[yakshaving_jgt]

You can build a scary amount of social capital (which usually translates to financial capital) in this industry by just pushing the narrative accepted by a certain clique.

- Everything bad in the world is because of straight white men, and capitalism.

- Coding is not part of a coding job. Culture is more important.

- Making people feel happy is more important than building something that works.

- Truth is subjective, i.e. post-modernism.

Parrot the above talking points with an air of self-importance and you'll be well on your way to a highly-paid do-nothing job.

[dwaltrip]

You are straw-manning your political opponents, and it doesn't help the conversation.

I understand the temptation, I have my own critiques as well. But divisive rhetoric is not the correct response.

[ppf]

Which part of his comment is a straw man? It doesn't help if you dismiss valid observations and experiences as "divisive rhetoric".

[dwaltrip]

All of the bullet points in the comment.

The 4th one about truth is perhaps an exception, unfortunately some people might agree to that. Although, it's a bit abstract for most useful discussions.

[ppf]

1. If you haven't seen the demonization of white, "cisgendered" men in the tech scene and culture in general, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you're not in the US (and specifically, West-Coast) tech scene.

Edit: I had to add quotes, as I really dislike that word.

2. A more subtle point, but I've seen enough articles written by members of the tech scene to be convinced this may be a genuine issue. Articles claiming that demanding merit-based software development is bigoted/racist/sexist, others saying that if there isn't equality of outcome for all software devs, then the issue is the stated goals of software development.

3. Similar to 2

4. Again, very US-centric. There is a definite movement towards a person's "lived experience" and feelings (of being "safe" or whatever) is more important than objective facts.

The points above are true to the extent that I decided the West-Coast US tech scene was not for me, and returned to my home country.

[dwaltrip]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

I know what you refer to, as I worked in SF recently for several years. I don't think it is true that white men are unilaterally demonized by any significant group in American culture today. There is obviously some of that occurring, and occasionally the behavior is a bit troubling, but I don't there is any major problem to worry about. The behavior you are concerned will go away naturally as the recent social movements mature and are able to see some of the progress they are making. In general, most people don't support the extreme behavior, so there is only limited space for it to survive.

I do think patient and healthy pushback can be appropriate in the right circumstances. It is a tricky issue though. There are some very legitimate (and some less so) reasons motivating such behavior, even if, occasionally, some of the specific actions themselves are troubling. Anyone claiming rigid, simplistic absolute statements here seems wrong to me.

Perhaps I'm biased towards (and privileged enough to do so) being patient with what I see as some temporary flare ups that are side effects of attempting to process and rectify some of the results of absolutely terrible historical occurrences over the past several hundred years. I don't know. We will see how the next 10 or 20 years go.

I have to go so I won't address the other issues. These topics are tricky and hard to discuss with a short comment.

I will say that the way you are discussing them is preferable to the person I accused of straw-manning. You seem more capable of considering nuance, which I appreciate.