6 ms·

The Woman in the Facebook Frat House

46 points by brevityness 14y ago

aheilbut 14y ago
I'm hearing a tiny, sad violin.
- mcantelon 14y ago
  Seems like a pretty straightforward account. Neither condemning not lauding.
  - gmrple 14y ago
    Indeed, and because of that I was rather confused. Was there a point to the article other than to give an account to her experience? Maybe I'm just too used to reading articles with obvious bias.
    - jbigelow76 14y ago
      > Was there a point to the article other than to give an account to her experience? Depending on your level of cynicism you could consider the article an "advertorial" seeing as how these are few anecdotes from her book coming out next week.
- te_chris 14y ago
  And I'm seeing the problem with the tech industry's attitude towards women illustrated in your comment, not to mention that it's actually just one excerpt from an upcoming book (disclosed down the bottom of the article).
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- pnmahoney 14y ago
  god. jesus. NO. you've already set the course for the "here comes another HN thread where people act/get pissy" thread, so we might as well. Here goes: You probably can't imagine what it's like - for a female employee to be aggressively pursued by a supervisor for a sexual act, nor can you fathom - the powerlessness of being one of those women who have all noticed this behavior and, worse, - knowing that they can't do anything about it. Nor, as your comment indicatese ... should anyone think it's important. Some people might consider this worth discussion, even if they think that the issue's overblown (either this instance or generally 'women in tech'), but not you. No, instead, you thought it would be fucking clever to do perhaps the stupidest, tritest 2003-era joke to convey your callous - in response to a pretty even-handed account, no less. It's beyond saving to be upset about the stupid shit which runs through this site, but what I am having trouble with is trying to decipher what the fucking point of your comment here is. Does mine have one either? Not really; guilty as charged. In any case - your stupid response deserves at least mine in kind, and probably also the revulsion of anyone who thinks things this-article-related should matter. And, fuck, a tiny violin joke? Really? That's the icing on the human-shitstain cake. Edited for emphasis, I am sorry that my infuriation has distracted you by way of cursing. But not apologizing for total derision - I'll stand by conveying how _completely fucked up_ this is. Let's take this seriously.
  - __float 14y ago
    Hm. I'm willing to bet your response would have been taken more seriously than his (hint: it wasn't) if you hadn't taken his tone and reduced it to the point of swearing so much. If it is such an important issue, perhaps treat it a bit more professionally.
    - sp332 14y ago
      "Professional" comes across as dispassionate on the internet (and often face-to-face as well). Swearing is one way to express emotion in text.
      - Aaronontheweb 14y ago
        Coming across as irate and unbalanced, which the author's swearing did in this instance, does nothing but detract from his / her point. You can be assertive and "professional" without sounding like a shriek.
- walrus 14y ago
  I understand your viewpoint here, because that's more or less how I interpreted the article on my first read through. However, you likely misinterpreted the article. See pnmahoney's response to my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150139 (and try to ignore that it's the same pnmahoney who responded angrily to your comment :)
  - pnmahoney 14y ago
    Oh hey, I think you're missing a crucial part here (again :) "I'm having trouble reading this one . . . can someone else help me?" is NOT-equivalent to "I am so closed to this issue that I'd rather demean the point, let's make the industry look bad AND lame. here ya go. <idiotic joke>." ...or at least there is a conceivable difference between the second and the first BESIDES just the idiotic joke. That said, I don't mean to imply that you can't actually mean the latter and dress it up as the former.
    - walrus 14y ago
      I really did interpret it in the same way as aheilbut initially (i.e., I initially thought that the author was just whining). However, I realized I was probably missing something, so I decided to ask. Fortunately for me, you came along and explained it! I don't think that aheilbut was necessarily closed to the issue. If I had to guess, he was probably just distracted by the presentation, like I was.
gfosco 14y ago
I think she read wayyy to much into that bear photo... The sexual harassment type stuff never surprises me, but they handled it very well. Master password.. shocker. I'm sure there are still ways, just not as simple anymore.
duck 14y ago
Once we learned how the software worked, he taught us, without batting an eye, the master password with which we could log in as any Facebook user and gain access to all messages and data. Yikes!
- __float 14y ago
