Honestly, while I believe a lot of the perspective shared, there always seems to be a huge lack of objective assessment of options for these folks.
In tech there are many incredibly high paying jobs - taking control over your situation has a low bar.
if you don’t like your manager, taking the view that if you escalate a formal complaint to HR (in doing so lose all trust you manager and HR may have in you), you’ll be vindicated and live on happily ever after… it’s a fairytale. Go work somewhere that makes you happy. Leave toxic environments - it’s not your job to fix them/right wrongs.
There are certainly real victims in these environments.
There are also in my personal experience a lot of people who make noise/complain about immaterial incidents in the hope of claiming some group control over their situation or with some sense of justice around fixing things. This thrashing can create a toxic environment for those around in itself.
> if you don’t like your manager, taking the view that if you escalate a formal complaint to HR (in doing so lose all trust you manager and HR may have in you), you’ll be vindicated and live on happily ever after… it’s a fairytale. Go work somewhere that makes you happy. Leave toxic environments - it’s not your job to fix them/right wrongs.
Know where it's not a fairytale? Unionized workplaces. Source: I know several people who work at such places—raising all sorts of issues and having them addressed reasonably-fairly is downright normal at them, and a manager trying to retaliate for that kind of thing is likely in for a bad time.
"Cut and run" doesn't work if you're on a visa, if you've already had to do that once or twice in the last couple years, or if you don't have enough of an emergency fund. It also doesn't work if you're not a tech worker - remember that discrimination affects HR reps and program managers and mechanical engineers and fabrication technicians and research scientists just as much as it affects SWEs.
One other thing that is great for your mental health in any job, is treating it as a job and nothing else. Something you do for 40h per week to get a salary to pay your bills.
You're not there to make the world a better place, to belong to a family, to improve anything. Just do your job and go back to your life at the end of the day. When you're off work, do your best to forget about it. In fact, always prepare yourself for interviews, so leaving your current job it is easier when the time comes, and it always comes.
This detachment always served as protection from toxic workplaces, and I worked in a few of them. Don't let anyone fool you that it will harm your career, the only thing that will harm your career is not putting effort to learn skills that are in demand.
Be the change you want to be. Everyone just says "leave" but what if you have no where to go, and inversely, if everyone is just leaving, then there is no incentive for organizations to change.
You can argue its "futile" but the truth is, its not, these things compound, the more people do it, the less it can be swept up and hidden away. Real change is thousands and thousands of people doing small things to increment in a better direction. Its not always easy, but its the right thing to do. Thats how as a society can do better.
The idea of shifting it to "some other person" is why I think we have some of the issues today with reform and general societal polarization: everyone wants someone else to fix the problems
People should absolutely call out toxic work environments as just that. What's lacking is legislation protecting employee rights. Your approach is to cut and run, but ultimately people need to raise their voice for legislation to exist.
Yeah, tech is fortunate enough (for now… note how company ”gratefulness” to employees seems to be dependent on stock price) to the point that most everyone in the industry can switch jobs land on their feet and be better off.
I guarantee you that will change in about 10 years, if not sooner.
Ironically, as a collective bargaining unit we have the most negotiating power right now — when we don’t need it.
It seems foreign to us in the US, but being an employee should be no different than a tenant at a nice apartment building: both types of corporations extract value from the individual. Both find a way to make profit. However, as a tenant you have some legal rights (Europeans would still laugh at them in comparison). As a tenant you’re legally entitled to some basic day-to-day guarantees (though maybe not always in practice): a light breaks, plumber is needed, common areas kept in order, tenant disputes? A landlord has to fix that. I’m not saying a corporation needs to hold our hand, but it absolutely should be responsible for providing a comfortable environment, work-life balance, etc.
It’s really not too crazy to demand the bare minimum from our jobs, considering how much of our lives are spent working on them.
