In August 2015, Dan Gackle (moderator of Hacker News) had been searching, for months, for a pretext to ban my account. I’d previously suggested that Silicon Valley engineers might be better served by collective action than vain hopes and startup equity, that tech-industry sexism came from the investor-level ranks rather than programming culture, and that venture capitalists’ funding decisions were often driven by their own careerist concerns rather than portfolio optimization. The man (and his predecessor, Paul Graham) had been waiting for me to slip up.
Then I said something stupid. Something that I have to own up to. Something that could even be interpreted as sexist (which I strive not to be). “The bad part” is italicized.
Sounds like Marissa Mayer took Google’s stack-ranking machinery and replicated [it], awful detail by awful detail. What a queynte.
At Google, the bottom categories are rarely used and “Meets Expectations” is a huge window (3.0-3.4) from the 3rd to 65th percentile. Since you only get your bucket, your manager could be saying that he’s giving you a perfectly respectable 3.4, while actually raping you in the ass with a 3.0.
Often, you have managers who give the 3.0 and 3.1 to keep reports immobile (they can’t transfer) while conveying that they are getting average or average-plus scores. But whenever there’s a witch-hunt-I-mean-dishonest-layoff-I-mean-“Low Performer Initiative” those people given 3.0s get hit with PIPs, which is not what even their managers wanted.
I shouldn’t have said it. It distracted people from the message. It added an insult when someone’s actions already condemned her.
If the sexism wasn’t clear: see, if I’d been talking about a man who had imposed evil stack-ranking processes on an entire company, I would have likely called him a cunt, because no one considers that word to be a gender slur when the target is a man (and I’ve used it that way, myself). Since it was a woman, I softened the language and used queynte, a non-incendiary Middle English word, most of whose meanings had nothing to do with genitalia, and that probably isn’t related to “cunt” (which is probably derived from Latin cunnus) at all.
Was I being sexist? I can’t be sure, but my guess is that if it were a man who decided to fly a plane into his company with stack-ranking, I would have let him have it, and said far worse things. Since it was a woman, I toned down the invective.
Okay, there’s a separate issue that I don’t want to discount. Should “cunt” or “dick” (or even “asshole”, which is not in my interest, but a locus of pleasure for some) be insults at all? Should we use “fuck” in the negative (synonymous with “harm” or “destroy”, as in “fucked up”)? Why is “sucks” (or even “cocksucker”) an insult when, in reality, if the worst that you can say about a person is that he or she performs fellatio, then you have no legitimate reason to condemn that person?
To be honest, as one who uses a lot of profanity (because the tech industry has been invaded by bad people, because we’re at fucking war here, because a lot of programmers are apathetic and have been lulled into complacency by okay-ish salaries during an economic boom, because sometimes impassioned anger that tramples social acceptability is the only way to reach people) these are questions that I ask myself. I’m getting older, and I doubt that I’ll ever hate the things that I am saying now, but I worry that I might regret the way I’m saying them. If I ever have children, I’m not going to try to prevent them from hearing certain words (that’s impossible) but I would not want them to be infected by certain insidious social attitudes: like the assumptions that sex and genitalia are somehow “bad” things, or the myriad negative implications made about women in our vulgar lexicon.
The above in mind, I don’t want to go on trial to defend certain usages that might be less-than-healthy. I’m already guilty. I say that things of low quality “suck” and call people “dickheads” or worse when they act like, well, jerks. It is a worthwhile discussion, whether the use of bodily dysphemisms for disagreeable and toxic people– something that I, like almost everyone else, do frequently– ought to be socially acceptable. I’m just not ready to have it here. It’s something that I worry about, more than might be obvious, but not enough to abandon certain powerful tools in the English language.
Speaking of tools, back to Dan Gackle: he needed a pretext to ban a person who had the gall to mention, on his site related to tech-industry concerns, that collective bargaining might be a good idea. When I made the comment above, I gave him the opportunity. He deleted my comment and responded to it, deliberately misquoting me. When it was made clear to him that he’d be walking into a 7-figure lawsuit in doing this, he changed it back and acknowledged that I’d never called Ms. Mayer “a cunt”, but remained firm in banning my account, continuing to take me out of context while I could not defend myself.
Being banned from Hacker News was probably a good thing for me because, honestly, the site had become a toxic waste of time. Having that 30-60 minutes of my day liberated was a favor. I’m justifiably irked when it comes the reputation issues inherent in how Dan Gackle went about this, but if he’d just reached out and said, “Hey man, I need you to go away, because this union stuff is causing problems upstairs”, we could have worked something out.
Paul Buchheit, next, started slandering me on Quora, so I challenged Paul Graham to a rap battle. (I didn’t expect the battle to occur, though I would have shown for it if needed. I was drawing attention to Paul Graham’s increasing inability to prevent his subordinates from starting stupid fights under the Y Combinator name.) Silly, right? Probably not even worth response, eh? Well, in retaliation for Buchheit’s perceived (?) humiliation, an investor in Quora (very likely, someone at Y Combinator) demanded that the site ban me.
I had over 8,000 followers, was a three-year “Top Writer” and I was a model participant in that community. None of that mattered. Quora employees who knew me (we’d worked together on podcasts and publications) were told to shut their mouths or get fired. Banning me from Quora wasn’t enough for these assholes, of course. They had to take a potshot at my reputation, by claiming that I was running a voting ring. (I wasn’t. Given that I had 8,000 followers and my comments often received hundreds of legitimate upvotes, what would be the point?) In fact, I did have an alternate account that I used to browse health related topics in 2012, because Quora’s user privacy story was dreadful. If you had even read a question, others would know it. I didn’t like being forced into that degree of transparency in what I was reading, so I had a “lurker” account. That’s what I did, and I consider it obvious that that’s not the same thing as the (legitimately ban-worthy) offense of running a voting ring.