  I think we learned of this master password probably several years ago. It's nothing new, but I keep seeing it repeated in various forms since. Also, other discussion possibly going on here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149731 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149731
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
More than 50 employees and one master password. Awesome. Most companies start silo-ing waaaaay too early, everybody breaking up into little "that's not my job" cliques. It's just much less painful that way. Sounds like FB actively resisted, whether through design or chance.
- heretohelp 14y ago
  >More than 50 employees and one master password. Awesome. Not sure that's the word for it. Seems more like engineering naivete. The thing is, I have a similar functionality at my company and the solution I came up with is conceptually simple but also a lot more secure. There's an is_staff flag on every user account. If you have it set to True, you can log in as one of our customers for debugging purposes. If you leave the company, you lose the flag. Simple as that really. All the same power necessary to really get down and dirty with whatever problems our customers encounter, but with less potential issues. I don't consider the above to be the end-all be-all as eventually it'll have to become more elaborate and locked down. For now, however, it seems to work well for a company of roughly seven people. :)
walrus 14y ago
Can someone explain to me what the author is trying to say? I see two things in the article: 1. In the author's eyes, the majority of early Facebook employees acted in a juvenile masculine manner[1]. 2. Some of those early Facebook employees weren't nice people. Am I missing something more subtle? [1] I.e., the manner young males are stereotyped[2]. [2] I'm not accusing the author of stereotyping.
- pnmahoney 14y ago
  It's easy to miss the point with the bearkskin rug thing. It's worth spelling out: a workplace which tolerates sexual harassment (senior supervisor known to proposition all the women at the company), or forces its female employees to go through backchannels to deal with sex-driven workplace hostility? It's less that the 'employees weren't nice people' and more that this employee was powerless to reign in patterns of offensive/illegal/errant behavior. Still it wouldn't be so necessary to focus on, _except_ for all the crap being thrown in here to accept/defend it.
  - walrus 14y ago
    Thanks. After reading your comment and rereading the article, I agree with your interpretation (but I can't stand the author's presentation). It's too bad that the author chose to put the "male" spin on things[1][2][3][4]. I found that offensive enough to distract me from understanding the main point of the article on my first read. (Also, the bearskin part was far-fetched. As another commenter here said: unless there was more context involved, she was probably reading into that too much.) [1] "[...]young, plain-looking guys in T-shirts, gazing at their screens, seemed startled—if not displeased—to see a strange new woman in the office." [2] "[...]it seemed like the kind of thing that suburban boys from Harvard would think was urban and cool." [3] "[...]or the unrepentantly boyish company culture that it represented[...]" [4] "As Mark wrote on his business card with boyish hubris[...]"
- tspiteri 14y ago
  I don't know if it's only me, but I saw the young male stereotyping as a way to justify their behaviour, as in: it's not that bad, it's just boys being boys. The things that were really bad were the things dealt with later.
temphn 14y ago
Mark Zuckerberg and those engineers made this customer service representative a millionaire. She repays them by trashing them in the Wall Street Journal. There is nothing wrong with something "unrepentantly boyish", anything more than there is something wrong with women's only schools. Working class men don't go around apologizing for doing difficult construction jobs, white collar men need to stop apologizing for doing the difficult programming jobs. This woman was in customer service. She was lucky to be put on the Facebook rocket ship. So too was Sheryl Sandberg, a nontechnical and obviously ultrapolitical operator, placed on third base as COO yet thinks she hit a triple. Both Losse and Sandberg consider themselves "women in tech". They're not. They're "women on tech", women carried on the backs of real technologists, male and female alike.
- kaonashi 14y ago
  No offense, but that comes off as extremely conceited.
  - lclarkmichalek 14y ago
    Yes, usually any misogyny on hacker news is at least concealed behind pseudo rational arguments.
- pnmahoney 14y ago
  I'm calling bull. Contributing to a company's success is NOT the exclusive purchase of programmers, nor (as some appear to conflate it) men who program. And, to be clear, there is something unambiguously wrong for a male supervisor to roam the workplace trying to push lesser-ranked employees into sexual acts; worse, for the behavior to go on long enough until SOMEONE (again, by your analysis, a 'woman on tech') thought it was worth fixing. Even if she had to use all that dreaded 'political operations-ing' to make it right.
