I was laid off in retaliation for anti-discrimination whistleblowing
evhaste.comHonestly, 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.
It's true, you never have to wonder about the work ethic of the unskilled and de-unionized worker. They have so little job security these days you can practically get the whip out on the poor, desperate little plebs.
I get your point, but it sounds like you forgot where you were commenting. Most of the people here work in tech and are very-high earners. Your overwhelmingly-non-unionized audience are hardly “poor, desperate little plebs.”
I'd rather work with lazy people than bullies, YMMV.
I think the reality is that lazy people and bullies tend to end up in the same organizations (and are with some regularity the same people). The places that I've seen the least of both was in a privately owned company.
It’s not either/or.
You think the parent was covering for the loafer because he was so friendly and kind?
Seems like you were doing more to protect that guy than the union was.
Why didn't you just not cover for him?
For real. This problem exists independent of unions.
If the one guy didn't get fired you probably wouldn't have either.
I didn't know better and after experiencing the consequences of my father loafing through life, I was determined to work hard. I was 18 and working my way through college (couldn't get loans or family aid). I grew up in right-to-work states, but went to college in a union state, so I wasn't really familiar with the dynamics.
Why would you cover for someone who wasn't doing their job? Unions don't make it impossible to fire a bad employee, they just require normal things like documentation and giving the employee a chance to improve.
If I started doing someone else's work making it impossible for the bad employee's boss to know there was a problem that's not really a issue with unions.
Lol
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.
> 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... Unionized workplaces can be just as toxic as any other workplace.
This is true, but unlike any other workplace, if your union is filled with corruption and nepotism you can vote to change your union leadership or even to disband it entirely and replace it with a new union under entirely different leadership, operating under new rules written to specifically address the problems with your old union.
Unions at least give you the option of improving the situation if the vast majority of union workers agree that there's a huge problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hoffa
Face prison and death? No thank you, no job has ever been worth that.
Thinking that you're going to fix deep corruption via democratic process... You realize that this doesn't work in mainstream politics either, right? Only in the movies.
I don't think most worker's unions are filled with Mafia members these days so you probably wouldn't have to worry about prison/death.
As for corruption, a strong democracy is highly effective against it which is why corrupt states try so hard to weaken or eliminate Democracy where they can. Democracy is absolutely a threat to corruption.
The US does seem to have slipped some (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index) and there's no surprise that there have been some very worrying efforts to weaken our democracy recently. Most Americans think our democracy is in danger. This would probably be a good time to fight for a stronger democracy so that we're better able to deal with corruption.
Good luck with that.
"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.
You're a good person.
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.
> 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.
That's your problem, not mine. God forbid I'm ever in such a situation.
Sounds great. What's the job?
If we just accept that abusive managers are unassailable and move around, pretty soon we'll find no place free from abuse.
Not to mention that not everyone has the luxury of being able to move around easily.
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.
I have a different take:
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.
If the company is in the USA and leadership doesn't like LGBTQ than there will be no chance one way or the other to change that org
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.
You have a problem with work.
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.
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).
So, she did exactly what she was hired for.
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."
My read:
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.
If you are hiring people that later need to be fired for doing porn, heroin, sexual harassment,... Maybe the problem is not them.
How do you filter for porn addiction during your interview process?
What a wild assertion.
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.
Wow any idea what she’s up to now? I feel like doing this would be blacklisting yourself from future tech jobs industry
Not just tech jobs I'd think.
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.
I don't think that's enough reason to be flagged.
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 agree that this a perfectly on-topic post and worthy of discussion (in part because it was well written). I was just countering the claim/insuation that people were flagging the story because of their own prejudice against trans people (or whatever).
> 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.
Hypothetically, if Rune was in the right and the OP had seriously misrepresented the situation, what would be the right thing for Rune to do?
They could point out the inaccuracies or misrepresentations. For example, the claim that 20% of the staff were let go, but 100% of the laid off folk were "of historically marginalized groups. Women, people of color, queer folks, and multiple people on disability and even maternity leave"
They could respond with information. Maybe this is a broad enough group and their workforce is unusually diverse, and 90% of their workforce fits that description. If their layoff cohort was remotely representative of their demographics in the first place, this would be fine, but it really doesn't sound like it.