I’m exhausted with tech-industry drama. Worst of all, I hate the fact that the people who are targeted by it aren’t allowed to defend themselves. I hate knowing that I’m taking far more risk by writing this post than Paul Buchheit took when he slandered me on Quora.
For example, I know someone who got “Perfed”, about a year ago, at a large tech company (here, “$BIGCORP”) for reporting sexual harassment. Fearing for zir reputation, ze (still on the job market) is still telling a “why I left” story that is far from the truth, in order to avoid “bad-mouthing” $BIGCORP. This professional omerta is disgusting. The lowly software engineer is expected to allow powerful people to ruin her reputation, but if she even suggests that a previous employer might have been unfair or unethical, she’s branded a “troublemaker” and judged unhireable. It’s bullshit. Petty disagreements (“drama”) don’t deserve to be aired– on that, I agree– but so long as people are penalized for exposing genuine unethical behavior by employers, employers in the tech industry will continue to be extremely unethical. They face no consequences, so why would they change?
I’ll admit that sometimes I say things that I probably shouldn’t, but let’s put all of this in perspective. Marissa Mayer implemented a stack-ranking system, if it works, has already destroyed hundreds of lives. Google’s stack-ranking system (“Perf”) has certainly claimed thousands of victims, and I know that not all of them have gotten their careers back on track. If Google’s “Perf” hasn’t contributed to at least 15 suicides (I understand that Google’s HR has a Perf-related suicide response plan) then I will consider myself shown up and leave a $100 bill on the altar of Paul Graham. So we have that, for the damage on “that side”: lives ruined by corporate shenanigans. Let’s even look at my personal experiences. Dan Gackle took something that I said out of context, in order to misrepresent what I said and damage my reputation. Paul Buchheit slandered me on Quora, and then Marc Bodnick banned me from Quora and claimed, knowing it to be false, that I had been operating a voting ring. That’s what these guys did. That’s who they are. As for my sin… well, I said something rude on the Internet about a millionaire CEO.
I’m beyond words with my disgust, when it comes to the tech industry. My first interaction with Paul Buchheit, ever, was when he started attacking me on Quora with claims that were provably false. Why does some millionaire ex-Googler need to start a fight with me? Have they resorted to personal attacks and reputation hits because they know that they can’t win on ideas? That’s certainly what it looks like. One thing is clear and proven: if there weren’t at least one venture capitalist afraid of me, then I would never have been banned from Quora.
Meanwhile, there’s one thing that I haven’t justified. I spilled words on tech drama, without answering the question: does this stuff matter? The answer is “God, I hope not.” I’ve not been interested in tech-industry drama, but it has been interested in me, and it’s extremely tiring. I don’t like it when I go to a job interview and a quarter of an hour is wasted on things that aren’t relevant to anything. I don’t want this garbage, and these people, in my life. There are so many other things that I could be using my time and talents on.
It’s probably not a secret that I’m looking to move back to finance. Why? When I’m asked this, I say, “The ethics are better.” People find that shocking, because the mainstream overestimates the ethical faults of Wall Street and underestimates those of the VC-funded technology sector. So here’s the difference, and it’s important. When Wall Street fails, ethically speaking, the world feels it. It’s uncommon, but the impact is high, fortunes are lost, and people go to jail. The software industry’s ethical failures, for a contrast, are generally limited in their effects. Because finance is more powerful and more relevant, its sins get far more exposure. Sleaze in the tech sector, on the other hand, is so much more commonplace. It may be public rarely, but there’s so much more of it. Startup founders don’t even try to hide it anymore from the less-than-human employees on 0.05 percent. Finally, bankers are rarely stupidly unethical. Tech people slime each other, often when there’s nothing to gain from it. What did Paul Buchheit gain when he attacked me on Quora? What did Marc Bodnick gain? Nothing. This stupid tech drama is a negative-sum game, one that I’ve wanted no part in, for a long-ass time. I just want to make things better. That’s all. I want to make myself better, the industry better, and my work better. I don’t care what happens to people like Buchheit; I just want them to go away.
When it comes to tech sleaze, the example that I first cite, although it’s not the only one, is that when banks have tough years, they have layoffs. They own up to it, pay severance, and get on with it. “We had a bad year and had to let good people go.” When tech companies have bad years, they have “low performer initiatives” and throw 5-10 percent of their people under the bus. The effect is the same– jobs get lost, sometimes good people get killed by the dice, and both the company and its people feel raw over what happens– but the banks take responsibility, while the tech companies preserve their reputations (monotonic expansion myth) at the expense of those being let go. This is just one of about 100 topics on which, when compared against each other for ethics, the bankers and traders come out ahead of the tech executives. In technology, our crab mentality is severe, and the modesty of our best allows the arrogance of our worst to go unchecked.
I’ve tired of the nonsense and never-ending drama that afflicts this industry. I’m sick of explaining certain things to people. I’m sick of having to justify myself in light of the fact that I actually fucking fought back and got a bit bloody. Life’s too short and I have too many legitimate projects and concerns (writing, code, cats, the gym, conferences) that need time and attention.
