The do-or-die environments of most startups just pushes everyone but the bros out.
I work for a software company with around 1000 employees and it's still a very relaxed environment:
- No dress code
- Free snacks, soda, coffee, tea
- 3 weeks vacation starting out
- Top of the line Xeon Workstation or comparable laptop with multiple monitors
- Flex work hours. I come in around 10am after exercising in the morning.
- No crazy work weeks (averaged around 40 hours a week the past year)
- Work from home when needed (bad weather, etc)
- Lax dress code (collared shirt, jeans on Friday only)
- Free soda in the home office
- 120 hours PTO + sick time
- Start any time between 6 and 9
- 8 hour day includes 1 hour lunch break, so really 35 hr/wk of work
- Overtime is explicitly banned, you actually need approval (since most time is billed to a client)
- WFH is available depending on your client, some have access restrictions that make it impossible but barring that you can WFH when needed/approved
If you are in the bay area, you might want to take a look at PlanGrid. We have a diverse culture which we're proud of, value work-life balance, and still build cool things that make a difference.
Alas your company is in the city and I prefer the valley.
> Unlimited vacation days
If a candidate requested a firm six weeks of accrued PTO, would that be granted?
I internally translate "unlimited vacation" to "as little vacation as possible".
Personally, I'm interested in minimum vacation policies instead. The founders do reiterate frequently that 5 weeks is expected.
I think the bro-ness goes along side the "work hard, play hard, be at the office all hours" mentality. I've been to a few different gatherings where startups were pitching (including YC) and tune out anyone who pulls the "we are a family, we are here all hours, we blahblahblah" type thing.
Liking your coworkers and developing a desire to hang out socially, etc. should develop organically instead of some "mandatory fun" type work culture.
I would love to know the answer too. I suspect that thanks to advances of feminism, there are now more professional careers available for women (such as various management positions) and they prefer those to programming or technology. But this theory is, for some reason, controversial.
Which isn't to say that people would exclude you from their team if you don't get involved, but you couldn't say that you have the easy camaraderie that most of the team seems to have. You're a little outlier, you're not quite in-step, references fly over your head. And you have to be _so careful_ to be friendly, but not _so_ friendly that your co-workers think you're hitting on them.
Occasionally, you miss a decision that happened to be discussed at the cocktail bar over lunch - it was just a spur of the moment thing, forgot to invite you, didn't think you would be interested. You talk about how you would have solved the problem, but it's just not seen as graceful enough to be worth exploring further. Because you weren't involved in making those decisions, your name doesn't come up when being considered for lead positions.
You're at a company event, and you think you've escaped someone asking you about your spouse that must work there. Then, someone hands you the trash to take out while they tell a hilarious joke about the only things men are good for.
You can't put your finger on any one thing (ok, maybe the trash thing), but when another opportunity comes along in a different field, maybe you take it. You can't say you really enjoy your work anyways.
The requirement for warmth enables politicking.
The interesting thing about the culture of projects like the kernel dev mailing list is that there is a strong culture of only caring about "Is the code from this person good?" and dismissing the question "Is this a good person (according to my own personal definition of what a good person is)?"
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make in contrast - could you qualify how politicking and 'warmth' is relevant to contributing to the brogrammer culture?
That said, now that I understand it, I feel like the parent comment being sexist toward both men and women to illustrate a false dichotomy.
It stereotypes women as being interested "wine tours, maybe some yoga, [and] trashy soap operas". I've met plenty of women in tech that have no interest in such things and I've met plenty of male engineers in tech interested in the first two of those three things. I don't know anyone in tech interested in the last item and to be honest I can't imagine a dominantly female tech industry establishing a culture where anyone is interested in such things. Looking at all the female engineers I work with that are great coders and great to work with and solve problems with, I can't imagine them really creating a culture that values social activities different from the ones I see my male colleagues participating in. They'd still play board games. They'd still read and watch sci-fi. They'd still hike and cycle. None of these activities strike me as particularly male oriented. They strike me as nerd oriented and they are incompatible with societies neurotypical social expectations for both men and women.
