
The tech industry has a problem with “bro culture” - daegloe
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/opinion/sunday/jerks-and-the-start-ups-they-ruin.html
======
ng12
I love the fantasy that this is in any way unique to tech. Tech's problem is
that they are less adept at hiding it -- partially because they eschew normal
corporate bureaucracy which does a fantastic job masking these issues. The
underlying reality is this is behavior that is seen when you have people with
large amounts of wealth and power (and guess what, it happens to people of
every gender!).

~~~
eridius
It's not unique to tech, but it's particularly prevalent in tech, and should
not be dismissed on the grounds that it's not unique.

~~~
jjaredsimpson
People keep saying it's particularly prevalent in tech. Which I don't believe
at all.

~~~
mercer
I'm skeptical too, but very open to change my mind, so I'd love to hear how
we're wrong.

------
kev009
I agree with the pretext behind the article of inexperienced, reckless CEOs
creating toxic culture but it is incredibly poor journalism and I'm laughing
that this made it past NYT editorial board. What came to mind is the scene
from Idiocracy "Wanted: for being a dick". There have been much better pieces
on excoriating these companies individually and using them as a vehicle to
discuss systemic problems. This one is just a bandwagon hack job.

Also "none of the 15 biggest American tech companies valued over $1 billion
has a female chief executive." er, what about the most successful tech company
of all time, IBM?

~~~
idlewords
It's an opinion piece, not journalism.

~~~
kev009
That is completely orthogonal. Journalism includes developing and editing
articles to meet expected standards, and you can evaluate that independent of
agreeing or disagreeing with the message. Being factually incorrect in the
case of the top 15 CEOs is not excusable just because it's an opinion piece. I
tend to think of NYT as a high quality paper and was surprised to see this
filler.

~~~
bogomipz
>"That is completely orthogonal"

No its, not. An Op-Ed is a specific format as distinct from regular
journalism, it is not edited other than grammatically:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op-ed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op-ed)

~~~
kev009
Touche

------
sillysaurus3
_Look at Uber, the ride-hailing start-up. It’s the biggest tech unicorn in the
world, with a valuation of $69 billion. Not long ago Uber seemed invincible.
Now it’s in free fall, and top executives have fled. The company’s woes spring
entirely from its toxic bro culture, created by its chief executive, Travis
Kalanick._

This is a big assertion. There are multiple forces at play regarding Uber's
erosion. The culture is a significant aspect of it, but not the entire reason.
Other forces include regulation, Uber's floundering self-driving play, and
Uber's inability to continue paying drivers the same rates without running out
of money.

~~~
vosper
I suppose you could stretch it to say:

1\. Their optimistic / misguided (or is it? Can we be sure yet?) foray into
self-driving cars was a result of arrogance stemming from their toxic bro
culture

2\. Their problem with subsidizing rides and losing money is due to a win-at-
all-costs competitive attitude that demands they run Lyft into the ground,
stemming from toxic bro culture.

3\. Increasing regulation is due to their arrogant tendency to flout local
taxi laws and run Uber anyway (this I might agree with, though I'll note that
Uber is often wildly popular when it disrupts a local taxi market, and they
have been able to get their way in part due to asking Uber riders and drivers
to actively support regulation change in their area)

But, no, I agree with you. The idea that everything Uber's struggling with is
directly the fault of the toxic bro culture that Kalanick has (seemingly
single-handedly?) created is absurd.

~~~
mschuster91
The win-at-all-costs culture is not "bro exclusive". For example, look at how
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are copying stuff from each other in
the hope that users do not leave the walled garden.

Or what Google did with gmail and now AMP.

~~~
vosper
Oh I agree, win-at-all-costs is definitely not bro-exclusive, since it's been
around a lot longer than this concept of bro-culture has been.

------
boyter
Are the following statements true?

"despite many studies showing that women run companies better than men" and
"none of the 15 biggest American tech companies valued over $1 billion has a
female chief executive"

The first seems to suggest I could find studies saying the opposite, or that
perhaps increased diversity is the best option and who is CEO isn't as
important. Would love to see the source they used for this. For the second I
thought HP and Yahoo were both run by women CEO's and as CEO why are they
being ignored? Or is it just referring to unicorn startups? On spotty
connection so hard to check.

