Ask HN: Women in tech, how do you find non-toxic work environments?
The JS job market in STL just isn't cutting it for me so I'm thinking of moving to CA and jumping into the tech scene there. Women, non-binary, people of color, how do you vet companies for not having horribly toxic work environments? I feel like I keep getting the same canned PR response of how great the culture is (for assumedly white dudes), but ping pong tables and free beer doesn't mean shit to me if I'm going to be underpaid, harassed, or viewed as not-technical enough on the regular.
What kind of interview questions have you found useful in weeding out unsupportive environments? What factors attract you to one company over the other? What other tips can you provide for reassuring me that I'm not just multiplying my potential abuse factor by jumping into a sea of ego-inflated tech bros?
510 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadAs for culture, I'd say just ask. Ask what the team does for fun. That will more or less tell you if you will fit in or not.
How will that tell you if they are accepting of e.g. non-binary people?
Plenty of people like to keep a separation between work and a social or family life. My employer has an outing once per year, but little else -- most staff either have a young family to go home to, or a social life outside work.
[NB: European in Europe here.]
You'll have easy union and HR support if needed and most people in such positions just want to get the job done and stay out of eachother's way, that attitude leads to friction minimization as a strategy instead of personal lives getting in the way of things. So if not caring is good enough for you, then it's possibly a good move.
As others have said, a workplace that involves more intermingling of social and work lives seems more likely to cause problems.
I'm not sure if you mean this, or if you mean a meal in the evening (or a weekend) every couple of weeks. I've not heard of any companies that regularly do the latter. We do this once a year, with a traditional Christmas meal -- pretty much everyone goes to that. There's also a summer event, about 3/4 of the staff go, mostly bringing their children as it's more likely to be a barbeque or picnic etc.
Sometimes, two or three or four of us go to a bar on Friday together, but it's not a team event. It's always less than half the team. It usually means leaving work 1-1.5 hours early, so my colleagues with children don't get home late.
Firstly, I spend all day with these people as it is and while they are perfectly easy to get on with and have a laugh with, my lunch time is for me to eat and catch up on my reading.
I really dislike cafeterias in general. They're too noisy, bright, uncomfortable and I would much prefer to just go and eat in peace and quiet.
I've been out with these people like a dozen times for meals, nights out leaving parties etc. but once or twice a week? That's way too much. I have things I like to do in the evenings, like exercising, playing learning guitar or improving my development skills. I also have a partner I wish not to neglect.
I'm totally fine keeping my work and colleagues separate from the rest of my life.
In a perfect world, none of that would be affected by your social habits, but our world is an imperfect place.
Some environments will say something like "Not much" IMO its a good sign too, because that means people are free to do whatever they want and probably clock in and clock out and leave their personal lives at home. IMO thats a good environment for diversity because the focus is on just performing, not on "Are you like me?" .
You don't even have to negotiate aggressively. Most people don't even ask.
The consequences for men and women negotiating (particularly "aggressively") are different. At the very least, someone perceived as a woman has to be prepared for backlash in a way that people perceived as men don't experience if they negotiate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/women-n...
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/lean-out-th...
* Check glassdoor.com to see what current and former employees have said about the company and how they rate it. While the feedback may not be specific to gender / diversity concerns, you can probably get a good feel for whether or not it's a happy place or a disgruntled place.
* Ask how many women work there in developer roles.
* Try to find a publicly traded company to work at verses a startup. A publicly traded company has a real HR department and potentially a lot to lose if they get sued. In a startup, there typically is no HR department. There might be one person who is in charge of some HR-related things like benefit administration, but that person is not equipped to deal with things like handling sexual harassment allegations. That person is also likely be friends with the founders.
I worked in 3 of big4 (Google/Microsoft/Amazon) and you need to try hard to find any harassing environment. Usually, if it's bad, it's bad for everyone, due to project/managerial conditions. All companies have trainings that teach you to prevent harrasment and give ways to report it.
Especially now, when woman can tweet picture of 2 dudes with remark on a convefence and they will have hard time, even if they're guilty in nothing.
After further thought, I think that you're just troll. At least in the places/teams where I've worked, white dudes aren't majority. Wast majority were chinese/indian folks. Also, don't expect to hear anything on non-work related stuff from interviewers - their goal is to evaluate your skills, not your sexual orientation, that doesn't matter in workplace.
This victim mentality BS is just another way for people to insert politics into the conversation. Every dev I have ever met has a horror story about an entry-level job where they were subjected to inordinate amounts of stress due to a number of factors.
