
Not a Black Chair: racism, sexism, and discrimination at Squarespace - gyardley
https://medium.com/@amelielamont/not-a-black-chair-8a8e7e2b9140#.ib8gvqlpu
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jpatokal
So the "black chair" stuff is inexcusable, but regarding the end:

> No matter who you are,

> You deserve to feel loved and appreciated.

> You deserve to be valued.

> You deserve to feel free.

> You deserve the chance to shine.

Actually, you don't. You might "deserve" these from your parents, but in the
workplace, these all need to be _earned_.

It's also really not the company's problem if you get panic attacks at the
thought of running into the ex-boyfriend that _you_ slapped -- even if you
worked at the same company.

~~~
omegaworks
>It's also really not the company's problem if you get panic attacks...

because of the way the company completely destroyed your sense of self-worth
and promoted a toxic culture of abuse?

Actually, it might be. I wish it was. Maybe we'd value each other a bit more.

~~~
Dr_tldr
Saying your company is at fault for how _you_ feel is the exact same reasoning
as "You made me do it", ie, not assuming any agency at all. Same thing with
"toxic culture of abuse."

People who are being sexually trafficked and child soldiers are in a toxic
culture of abuse that they can't escape from. We're talking about an adult
with a lower management job at a tech company, not the wretched of the earth.

~~~
noobermin
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning here. If a child is bullied by her
classmates, your reasoning would suggest that her negative feelings are her
fault and not her tormentors? Sure, she might not be locked up in a medieval
dungeon (a literal place she can't escape from), in fact, I suppose she can
switch schools... Are you saying the student should be tougher or not provoke
her classmates or...

~~~
Dr_tldr
You're comparing a child to an adult as if they're the same. That's a pretty
leaky abstraction and somewhat disturbing if you can't see the critical
distinction.

This is the kind of self-indulgent thinking that tries certain (usually poor
or minority) 12 year olds as adults, while treating certain (usually wealthy
and white) adults as children who should be forgiven for "youthful
indiscretions." Similarly, it focuses on the comparatively well-off but
unhappy while completely effacing the experiences of the genuinely exploited.

------
joelg
Is there any evidence of discrimination in this story? While it's certainly
tragic, I think it's very hard to separate what is sexist (or, aside from the
one comment, racist) from what is just people being generally terrible. It
seemed only implicit that the author's gender or race had anything to do with
her treatment at work.

Or maybe I'm missing something. How was this discrimination?

~~~
slantedview
"aside from the one comment"

"How was this discrimination?"

You mean, aside from the discrimination, how was this discrimination?

~~~
cpncrunch
I'm not sure how commenting on the colour of a person's skin is
discrimination. Perhaps unwise to say someone "blends in with the chair", but
I don't think it was racism and more than saying "when I was driving I didn't
see you because you were wearing a dark jacket and it was dark outside".

The issue is that Amelie interpreted the comment as "you're black, and
therefore you're worthless/invisible". That's not an unreasonable assumption.
The main problem IMO seems to be that Kelly is a bit of an asshole/bitch, with
zero empathy. Any reasonable person either would have thought twice about
making that comment, or would have apologised and explained that she didn't
mean that.

It just looks like a typical company with dysfunctional management/HR rather
than any kind of discrimination.

------
Dr_tldr
Squarespace really sounds like a nightmare, and also very rough on people who
work a support/call center role rather than a dev role. I say this having
experience with both, as only the call center involved handling tickets as a
primary activity, and having a regular night shift (rather than being on-call
every few months).

On the other hand, this sounds pretty grandiose to the point of being
delusional:

"Squarespace, you hoped I’d be another black woman in the tech industry who
would quietly watch as you grow in power while I wither away. You are
mistaken."

Squarespace: a company actively dedicated to the withering of black women in
tech. That's a pretty extraordinary claim, so it needs some pretty
extraordinary (ie, non-anecdotal, verifiable) evidence. The adjectives used to
describe literally every other person in the story are mostly if not
completely negative, and this ultimately weakens the writer's claims.

------
xlm1717
This is a cautionary tale on why it is so often a bad idea to start a
relationship with someone at work. In addition to that, though, it really
shows how terrible management was (maybe still is?) at Squarespace. I would
not want to work there based on what I've read here.

