On emotional labour

My awesome wife who's awesome wrote an amazing tweetstorm earlier tonight about the unpaid emotional labour women are socialised to do, and it’s made me pensive about a few things.

First up: I am absolutely guilty of a lot of these things. I hope less so recently than I used to be, but I have enough self-awareness to admit that yes, I have said and done these things. (She promises me it wasn’t directed at me, but that doesn’t mean I’m innocent—and I think I know her well enough to know she’d never subtweet the Hell out of me like that—but I think even that is part of the truckload of unpaid emotional labour that she, as a woman, has been brought up to do) And to be quite honest, if you’re a guy… you’ve done these things too. If you look at me and think to yourself, “well, I don’t think I’m like this,” you almost certainly are like that. Only if you can specifically identify things you do that are not like that… you’re like that.

Because, honestly, guys are socialised to do exactly that. And you even see a lot of it in what jobs in tech are coded as being “inherently” oriented toward men or women. QA and project management, which are both roles that require diligence, attention to minute detail, and an aptitude for predicting someone’s needs before they are aware of it, are coded as and performed by women much more than most other roles in the tech industry. Of tech roles within a tech company, they’re the only positions that I’ve consistently observed having anything close to gender-wise parity.

So why do I think that guys are socialised not to do this work? Because, let’s be honest, it is work. I had an opportunity to fill in for my team’s project manager (who, it’s important to point out, is a woman) late last year, and holy mother of God that job is hard. Like, Nintendo-hard. And at least she’s getting paid for it, but I guarantee she’s been doing this her whole life, because that’s what society’s taught her to do. And I haven’t. Instead, I’ve grown up around a lot of media that’s suggested that one set of gifts (chocolate, teddy bears, and diamonds) will satisfy any woman I may be involved with (here’s a hint: that’s a load of crap), and an escalating and never-ending series of ostensible jokes along the lines of “bitches be cray” when her birthday, or anniversary is forgotten.

And why the hell shouldn’t they be? Seriously, think about it for a minute. The person who you’ve decided to open up to and be most vulnerable with comes home on your birthday, or on the anniversary of the day you got married, and they have no idea what’s happened today, however long ago. They can’t bring it to mind at all.

Wouldn’t you be upset? I would be. I have been.

Long story short, just like math and art, the everyday things that women “just seem to do better than men” are things that they’ve practised, constantly, since they were very young. (Men have, conversely, been raised to ignore those things.) Anything you do every day of your life, for about as long as you can remember… yeah, you’re going to be pretty damn good at. Doesn’t make it easy, just habit. (Professional athletes are a great example of this) If you really want to show some kind of appreciation for the women in your life, and all the things they do for you… do them yourself.

Women don't join this industry to fulfil your fantasies

It’s been another bad day week for men in the technology industry being complete and total shitheads to women.

Admit it, guys, we didn’t have very far to fall to hit that particular point. But last Friday uncovered a few particularly horrible examples of just how poorly some men can regard women, and how quickly others will come valiantly leaping to their defense.

My day opened up with being pointed to codebabes.com (no link, because fuck that). Describing itself as a portal to “learn coding and web development the fun way” CodeBabes pairs video tutorials with scantily-clad women, and the further you progress in a particular technology, the progressively less and less the instructors are wearing. As if software development wasn’t already enough of a boys’ club that has used busty women to get people to buy things (whether it’s the latest technology at an expo, or the latest video game), now somebody’s had the brilliant idea of having PHP and CSS taught by women in lingerie.

The project doesn’t even pretend to have any particularly noble purpose in mind. Above the fold on their site, the copy reads, “The internet: great for learning to code [and] checking out babes separately, until now.”

The mind boggles.

First of all—even if we were going to ignore everything about how socially backwards this idea is—is just isn’t an effective way to accomplish anything semi-productive. Did they not learn anything from trying to get off, playing video game strip blackjack? Or any other game where the further you progress, the more you see of a nude or semi-nude woman? Because this idea is clearly derived from those. The problem with those games is that in order to reveal the picture you want, you have to concentrate on the challenge you’re presented, but the more you concentrate on the challenge, the less aroused you are. The aims are in complete opposition to each other. If you’re trying to make learning a new technology a game, make sure that the technology is the aim, and the game is an extrinsic motivator. If you’re trying to look at naked girls… well, there are lots of opportunities to do that on the web.

But this problem is so much bigger than just being an unproductive way of trying to do two things at once.

What’s the catchphrase, again? “The internet: great for learning to code [and] checking out babes separately, until now.” These two things are implied to be mutually exclusive—that outside of the site, beautiful women and learning to write software have nothing to do with each other. That, were it not for these videos, beautiful women who look good in lingerie would have nothing to do with writing software.

