Context: News broke earlier this week that Apple had hired García Martínez for an unspecified role.
Apple did not say what exactly García Martínez' position was, but sources said he was hired for a lower-level engineering role and started last week.
In the petition, first reported by the Verge, employees write: "We demand an investigation into how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored, along with a clear plan of action to prevent this from happening again."
In one passage from "Chaos Monkeys," García Martínez describes women in the Bay Area as "soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.”
This passage was also cited online when García Martínez started writing for Wired magazine.
> García Martínez describes women in the Bay Area as "soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.”
Why on earth would anyone put something like that in a book?!
Because he was comparing the woman he was dating to his general experience.
You can look at the larger passage as important context. It’s easy to dismiss him still as a jerk, but what bothers me is the idea that one cannot have an authentic experience that isn’t totally whitewashed and ready to be used for an ad for a multinational.
Reading all of the selected quotes in that petition came off to me as thoughts he probably shouldn’t have published, but ones that many ordinary people have that aren’t total monsters. Yes he’s probably got a lot of toxic masculinity hold ups.. but so do millions and millions of people. If you read the minds of most employees at large companies and then put it into words, probably people would be fired left and right.
At some point we need to acknowledge personal thoughts aren’t always the same thing as professional interactions, and that people can also grow, learn and change.
He might not be the one for this, but I think the public response feels very snap for someone’s life. Probably almost no one signing that petition actually read his book or learned much about him in order to put things into context and perspective, yet they were easily wanting to ruin a man’s life.
NB Perhaps he deserves it, I don’t know. But I’m wanting to withhold judgement, and I don’t have enough time or cares to actually investigate him.
This book came out at a time where people were lampooning the excesses of startup culture. (e.g Disrupted and HBO's Silicon Valley).
It's my opinion García Martínez thought he would capitalize on the trend and wrote a book describing his experience in a YCombinator company that was aquihired by Facebook.
He wrote himself as a character in that genre. His writing style in general, however, seems to give him away as a blowhard - which I don't think was was his intent.
Based on the comments above, it seems many people think that everyone who goes viral gets a lot of creepy and unwanted attention, but when it happens to women it gets more sympathy than when it happens to men.
Thus giving special attention to women's plight is at odds with our norms of equality. I concur and feel like this is an example of female privilege, where women in general are given more sympathy than men for similar hardships.
One of the threads that was eye-opening for me was Greg Doucette's (a lawyer in North Carolina among other things) ongoing Twitter thread with Pics/Video of police brutality as it relates to peaceful protesters/bystanders.
Thanks for pointing that out! Obviously I should have read the spreadsheet/link beforehand, but I hope linking the Twitter thread here directly also helped some people as well.
As someone with $40k in student loans remaining from my econ degree(after paying off $10k+), I'm fully in support of this. I don't know what "we" you're appealing to, but I certainly consider this "fair" in the sense that I'm more than happy to give back to my community, fellow students, and younger generations so that they don't have to struggle through the same things I did. It sounds like this position is that others be punished for/with student loans because they decided to get an education.
1. According to the article Bernie is proposing a 0.5% tax on trades, and a 1% tax on bonds. Given that ~half of all Americans invest in the stock market[0] (and given how Wall Street has acted) this doesn't seem to be a big issue in my opinion (obviously others will disagree with me).
2. I do have empathy for those who have taken on such debt, because such debt should not in aggregate be so large as to impact the economy adversely (which it has, and will continue to do via consumer spending etc...). Additionally, I know very few, if any teens who are able to understand the intricacies of debts/loans, let alone adults(I'm sure this argument will be mis-characterized).
It may sound grandstanding, but I genuinely believe that we should care more about the medical, financial, and social/political well being of others in this country, and I think this is a good first step for that.
I mean, of course you support a proposal to wipe off 80% of your entire student debt. I don't think you get to call it "giving back to the community" when you're a net taker under the proposal.
I'm glad you seem so willing to engage in constructive/effective arguments regarding the proposal, rather than how the proposal should be framed/discussed in terms of individuals.
