Incidentally the techbros you describe are majorly young cs graduates from my observation. Why are unis teaching them to be tech bros? Are unis at fault for making tech non inclusive and toxic?
Me and my wife are both AI academics in the UK who do a bunch of programming. I have no "interesring stories" to tell, my wife has a dozen including men punching walls because they were beaten by a woman in a board game, being sent death threats and dick pics (not from the same person), and being assumed to be my non-tech wife when we go to events where she was invited and I was going as her partner.
Now, these events aren't daily, or even weekly, but they stick with people and make then feel unwelcome and unsafe.
> Toxicity
Probably you don't need to go further than that.
Painting it was "frat bro" just makes for a better more exciting headline.
Exactly what about the Snapchat or Jared Kushner stories I cited do you believe is a hoax?
Please stop claiming things that were never said. You do this constantly in your comments and it's not fair or productive.
My point is only that the media is not the objective truth or overruling expert in any single subject, and often filled with highly-opinionated, ideological, and sometimes misleading takes.
As far as this specific issue, I disagree that it is so widespread across the industry outside of a few companies with clear problems. Also the Kushner story seems to be mocking their appearance than behaviors.
The exact same behavior is present in people that have zero background in frats. How do you explain that?
This is not a "frat bros" problem, it's a misogyny problem. Painting it with the words frat just helps paint whatever biased narrative is being spun to make the story more compelling.
In case English isn't your native language, or you're lucky enough to not be familiar with this dark side of American culture, the commonly used terms are "Fraternity Brothers", "Frat Brothers", and "Frat Bros", who become "Tech Bros" when they graduate.
And YES, it is a culture, and a notoriously toxic pervasive culture at that, which Snapchat and Uber exemplify.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/snapc...
>Snapchat, the App Frat Bros Love, Was Started By the Frattiest Bro of Them All
>Evan Spiegel, the CEO and cofounder of Snapchat, has created a massive, popular application. It's basically a frat boys dream, and as it turns out, Spiegel was the ultimate frat guy during his time at Standford.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/confirmed-snapchats-evan-s...
>Confirmed: Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel Is Kind Of An Ass
>I’ve known Evan Spiegel, Snapchat CEO and co-founder, for a while now. We have had more than half a dozen in-person conversations, far more phone calls, and even shared twenty minutes together on stage at Disrupt SF. And try as I might, I’ve had a hard time liking him. Now, after reading emails sent by Evan Spiegel during his undergrad time at Stanford, I clearly understand what my instincts were telling me.
>Dude’s kind of a dick.
>You can see the whole swath of leaked emails at ValleyWag, but I can summarize them all pretty easily for you with the above paragraph. Here’s a typical example:
>“LUAU FUCKING RAGED. Thanks to all of you. Hope at least six girl [sic] sucked your dicks last night. Cuz that didn’t happen for me.” Signed affectionately, “fuckbitchesgetleid. Spiegel.”
https://vator.tv/news/2014-05-28-snapchat-ceo-emails-talk-ab...
>Snapchat CEO emails talk about "bitches" and "sluts"
>Emails from Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel reveal gross fratboy misogyny in the wake of UCSB shootings
>Breaking news: rich, white man says awful things. Other white men rally to his defense.
https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/photography-2/americ...
>Inside the dark, depraved world of US frat culture. American ultra.
>Photographer Andrew Moisey explores the rituals, texts and initiations of American fraternities: breeding grounds for aggressive, toxic masculinity.
>The world of American fraternities is a strange and ghoulish one. Depraved and simmering with violence, it’s a hotbed of ultra-masculine entitlement: a grim embodiment of chest-pumping male tribalism.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/10/andrew-...
>Humiliation, homoeroticism and animal cruelty: inside the frathouse
>Photographer Andrew Moisey uncovered ritual hazing, extreme drunkenness and toxic masculinity on one college campus – from men destined to be America’s future leaders
>[...] A world in which homosexuality is taboo but cross-dressing and semi-naked wrestling are acceptable and parading your penis and testicles is almost de rigueur.
>[...] “These all-male campus spaces have been around since the 1820s,” elaborates Moisey, “but they changed perceptibly during the so-called culture wars of the 1970s, becoming a safe space for guys who didn’t want to have to worry about having their kind of fun.” Many fraternities, he believes, now view themselves as embattled institutions, maintaining their conservative core values of brotherhood, privilege and machismo against a perceived liberal onslaught. Disturbingly, the code of loyalty to the brotherhood endures even after the other principles of fraternity life have long since fallen away.
>“The central issue is that there is an allegiance to everyone inside the fraternity rather than to the higher ideal,” says Moisey. “So even though most of these guys consider themselves highly respectable, their loyalty is such that they will protect the bad guys who hide in their midst. If you are a bad seed and you join a fraternity, you have found your safe haven. And what we are seeing right now is that the support and protection that fraternities provide for the bad seeds extends into the highest echelons of American power and decision-making.”
>[...] “This is what our leaders looked like when they were young.”
https://www.andrewmoisey.com/the-american-fraternity.html
>ANDREW MOISEY: THE AMERICAN FRATERNITY
>An Illustrated Ritual Manual
The struggle between men and women benefits their divide et impera strategy, because playing people off against each other while maintaining an irrational authority is their main talent.