OP is a manager, good managers look out for their subordinates and surface issues so that they can be solved. Ideally before they become thorny legal issues. From this write up, it looks that OP did exactly this. At the beginning, she surfaced issues with two employees that could cause problems down the line for the company, she highlighted potential issues with documentations, requirements and test cases that would be problematic with the FDA (in any highly regulated environment like medical devices, making sure that the company is compliant is crucial and definitely the responsibility of any project manager).
I mean it depends. If you document your communications thoroughly and the company is sufficiently sloppy, then backlash from HR could set you up for a lucrative lawsuit.
Person A was potentially discriminated against, which combined with the previous incident of discrimination understandably got the author's hackles raised.
Person B may have been fired for any number of reasons, very few of which are any of the author's business. I've had to fire people who were viewed as great by their peers because they were browsing illegal porn at work, or because they sexually harassed a coworker, or they flagrantly and dangerously violated InfoSec policy, or they were observed not once but twice shooting up heroin in the work locker room. HR isn't going to share any of those reasons with nosy coworkers, and the person who was fired is also unlikely to admit to it.
After that it sounds like the author made themselves a completely unbearable coworker. ~50 person startups have code quality issues, bad documentation, lack of formal processes, etc, almost as a rule. If the author was making as big of a stink as it sounds like they were about it, they were demonstrably doing their job poorly.
While their involvement in championing person A may have absolutely factored into the decision to lay them off, so could their (potentially) inappropriate prying into the decision about person B, or their general unwillingness to help the startup meet their ship dates. Or the company could've done layoffs purely based on project need, compensation, and role redundancy (how companies are supposed to do layoffs), and the first 90% of the article could've been irrelevant to the decision.
This workplace sounds like a scary environment; this person presents themselves as someone who takes a lot of effort to try and make happy. Frankly it sounds exhausting. I don't get it; I manage 15-20 people and this stuff never comes up. They're visibly quite a diverse group and the rest of it has just never has been an issue, or any of my concern. I advocate for them against their goals and desires and have never considered their personal positions/beliefs/values/identity from a positive or negative perspective. This isn't because I'm some sort of amazing manager, it's because I'm lazy. It seems like so much extra work to discriminate against in these situations.
> this person presents themselves as someone who takes a lot of effort to try and make happy. Frankly it sounds exhausting.
Your comment reminds me of the Ashley Gjovik story that made the rounds on HN a few times. She was reportedly a project manager at Apple, but reading through her billion-word blog[1], it seems she spent all of her time as an activist filing complaints to regulators and fighting literally everyone and everything in the company. I don't understand how people can keep their actual job performance satisfactory when they're so busy filing complaints and appeals and appeals to appeals and meeting with lawyers all day. Truly, it must be exhausting for them, too.
I’m not in a position to evaluate your management, but I do think it’s important to point out that you and/or your org may have biases which make it harder for you to see issues, and which may discourage people from raising concerns. Discrimination is only extra work if it’s a conscious goal, and it’s easy to miss if your effort avoidance signals the bias as “normal”.
It’s entirely possible you’re totally unbiased and your self described laziness is warranted. But it’s at least as likely somewhere on the spectrum of not enough of a problem for people to risk rocking the boat.
I've worked with a couple of people in tech who were very worker solidarity, unionize, labor movement, discrimination everywhere, etc.
They must have been tiring for management to work with. And I go in to bat for my colleagues, and it has not always made me popular with management and executives, but there are better and worse ways of approaching things.
If you are unwilling to accept that a decision has been made for a reason other than discrimination, bullying, or retaliation, it's no longer a good faith dialogue. Expecting other parties to continue talking and negotiating as though it were, whether or not they are guilty of these things, is silly. That's the point where you need a lawyer, or an exit plan, or to read through a lot of statute and case law, or all of the above. By all means try to get them to keep talking and collect evidence, but the fact they don't want to deal with you any more isn't exactly evidence of anything by itself.
I'm not saying this person is wrong or did the wrong thing. I really don't have enough information. But this is a company that investigated their co-founder and CTO and kicked him out for harassing two trans employees, more than half their "leadership team" appear to be minorities or women, they have hired several trans people including at least one who got spectacular performance reviews and was being promoted. On its face I would have to entertain the idea that they are not engaged in wide scale discrimination of anybody who is not a straight white male.