- vamsee 14y ago
  Wow. Is this the attitude that people in SV usually have/tolerate towards women? No wonder there are so many complaints. Somehow 'doing difficult programming jobs' entitles you to act shabbily towards women? And somehow she needs to be thankful for all this? Wow, just wow.
pnathan 14y ago
One useful point to take away from this is it helps to have an "adult"[1] in a high level position, to whom sensitive concerns can be brought to and dealt with in a discreet, sober, and careful fashion. [1] i.e., someone mature, responsible, sober-minded.
- ryguytilidie 14y ago
  Yeah, last startup I worked at was two founders in their 20s with a head of operations who wanted to bang every chick who came in the office. Couldn't exactly make HR complaints to the head of HR when there was no one responsible around. Never working somewhere without a "responsible adult" honestly.
- mahyarm 14y ago
  Somebody like Sheryl sounds scary. The article makes it look like she handles private complaints she agrees with by stealth and doesn't even let the offending parties know the reason they were attacked. Also when you work in a place that has too many 'adults', they can discount you because of your youth.
  - lucisferre 14y ago
    I'm sure that's nothing like being discounted because you're a woman.
    - mahyarm 14y ago
      What I was talking about had nothing to do with gender, even though the article was.
  - geon 14y ago
    > they can discount you because of your youth. That doesn't sound very mature and responsible, the top level posts definition of "adult".
kaichanvong 14y ago
Interesting article. Some people have questioned what the point of it was. I saw it as this: A. Enter male to female ratio of 1:50 B. Experience some things that felt wrong/daunting C. New manager entered scene and "fixed things" I wonder if the fact the manager (Sheryl Sandberg) was female made a big impact on the resulting fixes. Would a different manager have done the same? Possibly not unless either they thought about it from reading about an article or having been in a similar position at say Froogle. Really interesting and I think it brings up the something that we as people should start doing more. Ask questions if something seems wrong or potentially off. Even if we're not a "manager" or not female. To at the very least try to promote `good`. It's good for stories such as these to circulate as hopefully it will speed up the dilution of sexist issues we keep hearing of. And by dilution I mean the hopeful removal of this problem entirely.
- lucisferre 14y ago
  I'm sure being female had some impact on her empathy towards the author. But it sounds like simply being a "grown up" was the more decisive factor here. Lord of the flies.
Muzza 14y ago
Yes yes. Women good, men bad. We get it.
- markfinger 14y ago
  Rather, the article raises a common problem for many tech companies. Specifically, creating a more accessible culture. Replacing the role of female entering FB's workplace - how would a conservative or devoutly religious _male_ would respond to the machismo described? Likewise: a feminist male, a homosexual male, a father, a grandfather. The article offers another voice calling for an increased awareness of serious problems in our industry.
niete 14y ago
This is possibly the weakest article ever.
shadesandcolour 14y ago
This problem seems pretty circular to me. Girls don't want to join companies like this because it's a boys club, but it stays a boys club because girls don't want to join. I do feel bad for women who wind up in situation like this, and I personally have no problem with girls writing code or managing projects or being involved with the tech world if they want to. About the things that "suburban boys from Harvard would find cool" so that's why they were there, um, duh. They were suburban boys from Harvard who didn't really have a lot of women around the office. Obviously they're going to put things like that on the walls. Speaking from experience, the only thing dumber than a guy is a guy who is still in college. These aren't mature individuals yet, and while that's unfortunate, they have to be treated differently sometimes. Here's my problem with the bearskin thing. We have to remember who picked it up and put it on. Everyone was drunk, everyone was having fun. She picked it up and put it on her head and was being funny. I challenge you to find one drunk person, guy or girl, who would tell someone to stop doing something that is funny. The picture sounds like an issue of most pictures that wind up on Facebook after a party. They were taken at an inopportune moment and you wish that no one would have taken it. Long story short, some guys are dicks, and they have to work somewhere. When they get out of line, the issue should be dealt with like it was. Its unfortunate that the tech world still seems like a boys club, but it's a difficult problem to fix when the people working in the industry don't always see themselves for what they really are.

