Please keep ideological flamebait out of your comments here. The last thing we needed in this thread (ok, one of several last things we needed—but they're all tied for last place!) was yet another gender flamewar. You didn't need that to make your substantive point about competitiveness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262574 and marked it off topic.

Not google, but I was once given feedback that I wasn't promoted to a management position at a company because I was seen as being too "nice". This was despite 4 years of being a manager at past companies and being perfectly able to solve problems w/o pounding on the table and twisting arms. I left that company soon after. But I see that as an symptom of toxic competitiveness culture too.

I understand doing it accidentally or as a side-effect of hard-to-fix dysfunction, but it boggles my mind that they were fully explicit and self-aware and intentional about creating a process where you couldn't succeed without being an asshole. What a terrible place!

To give a maximally charitable interpretation, "nice" could be a euphemism for "doormat/not assertive/not raising objections when one should". Though "being perfectly able to solve problems w/o pounding on the table and twisting arms" is evidence against this. (Though conceivably those giving feedback hadn't noticed that evidence; I have no knowledge here.) Also, it would be ironic if they were "nice" enough to use a euphemism that obscured their point completely.

Seems pretty sexist to associate solving hard problems with masculinity. Women at Google also work on hard problems.

The sexist part is not the "hard problems" but the competitiveness. I don't think sexism is intrinsic to solving hard problems - certainly gender-inclusive companies work on hard problems successfully. But in my experience those companies tend to be more collaborative.

Google needs to celebrate heroes. Like Jeff Dean. Or Sanjay Ghemawat. Those are Great Men. They are "Living Gods" because they solved Really Hard Problems. Getting into that class of people requires being a "lead" which necessarily means other people around you aren't leading. So you need to prove why you're worthy of being the "lead" which means proving the others around you aren't. This is toxic masculinity. Not solving hard problems.

Proving that you can lead does not neccesarily mean that you must prove others cannot lead. This is the fundamental problem in your thinking when you make such generic and universal claims. If people are doing this (and I do believe it happens a lot), then it is certainly very toxic culture but calling it "toxic masculinity" is forcing the issues into your own sexist ideologies. Also, competitiveness is not by default "masculine". You are doing massive disservice to many brilliant competative and successful women by making such blanket claims. When resources are finite, competition are natural regardless of sex. For example, we all need to demonstrate good grades out of school to get in to programs with very limited seats. Being able to compete is neither exclusive or inherent male characteristic.

Whether or not it's "toxic masculinity", the internal lingo around performance reviews at Google is lulzy.

It's called "perfing" (as in, if you do something bad, you might get "perfed hard" next cycle) and managers frequently threaten to take people "into the Perf Room" although it's just an expression (there isn't actually a dedicated "Perf Room"). Anyone who gets below 3.0 (Meets Expectation) during the calibration process is called a "PB" It used to be "pillow biter" but you can't make that joke anymore so it's just "PB", as in "How many PBs does Exec want us to have this cycle?"

It's offensive and backward, but it's also hilarious that grown men (and women, if they ever get let in to executive circles) are using language that sounds like it was invented by teenagers.

> It's called "perfing" (as in, if you do something bad, you might get "perfed hard" next cycle) and managers frequently threaten to take people "into the Perf Room" although it's just an expression (there isn't actually a dedicated "Perf Room"). Anyone who gets below 3.0 (Meets Expectation) during the calibration process is called a "PB" It used to be "pillow biter" but you can't make that joke anymore so it's just "PB", as in "How many PBs does Exec want us to have this cycle?"

1. You must be in an incredibly toxic enclave if managers in your org are routinely threatening people that way. It's certainly possible, it's a big company, there's been a number of shitty directors/execs that have made the news. But given points #2 and #3, I have reservations about believing generalizations about this particular claim.

2. ME is not a '3.0' (Unless you're measuring on a 12-point scale, that starts at 0.) There are three ratings above, and only one rating below ME - Needs Improvement. Which is a pretty serious wake-up call for the person and their manager.

3. Very few people get NI, you seem to be confusing Google with either old Microsoft, or Amazon, whose bell curves, as I understand, require(d) ~1/5th of the company to be on the shit list at any particular point in time.

Women demand men that are better than their peers while men only demand women who are good on their own. The evolutionary pressure produces men who are competitive in this toxic way.

This is pure evopsych fantasy land. Women do not, as a rule, demand men "better than their peers". We would see more little old ladies out there who held out for above average, never got it, and chose instead to remain single.