So, if beautiful women who look good in lingerie would other have nothing to do with writing software, we can further assume that the creators are implying—and equally importantly, that their users will infer—that women know shit about computers (if I may coin a phrase).

Now, that being said, I’s quite sure that the women who are presenting these videos actually know what they’re talking about. There’s nothing more difficult than trying to convincingly explain something you don’t understand, unless you’re a particularly talented actor with a good script (see: every use of technobabble in the last thirty years of science fiction television). And I’m not trying to suggest that they should be accused of damaging the cause of feminism in technology. Why? Because there is nothing about this site that suggests to me that the idea was conceived of by women. The whole premise itself is simply so sophomoric that I can’t come to any conclusion other than that it was invented by men, particularly when the site’s official Twitter account follows The Playboy Blog, Playboy, three Playboy Playmates… and three men.

Software development, in most English-speaking countries, suffers from a huge gender gap, both in terms of staffing and salary. Sites like this will not do anything to close that gap, because all this says to a new generation of developers is that a woman’s role is to help a man on his way to success, and to be an object of sexual desire in the process—their “philosophy” flatly encourages viewers to masturbate to the videos.

What makes it that little bit worse (Yep, it actually does get worse) is that, on reading their “philosophy”, the creators also make it quite clear that they recognise that what they’re doing will offend people, and they don’t care. They say, “try not to take us too seriously”, and “if we’ve offended anyone, that's really not our goal, we hope there are bigger problems in the world for people to worry about.” Where have I seen these arguments before? Ahh, yes, from sexist men who are trying to shut down criticism of their sexist bullshit. The next thing I expect to see is them crying “censorship”. I’m not trying to prevent them from saying their repugnant shit. I would, however, like to try to educate them about why it’s hurtful, and why it’s something that they should know better than to think in the first place.

As for the rest of us, we need to make it clear that there’s no room for these attitudes in today’s software industry. That when somebody suggests visiting sites like this, they get called out for promoting sexist points of view. That when someone posits that a woman only got an interview, or even her job, because of her anatomy, that they get called out for thinking that she isn’t fully qualified to be there. If this industry has any hope at escaping the embarrassing reputation that it’s earned, we have to do better. We have to have to the guts to say, “that shit’s not cool,” to anyone who deserves it. Stand up for what you believe in.

How you speak reflects how you think

My good friend Audra pointed me to this list of “20 programming jargons” that is just full of awfulness. First of all—and this is the easy, facile complaint—I’ve never heard any of these terms (at least, with these definitions) used in the wild. Maybe it’s because I’ve generally worked for reasonably grown-up companies where we attempted to act like professionals, but who can say? I don’t quite know why these terms are so foreign to me, but some of them are just bad.

First, the good… or, at least, neutral:

Baklava/Lasagne Code

Okay, this one’s actually kind of good. Lasagne code evokes a particular variety of spaghetti code that got that way by adhering a little too closely to old “enterprise” techniques of organising class responsibilities, and by applying code patterns for the sake of applying code patterns. I’m hesitant to use baklava to describe this phenomenon because (a) baklava’s delicious, (b) there’s too good of a parallel to spaghetti code with lasagne, and (c) it feels like it’s making fun of Muslims, and I just don’t go in for that.

Banana Banana Banana

I’ve never heard of this, that I can recall. As an actor, I’m definitely familiar with rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb, the chorus equivalent of making it look like you’re having a conversation onstage without actually saying anything particularly coherent, that would pull focus.

Claustrocodeia

Can’t say I’m familiar with this term. Granted, I don’t like moving away from my nice 24” screen at the office, and working on my laptop screen, but it’s not like it’s anything more than a minor inconvenience. Get over it. Or buy yourself a big screen and expense it.

Stringly Typed

Again, this one’s pretty good. I’ve seen code like this, and it’s always much more of a headache than it could possibly be worth.

There’s Already A Word For This

Bugfoot

Over here, where the professionals work, we call this an “intermittent bug”. Could be environmental, could be infrastructure, could be code. But while we can’t replicate it, we don’t want to dismiss it out-of-hand, because this also means we can’t gauge its impact on the end user.

Jenga Code

Also known as “tightly coupled”. If you don’t already know this, or for some reason refuse to use this industry standard terminology, I frankly worry for the quality of your code.

Shrug Report

The bug report with insufficient detail. This is just a bad bug report, and should get sent back to the reporter for more details.

Unicorny

Otherwise known as “the business’s problem”. Unless you’re being called in to provide swag work estimates. I’ve also heard this as a “future project”.

