I think asking coworkers out is a huge no-no. If the only people in your orbit you feel you can connect with that way are at work, that's a sign your personal life needs some development. However, let's say you have a robust personal life, and you just have this absolutely amazing co-worker, who totally is not your subordinate, and ideally you don't even work directly with, and you want to ask them out... again.. I discourage it.... but:

Ask them out someplace public outside of work. If they say no, that means no, and just drop it. If you hear "I don't know, I don't really like to date coworkers" that's also a no - don't push the issue. If they say "I don't think that's a good idea" - also a no. If they say "Eh....." or laugh or whatever, it's a no, and just drop it.

Be aware a no could make things really awkward for you two, and it may even piss off your co-worker who perhaps viewed you as this great work friend but now thinks things are weird. It can hurt them in other ways: they may also blame themselves for not being more into you, and question if they lead you on. So if you get rejected, just say "Hey that's cool. It was a long-shot, I understand."

'Asking out co-workers is a huge no-no' - to me this feels almost anti-humanist to the point where business is truly more important than our own lives, our being, our existence and our own free will. There is a massive difference between asking out co-workers and sexual harassment.

I agree. Answers like the above one indicate a level of dystopia/fear that itself is concerning. Friendship on any level is highly dependent on proximity in space and time. We need to be aware of how our righteous minds work and stop throwing stones all over the place.

Exactly my feelings, I wouldn't hire someone into my team that I didn't think couldn't become my friend should the situation play out as such, it just seems logical to me.

That sounds like pretty dysfunctional hiring process, no matter what gender of candidate.

As a humanist, I disagree. This is my reasoning: Unless the feelings are mutual, asking someone out at work can have negative consequences for the person you're asking, even if your intentions were good. You can't control their feelings, but you can control your actions. Also, believe it or not, your romantic options far outstrip your employment options. Asking people out at work just seems easier but it's quite complicated.

>Unless the feelings are mutual

That's the whole point of asking someone out -- to find out whether the feelings are mutual.

Yes, that's part of my point - that's why it's called /asking/, a world where people are not free to ask - I can only imagine would result in a world where people take, and that - I think we've all whitnessed at times.

If you two barely know each other and never even really talked, then they are unlikely to be mutual. I mean, they are even unlikely to be one sided.

This story is not about couple where two people were fond of each other and started relationship. This is about sending text messages out of cold to women he barely know, who never shown interest and you have power to hire or not. That has nothing to do with love.

I think there's been a misunderstanding, I was making comments about general workplaces - not about the situation in the article.

Maybe you need to step back a bit and think about this a little more clearly. The issue here isn't the supremacy of business over the individual; it's whether or not it's a good idea for an individual to behave this way because doing so may harm their lives, being, existance, free will, or all of the above of the other person.

I mean, it's OK to be naked, but it's a bad idea to be naked in a public park. We don't assume that means that the municipal government has total supremacy over your being and free will and is anti-humanist.

>If the only people in your orbit you feel you can connect with that way are at work, that's a sign your personal life needs some development.

Then a very, very significant portion (quite possibly close to half of the population, or approaching thereof in some fields) have personal life developmental problems......or....it could just be that your world view or definition of "appropriate" is a bit off. Which one of those situations is more likely?

Since we are talking about highly male dominated field, his definition is right. They have problem and there is not enough female programmers for them all. And even if they would marry one, they won't spend time with their children and all care will be on her - meaning that they need traditional women who has little carrer ambitions and is simultaneously programmer.

It just so happens that traditional women tend to chose more feminine professions and people with little carrer ambitions tend to prefer slower workplace.

So, good luck.

Give us a break, it's not a huge no-no. One of the most lasting TV series of all time was based entirely on co-worker romances (The Office). I know multiple girls and guys who met their SOs as coworkers.

You may think it's lame (I do too fwiw), but it's still clearly acceptable almost everywhere, so I don't appreciate your gatekeeping.

I don't see how I'm "gatekeeping" by merely answering a question by giving my honest opinion and then pointing out a tactful way to go about doing something I personally would not do.

The version I responded to lead with "Asking out coworkers is a huge no-no," which is pretty clearly gatekeeping.

This is an interesting blend of rigid paranoia and moralistic finger wagging.

It's not as black and white as you try and portray it. Sure, if the other person says "sorry, I'm busy", that's a definite no. But what if they say is "sorry I'm busy, perhaps some other time"? Are they actually busy and do they actually mean that? Or is it a polite rejection?

At this point, you need to figure out based on body language which one they mean. If you guess wrong and ask again, you're a sexual harasser. If the original conversation was over text and you have no body language other than emojis you're more likely to guess wrong. Nice going, sexual harasser.

