Note I'm submitting this article with with its title unchanged, but the story is more notable for having been removed from Forbes as a violation of their terms of service. I think its relevant given the recent discussion around internet.org, that controversial content is increasingly removed for violating a site's terms of service.
This was a very well written and balanced article. I want to contribute a reason why I think that many men in tech hold back from fully endorsing this viewpoint.
The reason is that there is a very fine line between saying that you don't have to be nerdy to be in tech, and failing to acknowledge that in general being nerdy is a disadvantage in society, and many people found a refuge in tech where they were mocked and often bullied outside[0]. To fail to acknowledge this is to risk promoting the same negative attitudes towards nerds within tech, as exist outside it.
So I would say that we should all encourage tech to be as open an welcoming as possible, and to avoid any implication that you have to have a certain personality, appearance or interests to succeed in tech. But we shouldn't dismiss the traits of people who currently are overrepresented in tech as a "stereotype", much less a "negative stereotype". I also don't think this is what the author was suggesting. As the article says, "stereotypes are only partly true, and women who actually take classes in computer science don’t hold the same prejudices as women who get their ideas from pop culture."
Speaking as a nerd who grew up in the early 1990s: persecuted nerds do not have the right to (in any way) cordon off computer science as a refuge for their culture. But a lot of male nerds think they do!
Do persecuted non-nerds have the right to (in any way) cordon off computer science as a refuge free from nerdiness? Because that's what articles like these seem to be suggesting we'd need to do, by saying that nerd social cues like Star Wars and geeky T-shirts are excluding women.
I think that's an overwrought reading of the article, for two reasons: first, the article isn't prescriptive about Star Wars, and second, it's reporting simple facts; whether you feel comfortable about it or not, nerd culture's coupling with software development does alienate potential entrants to the field.
But let's not bother deploying dueling readings from the article, and instead see how much you and I actually disagree:
I do not in fact think it's reasonable to suggest that individual software developers should avoid nerd signifiers to avoid alienating people. I feel safe presuming we agree about that.
Do you feel like it's reasonable for companies to avoid aggressive identification with nerd culture? To not ask candidates what their favorite Star Wars movie is, or to try to balance out outings and fringe benefits so they only appeal to sci-fi fandom?
I'm a hardware engineer. Most hardware companies are too tight fisted to have offsites (making physical things is expensive). The few that I've been on have been very tame because the last thing management wants is an offended employee.
Having an offsite at a brewery is kinda shitty because not everyone likes to drink. Did anyone try to suggest another venue?
I wasn't trying to be gender-specific with my example, just showing how something you can do as a manager to build culture can exclude and alienate people.
(Though: I do think beer drinking trends masculine.)
It's really hard to win at this. Whatever you do as a culture or team building exercise is going to either offend or just be uncomfortable to some subset of employees, unless it's so bland as to be boring for everyone.
It seems like a borderline example. I feel that the "brogrammer" stereotype was invented up mainly because the nerd stereotype was too sympathetic. I'm genuinely curious if there are examples of the kind of stereotypes in the article being promoted right now by tech companies.
As an aside, these sorts of critiques of mainstream/White culture are somewhat contradictory in that they criticize any specific cultural identity as being exclusive and insular, and yet whenever this is lacking, they point to how boring mainstream/White culture is. Even lack of crime can be turned into evidence of boringness. For example, for every article on the negative effect of nerd culture on diversity, there is an article complaining about the decline of nerd culture and the rise of corporatism. The latter tend to be highly revisionist and pretend that the tech industry was founded by LSD taking hippies who coded inside isolation tanks. But the contradiction is still stark.
Right: nobody bonds over building shareholder value. They bond over shared interests. But there are no _universal_ interests, so team-building is a quandary. I think the best you can do is rotate events and make sure most people are interested most of the time.
Maybe after the beer offsite, you can visit a winery, or a famous local coffee house, and then a museum.