Your Professionalism Is Showing

Counterbug

Code review isn’t supposed to be an adversarial process. When another programmer is reviewing your code, this is supposed to be about everyone’s professional development. Your reviewer may learn techniques they weren’t previously familiar with, and will gain exposure to more areas of the codebase, and that’s always a good thing. And by the same token, you’ll have the opportunity to learn techniques you weren’t previously familiar with, because your reviewed may be able to suggest a better (or even just different) way of solving the problem at hand. By saying, “yeah, well, you did this wrong”, you aren’t helping anyone (beyond exposing additional bugs to be fixed).

That said, getting used to code review as a collaborative process, and no longer hearing their comments as a personal attack, takes a conscious effort at first. But it’s effort that’s worth it. So when a reviewer points out an error, you should first bite your tongue, then think about what you can do better the next time around.

Duck

The business is not your enemy. Distracting their attention away from one particular area of the software is staggeringly unprofessional. It suggests that either you didn’t do your job properly there, or you think you know better what the business, or customer, wants. You might. You probably don’t; the business holds all the cards, and knows things they haven’t bothered to tell you, because they didn’t consider it germane to the feature request. If you have an issue with their ideas, the best thing to do is to take it up with them. In the event that they didn’t consider your alternative approach, then you might get them to reconsider their approach, and create an ultimately better product.

Refactoring

There’s a great maxim about how to write software: write code as though the next maintainer is an axe-wielding psychopath who knows where you live. Vivid, I know, and pretty violent, but I think it kind of gets the point across. Another, less aggressive version, describes the next maintainer as someone less capable than you with no context. If you’re writing code, or refactoring, and you don’t leave it in such a state that any developer could read it and know immediately what it does, you’re doing it wrong.

I know, I know; I’ve written before about self-documenting code being a lie. That doesn’t mean your code should be incomprehensible; it’s about not eschewing documenting your classes at a high level, simply because another developer need only read the code to understand it. Being a nice person to the next person is what self-documenting code is supposed to be about.

Smug Report

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m guilty of having this reaction to an external bug report that suggests that the reporter knows more about what’s going on than the developer. I’ll also cop to the reality that I’ve probably filed a few of these bug reports, as well. However, instead of going into adversarial mode, or trying to belittle the reporter, acknowledge something: you probably have a particularly technically competent reporter on your hands. If they’re outside your organisation, then you basically have someone who will do free testing for you! Make use of this reality, because you have someone on your level, who you probably wouldn’t have to work very hard to convince to do black-box testing. These reporters are gifts in human form.

Unfortunately, there are some that betray an awful interpersonal culture. Presented in no particular order, and certainly not the original order:

Being A Good Person: You’re Doing It Wrong

Jimmy

This, frankly, reads more like an in-joke at one particular organisation. Probably Jimmy was a wet-behind-the-ears recent graduate who managed to get past the interview, only to flail wildly until he was put out of the rest of the team’s misery. It happens sometimes. It’s unfortunate for Jimmy that no one on his team was willing to mentor him into a good programmer, but if the rest of the list was written at the same company, there probably weren’t many qualified candidates.

Not to say that professionals don’t turn colleagues’ names into in-jokes. Never mind that at the foosball table, I can think of at least four developers whose names are used to describe particular moves, one of our developers was, due to a fluke of seating assignments, regularly forgotten to be pulled into impromptu meetings. He’s now a verb, used when something (or, more typically, someone) is carelessly forgotten. However, this is done (a) in jest, and (b) is aimed squarely at the forgetter, not the forgettee. Poor guy just got it named after him after we did it so often that we started using his name as a shorthand for “we forgot him!’

So why is it unfair to call the clueless newbie a Jimmy? Because it pokes fun at the clueless newbie for being just that. Instead of mocking the new kid, they should be welcomed with open arms and guided into being a better developer.

Chug/Drug Report

Yes, suggest that the bug reporter was, at best, in an altered mental state when they wrote the report. This seems fair. Or, you could be working with a language barrier. Perhaps two, depending on when you, as the reader of the bug report, learned the language it’s written in. Assume that the reporter did their best to convey what they encountered, and give them the benefit of the doubt.

Mad Girlfriend Bug

First of all, this kind of bug is pretty much any bug that isn’t completely straightforward. Second of all, this is an idiotic gender stereotype. If you aren’t willing to try to communicate with your signficant other when you’re having an argument, your miserable relationship is your own problem. Finally, reinforcing idiotic gender stereotypes in the workplace is just one of the reasons that the gender balance both in the workforce and in school is so completely out to lunch. It’s one of the reasons that twice as many women as men exit programming as a profession. It creates a hostile work environment for your peers. Don’t do this.