===
Strangely this particularly part of the comment caught my attention:
"And you have to be _so careful_ to be friendly, but not
_so_ friendly that your co-workers think you're hitting on
them."
When I look around at my workplace and previous workplaces, there are women who have a lot of ease fitting in and there are women who don't. Those that do remarkably well are often remarkably similar to the men who do well. They care about code in and out of work. Their interests outside of work are nerdy (hacking, making, sci-fi, board games, etc.). They spend relatively little time preening (social self-grooming).
Those that are most challenged and have the biggest difficulty fitting in and getting along with their colleagues don't share these traits. One trait I see in common with many of the women that have difficulty in tech culture is that the more closely approximate the gender roles and expectations that society at large sets for them; the most damaging of which is preening. Society has for a long time had a strong expectation for women to self-groom socially a lot more than men. Women are basically expected to wake up each morning and dress well, put on make up, etc. Those that don't do this will encounter friction socially outside the office and those that do will encounter friction inside the office.
The reason I find this observation interesting is that it's not even a problem exclusive to women in tech. Men that socially self-groom are more likely to feel like outsiders. An example of such high social self-grooming that would make you feel like you don't belong is wearing collared shirts, nice pants, nice shoes, possibly even a suit jacket or even a full suit. Interestingly, Greg Foster over at AirBnB even wrote about this exact type of discrimination in his essay "Does tech discriminate against suits?"[0].
Assuming this is valid anecdotal observation, there are two things to consider:
- For this particular phenomena, is this illustrative of tech discriminating against women or is it tech discriminating against the high self-grooming? (I'm not saying there aren't other ways in which women are made to feel like outsiders, I'm just picking one in particular that applies to men as well, but AFAICT seems to affect women disproportionately, since I've observed that women are likely to continue to highly self-groom in an engineering environment.)
- If it is, then is the problem with tech discriminating against male or females that are high self groomers or does the problem lie with society at large that imposes far greater pressure on women to self-groom outside the workplace. Put another way, should hacker culture be accepting and welcoming of high social social self-grooming or is it mutually incompatible like low social self-grooming would be in an industry such as fashion and design?
Anyways, the reason this original comment is additionally interesting in light of this observation, is that high social self-grooming by women (or men) generally contributes to feelings of sexual attraction, such that those women that do feel and give into society's pressure to self-groom likely have to worry far more about being friendly with their co-works than those that don't.
Anecdotally, and speaking for myself here, the female colleagues I feel sexual attraction for and that I possibly would attempt to court (were they not professional colleagues of mine) are those that are higher social self-groomers. Those that are low social self-groomers feel far more like professional peers than potential partners.
At the end of the day, the evolutionary reason for social self grooming comes down to status and mating. Men, especially men in Silicon Valley, don't have the same pressure from society to dress in a way that appeals to courtship instincts (the average male techie outfit of ill-fitting hoodies, jeans, sneakers and t-shirt doesn't get you that far in terms of attracting the attention of those attracted to your gender or gender identity).
I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts here? Agree, disagree?
Lastly, please don't interpret my attempt here to describe and predict as an attempt to prescribe. I'm thinking aloud in an attempt to be mindful and seek deeper understanding here.
[0] https://medium.com/@gregorymfoster/does-tech-discriminate-ag...
In any case, it doesn't matter really. We don't know what the truth is, and AFAICT no one is really looking for it (I unfortunately don't have enough (interest/(resources*time)) to do a study).
From small anecdata I have, I had several smart women told me that they want to quit because they themselves feel they are not smart enough or skilled enough to do programming. I have never heard of somebody wanting to quit (the field) because there was some idiot thinking they can't do it. In fact, having to prove yourself may actually be motivational.
And I think I am not righteous enough to claim that when a person says "the reason is that I don't feel I can do it", then there must be something in the environment causing it. It may simply be their preference, and I have to respect that. Maybe their thinking is delusional, but unless they clearly say, "this external reason is the reason", we can't do anything about it if we respect personal freedom of choice.
