>Tumblr had a lot of LGBTQ "diversity hires". One guy would show up at company-wide meetings and use all of the gay porn blogs to demonstrate the latest features he had been working on. Another guy would strut around the office in a zz-top beard and a french maid outfit w/ fishnet pantyhose and heels. There was a group of transitioning guys who would hang out by my desk and discuss their urine fetish - though they stopped doing that after I challenged them all to a "b_lls-out" coding contest knowing they were no longer equipped.

This reminds me of Aphyr (Jepsen guy). He does good work, but his twitter feed was full of NSFW stuff, last time I checked. He was also in the silicone balls cult for a while, and spoke out against its leader noodlesandbeef.

> After all that I think I'm ready if I ever get that dream SRE job at PornHub. O Canada!

You know what they say about not letting your dreams just be dreams: https://www.mindgeek.com/careers/?gh_jid=4564518002

I actually think this is the most amusing comment I've read on HN. Thanks. Workplaces seem so sterile these days.

This just made my top 5 "WTF" moments of working in Tech.

Thank you for this - I thought I was the only who experienced these types of madness at some of the smaller companies I worked at.

I’ve heard of “bring your whole self to work”, but I didn’t imagine anyone would ever take it that far.

That porn server sounds like a huge liability. Did you have any vetting process to make sure it didn't accidentally collect child porn or other illicit images?

Absolutely! There was an community of moderators that came by the storage room every day to review the latest intake. There was much discussion. Lunch was served.

Lost in this comment is how brutally inappropriate that Tumblr office would have been to work in - and beyond illegal in so many ways but it's just all cool because it's LGBTQ? I thought they were suppose to be 'just like us' and that 'transitioning pantihose urine fetish' would a gross, charicatured misrepresentation?

YouPorn you'll find is completely not like that, super professional to the point wherein the 'content' would effectively be mundane. Maybe in some ways more like a bank actually.

I just ignored most of it - the only time I was really insulted was when I found out the real reason the office manager went around lighting candles everywhere was that she thought the engineers smelled bad. I overheard her taking to the receptionist while I was downstairs foraging for a favorite snack one day. They didn’t realize I was there, but not cool just the same.

Sure, it wouldn't bother me either, but those things are 'squarely sexual harassment' of the kind HR teams usually writhe over. I think if the story were changed to 'straight white guys' then I can also see some letting it pass, but a lot more people viscerally upset as well, popularly.

Balls out actually refers to engine govenors. Additionally if a person AMAB is transitioning you may well not call them men, but if you asked I guess I would take your word for it.

Yep, "balls out" and "balls to the wall" are respectively the steam train and fighter plane expressions for "full speed" (similar to "full throttle" or "pedal to the metal"). Neither expression has anything to do with testicles.

In any event censoring the word "balls" (even when used euphemistically) is a bit weird.

how is it possible to have a 400k per month cocaine habit? was he giving it to his 100 closest friends every day?

I wasn’t close enough to him to reconcile his receipts, but this was a place were people talked a lot, the number was 400k per month, they sent him to rehab because they were afraid how his family might react if they dismissed him, he had to hold a job in order to continue to receive funds from his family.

You would be surprised at how quickly tolerance builds up once someone gets ahold of the good stuff. Considering that this guy is in Berlin, it's probably not as cheap as it is close to the source. Even so, at $300 an eight ball, that's roughly 44 eight balls a day, or roughly 2-4 an hour depending on how hard he's partying. It certainly is on the heavier side of usage profiles I've heard of.

> You would be surprised at how quickly tolerance builds

my experience in the US navy with alcohol lends strong credibility to this.

heavy drinkers can put away 750mL of 80proof a night and not be hungover the next day (much less debilitated). a person with no tolerance would drink that amount and either vomit or die - possibly both.

a heavy drinker with an uncommonly high tolerance is capable of truly startling things.

Berlin is not that far from the port of Antwerp, one of the biggest shipping centers in the EU (and world) -- apparently you can get tons of cheap cocaine there that is really high quality.

No single person is doing 11oz of cocaine per day.

Prices used to be higher too, in the past.

> We had server set up in a storage closet with a huge porn cache. When the project managers came back to the US we would copy all the porn they had collected to the server, replace the porn on their laptops with new porn from the cache, then send them back abroad again. We never knew what people would come back with but it ranged from "Cinemax" to "Only Legal In Kentucky".

Wait, sorry, what? Why were you storing this porn, exactly?

> Why were you storing this porn, exactly?

Given that the parent comment mentioned that 20 years after the porn storage story happened they ended up working at Tumblr, I assume the original story took place during a time before high-speed internet and porn streaming were a thing.

> spoke like John Moschitta imitating yoda

Thanks for this

This career trajectory is my nightmare. I would have quit all of those jobs on the spot. To each their own I suppose.

> It depends on the company.

You aren't offering evidence for entertainment companies "it" doesn't happen in, just sayin.

I see the tradition of SAP, Oracle, and the big consulting firms from the days of yore is still going strong.

>Tumblr had a lot of LGBTQ "diversity hires"

Out of curiosity, what is your basis for thinking that they were hired only for being LGBTQ? As a gay man I wonder how I can avoid my colleagues thinking this. (It sounds like it's not just the gay folks who were engaged in inappropriately sexual behavior, so it can't be that.)