And I'm certainly glad you saw that my other points were reasonable and saw fit not to refute them at this point. :)
However, even under this proposal I would be a contributor as I invest in the stock market, which is the entire point of taxes/a community(it's literally giving back to the community/the cost of living in a society). So no, I would contribute my fair share, and arguably get less out(compared to others) since I've already paid $10k+, and I have no problem with that, at all.
Like I said, I'm happy to help others given the position that I'm in, which is better than some and worse than others.
What I, and others, find objectionable about your post is that you frame yourself as an altruistic contributor while downplaying the fact that you have orders of magnitude more to gain from this than you contribute. Implying that a 50bp tax on your personal stock trading comes even close to the $40k amnesty windfall you stand to gain is preposterous. Implying that you are giving back and helping others even more so. You are not helping, you are being helped. You are a net taker.
I frame myself as a contributor, because as I stated before, I would be contributing via the same proposed methodology as anyone else, via a tax on investments. Additionally, I haven't downplayed this, me downplaying it would be me either obfuscating my debt, or not discussing it at all, I haven't hidden the fact that I'd benefit from it, I'm arguing the merits of the proposed policy and why it would be good not just for me, but for society writ large(including you my friend)(benefits include increased consumer spending, increased GDP, etc...). Furthermore, given the potential timeframe on this, and any investments I would likely make in the future, it is well within the realm of possibility that I end up paying far more than the $40k that I might gain in the short term which would seem to reasonably answer "you're a net taker argument".
As I argued in my previous post, taxes are not altruism they are a cost of living in society, it's why we have a progressive tax system the more one benefits from society, the more they pay back. I do argue however that I'm more than happy to pay this tax so that current/future generations are better off, which doesn't seem to be a point that you've refuted at all. It seems that your argument is that because you struggled, everyone else should have to as well which seems fairly draconian to me(and ignores a basic sense of fairness, depending on how we want to define fair), and also seems to ignore the potential struggles of others and any questions of why they took on such debt (but that's another question for another time). I have no idea why you keep framing this as a means of "takers" vs everyone else, when I've kept bringing this back to the more nuanced point that yes I would benefit, and yes I would also contribute. It's also strange to me that you haven't seen fit to offer an alternative or any kind of compromise, but rather dismiss the whole proposal out of hand.
I suspect that you're going to come back to the point/continue belaboring the point that "you're a net taker"(while conveniently ignoring any other points) as if somehow: A. The only point of society is for no one to benefit from it. B. The only point of society is to make a profit. Neither of which is true, because frankly everyone "takes" from society in one form or another to varying degrees, we do this because everyone should have a reasonable shot in life. It seems unreasonable to ask people who are just starting out, to be potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt in the hopes of pursing them for the rest of their lives to make money. This is a question of lives/quality of life versus money, you seem to be fairly square on the side of money which is certainly a position one can take. Generally the point of society isn't profit, but to try and make the society a better place, and sometimes that comes at a cost, or with things we disagree with(I disagree with ag subsidies, but it likely helps rural farmers somewhere, so I'm OK with that in the end).
I can't decide if you're just trolling us or if you truly believe that your duplicitous position of both "helping society" and "pay off my student loans" is valid. What if we don't pay your student loan, but pay for those who are in default? You seem to be managing quite well, so let's help those who are less fortunate than you for the common good, but since you're doing fine, you can continue to pay your student loan, and maybe an additional 5% take to help those who are less fortunate.
I paid off roughly $70k in student loans. Can I have that back? Because if you're going to support the government paying off your student loans, surely you wouldn't deny me a check from the government to reimburse me for mine? Do you think it's better to not pay back the loans and just let it default with the hopes that someone with rescue me?
What about those middle class families who chose the financially prudent path of
sending their kids to cheaper but low ranked state universities even though their
kids had admission to expensive ivy league universities ? How would they feel about this proposal.
I really love bell hook's work. Feminism is for Everybody was a clear and concise discussion of the issues of race, class, sex, and gender and I truly wish more critical theory books were up to that standard.
Yeah, Feminism is for Everybody is really fantastic and accessible. I think the online anti-feminist/MRA set would be surprised with how much they agree with hooks.
Carl Benjamin, an "anti sjw" YouTuber actually read and reviewed one of her books[1], and liked her unpretentious and communicative writing style, even if he disagreed with some of her ideas.