I think the closest universal interest for me has been music. I don't really drink and I don't really talking to drinkers when I'm sober but I always love going out to gigs with pretty much anyone.
It's not exactly the most interactive activity when you can't talk for 80% of the time, but it's still enjoyable and sociable.
Beer seems more in-line with bro culture than nerd culture. This particular article seems more against corporate nerd culture than against corporate bro culture, but I've definitely seem articles speaking out against brogramming culture. Bros and nerds are quite different things (even though it seems like there are a lot of hybrids in Silicon Valley), but it seems to me that the only way to not alienate anyone is to have zero corporate culture.
Palantir is named after an item in Lord of the Rings. From what I've heard from friends working there, they have an internal conference called HobbitCon, meetings rooms named after LotR, and refer to their office as "the shire".
Did I say that persecuted nerds have the right to cordon off CS as a refuge for their culture? I thought that I said the opposite. Your later comments suggest that you break things down exactly as I do: it's ok for nerds to be nerds, and it's ok for nerds to cluster in tech, but it's not ok to promote the idea that only nerds can do tech, or to promote an stereotype that goes beyond reality.
Did you read my comment carefully? Was I unclear at some point? Do you disagree that a lot of male nerds are resisting the diversity movement because they feel that it attacks them, and that this article notwithstanding, often the diversity movement does attack them?
The very fact that your previous comment was misinterpreted by tptacek to the point of castigating the imaginary nerds to give up their imaginary rights to "cordon off computer science as a refuge free from nerdiness" indicates to me that those people who are wont to blame the men in tech have little empathy to begin with.
The nerd culture has been one of the most inclusive cultures I've been with. As esr wrote, "No compiler or network stack or 3-D printer gives a crap about the shape of your genitals or the color of your skin, and hackers as a culture don’t either." http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6642
Of course not. The provided quote from Eric S. Raymond -- who, in my mind, is more of someone who intelligently analyzes these matters better than most people than is someone popular/ famous/ worshipped -- is to illustrate the 14 years of personal experience dealing with nerds (7 years in India; 7 years in the West; plus various interactions over the internet with people from other cultures) wherein it became clear, again and again, that the nerd culture has been one of the most inclusive cultures I've been with. Indeed, just in the last month I have seen two incidents where the non-nerds (the so called "women in tech") have clearly demonstrated their lack of empathy (and there have been more such incidents, outside of tech).
It makes sense. Advertising is inefficient, wasting people's time and attention for the gain of the advertiser.
Advertisements have long been used as a form of micropayment, to fund first TV shows and now websites, where a monetary payment would be infeasible.
There is no such reason to allow advertising in public property (private property is more complicated, but generally the outward appearance of buildings is considered a public good, and highly regulated). The person viewing the building or billboard is not a party to a transaction, so there is no reason to charge that person a hidden fee for viewing that space. In a way it is the ultimate hidden tax.
Billboards are illegal in four states: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont. I would love to form a SuperPAC to work on outlawing them in the other 46 states.
If one looks at GDP per capita or life expectancy, progress did not stop or slow in the 50's.
I think the main difference is that progress is now made in much smaller increments. E.g. smartphones have transformed our lives, and yet the smartphone era really begin with the iPhone, which was itself not revolutionary from a purely technological viewpoint. It was however, sufficiently better in its hardware and software to appeal to a much larger market.
I thought the principle you and the other poster were arguing for, was to minimize conflict. In the case of "bro" the conflict arises from a feminist critique of the word's usage in the context of a male dominated industry. In the case of the menorah, the conflict arises from the political controversy of the state of Israel, and its relationship to the Jewish community[0]. I don't have a problem with pro-Feminist websites or anti-Feminist websites, I just think it's professional to avoid stirring up debate with terms or symbols that would likely offend people with a particular viewpoint.