46 points by brevityness 14y ago

aheilbut 14y ago

I'm hearing a tiny, sad violin.

mcantelon 14y ago
Seems like a pretty straightforward account. Neither condemning not lauding.
- gmrple 14y ago
  Indeed, and because of that I was rather confused. Was there a point to the article other than to give an account to her experience? Maybe I'm just too used to reading articles with obvious bias.
  - jbigelow76 14y ago
    > Was there a point to the article other than to give an account to her experience? Depending on your level of cynicism you could consider the article an "advertorial" seeing as how these are few anecdotes from her book coming out next week.
te_chris 14y ago
And I'm seeing the problem with the tech industry's attitude towards women illustrated in your comment, not to mention that it's actually just one excerpt from an upcoming book (disclosed down the bottom of the article).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
pnmahoney 14y ago
god. jesus. NO. you've already set the course for the "here comes another HN thread where people act/get pissy" thread, so we might as well. Here goes: You probably can't imagine what it's like - for a female employee to be aggressively pursued by a supervisor for a sexual act, nor can you fathom - the powerlessness of being one of those women who have all noticed this behavior and, worse, - knowing that they can't do anything about it. Nor, as your comment indicatese ... should anyone think it's important. Some people might consider this worth discussion, even if they think that the issue's overblown (either this instance or generally 'women in tech'), but not you. No, instead, you thought it would be fucking clever to do perhaps the stupidest, tritest 2003-era joke to convey your callous - in response to a pretty even-handed account, no less. It's beyond saving to be upset about the stupid shit which runs through this site, but what I am having trouble with is trying to decipher what the fucking point of your comment here is. Does mine have one either? Not really; guilty as charged. In any case - your stupid response deserves at least mine in kind, and probably also the revulsion of anyone who thinks things this-article-related should matter. And, fuck, a tiny violin joke? Really? That's the icing on the human-shitstain cake. Edited for emphasis, I am sorry that my infuriation has distracted you by way of cursing. But not apologizing for total derision - I'll stand by conveying how _completely fucked up_ this is. Let's take this seriously.
- __float 14y ago
  Hm. I'm willing to bet your response would have been taken more seriously than his (hint: it wasn't) if you hadn't taken his tone and reduced it to the point of swearing so much. If it is such an important issue, perhaps treat it a bit more professionally.
  - sp332 14y ago
    "Professional" comes across as dispassionate on the internet (and often face-to-face as well). Swearing is one way to express emotion in text.
    - Aaronontheweb 14y ago
      Coming across as irate and unbalanced, which the author's swearing did in this instance, does nothing but detract from his / her point. You can be assertive and "professional" without sounding like a shriek.
walrus 14y ago
I understand your viewpoint here, because that's more or less how I interpreted the article on my first read through. However, you likely misinterpreted the article. See pnmahoney's response to my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150139 (and try to ignore that it's the same pnmahoney who responded angrily to your comment :)
- pnmahoney 14y ago
  Oh hey, I think you're missing a crucial part here (again :) "I'm having trouble reading this one . . . can someone else help me?" is NOT-equivalent to "I am so closed to this issue that I'd rather demean the point, let's make the industry look bad AND lame. here ya go. <idiotic joke>." ...or at least there is a conceivable difference between the second and the first BESIDES just the idiotic joke. That said, I don't mean to imply that you can't actually mean the latter and dress it up as the former.
  - walrus 14y ago
    I really did interpret it in the same way as aheilbut initially (i.e., I initially thought that the author was just whining). However, I realized I was probably missing something, so I decided to ask. Fortunately for me, you came along and explained it! I don't think that aheilbut was necessarily closed to the issue. If I had to guess, he was probably just distracted by the presentation, like I was.

gfosco 14y ago

I think she read wayyy to much into that bear photo... The sexual harassment type stuff never surprises me, but they handled it very well. Master password.. shocker. I'm sure there are still ways, just not as simple anymore.

duck 14y ago

Once we learned how the software worked, he taught us, without batting an eye, the master password with which we could log in as any Facebook user and gain access to all messages and data. Yikes!

