[vm]

I already see comments downplaying this issue. Take a moment to acknowledge the series of events: 1) multiple women felt harassment at at work, 2) they reported it to the company (which can be hard) 3) the issues did not get fixed.

I hear about this pattern across companies and industries. It's awful. Quit systematically downplaying it. It's real and needs fixing.

[andriesm]

It may be an unpopular view, but I don't believe we should attach ANY MERIT AT ALL to, as you said "women FELT" harassed. The only yard stick should be actual concrete actions of harassment, and those should be dealt with strongly and profesionally.

In this article she complains about guys prospecting for dating opportunities at company social events. Depending on the exact nature of such, it is likely poor form, but is it really sexual harassment?

Or her complaint that "men stare at women working".... what are women like royalty you have to stair at the ground lest you accidentally "stare"?

You cannot and should not punish anyone for using their goddamned eyes to look at anything in their surroundings anymore than you can or should punish thought crimes.

If it is really obnoxious staring, the mature thing is to confront it and make it clear. Beyond that I don't have a solution against people being assholes. I mean if a woman is bitchy to me in a way that doesn't cross the line of breaking company policy, there is nothing much I can do except manage the situation.

BUT: as soon as any real line has been crossed, consequences should get real.

But this woman has so many complaints that seem marginal, mixed with complaints that are very serious like inappropriate touching, that I think she probably burned her credibility.

I mean, if the same person kept coming in to HR with very marginal complains, someone looked at me and I didn't like it, someone asked if I would like to for lunxh and I said no and then nothing further happened... this stuff seriously dilutes and detracts from actual sexual misconduct.

[zozbot234]

I might agree that the "hurt feelings" framing is unhelpful to an outside observer, but the article mentions butts being grabbed, women getting bear-hugged without consent and people outright ignoring OP's request to "stay professional" while discussing work (at her house, no less). That's seriously toxic behavior and no one should be expected to put up with it. When a toxic, dysfunctional work culture is being enabled like that, even stuff that would usually be dismissed as "marginal" becomes relevant because it's just adding to a huge unaddressed problem.

[sebazzz]

I wonder if the fact that you can get fired easily in the USA has something to do with it. In some other countries an employer needs to build a serious dossier against you if they are to fire you.

[fxtentacle]

I think the problem with this article is that it's very easy to (mis-) interpret as her exaggerating the scale of the problem.

"Some of the men who work at SpaceX [..] stare at women while they work"

That struck me as a rather odd thing to say.

"a fellow intern approached me in our intern housing and grabbed my butt"

That is definitely unacceptable, but if I understand things correctly, she was living together with other interns to save money. So that was her roommate, doing bad stuff in his free time. I'm not quite sure if SpaceX should manage their employee's life at that level.

"learn from our colonial past and incorporate indigenous expertise"

That sounds to me like a dog whistle for her subgroup of social justice warriors. In any case, my boss would also be pretty surprised if someone used that word choice for arguing their case.

Similarly, she mentions "very small group of women and nonbinary people" the latter of which seems hyperbolic to me because nonbinary people are rare in general, so it's not unexpected that they would be as rare at SpaceX as they are in overall society.

So while I agree with her statement in the abstract that SpaceX should have a better work culture, there's too many little oddities in that letter for me to agree with it.

[dang]

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[fxtentacle]

It appears the article URL changed while I was replying to it. But the new URL contains even more things that seem odd to me.

"I found my way through an abusive upbringing, leaving home at a young age, subsequent homelessness, and sexual assault in college"

That is horrible, but in the context of the letter I would be surprised if it will not affect how one experiences the world. It's easy for me to assume that people are acting in good faith if they do stupid things because I have never had any of those negative experiences. So the same people doing the same action might be interpreted as "stupid fun" by me and as "abuse" by her.

"I had to continue living in the residence with this man."

That sentence reads weird to me because I assume that SpaceX will not require you to live at any specific house. So based on my experience of the world, it should have been easy for her to move. I can fully understand if she wants that guy to move instead of her giving up the apartment, but then she should say so instead of claiming that it was impossible to move.

