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.
My first job was at a unionized workplace. I ended up doing more work to cover the guy that was loafing around under the protection of the union. Who protects you from the protectors? Rational or not, since that time, I am suspicious of the personal work ethic of those arguing for unions.
I've been in three different unions and never saw anything like that happen.
Mostly I saw things like rampant sexual harassment and nepotism at every level. Anyone who so much as squeaked about things being wrong saw management and the union reps team up to screw the person for fucking with the status quo. Heck, at my last job like that, they were cousins/roommates.
Unionized workplaces can be just as toxic as any other workplace.
"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.
Yeah, as someone who has been in one of these situations before and was unable to speak out, I am incredibly grateful for those of my coworkers that did speak out.
One of the reasons people in power can behave so terribly towards specific groups is because they can't "just leave" like you suggest. You think the bully's going to choose the strongest person as a victim?
I try to pay the favor forward by speaking out and supporting folks who are treated badly by shitty leadership whenever I can.
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.
> 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.
Speak for yourself. I do want to make the world a better place and I'm fortunate enough to have a job where I do that. It's rewarding; my life has purpose during working hours.
I'm dealing with this at my currently. It is a fairly large org and has good people and not so great people like any large enough group will have. What they don't have in my estimation is someone who actually knows how to engage with individual contributors in a meaningful way so struggles with issues of communication and direction, again, not atypical. I've invested into building an internal "meet up" for dev+adjacent folks to hold a weekly tech talk session, and am slowly building trust in what was a relatively low-trust environment. I do all this and some more within approximately the normal amount of working hours as if I weren't doing this with some very careful scheduling. My philosophy is that if we need to be here then might as well find a way to enjoy it and get something more than a paycheck. The effort is also slowly paying of in getting the attention of recruiting and hr, in that they are trying to learn how to engage with technology more effectively. It is slow growing but has been a joyful experience getting people to come out of their shell and give their, sometimes first, presentation at a meet up.
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
I don't think it's futile to try to change an organization within, but depending on the level of toxicity a lot of times leaving (and giving opportunities to others who want to leave and are still there) does more good than spinning your wheels someplace.
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.
In this case, HR wasn't the problem. They were helping and tried to improve the situation. The problem is that there's only so much HR can do when the top executive chose to completely disregard them.
I'm biased, my wife works in HR but I've heard multiple stories from her where she helped solve problems by acting as an intermediate and deescalating the situation.
One of the major impetus of HR is to comply with laws regarding discrimination and ensure that the company doesn't engage in behaviours that would result in them being either liable or having a PR problem. This means solving those kind of issues and that sometimes involve batting for the employee with the executive team because they know that it's in the best interest of the company.
In this specific case, OP is a manager and passing up the chains issues that have been signaled to her. In a well functioning organization, this is absolutely the correct response and it's part and parcel of a manager's job. Involving HR early with a clear solution to deescalate and improve the situation (as described by the first case from OP) is great because this is what's best for the company. If the employee had transferred to the new team there would have been no basis for a lawsuit.
If you have a good relationship with an HR person, and trust them enough to ask for informal advice, some positive action can follow. If you want to go the formal route, if you use words and phrases that sound like a lawsuit in the making, expect an action to your disadvantage. HR is there to protect the company, not you. An obviously disgruntled employee crying foul is immediately perceived as a threat to the company, regardless of whether they're objectively right or not.
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.
I saw some CA employment lawyer [1] on youtube, and something he says a lot on his talks is "Don't call me if your manager is mean or not following some legal requirements, instead, here's how to best document and complain about it so it'll look good for you if they ever retaliate against you. Once they retaliate, then you should call me."
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.
For many of these problems, the only way you might know ahead of time is if you did a really extensive background check. Such a process would mostly be a waste.
It's perfectly reasonable and fair to hire people, provide clear standards of conduct, and fire those who fail the standard.
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 worked with her. She was a bully. She spent most of 2020-21 on various leaves with her fictional health and toxic workplace issues. She complained about her role so they did what she asked and now it’s listed as retaliation. She went on to report everyone who criticized her to the government for “intimidating a witness”. This woman at least seems sane.
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.
Unconscious bias is a completely overblown concept, and some of the science that supports it (such as Implicit Association Tests) is hogwash.
Note that I am not saying that we do not have cognitive biases (in the general sense of the term) or blind spots, but the idea that people are systematically biased against certain racial or other identity groups in ways they are not aware of just isn't well supported.
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.
90% of the submissions from people sharing their experience with a company/product here would fall under that description as well (and many of those are upvoted because they seem useful)
That dude who interned at repl.it a while back and posted about a mildly bad experience was upvoted to the front page for over a day. people had their pitchforks out.