So yeah, we should do a study, ask women, why they don't want to do it, and if they say, "it's boring", just accept that as a fact of life and move on and stop searching for reasons in patriarchies and whatnot.
And I don't think it's quite morally correct to try to somehow correct people's preferences, however silly they might be. If they should be convinced for economic reasons (say, STEM is important), then it should be done with money.
(1) The mini-computer happened. You can't read the part in Clayton Cristensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" that talks about how the industry went from 5" drives to 3.5" drives and not see how many computing dinosaurs disappeared to be replaced by completely new companies founded by outsiders that inherited practically none of the culture of the big traditional tech companies from the days of The Organization Man (or Woman).
which lead to...
(2) The central locus of the tech industry migrated from Route 128 and MIT, which were the power houses post WWII to Silicon Valley and Stanford. The two had polar opposite cultures. Gone were the cultures of places like DEC and IBM to be replaced with the cultures of HP then Apple. AnnaLee Saxenian's book "Regional Advantage" does a great job of chronicling that shift from Route 128 to Silicon Valley and how East Coast and West Coast tech culture differed. If you look at pretty much every story that talked about tech culture back in the day versus today, they are often as much about Route 128 versus Silicon Valley, but few people are aware that such a big shift happened in tech from the 70s to the 80s. It wasn't just new companies built by the same people from the old companies. They were new companies built by complete outsiders to the old computing industry. At MIT, there was tech on campus and mainstream culture was exposed, thus the companies hired from the mainstream. When the center of tech moved to a couple of buildings across the country nestled among rural orchard communities, the people worked at those companies were not a sample of that community, rural orchard farmers. Instead they were the people who were so deeply involved in engineering AND sufficiently detached from their social structures on the East Coast, that they packed up their bags and moved Westward. Migrations are remarkable for their filtering effect. You can see this just by comparing each coast non-tech culture and west coast non-tech culture. The engineers that ended up in Silicon Valley were qualitatively different in attitude and baggage like all the people that settled in SF during the Summer of Love compared to those that remained in their comfortable rooted East Coast lives. Heck, Apple used to fly a pirate flag in their offices. You would have never seen such a display at companies like IBM, DEC, GE, Philips, etc.
> I gather that I'm about the same age as the author.
Fwiw, and I'm not sure that's much, I'm probably a lot younger and male to boot, and I think the same when visiting the offices of some companies that are popular these days.
Well, it's worth something to me because I sometimes wonder if it's just me being "the old guy" rather than just having a work ethic that causes me to want to go to work to work, not play foosball (not that I haven't kicked some 20-something ass at the foosball table from time to time during work hours).
Boys are struggling in many areas in western society. They happen to be succeeding in tech. It's no wonder they're edgy about letting outsiders manipulate the field.
Silicon Valley preaches individual achievement and personal responsibility. No doubt boys often needed those skills to survive an education system designed around them. Feminism often pushes for change at the institutional level, not for individual accountability thus the tension IMO.
More than that, your opinion about education seems to not actual support the fact that fewer women are going into Computer Science and related fields than were in the 80s. If it was all down to education/politics, and there's more money now in this field than there was then, why has that ratio gone down? OTOH, if the people making the hiring decisions at startups are choosing to not hire women (consciously or not) and those decisions are trickling into the rest of the midsize companies, then maybe there's something wrong with the hiring process itself.
In general there are fewer men participating in higher education than women:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_306.10.a...
2012 shows enrollment at: 43% male, 57% female = 14% difference
In my original comment I said that men are succeeding in tech and not much else. I think these numbers show that.
If there are fewer women going into CS then it's not the hiring process that's the problem, it's a supply issue.
People have many reasons to create startups, but the decision to make one is way down the pipeline of where any issue lies.
What makes someone passionate enough about technology that they choose to study it, pursue it as a career and eventually maybe do a startup? That question gets answered early in life and doesn't have to be the same for everyone.