Grow up already, no one cares about the feelings of an employee when there is money on the line and deadlines to meet. This OP sounds like a toxic candidate.
In my experience working with both men and women, those that find the most problems and find the most toxic environments are themselves the truly toxic ones; conflating personality conflicts with outright bigotry or special treatment as equality.
Again, I am not claiming this is what hte OP is doing here, and I don't see a point in accusing her of it; but the language and air of the post definitely suggests to me there is a real possibility that is what is going on.
It's a real trigger issue for many men who are sick of being told they are the problem; which doesn't excuse the overly-aggressive responses, but to me, does explain them.
There are plenty of studies demonstrating the reality of sexism, if dudes are unwilling to believe what women tell them. Ongoing willful denial of this reality contributes to a hostile atmosphere where women are intimidated into silence about their experiences, which in turn lets men pretend they have no idea that there could ever be gambling in this es... I mean, sexism in tech.
It's not like you can't tell if you're going to be underpaid before you agree to a salary, is it?
I thought about answering this too, but then I thought that there are factors that don't affect us, and this is what the OP is specifically asking about.
I think the questions you suggest beg for people to lie, especially hiring managers; I'd ask something more subtle like "how competitive the team is"... "How do you deal with bugs that made it to production" which begs asshole managers to brag about team toxicity...
Men of HN: "None of this is real, stop making stuff up."
...
I dunno; I've found metafilter has some folks in tech who might be more useful to you. Maybe this thread will become less of a clusterfuck as time goes on.
My experience has been that asking to talk to a woman on the team has been helpful. If HR / the manager think that's weird, they'll probably not be terribly good allies anyway.
No, that's not fair. The commenters you're referring to exist, and so do many others.
Edit: There's a pattern on HN, and maybe other internet communities as well, where the first comments to appear on a topic (especially one on which people are divided and have strong feelings) tend to be angry, reflexive ones by people who are quickly triggered and respond from pre-existing judgments. That doesn't mean they're representative of the community. Just the opposite: the majority of the community is more thoughtful than that, and thoughtful responses take longer to come up with. (It took me 30x longer to write this paragraph than the first one.)
As a thread continues, more thoughtful responses typically emerge. Such comments take longer to read and consider, too. These eventually get upvoted. The process takes time, and you can see it clearly in the current thread.
The barrage of sexist comments that show up every time this subject is discussed is clear evidence this community has a sexism problem.
Sexism on HN is prevalent amongst the most downvoted comments on the page perhaps...
I wouldn't say this community has a sexism problem any more than "real life has a sexism problem", the same - or worse, heavily upvoted sexist comments can be found in just about any other online community, so making it out like HN in particular has a problem when quite clearly the majority around here do not exhibit that is quite a stretch.
HN isn't separate from real life, it's part of it. Many people have built their careers through HN. Companies get funded through HN and people launch their startups on HN. This place is real, and if it's not welcoming to women, people of color, or other marginalized groups then that's a problem.
I wasn't suggesting it's separate - I was simply suggesting that I think its sexism level is comparable to many "real world" average places. I think that's pretty good, especially for the Internet where the disconnect is often larger.
Unless you're suggesting women and minorities are turned off immediately by heavily down-voted comments, many of which are hidden unless you check the "show me the bad stuff" box then I don't think "not welcoming" is an accurate description. I can't speak to race or sex, but with other things at least, I know that seeing nasty comments present but heavily downvoted is a sort of comfort to me.
I guess I've only been using HN for... [looks at bio] 9.77 years. But yes, I'd say HN is significantly worse than real life. And honestly, I expect it to be better. It's backed by YC. It's a professional forum for people who pride themselves on being smart and rational.
Almost every time a topic like this comes up here I consider it an embarrassment. I am always encouraging people to get involved in tech. I would like this to be a place I can send people new to the industry. But the amount of sheer garbage on anything that doesn't coddle the feelings of white men means I can't.
The argument on this subthread is that you can't judge the response of the community based on the most immediate, knee-jerk comments written on a thread. What you're doing is attempting to co-opt that sentiment into rebutting the question the thread is based on.
The OP of this thread asks women specifically how to find an employer that she might feel comfortable working at. That is a fair question, though personally I believe that toxic workplaces for women are also toxic workplaces for almost all men as well. But fine, that's not the issue. Some men have responded even though they were asked not to and some of those responses have been thoughtful and potentially useful.