Barack Obama

This one feels vaguely racist, and the fact that it’s the editors’s favourite, of everything on the list, gives a certain amount of credence to my worry in this regard. I want this to be a joke about Healthcare.gov, or about how a lot of liberal people had a lot of hope which has been repeatedly dashed, but the bit about “which would not otherwise get approval” bears a pretty strong suggestion that African Americans only voted for Obama because of the colour of his skin… and that just a reference of questionable future usefulness into a racist joke.

Ghetto Code

While I was simply wondering if the Obama project account was racist, this one pretty obviously is. Inelegant code is just that. Inelegant, perhaps sloppy. Tightly coupled. Not cohesive. Spaghetti code. With so many descriptors for code that isn’t elegant available… why on Earth would you go for the one that takes advantage of a marginalised group of people? Other than the obvious explanation that you almost certainly grew up in a life of privilege, with no idea of what it’s like to live in a ghetto. Bear in mind that the word ghetto was first used to refer to the quarters of the European cities where Jews were effectively obligated to live, because the Christians in power viewed the Jews as something less than themselves. Ghettos are areas of both crippling poverty and, at least once (if not still), systematic oppression. Your inelegant code is not described by this. Just stop using this word entirely.

As a profession, we get a lot of flak for how we treat people who don’t look like us… and I can’t say it isn’t well-earned. By adopting, using, and promoting language like this, all we’re doing is saying that we think it’s okay to do exactly that. It isn’t. So other than the two phrases up at the top… this stuff all has to go. The writers and editors at EFY Times who wrote and approved this list should give some serious consideration to what they’re really saying when they publish lists like this.

An unfit culture

Yesterday afternoon, Nitasha Tiku published a piece on Valleywag, entitled This Is Why There Aren’t Enough Women In Tech. It’s eye-opening reading, even for me (and I consider myself at least somewhat awake to the terrible ways in which women are treated in this industry). Go ahead, read it. I’ll be here. I’ve got a Scotch to keep me company. Read Shanley Kane’s February article and Ciara Byrne’s followup interview with Kane, while you’re there.

Read them? Good.

Assuming you’re a cis man… still feel good about yourself, and the developer culture in the office you work in? I hope not. Because if you’ve ever sat an interview, and were asked afterward about “cultural fit”, you’ve been on the edge of this problem. And the problem, as Kane puts it so eloquently over at Pretty Little State Machine, is that cultural fit is “a loosely coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce.” Cultural fit is a catch-all way of rejecting otherwise perfectly suitable job applicants, without having to flat out say that it’s because they don’t have a similar cultural background.

This also introduces design problems in your product. No, seriously. Hiring with a view to cultural fit ensures that your entire development team thinks similarly—and approaches problems similarly, allowing for slight differences in experience with the tools in use and with others. You could get an entire team of programmers who would write, structurally, almost the same code, just with different variable names. You might say, "great minds think alike," but I would suggest that fools seldom differ. Then. if you hire one person who is eminently qualified, and is largely unlike the rest of your staff (e.g. outspoken about what’s shit code and will just fix it, as opposed to the various forms of introversion you stereotypically see in programmers), you see not only significant structural differences in coding styles, but this also helps your entire team evolve as programmers. Instead of everyone already writing according to an unspoken code style, there’s discourse, improvement, and a gradual winnowing away of the chaff.

But enough about how cultural fit damages your codebase.

Cultural fit damages developer culture, and society as a whole. Reading through the anecdotes in Valleywag, I’ve seen hints of this attitude in virtually every office I’ve worked in, since I started working. My computer science program was, as in so many others, overwhelmingly dominated by men. The few women who started, and made it through the three years that I was there full-time, were either as naturally talented as some of the men, or struggled every day with it. And I can’t imagine it was made easy for any of them by the men, who alternately accused them of following their boyfriends into the program or buying answers, and incessantly hit on them.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, because it seems like every week I see another example of it: the tech industry, by and large, is an industry made up of little boys who were hurt over and over again, and never learned anything but how to hurt. They were rejected and hurt by their peers growing up, formed a tribe of comrade rejects, and grew to fear outside interest. When they were young, outsiders becoming interested in them led to pain, but now they have the means to reject and hurt those who rejected and hurt them. The bullied have become the bullies.

These hurting little boys grew up in a society of intense white male privilege. One where, even in 2003 when I began my degree, there were jokes that the women taking B.Comm. were really just being there for their “MRS”. One where the University of Waterloo was “jokingly” called the University of Waterwoo, on account of the high concentration of Asian students in the Math and Computer Science programs—almost as though they were displacing the rightful seats of (might I add, white) Ontario-raised students. A culture where, I hate to admit, I participated in jokes about final exams being either the perpetrators or victims of rape.