This is also quite a serious step for the person to make, whether or not there are legal ramifications (and I hope they got very good advice about breaking their NDA). But what would an employer think about hiring this person after reading this? What would be the best outcome for them? The worst?
> I'm not saying this person is wrong or did the wrong thing. I really don't have enough information.
Despite what other people may claim about why this story was previously flagged, this is probably why: we don't have enough information to know for sure this story is the truth, but people are going to come armed with their own presuppositions and argue about it anyway.
> On its face I would have to entertain the idea that they are not engaged in wide scale discrimination of anybody who is not a straight white male.
Not to mention that, as per the blog post, other employees close to the matter disagreed with OP's interpretation. Still doesn't mean the OP is wrong, but hopefully at least some of the people who responded to the article favorably will reserve some doubts.
Author doesn't present any evidence to back up claims that I saw. I don't understand why people make posts like this and don't back it up with exact and specific instances?
I mean, at most employers you literally can't publicly share any material produced on a work computer or context, unless you feel like being sued (for violating a non-disclosure agreement). When it comes to law-violating stuff, of course in that case the NDA won't apply to sharing stuff with law enforcement etc. .. but that doesn't mean the stuff can be shared publicly (unless it becomes part of a public court case of course). It's not all that easy to blow the whistle on something and "provide receipts" to the general public (unless you don't mind having lawsuits filed against you I guess). This is why you generally give such people the benefit of the doubt -- they basically have no other option but to make their case as fairly and reasonably as they can, while still protecting themselves to at least some basic degree. If it really came to it, the claims _can_ be verified, for example in a court case, where the process of discovery would reveal all the HR records and whatever else.
> who asserted that Person A was “too aggressive” to succeed in the new role. Behaviors that were regularly rewarded in white, male peers, such as taking initiative to perform needed duties outside the scope of their role, were instead framed as negative indications of focus.
> I provided written guidance to Ram, who was also my supervisor, on the ways in which this “vibes based” determination of inadequacy constituted sex bias and workplace discrimination, and asked him to please speak with Person A and HR jointly.
To me, without any additional context, this seems like it might be people referring to different things with the same terminology. Management is not an area I would want someone to be aggressive, as in confrontational, in. But in business aggression, as in ambition, is often seen as positive. Aggressiveness is often used to describe both types of behavior, and I think it's easy for people to misinterpret what is trying to be communicated because of that.
Is being confrontational a male trait? Is being ambitious? Perhaps one or both are, but certain positions work with those traits better than others, and if that's indeed part of what was being communicated, that may not be a matter of a male trait that's valued being devalued when expressed in a women as much as a trait being a bad fit for the position.
I don't know it was actually meant or the full context in this situation, but as someone that has a coworker that is often confrontational, sometimes in disruptive ways, but also was interested in a management position, that's what came to mind when I read this. I do not believe his particular way of interacting with people would work well in a management position, and I could definitely see myself calling it "aggressive". That said, I do personally like this person and consider them a friend, I just don't think they would do well in a position such as that.
Edit: I haven't completed the article, so the above is from reaching that point in the piece, and should be taken mostly as a general discussion point and not a specific assessment of an event in this article.
> people referring to different things with the same terminology. Management is not an area I would want someone to be aggressive, as in confrontational, in. But in business aggression, as in ambition, is often seen as positive.
My understanding was that the author refers to "peers" as males in the same role, i.e., the arguments are made differently for people not based on their role, but based on their sex. They even reference specific arguments applied in opposite ways in the part you cite.