Edit I previously mentioned AMD and IBM having female CEO's but edited out as
I was getting downvoted. Not trying to push any agenda just pointing out the
statements seemed wrong.

~~~
thrownblown
IBM CEO
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginni_Rometty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginni_Rometty)
AMD CEO
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Su](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Su)
former HP CEO
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman)
former XEROX CEO
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Burns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Burns)
(still chairwoman, tho)

~~~
dmritard96
also worth noting that these are exceptional companies with TONS of companies
that aren't unicorns that are highly valuable and well run. Whether women run
unicorns better perhaps was not what the stat was about and instead was
probably about whether in general women run companies better. Since there
aren't that many unicorns that popup annually, wouldn't be surprised if there
aren't statistically significant sample sizes to determine which gender runs a
company better, assuming you subscribe to gender binaries and agreed upon
'better' conditions of course...

------
evangelista
This is an article about nothing. People used to fall for articles like this,
not anymore.

Lets deconstruct it.

(a) Select for examples where white men (who the tech media has generally
decided are evil and always are a problem) have failed in business (b) Now we
will identify these people with a codeword (tech bro) because we can't
actually say "aggressive white men" without being overtly racist (c) Now lets
generalize and blame all the problems of the entire industry on these evil
white privileged males who the media has decided to demonize (d) Conclusion:
White men aka tech bros are the root of all problems in Silicon Valley and
must be controlled and stopped because they are bad human beings, all of them!

Once you see through the superficial dressing the underlying logic is
hilarious.

If you read a lot of media you start to see the patterns. Over and over again
the urge is to blame the nearest convenient white male CEO for whatever
problem just happened. Donald Trump got elected? Lets blame Zuckerberg for
fake news. Then lets blame Peter Thiel and then Sam Altman. Note: All white
men in positions of power.

In reality:

People get rich frequently in Silicon Valley by being assholes, taking other
people's property, customers, business, employees. We call this system
"capitalism."

YouTube grew enormous on the back of pirated content. Alibaba and Amazon
profit tremendously from counterfeit products. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates spent
their careers suing, back-stabbing and stealing ideas form one another and
those around them.

Don't even get me started about Larry Ellison.

Capitalism is not really nice, get over it.

~~~
fatbird
"People get rich frequently in Silicon Valley by being assholes, taking other
people's property, customers, business, employees. We call this system
'capitalism.'.... Capitalism is not really nice, get over it."

The name of this fallacy is "The Naturalistic Fallacy".

~~~
WalterSear
And the name of that fallacy is Libertarianism.

------
SamReidHughes
Does anybody else get the sense that the NYT's role in reporting about the
tech industry is that of a gossip rag?

~~~
whorleater
You do realize this is an opinion article right

~~~
loeg
Whoever wrote it, NYT chose to publish it.

~~~
whorleater
Opinions pieces do not carry an implicit approval of the publisher, that's
their entire point. Just because the NYT allowed an op-ed reflects little on
their journalistic standards.

~~~
mercer
This does show how perhaps the 'op-ed' doesn't quite work in its current form
on this new-fangled internet thing.

I've talked to more than one person who assumed something written on the main
domain was a 'proper' article, when in actuality it turned out to be an op-ed,
blog (some new site did/does this) by essentially a random person, or
something like that.

Maybe people made this mistake before and I'm only noticing it now?

~~~
whorleater
I feel like this is only an issue with people who only skim the title and fail
to actually read the article. The page itself makes it very clear that it's an
opinion article, and if you're drawing conclusions from the url or title
itself it's the fault of the person.

------
egonschiele
I also don't like bro culture, but I don't think VCs are going to push it out.
Venture capitalists are bros. Finance has a bro culture. This is a pervasive
problem, not just a tech problem. Zenefits' downturn was because of fraud, not
the bro culture. Despite all the recent bad press, I don't think Uber is close
to going up in flames.

~~~
Spooky23
End of the day, this stuff happens because people prefer do business with
their friends, and those friends tend to come from college, so the friend
funnel looks like the college recruitment funnel.

That probably also accounts for the dearth of women.

------
abhv
"...they’re boorish jerks who don’t know how to run companies."

Theranos.

Congress.

Office of American Innovation.

We're celebrating an era when skills like "manipulation" and "rhetoric" are
more important for success than a passion for doing things exceptionally well.

------
elvinyung
Only when I finished the article did I notice that the author was Dan Lyons,
who also wrote the _Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble_ ,
chronicling his time at HubSpot.