>We would see more little old ladies out there who held out for above average

How in the world can you come to this conclusion when society hasn't been in the situation where old ladies as a whole were in a position to be close to equal financially compared to their male peers in at least the last century? If anything, you have to wait a few more decades to come to this conclusion at minimum.

The original contention was that women held out for higher-status men, leading to selection pressure such that men evolved to be more competitive. If women are only very recently even able to be more selective, then I don’t see how all this is supposed to work.

Is there even any evidence that modern women are more “choosy” than men? You’d have an hypothesis like: among married 40-something women, the distribution of socioeconomic status matches that of women overall, whereas married 40-something men have higher SES than would be expected. Should be easy enough to test with publicly available data.

>If women are only very recently even able to be more selective, then I don’t see how all this is supposed to work.

That's not what the above implied. You can still fulfill the condition "be more selective" if the male populace as a whole was earning way more than the female populace before, which it very clearly was. This directly questions the notion of there being a bunch of old ladies who'd have held out: the majority would've found their "better off financially" peer. Things only caught up in the last few decades or so. All those younger generation women still need to age into old ladies in the first place.

>Is there even any evidence that modern women are more “choosy” than men?

Financially? Yes. While I don't fully subscribe to the idea of "equal or better than", you only have to look for a few minutes to see the hoards of anecdotes and studies pointing towards women putting vastly higher weight on a man's finances than the other way around, to the point men can use their money to compensate for deficiencies elsewhere[0]. That alone would explain why women haven't been nearly as competitive in the workplace as men: men have a far bigger incentive to do so on top of all the other incentives both experience.

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...

> You can still fulfill the condition "be more selective" if the male populace as a whole was earning way more than the female populace before, which it very clearly was. This directly questions the notion of there being a bunch of old ladies who'd have held out: the majority would've found their "better off financially" peer.

But the original idea was that women prefer men better than their peers -- that's a direct quote from that top-level comment. You seem to be saying something distinct from that, that women prefer men who are better off financially than they are. These are very different claims.

Further, if you're right that women tended to satisfy their desire for higher-status men simply due to the fact that men used to have more money on average than women did, then where is the selection pressure supposed to come from? There's no pressure -- it wasn't hard for a woman, who had few career prospects, to find a man with a job who could bring home consistent pay.

> you only have to look for a few minutes to see the hoards of anecdotes and studies pointing towards women putting vastly higher weight on a man's finances than the other way around

Take your pick between "I don't really care about anecdotes" and "I have my own anecdotes that tell me that women don't place significantly more weight on socioeconomic status than men do". I'm curious about the studies, but I'd have to find a copy of the article you cite before I'd place too much stock in it. What I'd like to see is some proof in the data that conditioning on socioeconomic status does not significantly alter marriage rates for women but does do so for men.

> Is there even any evidence that modern women are more “choosy” than men?

yes; look up sexlessness among youth by sex

Every bit of both historical and contemporary data we have contradicts what you and GP say.

Great. Where can I find this data?

The whole usage of the phrase "Toxic masculinity" to describe "Competitiveness" is some throughly pointless gendering which only serves to confuse matters.

It seems that you missed their point: the toxicity is non-gendered. (I say you missed their point but they also kinda did a poor job of making it, FWIW.) There might be a point that Google's culture in practice is male-dominant but I think it's mistaken thinking that puts the toxicity on the male-dominance.

Consider your words as if they were being said about a woman:

> Proving you're smart by solving hard problems is a gorilla-chest-thumping exercise.

Isn't it still true?

It's hard to claim a phrase like "toxic masculinity" is non-gendered.

I'm claiming that toxicity is non-gendered.

I'm don't see the connection between what you wrote and masculinity.

People who joined early on will always have much much more opportunity to become heroes.

Women aren’t competitive???

This take strikes me as a weird form of reverse-sexism, in the sense of Kinsley's famous piece about reverse-snobbery (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2001/03/bill-o-reilly-am...).

I agree that competitiveness is masculine[1], but it's not obvious to me that this is a case where it is toxic.

It may be a more competitive or masculine environment than you would prefer, and that's fine. But what benefit do you think comes from labeling the perceived problems of Google's culture as "toxic masculinity"?

[1]Yes women are also competitive, but most of the extremely competitive people are men.

Solving hard problems isn't an inherently masculine thing, but basing a work culture's progression around being able to prove employees solved hard problems is a pretty good example of toxic masculinity. And the phrase "toxic masculinity" does not mean that all masculinity has problems, it's a separate (and pretty well-documented) concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_masculinity

Can you list example of "toxic femininity"?

