lobsters score: 46 · tags: culture, video
Shame on anybody marking this off-topic. I’m a man in tech, and men so often get in the way of actually working.
- I started a new contract. CEO calls meeting with me and the team to have a high level technical discussion. He monologues for 50 minutes. I address him as a tech equal, reminding him that good communication is key to good software. I’m seen not to be a “team player”.
- Remote colleague has unhelpfully strong opinions on Slack about technical decisions, but won’t have video meetings. We have to put up with him because he’s good value for money.
- Old friend of the company and occasionally contractor joins project, rewrites large portions of the codebase rather than communicating with the existing team.
I’m not saying this to make it look like it’s just as hard for men as it is for women in tech. I’m just pointing out that the matter of woman in tech is profoundly on-topic. It’s not merely some, “yeah wouldn’t that be nice to fix”, but rather a technical concern at the very heart of working at the coalface in this industry. Software is literally worse and harder to make because of male culture.
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Are any if those three cases uniquely men? The second one seems mostly like a clashf personal preferences?
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Historically, that kind of behavior is only tolerated with men. A woman acting similarly (if she even felt empowered to do so in the first place) would be labeled “hysterical” or “emotional” and would be pushed out, even if only unspoken and socially rather than by official reprimand. What we’re often left with are unpleasant men and “well-behaved” women.
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I’m confused by your examples. Could you explain what point you’re trying to make by them?
(Yes, I am asking in good faith; I can’t figure their purpose out. My best guess is that you’re saying these are things only men would do? But then the last paragraph doesn’t feel like it fits?)
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I agree wholeheartedly. The amount of barriers I’ve seen women working in the field face are enormous, and they are present at all layers: education, hiring, promotion, etc etc.
Some of those attitudes can even be seen in the discussion here.
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I’m a man in tech, and men so often get in the way of actually working.
I don’t doubt that this is true (and I didn’t mark it off-topic), but it seems odd to analyze it as “men” when (by my estimation) it’s a small minority of men (<10% in tech? if it’s larger, maybe I’ve just been very lucky, or maybe most men keep their bad behavior hidden from other men such that I don’t see it? or maybe it’s not evenly distributed geographically?) who cause most of the problems. If someone were to note that all of the problematic individuals are humans and thus this is a human problem, everyone would implicitly agree that this isn’t very helpful because the overwhelming majority of humans don’t do this, so why settle for the same analysis for gender?
If such a small minority of men are badly behaved, why not look at what that group has in common that is driving this bad behavior in this minority but not in the majority? It seems far more tractable to address some at-risk population rather than trying to change the behaviors of half the population in hopes that they will, in turn, be able to persuade or coerce the problematic minority into behaving better.
And if you are really wed to petitioning someone to coerce the offenders to behave better, why try to persuade an enormous group of mostly powerless people based on gender when you could instead appeal to powerful people of both genders who actually have some power to affect change? It seems a lot easier to appeal to some critical mass of the ~1% of the population who has the power (regardless of gender) than it is to convince whatever critical mass of males are necessary to have the same effect.
It’s also worth exploring the efficacy of the attempts of the 2010s to pressure people to change their behavior (and the ensuing backlash) and to compare that with other attempts, like the gay rights movement of the prior decade (which was so successful that a majority of Republicans supported gay marriage by 2020), and the civil rights movement.
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Yes, but all men need to pay attention to it. It’s very, very, very easy to ignore it by accident, or not see it because it hasn’t occurred to you to look for it.
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This is a thorny, gnarly problem for so many reasons.
A lot of such behaviour happens behind closed doors or can be brushed off as a joke or plausible deniability. Bad actors like this are absolute gaslighting champions, which allows them to get away with it, and even get the victim to be seen as the bad one.
Often, people don’t speak out because they don’t want to get into trouble themselves. The guy from the start who refused to review her code, do you think he’d just accept a stern talking-to from a peer without causing further problems for that person as well? And the senior who put flowers and chocolates on her desk, would he even listen to a junior? Who is willing to lose their job or turn themselves into a bullying target, especially considering the guy in question probably won’t change anyway? Better to keep your head down and find a better place to work at. Most of the time, the people who stay at such companies are either no better themselves or complete doormats, so the problems persist.
Then there’s the elephant in the room of neurodiversity. Some people don’t even know they’re doing anything wrong and can’t read body language, subtle language or social cues.
The tech industry is messed up in more ways. People are treated shitty in general. Stuff like the grindset mentality, working in the weekends or late, paying shit, etc. And then there’s office bullying, gossiping, abuse of power etc which I’ve personally witnessed. I’ve actually said this out loud before: I don’t want to work in an industry that’s so full of shitty people. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen or heard of similar or worse shitty behaviour in other industries so I’m not so sure it’s just a tech industry problem.
Maybe a more pertinant question is: why is it that many companies don’t have HR departments or a confidence person? They have the authority to actually do something about bad behaviour without fear of retaliation, and attach real consequences to them.
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