not to be. People choose to be offended or not, that's a voluntary choice. So if your SO is offended by people who have no intention to commit offence or cause harm, then what can I say? What can they do? Everybody will have to walk on eggshells around your SO so they don't offend her I guess. Doesn't sound like the problem is with "tech" to be honest.

The price of the privilege and prestige of being a member of the oppressive majority is eternal vigilance against overstepping the mark. Sure it's inconvenient, but politeness doesn't cost much effort. Eggshells is a good way of putting it.

If you or anyone you see steps over the line, get an apology out there and discuss it and move on. Over time what constitutes a transgression seems to get more minor and trivial in my eyes, but until we're at a star trek utopian standard of living, progressing towards it is worthwhile in my view.

Of course if somebody is taking the piss and claiming oppression when there isn't any, they deserve to be called out on that too. In the poster's comment to which you are replying I do think his SO's grievances are valid.

>The price of the privilege and prestige of being a member of the oppressive majority

I disagree with this assertion that I belong to an oppressive majority, or that the majority is oppressive.

>Sure it's inconvenient, but politeness doesn't cost much effort. Eggshells is a good way of putting it.

Tolerance goes both ways. Why should 100 people modify their behaviour so that 1 person doesn't get offended, when 1 person could modify simply raise their threshold for offence, and save a 100 people a lot of hassle.

>If you or anyone you see steps over the line

There is no way to know what or where the line is. The line is totally subjective and unique to each individual. So it would simply be easier and less risky (remaining employed wise) to avoid interacting with the person than spend the time to learn how to avoid triggering their offence reaction. I guarantee the path of least resistance is the one that will be followed.

100 people should modify their behaviour if they are being impolite and unprofessional.

The line is subjective I agree. Being polite and courteous rather than unprofessional works best for everyone. It's pretty easy too.

The path of least resistance is being followed and we are all the worse for it.

Also the opinions you are expressing are very much those belonging to a member of the oppressive majority, as far as I am concerned. 100 to 1? Oppressive majority? Fairly cut and dried.

>The price of the privilege and prestige of being a member of the oppressive majority

That sure sounds like most nerds I know - we are just so high on the social scale, even pop stars wish they were us.

And let me put it this way: I have no intention of walking on eggshells my entire career, never knowing when I hurt some delicate being. I don't for a second believe women are that delicate (there are far too many women in combat for that to be the case) but if they are as delicate as I read your comment to assume they are then they don't belong in computing - the compiler will not care how much it hurts your feelings.

for the record, my comments assume no delicacy on the part of women.

i actually hate working with and being around people who hold your viewpoint.

keep shooting from the hip buddy, everybody who finds you offensive is a delicate being - right on.

And you are some sort of compiling automaton? Keep telling it like it is - you stick to your guns. You won't have to walk on eggshells when you're done trust me.

Oppressive majority: I meant white male, rather than programming nerd.

And I am pointing out that you can't simply include all white males and say that they are all oppressing majority (for one there are more people who are not white males on this planet) - not only would you have to include nerds, but you would also have to claim that homeless people are oppressing (since they tend to be men).

so you want to be an ass (not walk on eggshells as you put it, be unforgiving like a compiler) because there's homeless people and because nerds get a hard time?

yep i'm convinced those industry ladies should get thicker skins alright, especially when they are in your industry - they should play by your rules - right?

Why don't men want to be elementary school teachers? Well nobody really cares that much why, but they definitely don't. I think they don't because it's a low-pay, low-respect job and there's a risk of being called a pedophile.

Why don't women want to be in tech? Full of nerds, full of people they don't really want to be around. Hard work, the pay is getting lower every day, have to compete with low wage offshore workers. There are lots of men with no social skills in tech. Women can probably earn more money outside of tech, and have more networking and social outlets in non-tech jobs.

Elementary teachers -> a lot of people care because they think that without men, it runs the risk of becoming a marginalized, low paid female only job. Some of which is already true in your view.

I'm with you on why women don't want to be in tech, except disagree about the hard work or lower pay ever day and offshore workers. Not all women are social butterflies either, so it's just the negative stigma around it.

So that's why I asked, they don't want to be in tech cause of a bunch of needless, highly negative stuff. Stuff that could easily be rectified and thereafter everyone would be much better off.

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