For example, the claim that they laid off people on maternity leave. Did their 20% company-wide layoff comprise 20% of their staff which was on maternity leave (in other words "sure, we laid off 2 people on maternity leave, but another 8 of our employees are actually on maternity leave, and they didn't get laid off").
Or was this overall inaccurate? ("actually our layoff cohort contained groups of people who are underrepresented in tech, but also groups of people who are overrepresented in tech. Protected statuses were not a factor in our layoff decisions").
Perhaps they fucked up and realize they did discriminate based on protected class, and can only dig the hole deeper by responding now.
> the claim that 20% of the staff were let go, but 100% of the laid off folk were "of historically marginalized groups. Women, people of color, queer folks, and multiple people on disability and even maternity leave"
Even if that claim is true, it's far from sufficient to assert discrimination is at play:
- Disparate impact != discrimination. IIRC, the idea that disparate impact could be penalized without explicit intent to discriminate was a judicial fabrication that contradicts the plain text of the Civil Rights Act.
- There are so many ways one could qualify as belonging to a "historically marginalized group". That's not really unrealistic to think that something like this could happen by chance.
- Sounds like the author's own marginal status wasn't a driving factor in being fired or even a barrier to promotion. If anything it sounds like the problem was retaliation, not discrimination.
- There does appear to be a decent amount of demographic diversity at the leadership level. It doesn't seem likely that they would have a plan to get rid of minority employees simply because of their minority status.
Whether as an individual or a company there plenty of reasons to hold your tongue admist public controversy. That doesn't mean the company is making the right move by being silent, but interpreting that silence as guilt seems unwise.
When someone is suing you, even wrongly (in your view), responding in public is very rarely the legally recommended appropriate thing to do.
I don’t think there is any compelling argument to be made from Ram’s silence.
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?
With the reference to comparing her employer to Alex Jones, I think the author is trying to sway the court of public opinion.
I hope the author has some hard evidence like emails or voice recordings that she's saving for a lawsuit.
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.
The new position was junior project manager. That is a lot different than a manager.
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
I sincerely can not discern whether this is satire or reality.
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.
We only have the worker protections we have because at some point people chose to take a stand rather than just change jobs because it was easier.
Ok for discriminations.. but criticiszing internal procedures being annoying about it and raising concerns all the timebhas nothing to do with worker protection.. you are just being a weight for the managements and just not worth the money
>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.
Author would be well served to spend some relaxing days on the beach
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 don't understand how this logic works. So many high profile whistleblower cases (deutscebank, volskwagen, cia) happened because a high profile employee put their career at risk, but I get an annoyed self-contradictory response using quotes and caps. Disappointing.
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.
FTA: "I provided written guidance to Ram, who was also my supervisor"
This person sounds like a very valuable addition to any team.
This is an incredible piece.
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."
This is the relevant section:
> 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....
… 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.
As another trans person that's been in a similar position before, it's really frustrating how many loops I've gone through where the moment I'd get to some part where it wasn't voice only anymore, you could just hear the tone shift and get rejected shortly after.
Combine that with the current tech market being on a downswing and it's not unreasonable that this would take a while to find a new place.
I've met more than one hiring manager who tacitly refuses to hire anyone who is transgendered. Of course this is only revealed in confidence, and they'll deny it if asked.
The reason is typically one or more of:
- they don't want the rest of the team to have to walk on eggshells regarding pronouns and so on, or
- they don't want to have to deal with any fallout from female employees getting pissed about males using their bathroom, or
- they've had a bad experience hiring a transgender previously (typically due to the previous two reasons) and don't want to repeat it with another.
Kind of sucks for the transgendered applicants, but understandable I suppose, given the circumstances these days.
> Kind of sucks for the transgendered applicants, but understandable I suppose, given the circumstances these days.
Yikes. That's true in exactly the same way that segregation kinda sucked for the black kids, but was understandable given the circumstances of the postbellum south.
Discrimination against a minority solely for the social conveniences of the majority is a terrible sin. Haven't we had this fight a thousand times already? Why do it again?
Yup. Catering to bigots makes you a bigot. The fact that "they won't ever admit to it" is the problem with bigotry.
Thank you for this comment, I was just about to rage and you eloquently expressed a great reply!
In addition I was about to add:
How about the manager not use their internal prejudices to influence their decision and hide behind a thin veil of “what about my employees” and actually let their employees LEARN how to correctly interact with transgendered, queer, ethnically diverse co-workers and possibly come out of their cotton-wool lined shells.