So these little boys, already distrustful of new people becoming interested in their interests, were raised to further distrust the motives of those others. And now that they’re creating tech companies, and doing the hiring, they’re applying that distrust to their staffing procedures, and keeping out everyone who doesn’t already think like them.

I’ve heard stories from colleagues—women who were interested in computers but hadn’t had the opportunity to try programming until they entered university—of being disregarded by the men in their program who had grown up in front of a keyboard and a CRT. That they were somehow inferior because, for whatever reason, they didn’t have the same opportunities growing up. The same men who, invariably, would describe developer culture as a welcoming meritocracy, where intelligence is fostered and output alone determines your worth. The same men who, on Slashdot (and later, Reddit) would, after receiving comments of “STFU, n00b” from their elders for asking naïve questions, would turn around and do the same to those who had naïve questions for them. A welcoming meritocracy, my ass.

Cultural fit is little more than code for “were you bullied as a kid for like computers and D&D,” when you get down it. It’s shorthand for decades of similar experiences of pain, and a similar unconscious desire to mete it out on the new kids. And it has to stop. We have to begin the difficult process of evolving past the pain and refusing to inflict it on others. Instead of demanding that people fit into our culture, we have to extend the olive branch to other cultures, and modes of thinking, and creating a brave new world where the meritocracy that we claim to exist is actually present. In private, we used to assure ourselves that, when we got older, the bullies would be working for us in the new knowledge economy. That knowledge economy seems to be here, but all the old rules of proving who’s got the bigger dick seem to still in force.

So to anyone and everyone reading who sits an interview, I call you to reject cultural fit, and reject old ways of thinking, and help create the meritocracy and the culture we all wanted our community to be.

E3, or, Seventy-two hours of misogyny

After lunch most days, before returning to work, I typically take a few minutes’ break to catch up with Reddit and Twitter, to see if any of my friends have said anything funny or interesting today, or maybe there’s an programming-related article I can share with my colleagues. However, today, my Twitter feed had this waiting for me, courtesy of a retweet from @lindsaybieda:

Holy shit. Female 343 games producer walks on the Microsoft stage and a man *seriously* wolf whistled at her. Fuck you.

— brandon sheffield (@necrosofty) June 10, 2013

My immediate reaction was not unlike Gollum’s, when Sméagol tells him in the film of The Two Towers, “Master looks after us now. We don’t need you any more.”… what?

Now, I knew going into this that E3 is a ridiculous three-day-long display of sexism, objectification, and misogyny (oh, and something about video games, too). Last year, Scott R Kurtz had a character deliver a webcast from “either E3, or the world’s largest Hooters.” I have privately, among my friends, and probably publicly, too, lamented every marketing department’s decision to hire booth babes for a conference—to use women as little more than decoration and furniture— and I’ve written before about the technology industry’s rampant misogyny. It's not as though I didn’t at least somewhat expect the result of what I did next.

I ran a Twitter search for “#E3 Bonnie Ross”—just that—and was promptly given a feed full of complaints about the new Halo, pleas for 343 Industries not to mess it up… and a litany of tweets about Bonnie Ross: how good she looks, how inept she (apparently) was as a presenter, and multiple people explaining in sometimes graphic details that they want to have sex with her. In particular, @Boogie2988’s gem (since, it seems, deleted):

£429 do we get a complimentary blow job off Bonnie Ross with that?"

— Boogie2988 (@Boogie2988) June 10, 2013

I can’t believe that I have to ask this, but where the fuck do these guys get off, thinking that this shit is okay to suggest, let alone think?! Bonnie Ross is not the studio head of 343 Industries for you to cat-call, or to ask for sexual favours from. She is there to do a job, and judging by the Halo sales, she seems to be doing a pretty good one at that. If you think she’s a dull presenter, fine (during the BB10 launch, I described BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Hiens as having “all the personality of a wet dishrag”), but for God’s sake, can a woman, for once, show up at E3 and be treated with some basic human respect? Is that so hard, guys? Maybe, you know, not call her a MILF. Perhaps not suggest that “that bitch had to have skipped speech class.”

I went on a bit of a tear on Twitter, quote-tweeting and retweeting some of the more egregious offenders, because you know what? I am sick to death of the way that men in my industry talk about women, whether they’re presenting for their favourite console, or the speaker’s colleagues and peers. I would really like to think that, in this day and age, we were raised better than that, but, clearly, this isn’t the case:

@mgpcoe do you want to fight?