And I think it's safe to say that many women will refuse to even consider asking a man out. It's entirely on the guy to initiate everything. Now put yourself in the shoes of someone who spends most of their time at work. In this thread I've seen jibes about how such people should get a life, but let's admit for a second that that's not easy. Such people have a choice - ask out a coworker or remain alone for a long while. In a situation like that, I can understand how they'd be strongly inclined towards interpreting "some other time" as an opportunity rather than a rejection.

That dude will be alone whether he technically has girlfriend or not. By your own description, he spends all the time in work, lets assume working. So they get maybe cofee break together anyway. If he is not working majority of the time he is in work, then maybe he should go socialize elsewhere so that he does not slow other people's work with socialising. There is nothing more irritating than having late meeting or having to work weekend, because basically dude who was supposed to do code review socialize instead of working.

This dude wants it both ways. He wants to be seen as super hard worker, hero who is all the time working - and at the same time he wants to have non work life experiences. So he wants workplace to become like a bar or playground. Then the workplace becomes ineffective but we all get to pretend we are hard workers.

> In a situation like that, I can understand how they'd be strongly inclined towards interpreting "some other time" as an opportunity rather than a rejection.

But then she gets blamed for "not being direct enough" - including here on hacker news. Altrough the issue is not that he did not get it, issue is that he really really does not want to hear the no.

I mean, I get the wishful thinking and dont mind relationship between people, but don't then chalk the persistent dude behavior on girls not being clear or direct enought.

> At this point, you need to figure out based on body language which one they mean.

Or you could ask for clarification. To get a definite answer, you should not ask the same kind of question that got you an ambiguous response last time, but instead directly address that ambiguity.

That's not how romantic relationship work, asking for clarification of ambiguities in a phase where 90% of things done and said are pure ambiguity

> I think asking coworkers out is a huge no-no

No way. It's a case by case basis. If someone legitimately seems interested in you, and you are interested in them, there's nothing wrong with asking them if they want to get a bite to eat or something once. Baby steps. It's just inappropriate to immediately reach for the "let's go out" or a romantic advance, and especially inappropriate to "pursue" someone. This is true in almost every social sphere, not just the workplace. It's called being a gentleman.

The idea is to be a gentleman, not a creep. Whether at a bar or at the park or at work.

The only difference as far as the workplace is if you have some sort of position of power above the other employee. Even if you somehow maintain complete impartiality to them, others will probably not see it that way and think it unfair to them. Not to mention that 9.9/10 times someone doesn't want to be hit on by their boss.

You gotta understand, for many people their work life and personal life are the same. A lot of happy couples met in the workplace.

That really depends. At my current startup there are three "<Company> couples".

Let's see how long that lasts after the company is done being a startup.

Of course there is: "Hey, I'm interested in you. Would you like to go out on a date sometime?" If they say yes, great, plan a date. If they say no, respond with "Ok, that's cool." Then continue to act the same way towards them you did before.

There's a lot of moaning here about how any interaction with a potential partner is an arrest waiting to happen, but the underlying sentiment to that is that everyone else is a vengeful harpy waiting to crucify you. It's an endless nice-guy support group meeting. When you read the articles about Mcclure and Sacco and others, though, you see common things: they're hitting on women coming to them for professional consideration, which necessarily involves a power imbalance; and their requests aren't to go on a date, they're "let's fuck" (i.e., they're inappropriate in most circumstances). You wouldn't ask a girl you met through mutual friends to just go to bed, you'd say "let's get dinner and drinks". But the creep behaviour here is creep behaviour almost everywhere, with an added dose of "I can make or break your career, so choose your answer carefully."

There are very specific definitions of sexual harassment. Asking a coworker out once when neither of you is in the other's chain of command isn't anywhere near that. If you believe that the word no means 'try again tomorrow', feel like part of asking out is to mention that there will be negative consequences for saying no, or work-related advantages for saying yes, and ignore others when they tell you your behavior is making them uncomfortable, then you are going in the road towards harassment.

Let's be realistic about harassment: While seeing something like this triggers fear that suddenly innocent behavior will lead to harassment calls, in practice, your typical male engineer will get away with habitual misbehavior: An employer will only get involved if the behavior at least comes close to qualify as harassment and is well documented. One has to be quite clueless to get anywhere near that level accidentally.

We can be afraid, but that doesn't make the fear well founded. The cases that we see in the media involve systemic, repeated misbehavior from people in situations of power, not a random IC that asks a woman engineer out politely when she isn't interested. Asking your coworkers out is fine.

A good antidote to the fears is to just listen to women talk about what they deal with. There's plenty of articles out there, and heck, even tweet storms form well known women engineers, explaining the kind of shitty behavior they are exposed to every day. It will show you how there's an abyss between what you think is OK and what they have to put up with.

> You work at a technology company. You are attracted to another coworker, who is NOT your subordinate. Is there some manner in which it is acceptable to express your interest? Or is this just not OK at all?

Yes, there are plenty of manners to express it, just like at any company. That said, there are a lot of ways to express it that are just making someone's work life terrible.