__float 14y ago
I think we learned of this master password probably several years ago. It's nothing new, but I keep seeing it repeated in various forms since. Also, other discussion possibly going on here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149731 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149731

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

More than 50 employees and one master password. Awesome. Most companies start silo-ing waaaaay too early, everybody breaking up into little "that's not my job" cliques. It's just much less painful that way. Sounds like FB actively resisted, whether through design or chance.

heretohelp 14y ago
>More than 50 employees and one master password. Awesome. Not sure that's the word for it. Seems more like engineering naivete. The thing is, I have a similar functionality at my company and the solution I came up with is conceptually simple but also a lot more secure. There's an is_staff flag on every user account. If you have it set to True, you can log in as one of our customers for debugging purposes. If you leave the company, you lose the flag. Simple as that really. All the same power necessary to really get down and dirty with whatever problems our customers encounter, but with less potential issues. I don't consider the above to be the end-all be-all as eventually it'll have to become more elaborate and locked down. For now, however, it seems to work well for a company of roughly seven people. :)

walrus 14y ago

Can someone explain to me what the author is trying to say? I see two things in the article: 1. In the author's eyes, the majority of early Facebook employees acted in a juvenile masculine manner[1]. 2. Some of those early Facebook employees weren't nice people. Am I missing something more subtle? [1] I.e., the manner young males are stereotyped[2]. [2] I'm not accusing the author of stereotyping.

pnmahoney 14y ago
It's easy to miss the point with the bearkskin rug thing. It's worth spelling out: a workplace which tolerates sexual harassment (senior supervisor known to proposition all the women at the company), or forces its female employees to go through backchannels to deal with sex-driven workplace hostility? It's less that the 'employees weren't nice people' and more that this employee was powerless to reign in patterns of offensive/illegal/errant behavior. Still it wouldn't be so necessary to focus on, _except_ for all the crap being thrown in here to accept/defend it.
- walrus 14y ago
  Thanks. After reading your comment and rereading the article, I agree with your interpretation (but I can't stand the author's presentation). It's too bad that the author chose to put the "male" spin on things[1][2][3][4]. I found that offensive enough to distract me from understanding the main point of the article on my first read. (Also, the bearskin part was far-fetched. As another commenter here said: unless there was more context involved, she was probably reading into that too much.) [1] "[...]young, plain-looking guys in T-shirts, gazing at their screens, seemed startled—if not displeased—to see a strange new woman in the office." [2] "[...]it seemed like the kind of thing that suburban boys from Harvard would think was urban and cool." [3] "[...]or the unrepentantly boyish company culture that it represented[...]" [4] "As Mark wrote on his business card with boyish hubris[...]"
tspiteri 14y ago
I don't know if it's only me, but I saw the young male stereotyping as a way to justify their behaviour, as in: it's not that bad, it's just boys being boys. The things that were really bad were the things dealt with later.

temphn 14y ago

Mark Zuckerberg and those engineers made this customer service representative a millionaire. She repays them by trashing them in the Wall Street Journal. There is nothing wrong with something "unrepentantly boyish", anything more than there is something wrong with women's only schools. Working class men don't go around apologizing for doing difficult construction jobs, white collar men need to stop apologizing for doing the difficult programming jobs. This woman was in customer service. She was lucky to be put on the Facebook rocket ship. So too was Sheryl Sandberg, a nontechnical and obviously ultrapolitical operator, placed on third base as COO yet thinks she hit a triple. Both Losse and Sandberg consider themselves "women in tech". They're not. They're "women on tech", women carried on the backs of real technologists, male and female alike.

kaonashi 14y ago
No offense, but that comes off as extremely conceited.
- lclarkmichalek 14y ago
  Yes, usually any misogyny on hacker news is at least concealed behind pseudo rational arguments.
pnmahoney 14y ago
I'm calling bull. Contributing to a company's success is NOT the exclusive purchase of programmers, nor (as some appear to conflate it) men who program. And, to be clear, there is something unambiguously wrong for a male supervisor to roam the workplace trying to push lesser-ranked employees into sexual acts; worse, for the behavior to go on long enough until SOMEONE (again, by your analysis, a 'woman on tech') thought it was worth fixing. Even if she had to use all that dreaded 'political operations-ing' to make it right.
vamsee 14y ago
Wow. Is this the attitude that people in SV usually have/tolerate towards women? No wonder there are so many complaints. Somehow 'doing difficult programming jobs' entitles you to act shabbily towards women? And somehow she needs to be thankful for all this? Wow, just wow.