I think we should maintain higher standards of evidence before getting our pitchforks out, but at the same time, we should let people have their platform if people find it discussion-worthy. In the case of Repl.it or the 1000s of posts of people being shadowbanned from big tech without explanation, we let people have their say, and we let the platform help them where possible. The HN algorithmic spotlight is usually pretty fair with illuminating all sides when they present themselves here.
The submission here is extremely detailed and well-written, and makes a great case. There are multiple claims made which, were they misleading or inaccurate, the other party could discredit quite easily.
But instead of doing that, we're seeing the post repeatedly get flagged.
There could be other reasons this is happening, and I assume many, like myself, are withholding judgment.
But the silence from Rune, and dialogue suppression tactics by mystery parties honestly just make me more inclined to believe there is at least a grain of truth in the original submission.
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.
Possibly? She was making a lateral move to a new discipline, and that ended up being a junior manager. Depending on how hands on a junior manager is with the position being managed in that company and department, that could mean little management work and lots of non-managerial work, or the exact opposite. To me, lots of managerial work in the new position would imply it was not so in the prior position.
In any case, I was trying to keep it abstract because I wasn't trying to be pro or con about this article, but instead make a point about communication, which is an interest of mine.
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
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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.
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.
Mostly I saw things like rampant sexual harassment and nepotism at every level. Anyone who so much as squeaked about things being wrong saw management and the union reps team up to screw the person for fucking with the status quo. Heck, at my last job like that, they were cousins/roommates.
Unionized workplaces can be just as toxic as any other workplace.
One of the reasons people in power can behave so terribly towards specific groups is because they can't "just leave" like you suggest. You think the bully's going to choose the strongest person as a victim?
I try to pay the favor forward by speaking out and supporting folks who are treated badly by shitty leadership whenever I can.
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.
Speak for yourself. I do want to make the world a better place and I'm fortunate enough to have a job where I do that. It's rewarding; my life has purpose during working hours.
Not to mention that not everyone has the luxury of being able to move around easily.
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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
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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.
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.
I'm biased, my wife works in HR but I've heard multiple stories from her where she helped solve problems by acting as an intermediate and deescalating the situation.
One of the major impetus of HR is to comply with laws regarding discrimination and ensure that the company doesn't engage in behaviours that would result in them being either liable or having a PR problem. This means solving those kind of issues and that sometimes involve batting for the employee with the executive team because they know that it's in the best interest of the company.
In this specific case, OP is a manager and passing up the chains issues that have been signaled to her. In a well functioning organization, this is absolutely the correct response and it's part and parcel of a manager's job. Involving HR early with a clear solution to deescalate and improve the situation (as described by the first case from OP) is great because this is what's best for the company. If the employee had transferred to the new team there would have been no basis for a lawsuit.
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So, she did exactly what she was hired for.
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[1] https://www.youtube.com/@braniganrobertsonlaw/
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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.
For many of these problems, the only way you might know ahead of time is if you did a really extensive background check. Such a process would mostly be a waste.
It's perfectly reasonable and fair to hire people, provide clear standards of conduct, and fire those who fail the standard.
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
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.
Note that I am not saying that we do not have cognitive biases (in the general sense of the term) or blind spots, but the idea that people are systematically biased against certain racial or other identity groups in ways they are not aware of just isn't well supported.
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?
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.
90% of the submissions from people sharing their experience with a company/product here would fall under that description as well (and many of those are upvoted because they seem useful)
That dude who interned at repl.it a while back and posted about a mildly bad experience was upvoted to the front page for over a day. people had their pitchforks out.
I think we should maintain higher standards of evidence before getting our pitchforks out, but at the same time, we should let people have their platform if people find it discussion-worthy. In the case of Repl.it or the 1000s of posts of people being shadowbanned from big tech without explanation, we let people have their say, and we let the platform help them where possible. The HN algorithmic spotlight is usually pretty fair with illuminating all sides when they present themselves here.
The submission here is extremely detailed and well-written, and makes a great case. There are multiple claims made which, were they misleading or inaccurate, the other party could discredit quite easily.
But instead of doing that, we're seeing the post repeatedly get flagged.
There could be other reasons this is happening, and I assume many, like myself, are withholding judgment.
But the silence from Rune, and dialogue suppression tactics by mystery parties honestly just make me more inclined to believe there is at least a grain of truth in the original submission.
I hope the author has some hard evidence like emails or voice recordings that she's saving for a lawsuit.
> 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.
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.
In any case, I was trying to keep it abstract because I wasn't trying to be pro or con about this article, but instead make a point about communication, which is an interest of mine.