Because everyone else at Tumblr more or less young, male, single, caucasian, straight, European ancestry. The Office manager was female, one of the HR reps was African American, head of security had kids, PHP developers were always blowing through so occasionally someone diverse would slip in there, but in large LGBTQ was the only category where there was diversity and they hired a lot from that category. If you were LGBTQ and had a cat it was more or less impossible to not be hired. All this would come up occasionally in the Friday company meetings and David would always promise to do better but the demographics never shifted much.

One of the Unix admins was allergic to dogs if that counts towards diversity.

I wasn't always a software engineer, and in my previous career (academic linguist) there were lots of gay men. This wasn't because linguistics departments were making a concerted effort to hire gay men. Nor are linguistics departments in the USA particularly diverse in other respects (e.g. race). In general, it's a mistake to conclude that any 'diverse' people you see around must have been hired according to some special diversity criterion. There are probably lots of contributing factors – tumblr's large LGBTQ user base being an obvious candidate.

It's not super helpful to LGBTQ folks to spread unfounded rumors that large numbers of us are just in our jobs because we're LGBTQ. Unless you've got some really strong evidence, I'd have to say that your remarks on that point were somewhat misjudged. I understand that you mostly wanted to tell a colorful story, but at the same time, it's annoying to see these ideas spread, even in a somewhat flippant context.

As another LGBTQ person, I find your post petulant. He had an interesting story. He's not promoting whatever "harmful" stereotype you're supposing.

> As a gay man I wonder how I can avoid my colleagues thinking this.

Diversity hiring has the same vibe as nepotism. Sometimes you look at someone's output (or even job description) and can't help but think that this guy wouldn't have a job here if he wasn't someone's nephew. Unless this is something that can be said about you (with "gay" replacing "nephew") you have nothing to fear.

>Unless this is something that can be said about you (with "gay" replacing "nephew") you have nothing to fear.

The OP's post makes me doubt this is the case, as it seems unlikely that he was very familiar with the work of all the people he's referring to as "diversity hires".

Most of us have one or two colleagues who we perceive to be performing badly. It's all too easy to weave tales about why they were hired without any evidential basis. If your equation is "bad at job + gay = diversity hire", then I think you're going to get an awful lot of false positives.

I suspect that there are at least as many people who've been hired in tech companies because they fit in with a bro-ish predominantly male culture. But of course that's just "culture fit", whereas any attempt to avoid falling into this trap is often referred to dismissively as "diversity hiring", and linked to disparaging remarks about people's job performance.

That happens at any company that's sufficiently devoted to SJW principles. Though it's usually about women rather than gays as obviously the question of orientation can't usually be brought up at interview time.

I thought everyone working in tech knew this happened. If you doubt it, a simple check of the Tumblr jobs page should make their policy clear:

https://www.tumblr.com/jobs

"Now, billions of posts later, we continue to build out Tumblr as a platform for diverse communities to express their points of view. And we’re committed to hiring a workforce that represents the same diversity."

A company committed to hiring a workforce that represents "diversity" will have a lot of "diversity hires", as it's literally their stated policy.

I'm aware that a lot of people think that "SJWs" have taken over tech companies and are forcing them to hire certain groups of people. I was sort of banking on the OP not being one of these people and getting a different kind of answer.

I doubt we can have a productive discussion of what you've posted that won't descend into a flame war that's been had a thousand times before.

The phrase 'diversity hire' is usually used prejoritatively to hint that the person in question is not really qualified for their job. If the OP simply meant to say that tumblr was quite successful at hiring a diverse range of people, then I think it was a slightly off choice of wording.

*pejoritatively ha - I thought I'd caught that in an edit.

Out of interest, why did you want a different answer? Do you think "diversity hires" don't exist? Whether they do or don't, it doesn't have any bearing on the "diverse" people being hired on the basis of their technical or professional abilities.

My question was why the OP thought that these particular people are diversity hires. And as I said, the phrase 'diversity hire' is usually used to cast aspersions on people's abilities (though it is possible that the OP didn't want to do this and just made a questionable wording choice).

His entire post is about bad behaviour by employees, and he has just confirmed to you that if you were (visibly) LGBTQ it was impossible not to be hired there. Most likely also impossible to be fired given the OP's stories. That is exactly what you'd expect from a SF based firm that says it's committed to diversity hiring, because that word is code for "anyone who isn't a straight white man".

That's why your response to me was not really in good faith. As the original writer later confirmed, the answer I gave you was correct - hiring standards vanished if you were the "best" orientation. Yet you just flatly rejected it and demanded an alternative (but wrong) answer you liked more. You also stated you wouldn't be able to discuss the issue without it "descending into a flame war", passive voice, implying that I'd be the one flaming you - that is also wrong. This seems to be an increasingly common tactic to avoid reading alternative viewpoints: just announce up front that polite debate is impossible, with the insinuation that it's the fault of other people. Not a great approach.

From your other posts, you are feeling hurt that people might doubt your abilities because you're in a favoured class. Yes, that must really suck. We can all totally understand that. At the same time it sucks a lot more to be at that sort of company in a non favoured class.

'SJW' is Godwin 2.0. If you see LGBTQ people as a 'favored class' (!) then I don't think we can go anywhere with this. I'm not avoiding debate with regard to the issue raised in my original response to zxcvbn4038. I'm declining your invitation to have another debate that's been had over and over again many times before.

Haha no one blows through $400k of cocaine in a month and survives. It's only $100 a bag (gram)! That would be 13 bags a day of coke.

They're not doing all the coke, but they're paying for it. In any case, it's still a lot. $40k would sound more believable.

Off by an order of magnitude. 133 bags.