It would be better for all of us, right?
I mean, this kind of "fight" is basically what society is about, and it is unfortunately always hard earned to get anywhere, but i'm also honestly not sure there is a way around this.
The principle you give is essentially limitless - your "social convenience" part is doing all the work here - but you can't just define away the things you like but the majority doesn't currently accept [1] as "social convenience" whether the causes happen to be "good" or not.
Because everyone who is part of a group that is discriminated against thinks they are in the right and that the majority doesn't accept them for, essentially, social convenience reasons.
And people in the majority don't see it as social convenience reasons.
If the two "sides" didn't have this disagreement, the minority wouldn't be discriminated against in the first place!
You are essentially arguing that the right things should just take hold immediately, without any work, and people shouldn't fight about it, but they would if people agreed they were the right things in the first place.
You can't just pre-define people as wrong and then say "why are they fighting about things when they are so wrong, and are always so wrong about these things"?
Humans as a group are slow to accept, and fairly wary of acceptance of new social things - it's incredibly rare for significant social change to take less than a generation to take hold overall, or to gain acceptance across all living generations simultaneously.
There are lots of reasons for this, most (AFAIK) to do with our survival over the long term. That sucks, for sure, in the short term. But i'm not sure what the better answer is.
I certainly wish there was a way to ensure society reaches a reasonable fixpoint on good ideas faster, if for no other reason than the obvious pain to people living it, but if there is, we haven't found it so far, and attempts to reach faster fixpoints have not .. always led to good paths, and attempts to legislate away resistance has never worked ...
[1] I honestly don't know if being inclusive of transgender folks falls into the category of what the majority of folks accept or not, i'm just presuming it doesn't based on your statement. The surveys i see seem .. complex and varying IE https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america...
> You are essentially arguing that the right things should just take hold immediately
I... don't think that's at all what I'm saying. Upthread commenter was saying that refusing to hire trans people "kind of sucks for them, but is understandable" in a pretty clear oh-well-what-you-gonna-do-about-it frame.
I think that's bad. And the reason it's bad is it's the same logic deployed to serve horrific goals.
I don't think you're saying that it's OK to refuse to hire trans people either. Are you?
Basically: sure, you and your reactionary gender normative compatriots are more than welcome to "fight about it". That's what you're doing right now. Just don't take it to the point where you're trying to exclude people from your workplaces. Because that's fucking awful.
"I don't think you're saying that it's OK to refuse to hire trans people either. Are you?"
No, of course not. But there is a difference between whether it is "okay" in some moral sense, and whether society deems it "okay", and whether it's normal/possible/desirable/etc for that to take time to change.
Replace "trans people" with something you hate in your arguments, and you can see that they apply equally well.
"sure, you and your reactionary gender normative compatriots"
Please don't assume you know anything about my view. I was careful not to express a view, but here you label me with one, in a fairly pejorative way.
That is not okay, in any way, shape, or form. If you want to know my view, then ask. You'd apparently be surprised to learn that i have spent lots of time and energy trying to help trans folks.
You really do keep missing the point, and appear very focused on how you feel about this particular thing. Other people feel equally powerful but opposite. You do simply define them as wrong. They do the same thing to you!
Your logic is actually the logic deployed to serve horrific ends, and i'm really not sure why you don't see it.
You claim you are not defining others as wrong, but you are in fact doing it, right here:
"Just don't take it to the point where you're trying to exclude people from your workplaces. Because that's fucking awful."
See here you've defined people who exclude trans people as wrong (again, i happen to agree if you really must know). I presume it is fairly fundamental to your beliefs, based on how hard you argue here.
But take people who believe the complete opposite of you - militantly (i don't care whether it's about trans people or anything else). That logic you just use applies equally well to that horrific end. Do you think these militantly opposite people should be excluded from their workplace? Do they get to think that you should be excluded because they think you are fucking awful? If not, why?
Because your logic applies equally well there - because, as i said, it is the logic you are using that leads to a horrific end.
Most people i talk with about excluding militantly transphobic people say "yes, i'm okay with"
Which I agree with, but not simply because i define the other side as wrong.
Now, as for what will happen, in practice, society will, over time, likely decide it's okay to not hire people who are transphobic, the same way society is okay not hiring all sorts of people that society does not agree with. Because that's what society is - a community and grouping, and a society always defines the acceptability bounds for the group. But changing those bounds takes time, and always takes time.
