
The Woman in the Facebook Frat House - brevityness
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304898704577478483529665936.html?mod=googlenews_wsj&mg=reno64-wsj
======
temphn
Mark Zuckerberg and those engineers made this customer service representative
a millionaire. She repays them by trashing them in the Wall Street Journal.

There is nothing wrong with something "unrepentantly boyish", anything more
than there is something wrong with women's only schools. Working class men
don't go around apologizing for doing difficult construction jobs, white
collar men need to stop apologizing for doing the difficult programming jobs.

This woman was in customer service. She was lucky to be put on the Facebook
rocket ship. So too was Sheryl Sandberg, a nontechnical and obviously
ultrapolitical operator, placed on third base as COO yet thinks she hit a
triple. Both Losse and Sandberg consider themselves "women in tech". They're
not. They're "women on tech", women carried on the backs of real
technologists, male and female alike.

~~~
lucisferre
Honestly when it comes to the subject of women's issues in frat boy tech
cultures I've seen people on this site post (and vote up) some stupid f'ing
shit, but you may have just won the triple crown with this absolute sexist
entilted load of crap. I love how you ended it with "male and female" just so
you could feel a bit better about yourself in the morning.

~~~
temphn
You can rant at heretical thoughts all you want. You offer no counterarguments
other than pointing and screaming. I want you to recognize that the free
speech of the internet means there are men who can and will offer different
opinions about these matters. Anonymity means immunity from character
assassination over a difference of opinion.

After all, who really has the power here? Isn't Sheryl Sandberg the
billionaire, and those two engineers the ones whose careers were ruined?

~~~
taligent
You can't possibly be serious.

One engineer propositions other employees for threesomes and the other calls a
fellow employee a feminist and is aggressive towards her. In ANY organisation
on this planet both would more than likely have been instantly dismissed.

It is grossly unprofessional to say the least.

~~~
temphn
You find her accusations plausible. Others may not. She certainly constructed
an elaborate internal discourse out of this bearskin rug photo. And seemed
proud of the fact that the engineers were demoted or reassigned without even
having a chance to defend themselves.

Are false accusations or office politics of such an underhanded nature
"grossly unprofessional"?

~~~
pnmahoney
You're really going all-in on this double standard thing, aren't you?

1\. Credibility You're take as fact that the accusations are already false,
and hence "grossly unprofessional". Which holds pretty much no water, since
that this person is making a claim not just about her own knowledge (re: the
aggression/harassment in question) but ALSO about what actually was also
_common knowledge_ at the time. Let's not leave out, either, that books of
length probably don't lend themselves well to 100% fabricated accusations -
least of all those which implicate small groups of people and mention them by
name. So much for anonymity and character assassination, huh?

On the other hand, the recounted instance the author gives us is being falsely
accused of being difficult to work with after a manager refuses to move past
aggression.

2\. Stated Accusation vs. Perception

"she seemed proud of the fact that the engineers were demoted or reassigned
without even having a chance to defend themselves"

You're living in the world of 'seems', rather than the world of facts. Of
course, facts can be fabricated, and we can prove that they are in fact false.
No one is denying that.

That said, things stated _as facts_ (behavior specified, conversations
recalled, timelines constructed, etc -- basically the stuff that makes up this
piece and others like it) are going to be better than your world of made up
accusations (the stuff that separates conspiracies like the one you're touting
here from an actual story). Think _Loose Change_ vs. _All The President's
Men_.

But as to the merits of what you've said, I don't know why she 'seemed proud'
to you. Joining you - again, temporarily - in your world of impression, you'll
find that she had _seemed_ pretty dejected and not the least bit upset that
she had to go through her superiors to get anything done about it. The word
might be something more like 'relieved'.

3\. ASSUMPTIONS

You straight-up assert that these people didn't have the chance to defend
themselves, and that's how they were fired. The truth, by your way of
thinking, was something that was not let out because they did not have the
chance to say it.

And, yet, you insist that _others_ are ranting and, as you put it, 'pointing
and screaming'. So let's work out the assumptions you're making, and who's
doing any 'pointing'.

I'm not sure that those accused had the chance to defend themselves, that's
something you have to admit from the account. But it's definitely not
something you can - as you have here - straight-up assume. If that were the
case, and these people were 100% innocent as you seem to believe, you can be
sure they would have a book deal of their own; although I'm less sure if you
wouldn't find some kind of duplicity or targeting then, either.

As well, the facts as given point against you: it's not a conspiracy against
engineers. The person who was doing straight-up sexual harassment by her
account was a senior supervisor/management or somesuch. It's not, as you put
it, the two engineers that this evil woman and her billionaire female ally
targeted.

Finally, let's not forget that the account also specifies that Cheryl Sandberg
made a point of talking to all the females in the office to make sure things
were right. Or could be made right, as was the case here. If you think that
any of this points to a world in which the, say, 5% of women in the office
lord over the politics and seek to find you and accuse you falsely so that you
can be fired, well, no amount of bullshit-detection applied to your posts can
save you.

------
kaichanvong
Interesting article. Some people have questioned what the point of it was. I
saw it as this:

    
    
      A. Enter male to female ratio of 1:50
      B. Experience some things that felt wrong/daunting
      C. New manager entered scene and "fixed things"
    

I wonder if the fact the manager (Sheryl Sandberg) was female made a big
impact on the resulting fixes.

Would a different manager have done the same? Possibly not unless either they
thought about it from reading about an article or having been in a similar
position at say Froogle.

Really interesting and I think it brings up the something that we as people
should start doing more. Ask questions if something seems wrong or potentially
off. Even if we're not a "manager" or not female. To at the very least try to
promote `good`.

It's good for stories such as these to circulate as hopefully it will speed up
the dilution of sexist issues we keep hearing of. And by dilution I mean the
hopeful removal of this problem entirely.