This is really well-written. Thank you for shining the light on this and sharing it with the community. Sorry you and your colleagues were subjected to this unfair treatment. <3
One observation is that retaliation against morally-driven whistleblowers on better-connected groups, is that it takes a form similar to complex trauma, resulting in gaslighting, repeatedly lying and contradicting actions and memories, to the point of creating self-doubt, questioning whether what you experienced or the stories being fed are true, and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness to follow your morals and effect change. I don't know whether it's personally worthwhile to fight against perceived wrongs when (her and myself) facing health and gender discrimination, somehow create legal or social changes to prevent future incidents, or just do the minimum to stay financially afloat (if possible) and with whatever leftover money try to support individual friends I care about.
"[I] also surfaced feedback that had been shared with me by my own engineering teams regarding ways in which Rune Lab’s technology was insufficient for clinical use."
"In each instance, I escalated this feedback to the appropriate members of the senior leadership team, and where appropriate, proposed refactors of common pain points. Synthesizing, evaluating, and sharing this feedback is a crucial component of any TPM’s day-to-day responsibilities. Yet many of my peers expressed fear of raising this feedback themselves, and were grateful that I was willing to do so for them."
Yeah, it's not just about the discrimination. If you start opposing leadership in their compagny decisions, wether you are justified or not doesn't matter, you're not going to last long in the compagny anyway.
If you disagree with your boss, leave, don't fight it because you don't have the power.
>Normally, my NDA would prohibit me from disclosing this, but as I will demonstrate in this article, it is a contributing factor to the retaliatory actions taken against me and thus covered under Washington State labor protection laws.
I hope the author ran this by a lawyer licensed in the State of Washington before publishing this.
A person who knows what they are doing versus someone who has difficulties learning the given tasks have two very subjective views of the workplace situation.
One is at the mercy of their colleagues, constantly and rightfully interrupted to correct their mistakes, while the other is chugging away in the zone.
We need the viewpoints of both levels of expertise to make sure that there is a whistle to blow.
You are directly implying that there is no way to know whether the person writing this blog post is "someone who needs constant correction" or if they're a high performer who's "in the zone". based on that, I do not think you read the parent article. The person in question was just promoted for their excellent performance, and had written performance reviews giving high marks. They spoke up, and then were quickly let go.
The company then went on to fire exclusively minority groups in their layoffs.
If those are the facts of the matter, then we really do NOT need the perspective from someone "in the zone" to make a judgement here.
I think Washington’s banning of nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements is going to hurt victims more than anyone.
It’s one’s primary bargaining chip when suing a former employer that has wronged an employee. Taking that away means more people will not get compensation when they should.
The fact that the 20% of the company laid off were all minority groups is absolutely insane. LinkedIn says they have at minimum 50 employees, meaning at least 10 people were laid off.
Here is their LinkedIn post (linked on their website),
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7058845...
" It is estimated that one in five transgender people will experience homelessness. Unfortunately, it's my turn. After six months of searching, I was not able to find a new role in time, and I have lost my home."
> Approximately 20% of the company was laid off, and to the best of my knowledge 100% of them were members of historically marginalized groups. Women, people of color, queer folks, and multiple people on disability and even maternity leave were specifically and disproportionately targeted. In the aftermath I could not find even one single person who did not belong to a protected class.
So bear in mind that this is very expansive group of people. This is not referring to "minority groups" as the parent comment wrote (women are the majority of the population). The author did not provide the denominator - that is, how many people at the company fit this group of people she's referring to - so it's hard to discern any significant discrimination without that piece of information. San Francisco and Seattle (where Rune labs and the author are located, respectively) are very diverse places, so it's not inconceivable that most of the company is comprised of "minority groups". A quick glance at the company's page shows that these "minority groups" comprise about 2/3rds of its leadership [1].
Furthermore, I don't think the author understands the term "protected class" [2]. Race, age, religion, gender, and disability are all protected classes, workplace discrimination on the basis of these is illegal. Everyone belongs to several protected classes (age, race, and gender, at minimum), so I'm not sure what she means when she writes, "I could not find even one single person who did not belong to a protected class".
… but you have to ask - why can’t this person find a job? Surely not every employer is non-inclusive. There’s smells of a partial story all through this.