One reason it's not OK, at least in tech, is that women are so hugely under-represented.

If a male employee not in a position of hierarchical power innocently expresses his interest to a single female coworker in the entire course of his career, is he evil? Is it harassment? Probably not... But from their female coworker's perspective, that's enough to create a pretty steady stream of random attention.

I think even that best case "only once" scenario creates a sort of crowd-sourced harassment baseline, on top of which you have to add repeat offenders, ones in a position of hierarchical or effective power, those who deal badly with rejection, the fact that the same thing happens in the street, the subway etc...

This crowd-sourced harassment issue needs more attention.

Offering guidance to men without acknowledging the cumlative effect of these random interactions is an oversight.

Due to the statistical imbalances of men and women in various workplaces, a slightly better rule than "ask once, and be polite if they say no" might* be "roll d20, on 20 ask once..."

*just a strawman, this isn't actually a good solution; nor are prediction markets, lotteries, drawing straws, competitions of fitness

I can't really think of any good ways to do it. The good news is that on a software engineer's salary if you're going to do a lot of drinking alone you can at least buy the good stuff.

How about "Would you be interested in going on a date some time?" And if the answer is "No thanks" the response to that can be "OK, I understand."

Have we all become so engrossed with our smartphones 24/7 we've forgotten how to be face-to-face direct with other actual humans?

I've seen someone get fired for doing that. And it was really just that.

I think there are many polite ways of expressing interest, just like you would express interest in any other social setting. I don't think that's inappropriate at all - for example to politely ask out for a coffee, obviously not at the workplace, but somewhere outside. However, in the light of recent activities, I would be quite cautious of any such moves, inherently. The last thing you want is for your actions to be misinterpreted.

Nobody reasonable is going to misinterpret a request for coffee as sexual harassment unless you are socially inept.

"Hey, do you want to get coffee sometime?"

"Oh, no thanks"

"Ok, cool. No problem"

Proceed to move on with your life.

Absolutely, reasonable is the key word here.

Right, and hopefully there exists one reasonable person in the chain of person -> manager -> HR

>Or is this just not OK at all?

You are asking single 18-30 year old who spend most of their waking hours at work, to not make any advance to the only females they probably see in the week.

Good luck with trying to fight nature.

sorry dude, but that is not an acceptable answer. We live in a society - with moral and legal structures of what is acceptable. During my the life of this startup and the previous one I have gotten f'ed over royally by a small amount of individuals where they infuriated me incredibly. "nature" would have made me punch them in the face - but that is incredibly unacceptable behavior in a society or work environment. You have to be rational and understand what is OK and what is not like an adult.

I think most normal/adult people don't want to live in a world where you can't ask out your coworker.

What target population are you basing this on?

I would expect that the overwhelming majority of normal/adult women in tech want to live in exactly that world, and I certainly want to live in a world where roughly 50% of people in tech are women. So it only takes a few men to agree to make it the majority.

There are literally billions of people in the world. Being professional just means that you exclude coworkers and people you do business with from romantic relationships. Pick anyone else from the billions of people - just not the ones you do business with.

There are spectrums of how much "business" I do with a coworker. If it's another person that works on the same floor or in the same building as me but whom I don't work with directly, then I don't really see any good reason to exclude them.

IMO being professional is more about how you handle the situation if the relationship goes south or never gets off the ground. PDA in the workplace is also unprofessional, obviously. But asking someone out? Doesn't seem unprofessional tbh.

Completely agree with this sentiment. If we all start acting out of our 'natural will', the world will just go bonkers.

Nature and humanity right? We're all humans, I find it fascinating but also infuriating how often people forget that most people just want to be happy and if they find love with those near them then I'm happy for them, far be it from profiteering companies etc... to tell people not to make connections with others.

If this is really true (and I find this rather insulting, as an 18-to-30-year-old male), I'd argue that it's a good reason to diversify hiring beyond 18-to-30-year-old straight single males who have no life outside of work.

I'd advise to never interact with co-workers beyond day to day work interactions. It's just not worth the risk in a society hell-bent on being offended and convicting others of wrong-think. I'm not speaking about actions that are objectively illegal.

Get off your cross, we need to the wood. Lots of people, including in the tech industry, manage to interact with potential romantic partners both romantically and professionally, without triggering lawsuits or tearful Medium apologies. They do it by being mature, considerate, and respectful, and accepting of any outcome, without consequence. If you see the gross behaviour of Sacco et al and think "OMG I'm next!" then that's on you, not the prevailing culture.

Here is an idea for a start-up. Go to the site. Enter the email of your interest at work. They receive an email saying "someone is interested in you at work". They come to the site and enter the emails of anyone at work that they are interested in [1]. If there is a match -> reveal. If not -> email the others at work that "someone is interested in you at work."

[1] Also, please let them opt out of any more messages.