[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[...]"

[tspiteri]

I don't know if it's only me, but I saw the young male stereotyping as a way to justify their behaviour, as in: it's not that bad, it's just boys being boys. The things that were really bad were the things dealt with later.