Timeline for 20 years ago, a colleague said I should have treated a female employee differently due to the difficulties of working in a male-dominated industry
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
45 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 18, 2022 at 21:34 | comment | added | Reuben Mallaby | @Thomas if you know it was wrong then kudos. If you have stopped doing such, then extra kudos. The past has passed, words in such a case should not matter, only the actions | |
| Apr 17, 2022 at 3:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackWorkplace/status/1515525629692846080 | ||
| Apr 13, 2022 at 18:58 | comment | added | Thomas | This is the part that really stuck in my mind: treating her like other programmers may or may not have been more harmful to her. Treating her differently may have harmed all of us in the long run (me as their boss, her in the team as she would get off more lightly). After my friend made that comment it made me think this was a lose-lose situation. Had it been handled 2020 style, behind close doors, people would still have questioned what the reprimand was and speculation would have started as well. I value the question because this is still an ongoing issue, even if it takes a different shape. | |
| Apr 13, 2022 at 18:55 | comment | added | Thomas | @mattfreake, it's not so much about the right thing per say because right at the time doesn't mean right today anyways. I think this has turned more into two lines of thinking: one philosophical where if you adjust punishment to fit the recipient's condition (for example issue a traffic fine based on one's revenue) it may be perceived as unfair by some and the other one where this would naturally open the door to many interpretations and everyone would want a different criteria (male vs. female there, but the same argument could be made with religion, ethnicity or anything else) (->) | |
| Apr 13, 2022 at 16:10 | comment | added | matt freake | @Thomas It seems odd that you are so concerned about the right thing to do 20 years ago. The purpose of Workplace, as I understand it, is to provide useful answers to future visitors to the site. It's hard to see how insisting that answers are relevant to the workplace 20 years ago does that. | |
| Apr 12, 2022 at 13:14 | comment | added | nuoritoveri | @Thomas I understand what you are worried about, I think that's another good reason for not to criticise (or praise) people in public. | |
| Apr 12, 2022 at 10:53 | comment | added | Thomas | context is important: smoking in the office is bad, but if you had suggested than 100 years ago, when it was the norm, people would have shrugged you off. You can't say in 2020 that smoking is bad when discussing a 1920 situation since, at that time, no one thought it was bad. Courts of law abstain from taking decisions where the culture of the moment impacts interpretation of past events. In this case, 90s dot com context, people were only sensitive to how much stock they had, no one was offended 2020 style. In that context, the question is still very relevant and is not a moral question. | |
| Apr 12, 2022 at 10:48 | comment | added | Thomas | @ReubenMallaby true, I know it, you know it, we all know it; but this is a past action in a defunct context and the core of the question is not about this. When my friend criticized me, she didn't criticize berating, it was accepted and she was also in that context and not especially nice to people either. She criticized that it was done to a woman. The context made that the not nice part wasn't relevant, but the question was relevant. (->) | |
| Apr 12, 2022 at 9:19 | comment | added | Reuben Mallaby | @Thomas still doesn't make it right | |
| S Apr 11, 2022 at 21:45 | history | suggested | blahdiblah | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Make title less coy
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| Apr 11, 2022 at 21:44 | comment | added | Thomas | @ReubenMallaby, just read the rest of the thread about the 90s dotcom boom context. Berating was not a problem there; I didn't fire her on the spot solely because we wouldn't have been able to rehire and train in time, so it would have meant more work for the team. I would handle it differently today, but this wouldn't change the question one bit. | |
| Apr 11, 2022 at 19:13 | comment | added | Thomas | @nuoritoveri, but wouldn't that cause an issue of people seeing a different treatment, quite openly, between male and female? I had one guy whose gf was sick with cancer, and he had a different treatment because he could work a lot from home to be there, but everyone understood it and it's not because he was different as a person but because his personal situation was different. In this case, there was no difference between her and her other peers (besides the fact she took shortcuts, hid it, and didn't help to find the problem until caught when everyone got together) | |