pnathan 14y ago

One useful point to take away from this is it helps to have an "adult"[1] in a high level position, to whom sensitive concerns can be brought to and dealt with in a discreet, sober, and careful fashion. [1] i.e., someone mature, responsible, sober-minded.

ryguytilidie 14y ago
Yeah, last startup I worked at was two founders in their 20s with a head of operations who wanted to bang every chick who came in the office. Couldn't exactly make HR complaints to the head of HR when there was no one responsible around. Never working somewhere without a "responsible adult" honestly.
mahyarm 14y ago
Somebody like Sheryl sounds scary. The article makes it look like she handles private complaints she agrees with by stealth and doesn't even let the offending parties know the reason they were attacked. Also when you work in a place that has too many 'adults', they can discount you because of your youth.
- lucisferre 14y ago
  I'm sure that's nothing like being discounted because you're a woman.
  - mahyarm 14y ago
    What I was talking about had nothing to do with gender, even though the article was.
- geon 14y ago
  > they can discount you because of your youth. That doesn't sound very mature and responsible, the top level posts definition of "adult".

kaichanvong 14y ago

Interesting article. Some people have questioned what the point of it was. I saw it as this: A. Enter male to female ratio of 1:50 B. Experience some things that felt wrong/daunting C. New manager entered scene and "fixed things" I wonder if the fact the manager (Sheryl Sandberg) was female made a big impact on the resulting fixes. Would a different manager have done the same? Possibly not unless either they thought about it from reading about an article or having been in a similar position at say Froogle. Really interesting and I think it brings up the something that we as people should start doing more. Ask questions if something seems wrong or potentially off. Even if we're not a "manager" or not female. To at the very least try to promote `good`. It's good for stories such as these to circulate as hopefully it will speed up the dilution of sexist issues we keep hearing of. And by dilution I mean the hopeful removal of this problem entirely.

lucisferre 14y ago
I'm sure being female had some impact on her empathy towards the author. But it sounds like simply being a "grown up" was the more decisive factor here. Lord of the flies.

Muzza 14y ago

Yes yes. Women good, men bad. We get it.

markfinger 14y ago
Rather, the article raises a common problem for many tech companies. Specifically, creating a more accessible culture. Replacing the role of female entering FB's workplace - how would a conservative or devoutly religious _male_ would respond to the machismo described? Likewise: a feminist male, a homosexual male, a father, a grandfather. The article offers another voice calling for an increased awareness of serious problems in our industry.

niete 14y ago

This is possibly the weakest article ever.

shadesandcolour 14y ago

This problem seems pretty circular to me. Girls don't want to join companies like this because it's a boys club, but it stays a boys club because girls don't want to join. I do feel bad for women who wind up in situation like this, and I personally have no problem with girls writing code or managing projects or being involved with the tech world if they want to. About the things that "suburban boys from Harvard would find cool" so that's why they were there, um, duh. They were suburban boys from Harvard who didn't really have a lot of women around the office. Obviously they're going to put things like that on the walls. Speaking from experience, the only thing dumber than a guy is a guy who is still in college. These aren't mature individuals yet, and while that's unfortunate, they have to be treated differently sometimes. Here's my problem with the bearskin thing. We have to remember who picked it up and put it on. Everyone was drunk, everyone was having fun. She picked it up and put it on her head and was being funny. I challenge you to find one drunk person, guy or girl, who would tell someone to stop doing something that is funny. The picture sounds like an issue of most pictures that wind up on Facebook after a party. They were taken at an inopportune moment and you wish that no one would have taken it. Long story short, some guys are dicks, and they have to work somewhere. When they get out of line, the issue should be dealt with like it was. Its unfortunate that the tech world still seems like a boys club, but it's a difficult problem to fix when the people working in the industry don't always see themselves for what they really are.