But in the case of SnapChat and Uber (and many other tech companies), the founders were literally (and archetypically) both Frat Bros and Tech Bros, who set the tone and culture for the entire company, and rampantly hired other Frat Bros from their own Frats, at all levels of incompetency.
Incompetent nepotistic job placement is basically what frats are all about. (Once you get past all that other stuff that Andrew Moisey documented.)
“This is what our leaders looked like when they were young.” -Andrew Moisey
This is still just meaningless name calling, not made any better by the fact that it's so entirely US specific. It certainly isn't even remotely close to an explanation for the global preferences both genders express for different jobs. As I assume you're aware that in fact most jobs aren't gender balanced, most are dominated by one gender or another?
Again, only saw emails.
Even then, all of that seems more outlier than any programming community. Not everyone is a billionaire programmer responsible for putting social media cringe in front of our eyes.
Please show me convicted for [reason] reports. I am convinced everytime I read these articles, the author is trying to see things that aren't there or it's hard to verify the validity.
Note that I don't condone the behaviour but should you really be painting majority of population as some sort of saint to highlight the evil? Because they aren't.
Alcoholism and drug rate among youngsters says otherwise.
If you wanted to make a stronger argument, you should at least pretend to have read what you're glibly dismissing out of hand, instead of preemptively admitting that you don't bother reading what anyone else says, and that there's no point in replying to you.
HN is not a forum for announcing you have not read things, then criticizing and dismissing them anyway. Don't you have better things to do than rationalizing and defending Frat Bro toxicity?
If you don't have time to go through all that, then you shouldn't waste your time replying to dismiss it all, either.
Why should I bother reading opinion of a writer when I can look at the source?
If your first few links don't show the problem, people wouldn't be willing to put in effort. I thought that was obvious.
https://vator.tv/news/2014-05-31-stanford-denounces-spiegel-...
>In a letter sent to that was sent out to the entire Stanford undergraduate community, and obtained by the Huffington Post, Stanford University Provost John Etchemendy called the e-mails "crude, offensive, and demeaning to women."
>"Like most of you, male and female, I found those messages abhorrent. I am writing now to convey clearly that the sentiments expressed in these emails do not reflect what we, as members of the Stanford community, expect of one another," the letter said.
Have you got anything to stand on better than your "boys will be boys ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" argument?
Can you provide some evidence for your conspiracy theory, such as a quote of Evan denying that he wrote those emails, or Stanford University Provost John Etchemendy retracting his statement that Evan's e-mails were "crude, offensive, and demeaning to women"?
Is there a source for your conspiracy theory, or did you make it up yourself just now? I thought you had better things to do with your time that defending the honor of Frat Bros. So give me a link to your proof Evan Spielberg didn't send those emails.
Which is what you should have linked and let people make their mind.
I agree it's pretty assy. What are you looking for me to say?
You are calling tech community toxic and frat boy asses because some billionaire ceo is a douche bag? I don't know how to reply to that. I already cleared that up. I am not defending him. I don't condone that behaviour but it's not far fetched for college students to be like that. It's not a disease specific to tech community. Tech bros are not special unicorns. Every field has those.
There is absolutely zero credible evidence that Evan Spiegel didn't write those misogynistic emails, and overwhelming credible evidence that he did, so you should stop believing and intimating that it's a hoax, if you can't prove it.
But yes, a lot of tech companies are terribly toxic, and a lot of Frat Boys are terrible asses, who graduate (but don't grow up) to be Tech Bros, and work in the tech industry. But they don't need you to deny it and rationalize it and protect their fragile feelings from criticism for them, they need to STOP.
If your only point is that "every field has those", and you think I disagree, then read my other postings about Jared Kushner's coronavirus "Frat Party".
Every field having those doesn't justify or counter tech having those, and if you don't have the time to read the source evidence that I linked to before you took the time to announce you didn't read it and then glibly asked for source evidence that will take you even more time to read, then you won't bother reading anything else, and you're not arguing in good faith.
The more frequently you reply, the more skeptical I become of your claim that you don't have the time to read the original evidence I posted. If you don't know how to reply to that, and didn't have the time to read the evidence, then you should not have replied in the first place, or again, and again. And especially not a fourth time.
It's weird that the dude you're talking to never expressed skepticism as to the provenance of the emails, yet you keep repeating this as if he is.
You seem to have a stock character of your own creation that you're responding to, some sort of cliched misogynist alt right conspiracies troll, instead of simply a skeptic who'd rather trust his own faculties to judge the source material over the opinions of ideological journo-activists.
Seriously, reread the thread.
> intimating that it's a hoax
In no way does he do this. Reread the thread.
https://www.businessinsider.nl/coronavirus-kushner-impact-te...
>Jared Kushner’s coronavirus ‘impact team’ mocked as the ‘Slim Suit Crowd’ and a ‘frat party’ descended from a UFO
Techbros. Techbros everywhere. It's not what people want to hear, most people would love it if the field and the educational pipeline leading to it had more professional norms all-around. But it's a real thing. (FWIW, I don't think of Damore as part of the problem, indeed his proposals would help a lot if widely adopted.)