"Elon Musk’s behavior bears a remarkable similarity to the behavior of a sadistic and abusive man who had previously been part of my life."

I do feel sorry for this person, because she clearly had many bad things happen to her, which never happened to me. So maybe that's just me noticing how privileged I am. But if her goal is to push SpaceX towards objectively improving their work environment, I wonder if it would have been better to not mention this. Because like I said in my first comment, this makes it very easy to misinterpret her (probably valid) criticism as a personal vendetta.

[itsdrewmiller]

"Intern housing" implies that the specific housing is provided or subsidized by SpaceX. Of course she's not forced to live there, but she would probably have to pay money to move. (And why shouldn't the person who assaulted her be the one to move?) It still doesn't seem to me that you are reading the article in good faith.

[fxtentacle]

She wrote "I had to". You wrote "Of course she's not forced to". So in effect, you highlighted the same odd word choice as me. And in my opinion, "I have to" is very different from "I don't want to for financial reasons" or "I don't want to for fairness reasons".

And yes, I was trying to find examples for how this specific article could be misinterpreted in bad faith.

[coddle-hark]

This comes across as a bad faith interpretation of the comment you’re replying to. I read it as providing additional context and a (slightly?) different perspective, not as an attempt at misrepresenting the article to push an agenda.

[dang]

A serious response to the article would begin by acknowledging the strongest parts of the complaint.

[fxtentacle]

I wrote the original comment, but I found that very difficult here. In my opinion, there are only 2 really strong statements in the letter.

1. She feels sexually harassed and is upset that HR apparently did not agree with her, or at the very least they did not take the action that she wanted them to take.

2. She has strong personal feelings about Elon Musk and is comparing him to her own past abusive relationship. She also has a history of very negative experience with family and relationships.

I'm guessing you would have wanted to hear "she was sexually harassed" but the entire point of my comment was to argue that the step from "she feels harassed but HR did not agree" to "she was harassed and HR didn't act" was not convincing to me. In my opinion, the letter contains many other complaints that to me appear unrelated (such as the "colonial past and incorporate indigenous expertise" plan) which gives me the impression that the person writing it is likely to complain in general.

Also, please consider that I originally wrote this as a reply to a comment which said "I already see comments downplaying this issue. [..] Quit systematically downplaying it. It's real and needs fixing.". That's why I finished my comment with agreeing in the abstract, but not the specific letter. So my intention wasn't to dismiss the letter, but to argue that if her goal is to improve the situation, then this specific letter and its phrasing might not work as well as a different way of reporting the same facts.

[simondotau]

Establishing the argument is the role of the article being linked to, not a job for every single commenter wishing to express an opinion. A serious response can always criticise the weak parts of any argument without having to guess which parts are considered stronger by others.

Or in the alternative, perhaps we should not have any discussion on this topic at all until SpaceX offers a formal response, at which point you can chastise everyone for failing to acknowledge BOTH the strongest parts of this article and the strongest parts of SpaceX's response.

[dang]

What you're saying would be fine if topics all came up in a vacuum with no priors and could be treated and dissected interchangeably. But that's very much not the case. In the real world we have to deal with, the topic of sexual harassment has a long history. In the context of that history, a comment responding to a claim of sexual harassment by dismissively belittling it is breaking the HN guidelines—not just the one I mentioned above, but others too, like this one:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Not to mention:

"Eschew flamebait."

And I think we could add this one too:

"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

I'm not saying people have to accept everything that gets said in every such article, but there's an art to addressing these things without blowing up the thread. Many of the comments in this thread are on the wrong side of that line.

[TigeriusKirk]

If you actually want this to be how discussion works on this site, you need to make the point much more consistently than you do.

[dang]

Consistency is a red herring because it's outright impossible. We can't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.

If you see a post that ought to have had some moderation but hasn't, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [e-mail].

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Seriously? You need to be told that?