------
csense
I only read up until "September 2013" but (except for the one comment about
the chair) it seems like just bureaucracy and office politics.

------
marcus_holmes
This is one area where having an MBA is beneficial to working in startup -
basic management training at least.

Too many nightmare stories of bad management incidents out there. This one,
for example, should have been dealt with a lot sooner.

We could say that we're only seeing one side of the story here, and that the
manager in question has a completely different version of events.

But the point is that the manager is responsible for the entire situation, and
is given the authority over it in order to prevent bad outcomes like this. If
an employee walks away with a bad impression and a story like this to tell
then that in itself is a management failure.

------
macscam
having left a job after three months with a verbally abusive boss, i have to
commend you for being career minded and staying so long. Looking for a job
now, I'm wondering where there is a significantly different dynamic. We have a
long way to go in this industry, like many others.

~~~
guard-of-terra
"i have to commend you for being career minded and staying so long"

I don't. People who don't leave encourage abusive bosses.

When large part of your team quits, it will be a painful but efficient lesson.
When they don't, it sends a signal that wrong behavior is okay.

That's same as not reporting rapes or turning blind eye on "inconvenient"
crime. It really really encourages crime in my opinion.

~~~
x0x0
I had an awful boss. K was easily the most obnoxious person whose presence
I've ever had to tolerate. Besides incompetence, he was eventually fired after
he was ordered by the cto to give me a good review and a raise in my annual
review; he gave me neither. When he was fired (and there's a long and funny
story here involving property destruction), he assaulted a coworker, was
removed by the police, and given a restraining order. He was delusional enough
that he called the ceo late that night and suggested that, upon receipt of a
written apology, he'd consider returning to work.

There's some amazing detail in the court documents from his 5 years of
multiple lawsuits against our former employer, including him assaulting the
videographer at a deposition and being removed by the police. Again.

I didn't leave because I was worried I'd never get another job and no one
would believe me. After all, what are you supposed to do in an interview when
asked why you're leaving after 3 or 4 months? Do you really want to tell a
potential employer you're leaving because your boss is verbally abusive and
slapped the back of your head because he thought you were being stupid? I
worried -- and I think it's true -- that I could easily be written off as
whiny or entitled or difficult or even just too much trouble to deal with. I
also had just left school and couldn't really afford to repay the relocation
bonus they gave me (protip: always write into your contact that repayment is
prorated over the first year of employment. And remember relo bonuses are
taxed when you decide how much to ask for. oops on both counts.)

It's hard.

Now I'm mature enough, and have a string of successful jobs behind me plus
savings, that I can joke about it. And if anyone doubts what working with him
was like, pull out the description of the deposition that lead to him being
declared a vexatious litigant.

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jgh
Hm, what's going on with this article? There are stories with fewer points
that have been around longer and are on the front page while this one is
dropping like a rock...

Get it together, HN...

~~~
xlm1717
Maybe people are getting tired of being told what to get angry about.

~~~
wheel_of_ka
That's the problem isn't it? Some people are forced to repeatedly ask for the
basic human decency and empathy that others receive as a matter of course.
Then those being asked get 'tired' because they are convinced they treat
everyone equally and are totally objective.

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jorgecurio
Unbelievable. This parallels to my experience working for a local startup long
time ago. The amount of abuse people, the bullying, useless HR seems to be a
pretty common theme in an industry without a union.

I still don't get why people who would benefit most from a union would be
against it. The explanations are usually self serving but a union is
protection for the collective. Classic divide and conquer strategy by
employers.

~~~
greggman
Why? Because many of us have experience with the bad side of unions and we
don't want to see programming become anything like that.

You'll end up with mountains of regulations and specialties and not be allowed
do anything outside of those bounds. Imagine being told "you're a front end
programmer. You are not allowed to submit code for the back end, that is for
certified backend programmers only. Also you are not allowed to edit CSS or
HTML. That is for certified web designers only" Why? Because that threatens
the backend guys and web designers jobs). Check out some union rules sometime
and look at all the crap. I don't want any part of that to come to programming

~~~
slantedview
There are some problems that a union can solve which seem to be unsolvable
otherwise, such as age discrimination, which is rampant in private sector tech
but not so much in public sector tech (surprise).