— goodsmell (@G__REX) June 10, 2013

@mgpcoe Oh sorry, didn’t realize I was being monitored. That FEMALE must have skipped speech class.

— sinrin. (@SannyRanny) June 10, 2013

@sannyranny @mgpcoe mgpcoe is the definition of a floppy wet turd. #E3 #goofball #letscaremorethanweshould

— Lawrence Fidelis (@HeyFiddy777) June 10, 2013

@mgpcoe It’s my opinion and I will freely state it anywhere I want. Your judgement means shit

— Vel (@God_Damn_Vel) June 10, 2013

I’m a little proud of eliciting “let’s care more than we should” as a hashtag; it really demonstrates the work that still needs to be done. And I have to say, I haven’t been challenged to a fight since Grade 9, so well done over there, too. However, one of the guys I quote-tweeted (the one who made the crack about speech class) got back to me and we had this conversation. It’s too long to embed without messing around with Storify, but I broke it down for this guy that, basically, what you say on Twitter is open for public critique (and I was just criticising his statement, not his character) but his closing statement, “I was in a casual context, speaking with kids just out of high school who couldn’t care less about semantics,” really reminded me, despite all the fucked-up things that have happened this year, that kids today still need to be taught this.

I’m sure he and his friends couldn’t care less about the semantics of what they’re saying, but the reality of the situation is that we need them to. Just as we, as adults and parents and nurturers and teachers, need to teach them to care. We need to carefully teach the younger generations about respect, and about the hidden messages they may not realise they’re delivering when they use certain words. We need to not only self-correct, and demonstrate the right behaviour; we need to call out the wrong behaviour in others. They may not realise what they’re doing, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be taken to task for it. After all, not knowing that, in this particular jurisdiction, you can’t turn right on a red light doesn’t mean the traffic police are going to let you off the hook.

To make this abundantly clear, if you were one of the guys who decided to judge Bonnie Ross’ ability or competence based on her appearance or gender, or you made—or laughed at—jokes about her, using language specifically reserved for insulting women, you are part of the problem. You are holding back the human race from evolving beyond prejudice, beyond hatred, and beyond unwarranted fear. And I refuse to stand idly by and watch you do it.

The bullied have become the bullies

I’m willing to give SendGrid a pass in this fiasco. A small pass, only, but Daily Dot is reporting that their hand was forced. Beyond the DDOS attack that they, and Richards’ blog, were suffering, Anonymous is/was threatening the utter destruction of the company if she wasn’t removed, and publicly.

I knew there was something strange about publicly firing her, if even just to try to pacify the trolls.

The threat from the Internet’s favourite band of vandals and vigilantes includes the following details of the plan:

“You [sic] client list has … been obtained by Anonymous. They have already begun harassing your customers. These include obnoxious phone calls, emails, denial of service attacks, online vandalism and defamation, and even real-life harassment.”

“Your financial backers have also been targeted for the same harassment. …If any of your backers have something embarrassing or illegal to hide (sexual misconduct, tax fraud, etc), Anonymous WILL find it (they are good at doing this) and make it public.”

“Real life harassment is an escalation that comes into play based on how long this situation is allowed to play out. It is not affected by the effectiveness of the previous forms of harassment. Even if your customers and financial backers are dropping like flies (or the opposite, entirely unaffected), this will still happen if Anonymous still maintains an interest in this situation. …If some of the more talented members of Anonymous take an interest into [doxing], every employee of Sendgrid becomes a target, starting at the top. For your reference, this is already happening to Ms. Richards as per standard protocol. There are also some interesting information about her dentist that was dug up in the process.”

“However, you do have a choice to make at this point: Do nothing, or publicly announce that Ms. Richards will be fired. The opportunity to stop this growing mob in its tracks before it tries to tear Sendgrid apart is as simple as publicly announcing Ms. Richards' firing. Now, you also have the opportunity to be sneaky about it and just publicly announcing the firing but not actually do it. But if Anonymous ever finds out, they will bring the full fury on you and your company. To put it in perspective, not even secure government websites are safe. If you believe you can tough it out, by all means, do nothing.”

I think it’s safe to say that Sendgrid didn’t have a choice in the matter.

They did, however, have a choice in what words to use when they announced Richards’ dismissal, which means that despite the reality that they had to sever their relationship with her, writing the following in their public blog continues to send much of the same message that I decried earlier:

“A SendGrid developer evangelist’s responsibility is to build and strengthen our Developer Community across the globe. In light of the events over the last 48+ hours, it has become obvious that her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite. As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid.”