In this subthread a HN moderator told a poster that they had made an unfair comment. That was refuted by another HN poster who asked the moderator to reverse his judgment because it his his responsibility as a moderator to support a particular political agenda that the other poster wants him to support.
I asked that person to reconsider their attitude because, like the moderator, I believe that there was a significant element of unfairness in this subthread and the moderator was correct to call it out because it leads to uncivil and unproductive discussions, as well as encouraging a kind of prejudicial attitude about men.
I agree with the moderator. That is the extent of my statement in this thread. In what way am I co-opting something? What am I co-opting? How does my language accomplish that, if that is what I am doing?
Maybe you will speak to your own positions here as well, since that might advance the conversation. You seem to enjoy sniping me so I don't hold out much hopes, but maybe you'll be nice. What do you think is going on here?
dang acts like sexism is just like any other topic on which HN is passionate and divided. Like tabs versus spaces, or whether linux is ready for the desktop.
Sexism is far more pernicious and far more serious than those other hot button topics though, so it should not be piled onto that heap.
I'm baffled by the suggestion that reasonable responses somehow negate the hateful bile others post. If somebody gets sexually harassed by 3 people in the office, does it help to point out the other 17 people have done no sexual harassment at all?
not a comparable situation. the comparable situation is when one man is accused of sexism, then all other men by proxy are judged as if they are sexists.
Women are not helped by painting the world worst then it really is - that just makes women less likely try things that could turn out enjoyable or profitable.
IMO, that is one of the things that holds women back - the moment we poke out of cocoon helpful people feel the need to inform us about grave imagined dangers and some end up believing that. If you want more females to try out these things, dont overestimate problems (nor ignore them).
And this is after only a single hour of the post going up.
Then I reacted also because the fear thing is a bit of pet peeve of mine.
There's going to be hostility on the internet. That's why some users can downvote or flag posts that don't add anything to the discussion.
I can see maybe one or two comments that I don't feel contribute anything near the top of the page, and that's because they were posted so recently it would be wrong to kill them immediately.
HN is not perfect, but it's damn good, especially when you give it time (as 'dang mentioned above).
I spend a lot of time apologizing for the 10-15 toxic minutes these things spend on the front page before they're flagged out of sight. I understand why that happens, but whatever we want to call it, "healthy" probably isn't it.
While I enjoy the technical expertise that I often find on HN, I'd be more inclined to actually talk about issues like sexism, politics, etc. if I didn't have to start by answering questions like, "is sexism even real?", "was slavery so bad?", "H1Bs are indentured servants", etc.
Every time I see a topic like this come up here I flinch, because I know there will be a lot of garbage, and quite often the garbage will predominate. I know you've been working on that, and I appreciate it. I hope we get there. But we're far from there yet.
Recently on a phone screen she asked the manager this and his response was "that's something you need to bring up with HR". That's a giant red flag and she saved everyone's time by not pursing the job further.
But it seems to me that an environment that is toxic for women is also an environment that I would find at least somewhat toxic - not because the crap is hitting me, but because there's a bunch of crap. So what I look for might be useful to you.
I'm older - 55 - and some of what I have is just "hey, this feels like that place that I worked, and it was pretty crummy". But I think there are some specific things you can try to look for.
Look for ego in the interviewing process. If the interviewer (even one of them) is trying to show how smart he/she is, that's a red flag. If one of them can't handle it if you disagree, that's a red flag.
Look for what they say about their culture. Or maybe, look for how they say it. It's fine if they have a ping pong table. At least, it's fine if that's an "oh, by the way". If it's a big part of what they have to say about themselves, that's more of a red flag.
Beer is a bigger red flag. The more their description of their culture sounds like a recruiting pitch for a frat house, the more it's probably toxic to someone who doesn't want to live in a frat house. ("We like to party together after work" is also a red flag.)
I don't know your age. I don't know how much of this is just "Get off my lawn!" But you might find some of it useful.
If people are drinking on the job, that is going to affect social interaction, in the same way that it affects social interaction at parties and in clubs. It will make people less socially inhibited, which means that tiny dickheads that normally have decent self-control will behave like big dickheads.
Only if you lack the maturity and self control to handle that.
In my home, I have daily, unfettered access to bourbon, gin, beer, wine, tequila, and more. And, yet I am as healthy as I have ever been. Because I'm an adult and don't choose to get wasted every day simply because I can.