I noticed this submission had become "dead" due to flagging, and retaliation for whistleblowing seems like exactly the type of thing that a coordinated group would try to bury.
I vouched for it. I don't have feelings one way or another on who is being wronged, but I thought the information was well-presented and coherent, and deserves consideration without being flagged. If the other party believes this is inaccurate they should present their side here.
Without taking any position on this post itself or flagging of it:
flagging has just become abusive. It needs serious reform, @dang.
I can't speak for the original rationale, but it seems like the intent must be to remove posts or comments that are clearly offensive on some semi-legal grounds (obscene, advocating violence, etc.) Now it's become just "I don't like this."
There are many possible reforms, but off the top of my head, changing "flag" to be nothing but a suggestion to the mods might fix it. It would do nothing unless a mod agreed. And the flagger's id should be public and it should cost them something (karma points, maybe).
This reminds me of a paragraph I recently read on another blog:
> I’ve been writing for a long time. In 2010, I started a blog, focused on the technology industry—topics included programming languages, organizational practices, and development methodologies—that reached a daily view count of about 8,000 (some days more, some days less) with several essays taking the #1 spot on Hacker News and Reddit (/r/programming). I quit that kind of writing for many reasons, but two merit mention. One: Silicon Valley people are, for lack of a better way to put it, precious about their reputations. My revelations of unethical and illegal business practices in the technology industry put me, literally, in physical danger. Two: since then, my work has become unnecessary. In 2013, my exposures of odious practices in a then-beloved sector of the economy were revelatory. Ten years later, tech chicanery surprises no one, and the relevant investigative work is being done with far more platform, access, and protection. The world no longer needs me to do that job. And thank God.
It's really telling that the frontpage post on the tech-industry forum about coordinated discrimination in the tech industry is being brigaded, yeah. Disappointing, too. I hope we learn what happened here and things are made better.
Seems it was flagged again, and then was unflagged again? How common are these kind of seemingly coordinated attempts to manipulate HN (assuming there is indeed nothing actually wrong with OP)?
wiredone|2 years ago
In tech there are many incredibly high paying jobs - taking control over your situation has a low bar.
if you don’t like your manager, taking the view that if you escalate a formal complaint to HR (in doing so lose all trust you manager and HR may have in you), you’ll be vindicated and live on happily ever after… it’s a fairytale. Go work somewhere that makes you happy. Leave toxic environments - it’s not your job to fix them/right wrongs.
There are certainly real victims in these environments.
There are also in my personal experience a lot of people who make noise/complain about immaterial incidents in the hope of claiming some group control over their situation or with some sense of justice around fixing things. This thrashing can create a toxic environment for those around in itself.
yamtaddle|2 years ago
Know where it's not a fairytale? Unionized workplaces. Source: I know several people who work at such places—raising all sorts of issues and having them addressed reasonably-fairly is downright normal at them, and a manager trying to retaliate for that kind of thing is likely in for a bad time.
saulrh|2 years ago
surgical_fire|2 years ago
You're not there to make the world a better place, to belong to a family, to improve anything. Just do your job and go back to your life at the end of the day. When you're off work, do your best to forget about it. In fact, always prepare yourself for interviews, so leaving your current job it is easier when the time comes, and it always comes.
This detachment always served as protection from toxic workplaces, and I worked in a few of them. Don't let anyone fool you that it will harm your career, the only thing that will harm your career is not putting effort to learn skills that are in demand.
advisedwang|2 years ago
Not to mention that not everyone has the luxury of being able to move around easily.
no_wizard|2 years ago
Be the change you want to be. Everyone just says "leave" but what if you have no where to go, and inversely, if everyone is just leaving, then there is no incentive for organizations to change.
You can argue its "futile" but the truth is, its not, these things compound, the more people do it, the less it can be swept up and hidden away. Real change is thousands and thousands of people doing small things to increment in a better direction. Its not always easy, but its the right thing to do. Thats how as a society can do better.