I'm surprised that this article itself makes no mention of it.

~~~
6stringmerc
Huh, I'd almost call that a 'material omission' considering the context.
Usually prior work is a calling card. Well, unless it's something more
convenient to ignore. Not saying I'm immune from this, just that I can
understand it.

------
tabeth
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the real reason. The reason is schools.

Elite prep schools to elite Ivies to elite starter jobs to elite opportunities
to elite companies. "Elites" tend to be, ancedotally, more bro-ey.

Like all of the social problems on Earth, here's another education parity can
solve.

------
nommm-nommm
The author of this piece is a white male who, at 52 year old, spent a year
working for HubSpot after being laid off by Newsweek magazine. He wrote a book
about his experience.

In this article - [http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-
lyo...](http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/) he
gives a lot of information on exactly the kind of culture he is talking about.

Stuff like, "Later I also will hear a story about janitors coming in one
Saturday morning to find the following things in the first-floor men’s room: a
bunch of half-empty beers, a huge pool of vomit, and a pair of thong panties.
The janitors were not happy. They get even more distressed when, one morning,
a twenty-something guy from the HubSpot marketing department arrives wasted
and, for reasons unknown, sets a janitor’s cart on fire."

The whole thing is worth a read.

------
dnautics
Aside from the similarity to others in the way that it collapsed, and the
behaviors that happened within the company, do other people get the impression
that zenefits actually a Bro-co? I can't claim to be an expert or claim to
personally know the founder/leadership - I didn't get the feeling that it was
particularly bro-ish.

I bring this up because while it's entertaining and perhaps a more-true-than-
not narrative of the Brogrammer startup, it's a bit facile and may lead people
to 1) automatically assume brogrammers are going to be a problem and more
concerningly 2) ignore problems at companies that aren't run by brogrammers.

------
DanBC
Here's a randomised trial of how rudeness affects teams. _The Impact of
Rudeness on Medical Team Performance: A Randomized Trial_ :
[http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2015/08/...](http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2015/08/05/peds.2015-1385)

------
username223
> the point is to get away with as much as you can.

i.e.

> They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter [to VCs].

\-- [http://paulgraham.com/founders.html](http://paulgraham.com/founders.html)

They may just be acting "naughty," but in the long run, sociopaths tend to get
caught.

------
flylib
NYT should be ashamed they posted this, extrapolates examples from a small
sample size to make a fake story

------
minimaxir
Dupe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14014993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14014993)

------
dbg31415
> What is bro culture? Basically, a world that favors young men at the expense
> of everyone else. A “bro co.” has a “bro” C.E.O., or C.E.-Bro, usually a
> young man who has little work experience but is good-looking, cocky and
> slightly amoral — a hustler.

> Bro culture also values speedy growth over sustainable profits, and
> encourages cutting corners, ignoring regulations and doing whatever it takes
> to win.

Doesn't this describe virtually every company that takes investor dollars and
then has to focus more on marketing and sales than they do on producing good
products or services?

I've been called a "jerk" on numerous occasions, I've also been thanked for
standing up to "jerks" on numerous occasions. I honestly don't know what the
term means, other than a term that's convenient for the "in crowd" to use to
describe someone who isn't a member. Wether someone is a "jerk" depends
entirely on where you are standing.

If a sales guy tells a delivery manager, "Buddy, I need you to lower the
estimates so we can make this sale..." who is being the jerk? If a manager
wants to boot someone off her team because he keeps re-hashing old discussions
about technical debt and risks the team already agreed to take on... who is
being the jerk? If a tech lead gets bent out of shape on process and rants
about how we need to stop doing hotfixes because marketing can't get their
work requests in on time... You get where I'm going...

Relationships are complicated, trying to dismiss anyone as a "bro" or a "jerk"
won't help you solve the real issue... why did an employee you liked enough to
hire turn into a jerk a few months in; is there something wrong with process
or culture? (And... do you have bad traits as a manager?) Why does the sales
team feel so much pressure... is there something wrong with the product? What
is making someone, who presumably is an expert at what they do, gripe and
complain so much?

It's rare that a company is successful if the power isn't shared across teams.
We horse trade time, scope, and quality all the time to get to launch dates
and budgets we need -- if just one person tried to mandate everything the
talented people on each team would leave for greener pastures. With
transparent leadership, communicative management, and a thorough performance
review process in place a consensus can be reached. Without that... everyone
is a jerk to someone else.

------
alphonsegaston
I like how the persistent ills of amoral, toxic businesses are now "Silicon
Valley's Special Problem with Bro Culture." It's just Wall St. in t-shirts. If
you let sociopaths run everything, you'll always end up with this result.