~~~
lucisferre
I'm sure being female had some impact on her empathy towards the author. But
it sounds like simply being a "grown up" was the more decisive factor here.

Lord of the flies.

------
DanielBMarkham
More than 50 employees and one master password. Awesome.

Most companies start silo-ing waaaaay too early, everybody breaking up into
little "that's not my job" cliques. It's just much less painful that way.
Sounds like FB actively resisted, whether through design or chance.

~~~
heretohelp
>More than 50 employees and one master password. Awesome.

Not sure that's the word for it. Seems more like engineering naivete.

The thing is, I have a similar functionality at my company and the solution I
came up with is conceptually simple but also a lot more secure.

There's an is_staff flag on every user account. If you have it set to True,
you can log in as one of our customers for debugging purposes.

If you leave the company, you lose the flag. Simple as that really.

All the same power necessary to really get down and dirty with whatever
problems our customers encounter, but with less potential issues.

I don't consider the above to be the end-all be-all as eventually it'll have
to become more elaborate and locked down. For now, however, it seems to work
well for a company of roughly seven people. :)

------
pnathan
One useful point to take away from this is it helps to have an "adult"[1] in a
high level position, to whom sensitive concerns can be brought to and dealt
with in a discreet, sober, and careful fashion.

[1] i.e., someone mature, responsible, sober-minded.

~~~
mahyarm
Somebody like Sheryl sounds scary. The article makes it look like she handles
private complaints she agrees with by stealth and doesn't even let the
offending parties know the reason they were attacked.

Also when you work in a place that has too many 'adults', they can discount
you because of your youth.

~~~
lucisferre
I'm sure that's nothing like being discounted because you're a woman.

~~~
mahyarm
What I was talking about had nothing to do with gender, even though the
article was.

------
gfosco
I think she read wayyy to much into that bear photo... The sexual harassment
type stuff never surprises me, but they handled it very well.

Master password.. shocker. I'm sure there are still ways, just not as simple
anymore.

------
shadesandcolour
This problem seems pretty circular to me. Girls don't want to join companies
like this because it's a boys club, but it stays a boys club because girls
don't want to join. I do feel bad for women who wind up in situation like
this, and I personally have no problem with girls writing code or managing
projects or being involved with the tech world if they want to.

About the things that "suburban boys from Harvard would find cool" so that's
why they were there, um, duh. They were suburban boys from Harvard who didn't
really have a lot of women around the office. Obviously they're going to put
things like that on the walls. Speaking from experience, the only thing dumber
than a guy is a guy who is still in college. These aren't mature individuals
yet, and while that's unfortunate, they have to be treated differently
sometimes.

Here's my problem with the bearskin thing. We have to remember who picked it
up and put it on. Everyone was drunk, everyone was having fun. She picked it
up and put it on her head and was being funny. I challenge you to find one
drunk person, guy or girl, who would tell someone to stop doing something that
is funny. The picture sounds like an issue of most pictures that wind up on
Facebook after a party. They were taken at an inopportune moment and you wish
that no one would have taken it.

Long story short, some guys are dicks, and they have to work somewhere. When
they get out of line, the issue should be dealt with like it was. Its
unfortunate that the tech world still seems like a boys club, but it's a
difficult problem to fix when the people working in the industry don't always
see themselves for what they really are.