Women don't have to be interested in technology. They should be given the same opportunities as men if they are though and from everything I've ever seen in our industry, they are.
which are basically, woman being treated equally as men
TBH, this dichotomy isn't even a feature isolated to feminism, but is a basic feature with most -isms and movements (for or against). There are those from one side that work towards equality and those that work towards equity, and on the other side there are those that work towards inequality and those that work towards inequity.
An approach for equality or inequality starts with promoting an idea or attitude to achieve a change in treatment.
An approach for equity or inequity jumps straight to seeking for arbitrarily chosen, unequal, and unnatural changes in treatment that breeds resentment because there is no establishment of understanding between both sides. Changes in attitude follow after the changes from a need to resolve cognitive dissonance (which leads to all sorts of zany, invented and often polar justifications for the unnatural changes (because of equity promotes an "us versus them" dichotomy instead of a unifying attitude of "we"))
When the industry moved from the east cost Organization Man (or Woman) operations, the computer science and engineering career largely fell off the map at Universities.
Up until ~93 (the year of the IBM layoffs) colleges and universities were grooming you for Organization Man (or Woman) career companies like IBM, DEC, GM, Ford, Chrysler, GE, Philips, AT&T, Shell Oil, Exxon, etc.
When tech stopped being an industries made of career companies, it became a fringe industry that you only knew was viable if you knew people making a living in it. At that point we have an industry that grows far more slowly based on Granovetter's strength of weak ties and far more rapidly based on strong personal hobby interest in subject matter such that you end up learning about the myriad companies in Silicon Valley well before there was a tech media like Wired and TechCrunch standing on roof tops and declaring a gold rush.
Before Wired magazine, no one without an already strong personal interest in computers and software really knew anything about what was happening in Silicon Valley. It was essentially non-existent for an entire generation (X) and most of a second generation (Y). It's only with Millenials that Silicon Valley has been considered a good career path for those with capital in terms of technical aptitude/competence, but aren't hard core computer nerds.
I'm curious how the engineering gender ratios evolved for companies like IBM and DEC versus HP and Apple from from 1970 to 1995. Now with those figures in hand, I'm curious what impact layoffs and workforce reductions at IBM, DEC and other highly visible traditionally Organization Man (and Woman) companies had on the industry ratio and the visibility of women in the industry.
I was born in the early 80s and my formative years when I would have been thinking about "what I want to be when I grow up" were basically the mid 80s to the mid 90s. At the time, I had exactly one engineering role model from elementary school to high school, an engineer at Philips, despite the fact that I grew up in a reasonably affluent town about a 30 minutes from the IBM headquarters in upstate NY. Computer Science wasn't even on the radar career wise. You were encouraged to become a doctor, lawyer or business person. If you were interested in companies like IBM, you were encouraged to want to get an MBA and be on that side of the social divide in those Organization Man (and Woman) companies, because the engineering side wasn't considered a path towards affluence for the systems thinking gifted like medicine and law were.
Young, smart hackers came to believe that it is not just acceptable to exclusively hire people who look and act like them, but imperative for the survival of their company. Unconscious discrimination is inevitable when you hire based on nebulous factors of compatibility rather than concrete measures of ability.
When a founder hires in this way, they create an immense obstacle to diversity. The company grows on this ethos, creating barriers both direct ("she isn't a good fit") and indirect ("I don't want to work in this frathouse"). Improving diversity in these companies is like steering an oil tanker.
In my opinion, we need a new hiring norm that reflects the hacker ethos. We need to abandon the multi-day interview gauntlet and replace it with a fair, blinded work assessment. Classical music has seen a boom in diversity since the introduction of blind auditions and we should follow suit. Everything a developer does can be fairly and accurately assessed through IRC and Git commits.
I gather that I'm about the same age as the author. And she's right, there was a time that we worked side-by-side with the wimmin folk and didn't think a thing of it. Hey, it was a brave new world of software, and in that brave new world gender didn't matter anymore. I remember it as a time of software being a good place for women to go because it paid well and it didn't matter as much as other fields if you were "a girl". It worked out well for my Mom around that era.
But I don't know when it changed and why it changed, so I don't have good answers for the current situation. But things have changed for sure.