~~~
liquidise
I've seen a trend of the word "sociopath" being thrown around here flippantly.
While I understand what this hopes to communicate, the claims are
unsubstantiated and it only serves to lessen the argument.

~~~
alexandercrohde
I think there is meaning to the use of that word. It's not just an ad-hominem
snipe, but it's an accusation on the values of these individuals' motivations.

When somebody says a CEO is a sociopath they are essentially arguing that the
CEO has little/no empathy, believes their success is due to their own inherent
superiority, views morality/law as an obstacles to their success, and defines
success as in personal achievement without regard for collective wellbeing.

Moreover, by name-calling the trait (using a derogatory word) one is
collectively reshaping the cultural definition of success away from "Make
billions of dollars you have no need for and are going to leave to your kids"
toward "Make the world a better place."

So I disagree on every level I guess.

~~~
rublev
The only people the word sociopath has no effect on are sociopaths.

------
teen
The graphic on the article is quite sexist

~~~
lutusp
How is it sexist? It shows the rational people running away from the
sociopaths. The graphic thereby puts women in a favorable light. Or is that
what you meant -- reverse sexism?

------
stevebmark
OH MY GOD, REALLY!? </sarcasm>

------
chillingeffect
> Toxic workplace culture and rotten financial performance go hand-in-hand.

Implying the culture at top-performing American companies is acceptable.

------
dontlikeitbro
> going to an escort bar with your colleagues, as Mr. Kalanick did in South
> Korea ...

So?

> ignoring (unenforceable) regulations ...

So?

> Uber’s public downfall began ... sexual harassment

This has really nothing to do with their core business.

> the poor treatment of women ...

What poor treatment of women? Because of the odd sexual harassment case
popping up?

> Without “adult supervision” ...

Mr. Travis Kalanick is doing absolutely fine. The issues mentioned, that need
to be dealt with, have been dealt with. Next.

------
mschuster91
The author is quite sensationalist and horribly uninformed.

> Bro culture also values speedy growth over sustainable profits, and
> encourages cutting corners, ignoring regulations and doing whatever it takes
> to win.

> As this was happening, Google’s self-driving car unit sued Uber, alleging it
> had stolen its ideas. Then word leaked that Uber had been using a sneaky
> software tool to deceive regulators in cities around the world. All this is
> as much a part of “bro culture” as the poor treatment of women; the point is
> to get away with as much as you can.

Blatantly false bullsh.t. This is called _capitalism in its raw form_ , profit
first and everyone/everything else be damned. (edit: No, this was not intended
as a pun on "America first", but indeed "America first" actually resolves to
"profit first" once you dig a bit)

Corporate trickery of regulators ("using a sneaky software tool to deceive
regulators"), corporate espionage ("alleging it had stolen its ideas") etc. is
nothing new, and it has zero to do with "bro culture". In fact, regulations
were created to rein in capitalism. Capitalism needs regulation or otherwise
it naturally evolves into a form of "anarchy", but unlike the ordinary
definition of "anarchy", this one means "corporations can do whatever the ...
they want, and the workers are exploited as far as possible".

Also, excessive partying, going to brothels on company accounts or wasting
company funds on stuff like private jets is nothing new. A decade or two
companies were even able to _legally declare bribes as expenses_ , it's only a
recent development that excesses get punished by the public. And because the
public does not want to blame the real culprit (capitalism and individual
greed, whereby the greed is the foundation for capitalism), the mentioned
behavior got labeled as "bro culture" instead.

------
jameskegel
I'll be risking being contrary to popular opinion saying this, but can we go
back to focusing on tech? I'd rather leave these types of 'floor is lava'
social discussion to the philosophy majors of the world who enjoy it. I feel
like we, as a community, get sidetracked by the bloodlust for drama and the
media respondeds to that demand by pandering to the lowest denominator. So-
called justice porn has no place in a productive society.

~~~
fatbird
Your whole comment is indicative of why SV is now in the situation it's in,
where disruptive apps aren't enough to overcome idiocy that the rest of us
outgrew decades ago.

"So-called justice porn has no place in a productive society." I'm
screencapping this as a warning sign on the road to downfall-by-hubris.
Seriously, shake your head. Productive society without justice is every
dystopian nightmare we've been imagining since we started wondering what
tomorrow might be like.