If not, you're just sexist, full-stop. (c.f. "toxic blackness" or "toxic Jewishness")

I'm not the one who named it. You're welcome to try and establish a new name for the phenomenon.

Also, yes, "toxic femininity" is also a term (and is even linked from the other page), but for some reason I don't think you were asking in good faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalized_sexism#Toxic_femi...

ah, yeah, of course, "toxic femininity" is defined in such a way that men are still evil

> such beliefs and expectations "[suggest] there is no a priori female self" apart from the needs and desires of men and boys

textbook sexism

Assuming the worst possible interpretation of someone's comment is also toxic.

Should have just said toxic humanistic traits

Should just have said toxic traits. Leave out the unnecessary elaboration because it contributes nothing and can detract from the point.

Toxic masculinity accurately represents what the OP describes and is clear here. There's nothing to be offended about. It's revealing the angst that sprang up from this community of mostly men.

Classic Bulverism on display. Don't defend your position, just assume you're right and offer an armchair pyscho-analysis for why people who disagree with you are wrong.

Here's some more Bulverism: What's there to defend? Colloquially toxic masculinity means exactly what the OP was going for. It's to jockey for power, position, and status at the expense of others (and often detrimental to their own goals). Hey! Women sometimes also display these toxic masculine traits commonly found in male primates! You should be more inclusive and call it toxic humanity! has to be one of the least useful things you can bring to the overall discussion.

Also, that is not what toxic masculinity means. If you have an all-woman organization that has a culture dominated by counter-productive competition, you don't call that "toxic masculinity". That just wouldn't make sense.

At best, the competition is a symptom of the real (alleged) problem of toxic masculinity: too many men. Specifically an environment where men are systematically favored over women for sexist reasons.

That Google is suffering under such a system is a claim which needs defending.

I suspect, though I cannot prove, than than many of those comments are made at least somewhat ironically.

We've been perpetually informed than men and women are the same from the neck up for decades, and a Google employee (James Damore) was even fired for pointing out that men and women differ in their preferences, attitudes, and social behaviors.

That it is now OK to acknowledge those differences when it makes men look bad is quite the standard to set.

I mean, which is it? Are men and women the same or are they different (on average)?

>a culture of toxic masculinity

Hyper competitiveness. There is nothing "male" in nature about pushing people to compete in a giant free for all.

On the other hand, having spent many years at IBM, the Loudest Person In The Room is rarely a woman. And, having been part of a fair number of woman-led organizations, including those that were straight up empire building, hyper-competitiveness tends not to be a problem; they have other pathologies.

Even every non physical competitive sport in the world is male dominated to an absurd degree. Chess, esports, poker, you name it. Hyper competitive environments are associated with masculinity for valid reasons.

Not in nature, no. But in socialization and culturally trained roles, yes.

But there is a masculine (in the sense of gender roles that a person assumes for themselves) way to do it, and that is what is typically expressed in these settings. And it is typically more harmful for more people on average than the feminine expressions of same.

>typically more harmful for more people on average than the feminine expressions of same

The equivalent feminine expression of the same kind of dominance is a reputation war.

Reputation wars can destroy lives and relationships. If I have to choose one, I for one much prefer to deal with people winning at how awesome they are (and how lame I am) than a reputation war.

Civilized places have cracked down on violence, so male dominance contests almost never end up with a face punched anymore. Toning down the violence made them much safer.

Female dominance contests are still as deadly as they have always been.

Tell me, what do you consider "toxic masculinity"? You're not really presenting a frame for us to discuss this in.

>And it is typically more harmful for more people on average than the feminine expressions of same.

Yeah, no. This is borderline sexist. It's one thing to argue "the workplace only allows masculinity in its toxic form". It's another entirely to go "feminine better".

I'm saying "masculine worse", yes, because it is. Any assertion to the contrary is deliberately ignoring the decades of research into aggressive tendencies and the (inverse) correlation to wellbeing globally. Anybody who speaks on this, having not informed themselves of the research, is acting in bad faith. By this point in global human connectivity, you really have to be trying in order to stay in a tiny little filter bubble that doesn't acknowledge this.

Nobody appreciates people who speak without knowing about what they speak!

Not to mention that any argument whose central point starts with "I would prefer..." cannot be taken seriously. Your opinions have no bearing on material realities, or, put another way, facts don't care about your feelings.

Google has a very smart workforce but lacks wisdom and emotional intelligence.