I don’t believe for a minute that Adria Richards divided the developer community. The developer community is already divided, because large numbers of men think nothing of making sexually suggestive jokes in a crowded conference hall. Large numbers of men think that a person who’s been offended by sexually suggestive commentary at a professional event should discuss the issue quietly, and not make a fuss. Large numbers of men believe that Human Resources department policies regarding indirect sexual harassment in a professional setting are stranglings of their free speech.

The software developer community is rife with sexist comments, and sexist thinking. Richards didn’t create a divide, her actions exposed it. The CEO of SendGrid “supports the right to report inappropriate behavior, whenever and wherever it occurs”… but clearly, only as long as it’s kept quiet.

To say that the Internet has exploded with hatred really doesn’t quite do the reality justice.

Let’s review:

1. A woman—a woman of colour, at that—embarrasses a man for making sexually suggestive comments in a professional setting.
2. The man is chastised, and apologises, presumably in earnest.
3. His employer fires him for making these comments.
4. The public isn’t told specifically why (perhaps this wasn’t his first offense, perhaps it was, we’ll never know, and his employer isn’t accountable to any of us), but he publicly accuses his accuser of getting him fired.
5. Men across the Internet rally around his cause, and begin attacking her for daring to publicly call out inappropriate comments made in public. Every terrible word you can think of to describe women, and women of colour, is used.
6. /b/ hears about it, and begins a campaign of harassment, demanding that she be fired in retribution for, ultimately, an HR policy violation firing.
7. Vigilantes get in on the campaign, and attempt to destroy the woman’s employer, and everyone associated with them, unless she is fired.

This is not the behaviour of an inclusive, welcoming group.

This is the behaviour of a group of misogynists, who are frightened by the thought that the power relationship that they have historically always enjoyed over women (and over people of colour—the English-speaking software development community is not only overwhelmingly male, but overwhelmingly white) is in jeopardy.

I don’t recall where I originally encountered the thought, but it’s becoming more and more clear how true it is, the longer I look around—the nerd community wasn’t born out of a spirit of inclusivity. The community was born in an effort to exclude those who had previously excluded its members—a spirit of “fuck you, now we’re the cool kids.” The community at large claims to be more evolved than the cool kids who rejected them, but that simply isn’t true.

We’re a tribe of hurt little boys, who only ever learned to hurt. When we were overwhelmingly in the minority, it was a support group, and there was no one to hurt. But we never got over the pain of rejection, and we never learned how to rise above the hatred that forged the community.

But now we’re a pop culture, and we don’t know how to deal with that, other than the only way we know how—by lashing out at those who say they don’t like what we’re doing. And those who are most inclined to lash out have the means to do much more damage than a playground fistfight.

This week has dealt a huge blow to the feminist cause in IT, because the public perception of developers being misogynists, and of the community being a boys’ club, has been dramatically reinforced. I’ve seen all kinds of comments confirming that the comments made at PyCon are by no means unusual, or that Richards is alone in finding them highly inappropriate. But for men to demand that women interested in STEM fields simply accept that ribald comments are just part of the environment only serves to keep highly talented women out, because they don’t think having to put up with their colleagues’ shit is worth it.

Regardless of what you think of Adria Richards, or of the picture she tweeted, I would like to think that we can all agree the technical community as a whole needs to stop the cycle of revenge.

This is not a meritocracy

UPDATE

An hour ago, SendGrid publicly announced Adria Richards’ termination. They say,

While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers.

In other words, they heard the thousands, if not millions, of people calling for Richards’ termination, and delivered. In an effort to do… what? Save their customer base? This is a hell of a message to send—if you embarrass a man for making tasteless jokes at a technical conference, and he gets fired and complains about it, we’ll throw you to the wolves.

The joker’s behaviour at the conference earned him disciplinary action (whether or not he should have been fired or given sensitivity training is academic)—he was acting as a representative of his company, at an event they had sponsored. Necessarily, he should have been on his best behaviour. Richards was probably representing SendGrid as well, insofar as SendGrid probably paid her to be there, and it was probably all over her nametags—and she may have been wearing company gear too. However, what was Richards’ offense? Saying “that’s not cool” loudly, really.

Rather than go to bat for Richards, and say, “we believe that the software industry is best served by a culture of universal respect, and we don’t condone anyone making inappropriate sexual commentary in the workplace or at a technical conference,” SendGrid has sent the message that they don’t have their employees’ backs. That they either don’t believe that the industry is rife with misogyny, or perhaps that they don’t think it’s a bad thing, or maybe just that it can’t be fixed.

I don’t hold with any of this. I believe that the misogyny that pervades this industry must be confronted head-on. New hire sensitivity training that says little more than, “don’t make dirty jokes around girls” is staggeringly insufficient, and if Human Resources requires this training, then everything that company does in public must reflect the beliefs that that training espouses.