In the meantime, society is not sure where it stands, and will be okay with lots of things it will not be okay with in the future. That is, again, normal, and IMHO, hard to avoid. Even if it is pretty horrific for those involved. As mentioned, it doesn't seem like we've ever been able to successfully avoid it.
> That is not okay, in any way, shape, or form. If you want to know my view, then ask. You'd apparently be surprised to learn that i have spent lots of time and energy trying to help trans folks.
It was a turn of phrase, and I apologize. The point was to poke fun at the rhetoric.
And now I've read that through about three times... and I genuinely can't see what your point is? You say you don't want trans people fired or excluded, but you're going to the mattresses to point out that someone who feels like like you do is... wrong? No, you don't say I'm wrong.
You're just making a meta point that I should recognize that my personal moral compass isn't the only one in the world? Like I don't already know that? How would you suggest I argue this point? Upthread, you're straight up celebrating society being able to "fight about" these issues. But only in defense of the other side?
Coming back: I still can't understand how you're deploying the abstractions above in defense of refusing to hire someone because they're trans. I mean... OK! You're right. Morality is complicated. But... is this really what you want to be defending? There are times where we need to pick sides, right?
It read to me like he was just commenting on your frustration that the law and all our norms don't instantaneously proscribe all possible forms of discrimination, that there isn't a plausible generalizable principle of "just don't discriminate", even if it's easy to anticipate that we shouldn't allow discrimination against e.g. trans people.
> there isn't a plausible generalizable principle of "just don't discriminate"
You'd at least agree that there ought to be an extremely high bar for "do not hire" exclusions like this, no?
It seems like both of you are interpreting what I wrote above in a senselessly absolutist way, which seems deeply uncharitable. I'm all for debating moral ethics in the abstract. I'm just a little horrified to see two major thought leaders on this site engaging in this particular direction.
Absolutely. I assume he would too. I don't have an opinion about what you wrote, but I make a habit of reading all of Berlin's comments, and it seemed like you two were just communicating at cross purposes. I'm not judging or anything.
> Now, as for what will happen, in practice, society will, over time, likely decide it's okay to not hire people who are transphobic, the same way society is okay not hiring all sorts of people that society does not agree with
I hope you're right, but I also worry you're giving "society" too much credit. In many countries, trans people are executed. There are very few where they have the same protections and status that they do in, say, Canada, and there is still a ton of transphobia in Canada (the U.S. is certainly quite far behind Canada in policy)
While it's nice the tech is more progressive with regards to inclusivity than many other male-dominated industries, this thread is living proof that even in a community which has been shaped by the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley (and the accompanying progressive lean of its historically LGBTQ-heavy constituency), there is still tons of transphobia.
> reactionary gender normative compatriots
Conceptually, this isn't really an accurate depiction. Many who are critical of the belief system of gender identity are also very much against the imposition of gender norms, and will argue against transgenderism on that basis.
I’ve heard of managers who are so inclusive of trans women that they talk down to them and give them menial clerical tasks (as an engineer) as if they were cis women.
I've literally met people who brag about trashing resumes with pronouns, openly because they think they're immune to consequences.
It's a common enough sentiment here and on reddit when the topic comes up. But if Blind is any indication, it's possible more people would trash a resume that lists pronouns before just... using it to inform how they address the candidate
It's not understandable. Some things you don't let yourself do and speak up when other people do.
As is the case with many anti-discrimination policies, often the actual result can be the opposite of what was intended.
Many employees are not comfortable with the accommodations for trans colleagues required of them by their employer (and by our current legal environment). Those employees don't really have a means to have their concerns addressed: it is either comply or quit/get fired. A way around that is to simply avoid hiring trans people.
That you do not understand those concerns does mean they are not understandable.
Perhaps parent and GP comments are using different definitions of "understandable".
“It depends on what the meaning of is, is”
And frankly, my experience has been that people with such "concerns" tend to also have corresponding ones for other minorities.
100%, I learned this early via that in a comanager.
While it’s unrealistic to believe that every bad thing that happens to you is because of discrimination, being part of a commonly discriminated group has an effect of making everything harder.
Lots of people struggle to find a job. Now imagine if on top of that, some additional percentage of jobs are off the table to begin with.