Negative health impacts of drinking kick in way before "wasted every day". People drinking what appear to them to be moderate amounts are sometimes drinking lots more than they should be.
Albeit, I'm talking about UK where a glass of wine after work is normal.
Even at the offices I've worked at that were beer friendly, you'd find yourself in deep trouble if you drank enough to get that drunk during work.
Look for the egos! Ask what happens if a developer disagrees with PM requirements, ask if they do code reviews/how they run code reviews, ask how they interact with QA (some times unfairly perceived as lesser teammates), etc
I find workplaces with a wide range of backgrounds, ages, married/unmarried, kids/no kids, university educated/self taught, are the most accepting/professional environments.
For the specific situation I experienced, interviewer ego would not have been a tip-off. Some of the other posts suggest asking questions that I wouldn't dream of asking in an interview - they border on accusatory.
The number of women working is probably the biggest single indicator I can think of. Even if the problematic attitudes exist, they tend to stay hidden when women holding the same/higher rank are omnipresent.
I'd hate to have to get another kind of job, to be honest, so kind of hoping I can keep at this for another 30 years or so. Thanks!
I'm in embedded systems. Here, experience tends to be valued more than it is in, say, web programming. I can come in and command better pay than someone with only 10 years' experience.
That is, I can come in a few places. Most jobs still list "senior software engineer" as 5 to 7 years, and that's where their concept of experience ends. I've learned to not chase those jobs, because they don't want to pay for what I have to offer.
At my current job, they wanted me to produce the piece that tied everything else together in six months. It had multiple threads of control and shared mutable state. They didn't have time for me to come "up to speed". They were willing to pay for the ability to deliver what they needed.
So, yes, there are places where you can program to 65 or 70. There aren't as many as you might wish, but they're out there.
If you are interviewing and discount an otherwise promising potential employer out of hand for not having enough women onboard already, what can they do to rebalance the situation beyond continuing to bring a diverse range of solid candidates in for interview?
Someone has to be the first employee.
Other people might accuse you of having an attitude, but to me it looks like a combination of frustration and exasperation. If you're looking to not experience something, you're not focused on the experience you want and you might find yourself stuck in the same loop wherever you go.
Instead of looking for the culture you don't want, consider the things that would be indicative of a culture you want to be part of and look for that. It may not be in CA. In fact, what you're looking for might be somewhere as far afield as New Zealand or Germany.
If you can identify even a few things that you would definitely want to see that would indicate a culture you'd like to be a part of (e.g. presence of other women, people of colour, non-binary etc, relaxed environment, team rather than individual performance focus etc.) then you may find that will help you find places that have that culture.
Especially if you are young and should be learning from seniors. While it can happen to anyone (including proverbial white dudes - really I have seen that) a women is more at risk.
That sort of thing really knocks it out of you, and while he could've probably taken the employer to court and won, he'd have a hell of a fight on his hands and it'd tar the rest of his career (he spent a fair few years before this boss turned up).
I think there's a world of difference between a culture that ignores the needs of people that don't fit like a glove, and a culture that actively persecutes. Either can be a bad experience, but the latter is pretty much guaranteed for all involved.
And these, from Lara Hogan https://twitter.com/lara_hogan/status/852204796941660160
If you don't like the answers, then it might not be a good fit for you.
From the perspective that I work for a large, old company:
* Get a sense of how the company embraces (or doesn't embrace) flexible work arrangements. Can an employee leave early to run errands or pick up kids and make up the hours that night or on a different day without having to jump through hoops and/or get looked at like they have two heads?
My theory is that, in having a mindset that can accommodate different working arrangements, this can extend to accommodating different kinds of people. I'm suggesting that an employee might be less likely to be ostracized as 'other' at a place like that.
* Do they have the resources to encourage your growth by supporting you taking classes, going to conferences, buying you books, etc?
My theory here is that this supports a belief that people are capable of growing and improving, which is at conflict with the belief of anyone not being "technical" enough or somesuch.
If you want to be around fewer ego-inflated tech bros I recommend a place where the leadership is not comprised of ego-inflated tech bros. This combined with what I mention above probably eliminates most startups right off the bat... anyway thank you for listening to my theories
Your theory about accommodating different arrangements -> accommodating different people makes sense too, but I think this flexibility is also the direct opposite of some anti-woman bias. If people don't value them as employees because of the assumption that as (potential) mothers they're less dedicated or less reliable, being willing to accept that parents have other, more important things in their life regardless of gender and being willing to work with that is progress (for everyone).