The idea of shifting it to "some other person" is why I think we have some of the issues today with reform and general societal polarization: everyone wants someone else to fix the problems
glitchc|2 years ago
thebradbain|2 years ago
I guarantee you that will change in about 10 years, if not sooner.
Ironically, as a collective bargaining unit we have the most negotiating power right now — when we don’t need it.
It seems foreign to us in the US, but being an employee should be no different than a tenant at a nice apartment building: both types of corporations extract value from the individual. Both find a way to make profit. However, as a tenant you have some legal rights (Europeans would still laugh at them in comparison). As a tenant you’re legally entitled to some basic day-to-day guarantees (though maybe not always in practice): a light breaks, plumber is needed, common areas kept in order, tenant disputes? A landlord has to fix that. I’m not saying a corporation needs to hold our hand, but it absolutely should be responsible for providing a comfortable environment, work-life balance, etc.
It’s really not too crazy to demand the bare minimum from our jobs, considering how much of our lives are spent working on them.
wombatpm|2 years ago
I know I'll get HR involved, they will help me.
You now have two problems with work.
Unless your goal is to get someone fired, I've never seen HR getting involved to be a positive action.
nicolas_t|2 years ago
So, she did exactly what she was hired for.
unknown|2 years ago
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kevinventullo|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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dingledork69|2 years ago
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testfrequency|2 years ago
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tambp94201|2 years ago
Person A was potentially discriminated against, which combined with the previous incident of discrimination understandably got the author's hackles raised.
Person B may have been fired for any number of reasons, very few of which are any of the author's business. I've had to fire people who were viewed as great by their peers because they were browsing illegal porn at work, or because they sexually harassed a coworker, or they flagrantly and dangerously violated InfoSec policy, or they were observed not once but twice shooting up heroin in the work locker room. HR isn't going to share any of those reasons with nosy coworkers, and the person who was fired is also unlikely to admit to it.
After that it sounds like the author made themselves a completely unbearable coworker. ~50 person startups have code quality issues, bad documentation, lack of formal processes, etc, almost as a rule. If the author was making as big of a stink as it sounds like they were about it, they were demonstrably doing their job poorly.
While their involvement in championing person A may have absolutely factored into the decision to lay them off, so could their (potentially) inappropriate prying into the decision about person B, or their general unwillingness to help the startup meet their ship dates. Or the company could've done layoffs purely based on project need, compensation, and role redundancy (how companies are supposed to do layoffs), and the first 90% of the article could've been irrelevant to the decision.
xchip|2 years ago
wintogreen74|2 years ago
ryandrake|2 years ago
Your comment reminds me of the Ashley Gjovik story that made the rounds on HN a few times. She was reportedly a project manager at Apple, but reading through her billion-word blog[1], it seems she spent all of her time as an activist filing complaints to regulators and fighting literally everyone and everything in the company. I don't understand how people can keep their actual job performance satisfactory when they're so busy filing complaints and appeals and appeals to appeals and meeting with lawyers all day. Truly, it must be exhausting for them, too.
1: https://www.ashleygjovik.com/apple-legal-battle.html
eyelidlessness|2 years ago
It’s entirely possible you’re totally unbiased and your self described laziness is warranted. But it’s at least as likely somewhere on the spectrum of not enough of a problem for people to risk rocking the boat.
throwawaylinux|2 years ago
They must have been tiring for management to work with. And I go in to bat for my colleagues, and it has not always made me popular with management and executives, but there are better and worse ways of approaching things.
If you are unwilling to accept that a decision has been made for a reason other than discrimination, bullying, or retaliation, it's no longer a good faith dialogue. Expecting other parties to continue talking and negotiating as though it were, whether or not they are guilty of these things, is silly. That's the point where you need a lawyer, or an exit plan, or to read through a lot of statute and case law, or all of the above. By all means try to get them to keep talking and collect evidence, but the fact they don't want to deal with you any more isn't exactly evidence of anything by itself.