In a way, this reminds me of climate change. You can’t usually point to any one event and definitively say “this was caused by discimination,” but you’re quite aware it’s happening overall.
San Francisco and Seattle aren't exactly hotbeds of intolerance. The large-scale studies on discrimination in tech companies did find slight gender discrimination, in favor of women: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
My company has a goal of 35% women in executive position. The thing is that we are working in the industry, you know, factories and machines. This environment does not attract women, we barely have women engineers. That means that any women in engineering willing to take responsibility is fast tracked to management. This was the same at my previous employers.
Anecdotal story time, when I was a young student in France, I believed that discrimination was mostly a thing from the past, I believed that in 2000, being black wouldn't affect hiring decisions that much and wouldn't make it much harder to find a job.
Then two very good friends of mine graduated, they were both black, they were both French citizens from the French islands, they both graduated as electronics engineers within the top 10% of their class, they were well-spoken, and pretty much serious model students. The average time to find a class for people who graduated in their major was less than 2 months. One of my friend found a job in 6 months, the other in 5 months. Both of them had a starting salary that was more than 40% lower than the average salary of the other students in my university graduating in the same major.
That's when I discovered that discrimination still exists and that it has tremendous impact. So, it doesn't surprise me at all that being transgendered makes finding a job significantly harder.
Many manager are reluctant of hiring members of certain minority groups, as they are afraid of the potential HR issues; as far too many people play the discrimination card when they are involved in any kind of conflict or face disciplinary action. Sometimes measure to prevent discrimination can do the opposite.
That's entirely true and I imagine that this article will unfortunately convince some hiring managers that it's not worth hiring for diversity.
Probably because they sound absolutely insufferable to work with.
Who demands extensive requirements docs in <100 person startups? Who organizes ERGs in that context? Who spends all their time obsessing over process, planning, and identity instead of actually building stuff?
It's amazing they had a job this long.
According to the article she was actually moving up the ranks and getting promoted, so it sounds like the company did in fact think she was doing something right.
It's just as possible that potential employers were put off by this personal personality and the HR issues they may present
A lot of whistleblowers can't seem to find work after they blow the whistle
weird
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).
I flagged it because it's exhausting sociopolitical drivel that has nothing to do with tech. If the company discriminated against this person, then prove it in court. Nobody here has sufficient information to make a determination one way or another. And none of us has an obligation to take the author at their word.
I don't care how many downvotes I get. An article about discrimination against marginalized groups in tech was flagged by "TechBro8615" because he is sick of "sociopolitical drivel." You can't make this shit up.
This is Hacker News distilled into a single article. If someone pitched this to The Onion, they'd throw it back as being too on-the-nose.
Thanks for reminding me that Tech Bros still do exist. I don't miss them.
The accusation of tech bro is basically the same as the accusation of being a nerd. Maybe even far more unsubstantiated.
I think this is a media term for people they for some reason or another just don't like very much. That is fine, but the accusation doesn't really carry any meaning.
I agree 100% with your characterization of the post.
However, I don't agree that flagging it is justified. It's substituting your judgment for that of the 220 people who upvoted it. Unless you're the moderator, that's not your call to make.
Flagging is a privilege you get with 500 karma. By definition it's my call to make, or else there wouldn't be a "flag" button available to me. However, note that moderators can silently ignore flags from certain users. For example I'm pretty sure my own flags have no impact. Whereas soon after I reached 500 karma, one flag from me was enough to set a post to flagged, but at some point my flags stopped making a difference. I'm guessing that if you flag too many "false alarms" then the moderators just turn your flag button into a no-op.
The purpose of flagging is to indicate that a story does not belong on HN. Frivolous flagging—e.g. flagging a story that's clearly on-topic by the site guidelines just because one personally dislikes it—eventually gets an account's flagging privileges taken away.
GP is arguing that it does not belong on HN.
I'm arguing GP personally dislikes the story despite its merits - it very clearly is related to tech - even though it doesn't need to[0]. Evidently, GP is wrong about it belonging to HN. Flagging a link that doesn't break HN guidelines, only because it offends your sensibilities is abusing flagging rights, IMO.
0. HN links only have to be interesting, to belong. They don't have to be tech-related, despite this being a widely-held belief.
GP claims it is not interesting:
> exhausting sociopolitical drivel
>> exhausting sociopolitical drivel
That quote would be exhibit A for antipathy, rather than "uninteresting"
No, I do mean to say it's uninteresting, because I can predict all the replies. Without any factual basis for discussion, it will inevitably devolve into a predictable - and thus uninteresting - argument rooted in opposing idealogical positions of a culture war.
