The Woman in the Facebook Frat House

http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304898704577478483529665936.html?mod=googlenews_wsj&mg=reno64-wsj

by brevityness • 14 years ago

46 61 14 years ago

professional.wsj.com

aheilbut• 14 years ago

I'm hearing a tiny, sad violin.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

Seems like a pretty straightforward account. Neither condemning not lauding.

gmrple• 14 years 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.

te_chris• 14 years 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).

pnmahoney5• 14 years 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.

__float2• 14 years 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.

niete3• 14 years ago

Taking this article seriously would seem to necessitate dismissing it.

walrus4• 14 years 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 (and try to ignore that it's the same pnmahoney who responded angrily to your comment :)

pnmahoney5• 14 years 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.

gfosco• 14 years 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• 14 years 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!

__float2• 14 years 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

DanielBMarkham• 14 years 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• 14 years 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. :)

walrus4• 14 years 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.

pnmahoney5• 14 years 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.

walrus4• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

temphn5• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

No offense, but that comes off as extremely conceited.

lclarkmichalek2• 14 years ago

Yes, usually any misogyny on hacker news is at least concealed behind pseudo rational arguments.

pnmahoney5• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

lucisferre6• 14 years ago

Honestly when it comes to the subject of women's issues in frat boy tech cultures I've seen people on this site post (and vote up) some stupid f'ing shit, but you may have just won the triple crown with this absolute sexist entilted load of crap. I love how you ended it with "male and female" just so you could feel a bit better about yourself in the morning.

taligent2• 14 years ago

I have to agree with you there. This post is every bad stereotype of IT workers rolled into one. In addition to the borderline misogyny is the dismissive attitude towards those not in IT.

As someone who has been in IT for 20+ years programming is SIMPLE compared to trying to get groups of people to work towards (and want to work towards) a common goal.

temphn5• 14 years ago

You can rant at heretical thoughts all you want. You offer no counterarguments other than pointing and screaming. I want you to recognize that the free speech of the internet means there are men who can and will offer different opinions about these matters. Anonymity means immunity from character assassination over a difference of opinion.

After all, who really has the power here? Isn't Sheryl Sandberg the billionaire, and those two engineers the ones whose careers were ruined?

niete3• 14 years ago

We are all ever so impressed with how progressive you are.

geon3• 14 years ago

> Mark Zuckerberg and those engineers made this customer service representative a millionaire. She repays them by trashing them in the Wall Street Journal.

If you mean she was paid in shares that turned out very valuable years later, thhen she has absolutely no reason to be grateful for them. The only reason she was not paid in cash was that the value of Facebook was uncertain. It could be a success, or it could flop. As with any stock market deals it was a gamble, and she was lucky.

Also, she was apaid employee. She would not have been hired if she didn't contribute to the success of the company. Therefore she made "those engineers" millionaries just as much.

temphn5• 14 years ago

  Therefore she made "those engineers" millionaries just as 
  much.

No. All contributions aren't equal. It takes someone special to write HipHop to compile PHP into C++. Engineers can (and do) do customer service in a pinch, customer service reps can't do engineering.

Doug Edwards, Google Employee 59, is more self-consciously reflective about this, recognizing explicitly in his biography that the company would have become successful if he weren't there. Losse and Sandberg only pat themselves on the back about hobbling the careers of engineers for their sins, real or imagined. If Losse could turn her own drunken donning of a bearskin rug into some bizarre cause for resentment, who knows what innocuous remark could have gotten transmogrified into cause for demotion or transfer of some hapless, apolitical engineer.

sp3322• 14 years ago

"unrepentantly boyish" is OK in certain places. Like, a boys' school, or a strip club or something. Our society has decided that work should not be one of those places, and we've enshrined that in law.

agateform2• 14 years ago

What laws? Could you please define "unrepentantly boyish"?

agateform2• 14 years ago

While its true that the majority of people in tech jobs or dangerous working class jobs are man, I understand why some people see misogyny when you wrote "white collar men need to stop apologizing for doing the difficult programming jobs" because it can come across as woman not being capable and not doing those difficult jobs...

With that said... It still surprises me that people in HN are quickly to point out misogyny but completely misses the man bashing, "boyish" shaming misandry from this article.

The article was not just sexist but also generally demeaning or condescending.

"...my first day at Facebook, the young, plain-looking guys in T-shirts..." "...woman in the office—an administrative assistant—was more animated, smiling toothily as she welcomed me in...."

The bad types of feminists seems to think that all man have power and/or privileges and are oppressors of woman and woman are always the oppressed victims with no privilege or power. The following quotes made her seem like she might be this type of feminist.

"...slight mocking disapproval that was my new colleagues' default tone in response to anything that resisted their power...."

"...Facebook album that Monday I was struck by the loaded nature of the image, ripe for interpretation, in which Mark appeared to be commanding a female employee to submit..."

"...photo was taken and posted on Facebook is that it didn't occur to anyone in the office that there was anything wrong with it, or that it revealed something unattractive about the culture of Facebook."

"...As Mark wrote on his business card with boyish hubris, "I'm CEO, bitch." The image of me in the bearskin was saying that power wasn't something to be questioned; it was something to collect and brandish..."

IIRC the "I'm CEO, bitch." business cards had to do with developers not becoming CEO of the company and not making as much money from their own creation.

"When I met Sheryl, the first thing I said was that she had really good skin," Mark continued, "and she does," he said, gesturing toward Sheryl, whose face had an admittedly creamy tone.

Was Mark talking about the actual skin or that she had good thick skin? It's pretty ironic if this is criticism of Mark considering she writes about peoples appearances in a condescending way.

pnathan• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

mahyarm2• 14 years 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.

lucisferre6• 14 years ago

I'm sure that's nothing like being discounted because you're a woman.

geon3• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

lucisferre6• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

markfinger• 14 years 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.

niete3• 14 years ago

This is possibly the weakest article ever.

shadesandcolour• 14 years 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.

The Woman in the Facebook Frat House

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