I'm not saying this person is wrong or did the wrong thing. I really don't have enough information. But this is a company that investigated their co-founder and CTO and kicked him out for harassing two trans employees, more than half their "leadership team" appear to be minorities or women, they have hired several trans people including at least one who got spectacular performance reviews and was being promoted. On its face I would have to entertain the idea that they are not engaged in wide scale discrimination of anybody who is not a straight white male.
This is also quite a serious step for the person to make, whether or not there are legal ramifications (and I hope they got very good advice about breaking their NDA). But what would an employer think about hiring this person after reading this? What would be the best outcome for them? The worst?
lliamander|2 years ago
Despite what other people may claim about why this story was previously flagged, this is probably why: we don't have enough information to know for sure this story is the truth, but people are going to come armed with their own presuppositions and argue about it anyway.
> On its face I would have to entertain the idea that they are not engaged in wide scale discrimination of anybody who is not a straight white male.
Not to mention that, as per the blog post, other employees close to the matter disagreed with OP's interpretation. Still doesn't mean the OP is wrong, but hopefully at least some of the people who responded to the article favorably will reserve some doubts.
TinkersW|2 years ago
bmarquez|2 years ago
I hope the author has some hard evidence like emails or voice recordings that she's saving for a lawsuit.
amatecha|2 years ago
kbenson|2 years ago
> I provided written guidance to Ram, who was also my supervisor, on the ways in which this “vibes based” determination of inadequacy constituted sex bias and workplace discrimination, and asked him to please speak with Person A and HR jointly.
To me, without any additional context, this seems like it might be people referring to different things with the same terminology. Management is not an area I would want someone to be aggressive, as in confrontational, in. But in business aggression, as in ambition, is often seen as positive. Aggressiveness is often used to describe both types of behavior, and I think it's easy for people to misinterpret what is trying to be communicated because of that.
Is being confrontational a male trait? Is being ambitious? Perhaps one or both are, but certain positions work with those traits better than others, and if that's indeed part of what was being communicated, that may not be a matter of a male trait that's valued being devalued when expressed in a women as much as a trait being a bad fit for the position.
I don't know it was actually meant or the full context in this situation, but as someone that has a coworker that is often confrontational, sometimes in disruptive ways, but also was interested in a management position, that's what came to mind when I read this. I do not believe his particular way of interacting with people would work well in a management position, and I could definitely see myself calling it "aggressive". That said, I do personally like this person and consider them a friend, I just don't think they would do well in a position such as that.
Edit: I haven't completed the article, so the above is from reaching that point in the piece, and should be taken mostly as a general discussion point and not a specific assessment of an event in this article.
ketzu|2 years ago
My understanding was that the author refers to "peers" as males in the same role, i.e., the arguments are made differently for people not based on their role, but based on their sex. They even reference specific arguments applied in opposite ways in the part you cite.
amatecha|2 years ago
renlo|2 years ago
nyanpasu64|2 years ago
davidguetta|2 years ago
"In each instance, I escalated this feedback to the appropriate members of the senior leadership team, and where appropriate, proposed refactors of common pain points. Synthesizing, evaluating, and sharing this feedback is a crucial component of any TPM’s day-to-day responsibilities. Yet many of my peers expressed fear of raising this feedback themselves, and were grateful that I was willing to do so for them."
Yeah, it's not just about the discrimination. If you start opposing leadership in their compagny decisions, wether you are justified or not doesn't matter, you're not going to last long in the compagny anyway.
If you disagree with your boss, leave, don't fight it because you don't have the power.
pcthrowaway|2 years ago
ThePowerOfFuet|2 years ago
I hope the author ran this by a lawyer licensed in the State of Washington before publishing this.
water554|2 years ago
nurettin|2 years ago
One is at the mercy of their colleagues, constantly and rightfully interrupted to correct their mistakes, while the other is chugging away in the zone.
We need the viewpoints of both levels of expertise to make sure that there is a whistle to blow.
lelandbatey|2 years ago
The company then went on to fire exclusively minority groups in their layoffs.