If the linked article does not contravene any of HNs guidelines, all your predictions on how the conversation could turn out still does not meet the bar for flagging.
The "bar for flagging" is 500 karma. Anyone with the "flag" button can click it, and it's up to the moderators to decide how to interpret that (for example, they might ignore flags from users with a history of frivolous flagging, or hide the story if a sufficient number of users flag it).
There is no "linked article." It's a biased blog post by an accuser who is making public accusations against a company, without offering documentary evidence or describing the other side of the story.
I wouldn't flag an article titled "Rune Labs found guilty of employment discrimination by the California Labor Board." But I don't feel it's appropriate, nor is it intellectually interesting, to discuss the smell of someone's dirty laundry when we have no unbiased information as to how it got so dirty. That's why I flagged it, and I'm not going to apologize for that.
For all we know the post is inaccurate or libelous. To me, it reads like an attempt to incite a mob against the plausibly innocent leadership of a company. We simply do not have the information to decide one way or the other, because the author offered no documentary evidence nor did they offer the company an opportunity to defend itself.
While I don't support discriminating against anyone, I also don't support publicly attacking people who are just trying to do their job and build a successful company. The leadership at Rune Labs - which is a company I've never heard of btw - is comprised of people, too. Shouldn't they be entitled to the same benefit of the doubt as the accuser?
Go to court, win the case, then come back with an article about the disgusting bigots at Rune Labs. Until then I'm going to flag the post out of respect for the accused, and in the interest of promoting fairness for all involved parties. Above all, I'm going to flag the post because it's my right to do that, and it's a way of casting a vote against HN turning into a forum for rage politics and mob justice. We have Twitter for that.
That's it. I'm done.
Been a Hacker News user since this launched, but have been feeling increasingly like I'm not part of this culture and don't want to be part of this culture anymore. So I'm out.
It's sad and kind of tragic to see what was once a thriving, diverse community that embraced all types of marginalized people (nerds, engineers, geeks, and so on) become a cesspool of bigotry and hate speech.
And the real tragedy, of course, is that Hacker News is just a microcosm of the developer culture -- which has become disgusting and hateful.
I hope those of you who are not bigots manage to fix this place. I hope the developer culture becomes healthier and less toxic. But I'm not going to be around to help or see it. Y'all are too exhausting and depressing.
Peace out.
Embracing marginalized people doesn't mean automatically taking the side of the accuser in an employment discrimination case, based on a one-sided blog post with no factual evidence presented. That's just mob politics, and I'm perfectly within my rights to flag the post, just like I'm within my rights to explain why I flagged it when someone asks.
It's ironic that you labeled my comment hate speech and essentially called me a bigot, despite knowing nothing about me aside from my username.
If you don't like it, don't read it. It's on-topic and worth discussing -- maybe not for you, but this story is absolutely not within the criteria of flagging, which is why despite people flagging it, the link remains and will continue to be present on the site.
It's not really on topic. It's a personal grievance of the variety that anyone might have at their job. There's nothing about it that satisfies intellectual curiosity, and as demonstrated by the comments here, it's a topic likely to devolve into a flamewar. This shouldn't be surprising since it's impossible to make any argument from a logical basis. There is simply not enough information available from this one-sided blog post to have a meaningful discussion about it that isn't unfair to one side or the other.
100%
Flagging stuff because "I don't like this" "it's critical of me or my friend or something I like" should be punished
Reforming "flagging" to make it less open to abuse and brigading is obviously overdue.
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.
oh boy...
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.
Thank you for doing so; it led me to see this post, and I appreciate that. I’ll vouch next time if I see it go back to [dead].
Your time to shine. Or can we get a ruling/override @dang ?
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)?
sadly, very common. See: anything critical about Elon Musk. See: anything about LGBTQ+ issues.
I love that this is being downvoted. Nothing validates my point better.
It appears it was flagged again? I can't see it on the first 5 pages of the front pages of HN..
the subreddit which is coordinating these attacks are very blatant, endorsed even by the powermods
The amount of time and energy some people are willing to spend furiously spinning webs of utter nonsense is... impressive.
Unnervingly, it sometimes resembles the zeal reserved for traditional religions.