SendGrid has told the world that they believe offensive jokes are okay in the workplace, and that if you call it out, you will be silenced.

Is my calendar right? Is it 2013, or 1963?

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This week is a bad week for how I feel about my gender.

We got an early start on Sunday with shockingly insufficient sentences for a pair of teenage rapists, followed up by horrifying apologia from, well, all the major news outlets, CNN included. I’m not going to comment on it here, but I will suggest that you read I Am Not Your Wife, Sister or Daughter, a fantastic article (that my wife Anne wrote) that’s getting a fantastic amount of coverage. She’s absolutely spot-on when she points out that we, as a society, really need to stop trying to humanise rape victims to rape apologists by suggesting, what if it was your wife? Your sister? Your daughter?. It’s not just objectifying, but it also reinforces your audience’s misogynist worldview.

I could really get into it, because it makes me mad… but the way that the professional software community is treating Adria Richards—and, by extension, every woman in the industry, has got me so upset I can hardly see straight.

You probably know where I’m going with this, but let’s review the facts, shall we?

Richards publicly shamed two attendees for cracking sexual jokes about, among other things, “forking his repo” after a suggestion that forking is the highest form of flattery. I understand the pair of them were going on for quite some time, and the PyCon organiser dealt with the situation privately, and the guys were chastised for their behaviour, and that seemed to be the end of it.

Until when they got back to work, when at least one of the pair of jokers was fired. He then posted a strange apology that suggests that he believes Richards was trying to make that happen. Richards sent her own public apology to him and urged his employer to reconsider their decision.

Regardless of this, the male developer community has worked itself into a mouth-foaming rage. People are specifically calling for her dismissal, and there was at least one suggestion that the guy who was fired should sue her. There’s a whole host of men insisting that “dick jokes aren’t harassment”, as though sexual harassment can only occur through individually-directed comments. I’ve lost count of how many people are suggesting that Richards’ fragile female sensibilities caused her to overreact to a “private joke” (one, I’ll point out, was told in a crowded conference hall, and thus is anything but private, unless it was whispered directly into the other person’s ear).

Virtually every comment I read on the thread following the non-apology is coming to his support, and attacks Richards.

Virtually every commenter seems to believe that a man’s desire to make offensive jokes in a public space, while representing his employer, somehow trumps every other person’s basic right to be in a room without being made to feel uncomfortable because of their race, gender, religion, sexual preference, or even no reason at all. That bad jokes are somehow sacrosanct, and that people who are offended by them should simply “grow up and get over it.”

Look, this isn’t the way adults, and professionals, are supposed to talk to each other. This isn’t the way the developer community constantly tries to describe itself to outsiders. We insist, adamantly, that everyone is considered equal, and that the developer community is a meritocracy above all else.

This is, unfortunately, not the reality. Women have never been afforded the respect they deserve within this industry. RADM Grace Hopper invented the compiler, and assembly language, in order to make programming that little bit easier than having to remember and decipher opcodes, and her male peers couldn’t possibly have taken her less seriously… but because of her, I don’t have to have any idea what the x86 instruction set looks like in order to do my work.

And yet marketers at computing events like CES and E3 continue to hire booth babes—in other words, human furniture to make their booth look good. I’ve read of women who have produced games, who later staffed the conference booth for the game, and tech reporters asked her to get the producer, or technical director, as though the idea of a woman being responsible for creating something as complex as a video game was a foreign concept.

I’ve worked in a variety of companies, some larger and some smaller. But the reality is that I’ve worked with far more men in technical roles than I have with women, and that, invariably, when there haven’t been women in the technical group, it’s turned into a boys’ club.

This is unacceptable. The current software developer community is openly hostile to women asking to be treated like human beings, and this shit has to stop. You wouldn’t make racist jokes at a conference (or would you?), so what makes it magically okay to make jokes that objectify sex, and women?

Right, nothing does, because it’s not okay.

It’s not okay to compare an object to a person’s body. It’s not okay to compare a development process to sex. It’s not remotely okay to tell someone who says, “I’m offended”, that nothing offensive happened, and that they’re overreacting.

And it isn’t fucking okay to make death threats against a person who called out inappropriate jokes. Yes, this happened. Yes, the post has been deleted. Yes, I hope YCombinator does the right thing and assists the police in any investigation that might occur, and yes, I hope that investigation happens.

Finally, it’s not even a little bit okay to attack someone for acting on having been offended. That someone got fired for making inappropriate comments while representing his company at a conference shouldn’t be remotely surprising.

Technologists really need to start showing each other a lot more respect, because right now, it really feels like we don’t show each other any.