If those are the facts of the matter, then we really do NOT need the perspective from someone "in the zone" to make a judgement here.
nostromo|2 years ago
It’s one’s primary bargaining chip when suing a former employer that has wronged an employee. Taking that away means more people will not get compensation when they should.
SanjayMehta|2 years ago
This person sounds like a very valuable addition to any team.
unknown|2 years ago
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jesterman|2 years ago
The fact that the 20% of the company laid off were all minority groups is absolutely insane. LinkedIn says they have at minimum 50 employees, meaning at least 10 people were laid off.
Here is their LinkedIn post (linked on their website), https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7058845... " It is estimated that one in five transgender people will experience homelessness. Unfortunately, it's my turn. After six months of searching, I was not able to find a new role in time, and I have lost my home."
Manuel_D|2 years ago
> Approximately 20% of the company was laid off, and to the best of my knowledge 100% of them were members of historically marginalized groups. Women, people of color, queer folks, and multiple people on disability and even maternity leave were specifically and disproportionately targeted. In the aftermath I could not find even one single person who did not belong to a protected class.
So bear in mind that this is very expansive group of people. This is not referring to "minority groups" as the parent comment wrote (women are the majority of the population). The author did not provide the denominator - that is, how many people at the company fit this group of people she's referring to - so it's hard to discern any significant discrimination without that piece of information. San Francisco and Seattle (where Rune labs and the author are located, respectively) are very diverse places, so it's not inconceivable that most of the company is comprised of "minority groups". A quick glance at the company's page shows that these "minority groups" comprise about 2/3rds of its leadership [1].
Furthermore, I don't think the author understands the term "protected class" [2]. Race, age, religion, gender, and disability are all protected classes, workplace discrimination on the basis of these is illegal. Everyone belongs to several protected classes (age, race, and gender, at minimum), so I'm not sure what she means when she writes, "I could not find even one single person who did not belong to a protected class".
1. https://runelabs.io/about-us
2. https://www.archives.gov/eeo/terminology.html#:~:text=Protec....
wiredone|2 years ago
jimbob45|2 years ago
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pcthrowaway|2 years ago
I vouched for it. I don't have feelings one way or another on who is being wronged, but I thought the information was well-presented and coherent, and deserves consideration without being flagged. If the other party believes this is inaccurate they should present their side here.
AlbertCory|2 years ago
flagging has just become abusive. It needs serious reform, @dang.
I can't speak for the original rationale, but it seems like the intent must be to remove posts or comments that are clearly offensive on some semi-legal grounds (obscene, advocating violence, etc.) Now it's become just "I don't like this."
There are many possible reforms, but off the top of my head, changing "flag" to be nothing but a suggestion to the mods might fix it. It would do nothing unless a mod agreed. And the flagger's id should be public and it should cost them something (karma points, maybe).
Buttons840|2 years ago
> I’ve been writing for a long time. In 2010, I started a blog, focused on the technology industry—topics included programming languages, organizational practices, and development methodologies—that reached a daily view count of about 8,000 (some days more, some days less) with several essays taking the #1 spot on Hacker News and Reddit (/r/programming). I quit that kind of writing for many reasons, but two merit mention. One: Silicon Valley people are, for lack of a better way to put it, precious about their reputations. My revelations of unethical and illegal business practices in the technology industry put me, literally, in physical danger. Two: since then, my work has become unnecessary. In 2013, my exposures of odious practices in a then-beloved sector of the economy were revelatory. Ten years later, tech chicanery surprises no one, and the relevant investigative work is being done with far more platform, access, and protection. The world no longer needs me to do that job. And thank God.
Source: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/
saulrh|2 years ago
floatingatoll|2 years ago
repeekad|2 years ago
jesterman|2 years ago
desuforever|2 years ago
transRfagz|2 years ago
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imtemplain|2 years ago
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asherah|2 years ago
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cbtacy|2 years ago
codehitchhiker|2 years ago
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transRfagz|2 years ago
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camdenlock|2 years ago
Unnervingly, it sometimes resembles the zeal reserved for traditional religions.