One thing I absolutely love about my current employer is that it is written policy that if you're absent less than four hours in a day, you don't have to report it as PTO. Of course, that same policy also tells you not to abuse it. I think that's pretty fair.
It feels really good knowing that if I have a doctor's appointment first thing in the morning, I can come in an hour or two late, and I won't be either forced to burn sick time or stuck in the office at night making up the hours.
Compare that with the last employer I worked at, which was a defense contractor. For those of you who don't know how defense contractors work, federal law requires that every employee's hours be accounted for, so I'd have to either make up the hours or take sick time every time I had a doctor's appointment. Don't get me wrong: they were fairly progressive for a defense contractor (nobody bat an eye at the purple stripe I had in my hair at the time), but they were still subject to a whole ton of federally-mandated bullshit that I'm glad to be rid of. I sucked it up when I worked there because I got paid really well, but now that I'm out, I don't miss it.
First, the most important person is your direct manager. Ask recruiters specifically "did I meet with the person I'd be reporting to? If not I would like to meet them." This is the most key person, and if they are not your ally, no matter what the rest of the company thinks, you are sunk.
Ask about other women at the company, or if the team has had women but they've left. If they think that question is stupid, that is one of the biggest red flags.
Of course, try to get a good vibe from everyone you talk to, and if they like you as a candidate, they are likely to be willing to spend extra social time after extending an offer, such as a lunch with the team or something like that.
In the end, I'm sad to report that because good people leave faster, that most likely if you have a great manager that respects you, it's likely if you stay more than a couple years that they might be replaced. You may or may not have a say in that, and they may not be supportive. Always be on the watch.
In my experience, this is good advice for everyone. No one else in the organization will have as much input, weight, and sway as to what happens to your professional self in the next couple of years as your direct manager.
Five years ago, I would have said that the percentage of women in an office isn't necessarily a good indicator of anything. Nowadays, this would be my first advice: ask how many women work there.
With maybe one exception, all the places I've worked in that had very few women were terrible places to work in. Most of them were unpleasant to work in even for men who think "bro" is not a word to be uttered after you turn 19.
Teams that have a strong bias against women act on it almost universally: they drive candidates away with shitty and/or unenthusiastic interviews and they make life hard for those candidates who do get through. They don't end up with all-male teams just because reputation preceeds them and no woman wants to work there -- they end up with all-male teams because prejudice and insecurity tend to tip the balance of their hiring decisions, too.
It's not a universal predictor, but I definitely consider it a red flag. Frankly, it's one that I look at, too. I'm not the SJW type, but when I got into this whole programming thing, hacker communities used to be inclusive and diverse, and I kind of like to keep that going.
I think the parent poster meant companies that have had a chance to choose from a large and diverse group of people; but have ended up hiring people of only one, less diverse group anyway; whether by making poor choices or by driving away the other groups of people.
I would just add make sure you specify that they actually do technical work, and you would be working with them. One job I got I would say 80% of the cube farm were women. The only down side was they were all data entry people, and not treated well. The turn over rate was amazing. The 2 females on my team weren't actually doing technical work and was more or less just adopted into the team because they sat near us. I stayed for as long as my contract stated and left asap.
I've heard similar stories from others since.
If the things go well (e.g. no injuries), there is also aspect of feeling able to do things and feeling strong while being expected to be iddle most of the time (babies sleep a lot at that stage and you are not used to be iddle at home). It can be quite frustrating.
I also felt like it really spoke to his personality and rubbed the workers in a bad way.
Based on your use of racist and sexist language, OP, I would probably NEVER hire you and I actively seek to keep people like you out of my organizations.
(for the record I'm coming from the perspective of cisgender black male in case it matters)
One suggestion: Search for events and meet-ups where people gather that are driven by a higher-goal idealism – depending on your interests this could e.g. be privacy and hacker's events, the sciences, NGOs, environment, political movements. Talk to the men and women there and find out where they are working. It is far more likely to meet people there that are intelligent and work in interesting jobs, and their idealism and progressiveness usually affects other areas of life, too (i.e. they are less likely to be racist or misogynist). Of course I am talking about probabilities here, not guarantees.
Yep that's a subtlety that's often overlooked: brogrammers are an alien culture that colonized tech. Old skool geeks were next to never misogynists, they might have lacked social skills but they were never malicious or aggressive. Geek culture was entirely about accepting people whoever they were and welcomed anyone who shared common interests, to play AD&D or watch Star Trek or whatever...