Perhaps you think the feminist viewpoint in this case is objectively correct and therefore deserves more consideration. In that case I would counter that the pro-Palestinian viewpoint is objectively correct. But my original argument was neutral on this issue.
[0] A relationship usually asserted to exist by the supporters of Israel, as is the case here.
Sounds like the real asshole is the person who instead of trying to understand and critique people with different opinions, simply lambasts them as "assholes".
A great example of the author's inability to engage with opposing views is in the intro:
Afterward, one of the event organizers thanked me for coming, even though, she said, “I disagree with almost everything you said.” Seriously? So it’s okay to evict poor people to make room for new rich people? Is that what the SF Chron talked about today with a story called “psychology studies suggest rising wealth means more jerks in SF?”
Note how the author is more interested in psychology studies about people, than what those people would actually say for themselves.
The worst stories of sexual harassment I've heard have always been from women in the social sciences. I commented on this to two girls doing PhD's in social psychology, who were describing harassment by their faculty, and they agreed and thought that this was due to self-licensing[0]. That is, these faculty who had proven to themselves that they were good liberals, then had less qualms about their own behavior.
Thanks for the pointer to self-licensing. I am sure there are many such mistakes at play here.
(Also, in the context of gender issues, I felt weird when you referred to two Ph.D. students as "girls", because they probably are not children. I have lots of cognitive bias to work on, and so I try to be careful about words like that.)
I don't go out of my way to modify my language (although I can see how without extra context, like the fact that I met these people at a social event not a professional event, you might object in this particular case) because I don't believe that cultural attitudes to gender are the primary cause of this sort of harassment, or are a big problem in general.
On the contrary, I think that men whose behavior is harassing or otherwise immoral, are primarily responsible as individuals for their actions. This is closely related to my original point. I think that another bias is that people, especially men, who attain positions of power tend to be likable, either because that's what got them there, or because people tend to like powerful people. Therefore people make excuses for these men, blaming the culture in general for actions that are really the fault of the individual.
I would like to see nerd elitism and nerd bashing both stop.
Some people claim that to be a programmer you need to have a certain personality or hobbies, and this is wrong.
But nerd elitism is also a reaction to having been excluded, ridiculed and sometimes bullied. That doesn't make it right, but it also means that bashing nerds and nerd culture, as is all to common amongst progressives, is both unfair and counterproductive.
What I would like to see more people saying is that it's ok that many people in tech have certain hobbies or personality traits in common, but that a person doesn't have to have these things to work in tech.
I hope this gives some pause for people who advocate the XKCD line on free speech[0]. While not every platform should be required to host every kind of content, when a platform becomes sufficiently dominant, its ability to censor content becomes a free speech issue.
While you bring up a valid issue (per e.g. [1]), it's not clear to me what you're trying to say about it. Even less clear to me is how any sort of coherent legal regime would be imposed on something like Internet.org, which presumably has access to sufficient resources to carve up its legal entities into the tastiest possible slices (such that e.g. the local entities only run the base stations while content approval decisions are ostensibly made by a mailbox in Panama or whatever).
I wasn't saying that Facebook should be regulated like shopping malls. I was saying that people who say that private censorship is not problematic, do not have an answer for things like internet.org. Facebook are legally free to set up programs like this, but people are also right to criticize Facebook for setting up a system that takes away from the freedom of the open internet. The shallow analysis of the XKCD comic ignores these issues, yet I often see that comic posted when people complain about left wing censorship online.
A daily comic isn't the medium that one usually chooses for subtlety or depth. A lot of people complaining about "left-wing censorship" (or "right-wing censorship", for that matter) are in serious need of a clue-by-four and wouldn't bother reading a deep analysis if it were given to them.
But people complaining about "corporate censorship" are smart well informed people? How is internet.org controlling what website people get to see different from, for example, YouTube controlling which videos people get to see? And how are the whims of whoever will control or influence internet.org different from the (mostly left wing) groups that (sometimes successfully) pressure companies to remove material from their websites.