------
walrus
Can someone explain to me what the author is trying to say? I see two things
in the article:

1\. In the author's eyes, the majority of early Facebook employees acted in a
juvenile masculine manner[1].

2\. Some of those early Facebook employees weren't nice people.

Am I missing something more subtle?

    
    
        [1] I.e., the manner young males are stereotyped[2].
        [2] I'm not accusing the author of stereotyping.

~~~
pnmahoney
It's easy to miss the point with the bearkskin rug thing. It's worth spelling
out: a workplace which tolerates sexual harassment (senior supervisor known to
proposition all the women at the company), or _forces_ its female employees to
go through backchannels to deal with sex-driven workplace hostility?

It's less that the 'employees weren't nice people' and more that this employee
was powerless to reign in patterns of offensive/illegal/errant behavior.

Still it wouldn't be so necessary to focus on, _except_ for all the crap being
thrown in here to accept/defend it.

~~~
walrus
Thanks. After reading your comment and rereading the article, I agree with
your interpretation (but I can't stand the author's presentation).

It's too bad that the author chose to put the "male" spin on
things[1][2][3][4]. I found that offensive enough to distract me from
understanding the main point of the article on my first read.

(Also, the bearskin part was far-fetched. As another commenter here said:
unless there was more context involved, she was probably reading into that too
much.)

    
    
      [1] "[...]young, plain-looking guys in T-shirts, gazing at their
      screens, seemed startled—if not displeased—to see a strange new woman
      in the office."
    
      [2] "[...]it seemed like the kind of thing that suburban boys from
      Harvard would think was urban and cool."
    
      [3] "[...]or the unrepentantly boyish company culture that it
      represented[...]"
    
      [4] "As Mark wrote on his business card with boyish hubris[...]"

------
duck
_Once we learned how the software worked, he taught us, without batting an
eye, the master password with which we could log in as any Facebook user and
gain access to all messages and data._

Yikes!

~~~
__float
I think we learned of this master password probably several years ago. It's
nothing new, but I keep seeing it repeated in various forms since.

Also, other discussion possibly going on here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149731>

------
Muzza
Yes yes. Women good, men bad. We get it.

~~~
markfinger
Rather, the article raises a common problem for many tech companies.
Specifically, creating a more accessible culture.

Replacing the role of female entering FB's workplace - how would a
conservative or devoutly religious _male_ would respond to the machismo
described? Likewise: a feminist male, a homosexual male, a father, a
grandfather.

The article offers another voice calling for an increased awareness of serious
problems in our industry.

------
niete
This is possibly the weakest article ever.

------
aheilbut
I'm hearing a tiny, sad violin.

~~~
pnmahoney
god. jesus. NO. you've already set the course for the "here comes another HN
thread where people act/get pissy" thread, so we might as well. Here goes: You
probably can't imagine what it's like

\- for a female employee to be aggressively pursued by a supervisor for a
sexual act, nor can you fathom

\- the powerlessness of being one of those women who have all noticed this
behavior and, worse,

\- knowing that they can't do anything about it.

Nor, as your comment indicatese ... should anyone think it's important.

Some people might consider this worth discussion, even if they think that the
issue's overblown (either this instance or generally 'women in tech'), but not
you.

No, instead, you thought it would be fucking clever to do perhaps the
stupidest, tritest 2003-era joke to convey your callous - in response to a
pretty even-handed account, no less. It's beyond saving to be upset about the
stupid shit which runs through this site, but what _I_ am having trouble with
is trying to decipher what the fucking point of your comment here is. Does
mine have one either? Not really; guilty as charged. In any case - your stupid
response deserves _at least_ mine in kind, and probably also the revulsion of
anyone who thinks things this-article-related should matter.

And, fuck, a tiny violin joke? Really? That's the icing on the human-shitstain
cake.

Edited for emphasis, I am sorry that my infuriation has distracted you by way
of cursing. But not apologizing for total derision - I'll stand by conveying
how _completely fucked up_ this is. Let's take this seriously.

~~~
__float
Hm. I'm willing to bet your response would have been taken more seriously than
his (hint: it wasn't) if you hadn't taken his tone and reduced it to the point
of swearing so much.

If it is such an important issue, perhaps treat it a bit more professionally.

~~~
sp332
"Professional" comes across as dispassionate on the internet (and often face-
to-face as well). Swearing is one way to express emotion in text.

~~~
Aaronontheweb
Coming across as irate and unbalanced, which the author's swearing did in this
instance, does nothing but detract from his / her point.

You can be assertive and "professional" without sounding like a shriek.