| Apr 11, 2022 at 19:04 | comment | added | nuoritoveri | I would say in such cases you have to decide what's your goal is. Probably you want your team to work correctly and efficiently. Woman are different from man and you should treat them differently not because woman in tech industry "have hard time", but because they respond better/worse to a specific kinds of treatment. | |
| Apr 11, 2022 at 18:16 | comment | added | Thomas | @AdrianMcCarthy, since we're investigating a 20+ years old murder that already too place, we now have to answer the question if the victim was part of a special class making the crime worse, or not | |
| Apr 11, 2022 at 18:09 | answer | added | Ian Kemp | timeline score: 3 | |
| Apr 11, 2022 at 18:01 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Apr 11, 2022 at 21:45 | |||||
| Apr 11, 2022 at 10:58 | answer | added | Dragonel | timeline score: 4 | |
| Apr 11, 2022 at 0:15 | comment | added | Thomas | But some of them didn't want to spend the time to keep the validation code updated (keep in mind that 12-14h days and week-ends were normal, so corners were cut everywhere and we had to rely on everyone eyeing the same goal) and we'd end up with errors hard to track. 24 years later this product is still the biggest seller of its category, the sacrifices paid off for some of the people, but it was too early for processes which are now standard. There was also no CI, we only had CVS and later VSS for revision control, etc and had to cross back and forth between SGI and Windows stations by FTP... | |
| Apr 11, 2022 at 0:06 | comment | added | Thomas | So instead we relied on tools validating the "sanity" of the data at several points in the pipeline, but it only caught very obvious bugs. Most of the issues would be noticed in the final stages of the pipeline and would be hard to track. Our main challenge was always speed (all was done in C and ASM). For this reason, all programmers were required to have a clean implementation of their part, used to validate data, and the fast one going in production. In theory they should output the same results (->) | |
| Apr 11, 2022 at 0:04 | comment | added | Thomas | @PaŭloEbermann peer review wasn't that common at the time (we didn't do it) and wasn't easily applicable in this case as it happened on a math heavy tool chain; most errors were mathematical in nature rather than in code and a simple code review wouldn't have worked since it would require an intimate knowledge of each part. Those were also the days where the concept of "bus factor" didn't exist, many people had specific knowledge and internal competition prevented much of the sharing and losing some key people could be catastrophic. (->) | |
| Apr 10, 2022 at 23:22 | comment | added | Paŭlo Ebermann | Why are you having people test their own code, and not each other's (4-eyes principle)? This seems to be the underlying process issue actually causing the problem (though it's likely off-topic here). | |
| Apr 10, 2022 at 18:47 | answer | added | gnasher729 | timeline score: 4 | |
| S Apr 10, 2022 at 3:05 | history | mod moved comments to chat | |||
| S Apr 10, 2022 at 3:05 | comment | added | Kilisi | Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. | |
| Apr 10, 2022 at 3:04 | history | protected | Kilisi | ||
| Apr 9, 2022 at 21:05 | answer | added | Micah Walter | timeline score: 12 | |
| Apr 9, 2022 at 20:57 | answer | added | user134121 | timeline score: 3 | |
| Apr 9, 2022 at 18:38 | answer | added | spazmodius | timeline score: 4 | |
| Apr 9, 2022 at 14:53 | answer | added | Anthony | timeline score: 0 | |
| Apr 9, 2022 at 11:15 | answer | added | Sam B | timeline score: 5 | |
| Apr 9, 2022 at 10:53 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Apr 10, 2022 at 10:41 | |||||
| S Apr 9, 2022 at 7:47 | history | suggested | Mari-Lou A | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Fixed typos and removed ambiguity, it was the person who caused the problem not the scolding that created a problem
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| Apr 9, 2022 at 6:31 | answer | added | Lawnmower Man | timeline score: 21 | |
| Apr 9, 2022 at 5:44 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Apr 9, 2022 at 7:47 | |||||
| Apr 9, 2022 at 1:00 | answer | added | Stephan Branczyk | timeline score: 8 | |
| Apr 8, 2022 at 23:18 | answer | added | NotThatGuy | timeline score: 11 | |
| Apr 8, 2022 at 20:49 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Apr 8, 2022 at 15:29 | history | edited | Thomas | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added some clarification
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| Apr 8, 2022 at 15:00 | answer | added | Purrrple | timeline score: 60 | |
| Apr 8, 2022 at 14:35 | answer | added | A. I. Breveleri | timeline score: 29 | |
| Apr 8, 2022 at 14:22 | answer | added | Hilmar | timeline score: 127 | |
| Apr 8, 2022 at 14:16 | answer | added | TheHowlingHoaschd | timeline score: 2 | |
| Apr 8, 2022 at 13:56 | answer | added | Kilisi | timeline score: 19 | |
| Apr 8, 2022 at 13:48 | review | Close votes | |||
| Apr 15, 2022 at 14:23 | |||||
| Apr 8, 2022 at 12:49 | history | asked | Thomas | CC BY-SA 4.0 |