Ex-Googler here. The comment above is wrong and sexist.

Googleyness was always about bringing up the people around you and elevating your team’s potential, something that both women and men can excel at.

I have a lot of complaints about Google’s perf process, but I never saw toxic masculinity, competitiveness or putting down co-workers. On the teams I was part of, if any of that happened it would have been dealt with harshly and stopped immediately.

Since when solving "hard problems" became toxic masculinity? Are you saying Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace suffered from toxic masculinity?

PS: I am not endorsing promo-culture where impact of users/revenue don't matter but I do believe solving hard problems should be rewarded (for example, Nobel Prize or Field Model) and making it "sexist" issue is unproductive .

Seeing your comment, I'm reminded of the Far Side comic where the dog only understands her name in the owner's speech: "blah blah blah Ginger blah blah".

"Proving you're smart by solving hard problems is a gorilla-chest-thumping exercise. It's not enough to build things. You need to be better than those around you. But you have to be "googley" which means using logic and data to put down your coworkers and show why you're right and they're wrong."

Erm that’s not true at all.

Okay, Googler, how about some data to back up that assertion? Let's have a googley-argument where we're respectful in showing that we're smarter than the person we're putting down.

Here's my data. Google values consensus - fact. This "wisdom of the crowds" philosophy was core to founding google - Larry & Sergey's brilliant insight that the collective votes of hyperlinks was a stronger signal than things like H1 tags and HTML titles in picking good search results.

But consensus means, in a literal sense, that everybody needs to agree on the right thing to do. Problem is in reality people don't always agree. So what happens when the group needs to reach consensus but people disagree? Since Google doesn't have a respectful way to disagree, the holders of divergent opinions must be minimized - either pushed out of the group or proven to be not smart enough for their opinions to be valid.

God I hate myself while I'm writing this. I left for a reason.

> But consensus means, in a literal sense, that everybody needs to agree on the right thing to do.

I want to push back on this. I think there is absolutely such a thing as “rough consensus” where everyone gets to air their concerns, but the group still makes a decision where not everyone gets their way. Rough consensus processes are much harder to do over a mailing list because there’s no sense of what “the room” wants - since all the air gets taken up by the people who have the most time & are the most argumentative. It’s much easier to achieve rough consensus in person - especially amongst groups who have good working relationships with each other.

In many ways this is a product failure of mailing lists and the like. I’d love more answers in this space to allow us to make better collective decisions, remotely.

That's a little over simplified the complexity of making a decision. A decision rarely reach a fully supported level of consensus in any cases. The process is more focused on reaching an accepted level for everyone, which usually means "I don't like it but that's FINE so I won't block it". The consensus of decision is grey instead of black or white.

Also, "the holders of divergent opinions must be minimized", not really. You can even continue without a consensus as far as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

"wisdom of the crowds" means respect everyone's opinion IMO. Direct attack to your colleagues will end up with warning from managers or being fired. It doesn't have any meaning of enforcing maximium level of consensus.

The problem of "try my best to prove I'm not WRONG" is much broader than Google's company culture. It's part of our self defense process and has been well identified in psychology (Well, same emotion as what you feel in this thread when someone opposed your opinon, your are trying to prove you have better understanding of the problem or smarter than them as you described yourself). Google's culture is trying to (maybe not that successful) minimize that type of self defense since it's harmful in many cases.

Holy shit. Sounds like my company.

The current model of NPCs have a limited dialogue tree. Saving CPU cycles by sticking to the script helps maximize their ESG score.

If it was about masculinity itself being irredeemable, the adjective wouldn't be there. Surely a website of programming enthusiasts can figure out parsing?

When it is prevalent (including in the irony of subsequent commentary), it shouldn't be surprising to see it called out, hyperbole notwithstanding.

Oh the irony

Indeed.

If the parent poster thought males were irredeemably evil, they wouldn't have used the adjective "toxic".

When is this straw man argument going to die?

When people stop feeling attacked when they hear the term “toxic masculinity”.

So, probably never. It’s a bit of a loaded term for lots of folks. I can understand why, even if that’s not how it’s often meant.

I don't really blame them, and I think any group would feel the same to hear one of their personal attributes referred to as intrinsically 'toxic'. If we simply described the personality traits that we meant, we might actually get somewhere (but, from everything I've seen, getting somewhere is not the objective).

Is that really masculinity? When women do it are they being masculine? It sounds like you're replacing "being a narcissist" with "toxic masculinity".