I for one like her too, but I find that when some media critics try to apply her methodology to pop culture, it can be problematic and clumsy.
It's not up to the FBI, it's up to the DEA and FDA. The FBI has to follow federal law and as long as that law says cannabis is a schedule I controlled substance there's nothing they can do about it.
Well, obviously the FBI can't encourage its employees to smoke pot, but unless there's a federal regulation on drug testing, the FBI isn't forced to drug test it's employees.
It’s always up to law-enforcement, which laws they want to enforce.
Some laws are harder to enforce than others too. That’s why people drive around my town with really loud engines and the cops never do anything about it.
There are plenty of laws that the FBI does not enforce within the realm of white-collar crime.
As someone who's new to CS, I love this resource, and while I've been coding for about a year now I've come across most of these topics, but as someone who wants to go deeper into CS, what topics would you all expect to see in a Computer Science II book?
I didn't read the book, just the TOC, but it seems like this book is only about programming, not so much about theory (automata, discrete math, calculus, linear algebra, etc), and not even so much about the engineering side of it (automated testing, algorithms, DevOps, etc).
In case anyone was wondering as I was before I searched around for it, Dr. Bourke actually has a good number of other resources available on his faculty site including lecture notes/PDFs for searching/sorting, data structures, security/cryptography, trees, and more.
...Here's what the rest of us put up with that aren't in SW engineering/development/IT.
Step 1. Put in 300+ applications (200+ in Nor Cal Central Valley area, 178 in PHX area)
Step 2. Wait for responses and get a 2% response rate in Nor Cal/central valley, and a 17% response rate in PHX...with the exact same resume despite being top 25% of the class, extra curriculars, and having a decent econ degree)
Step 3. Of 90% of the places and recruiters that contact they will either A. Pay you substandard wages, B. Make it clear that you are replaceable and they don't actually care about workers or work/life balance, C. Ghost you after contacting and interviewing you or D. Some combo of the above.
The worst one I've had is the same corporate recruiter lie to me multiple times over a part time job with no benefits, who brought me in for an interview that made it clear that they had no quality control, no work life balance, poor workplace communication, and expected workers to be treated like crap and be OK with it, oh and the best part is, that company was a major household brand that does $5bn in revenue annually.
So yeah, I've had recruiters treat me like crap, tell me I'm worthless, and companies string me along, while I'm trying to scrape by and eat...not that I've got a chip on my shoulder about the entitled attitudes that are represented by this comment on HN.
Hrmmmm, I'm interviewing now for general helpdesk roles in my area, and my numbers for comparison are as such:
172 Applications
14 Interviews
4 Onsite
2 Offers
I very much understand your frustration with the job market and how things go, because before I was in my current location, I sent out 200+ applications and got 2 interviews with no responses. The cop out advice is to just keep trying, but I would echo sentiments to find a set of friends to interview you in panel interviews and one on one and see what kind of feedback they give, or if you can do better and get a friend of a friend to do it, that may be better since they don't explicitly know you and may give you more constructive criticism.
It's always interesting watching discussions of class come up on HN. As someone who comes from a working class background/family, it astounds me how often people will respond with the idea that the tech industry/any kind of(generally college) education is some kind of meritocracy, or that the solution is to simply 'work harder'. Those are certainly nice sentiments, but far from reality(See, the Myth of Meritocracy[0]), and I'm overjoyed to see that others in this thread are providing other narratives and social situations.
Don't know what you're talking about. Most of my colleagues got into the industry by going to open/free events and using materials which can be found freely on the internet.
I came from a lower middle class family with a host of awful circumstances I won't go into. I learned most of what I needed to get a job through reading Wikipedia. A friend of mine and I did odd jobs for neighbourhood companies (and got screwed a lot) until he landed an entry level position at a web shop. A year later he was working at a different company and had them bring me in for an interview.
The prerequisite for getting into my industry, at least until some asshole decides to regulate it, is any home computer manufactured in the last decade (you can get a core 2 duo machine, a monitor, and a keyboard for about 20 bucks today), and a desire to work.
Today I can easily demand a six-figure salary and I've only been working full time for about two and a half years. Many people who are not as good as I am can get less after more working years. That is at least somewhat meritocratic.
*Snip*
Context: News broke earlier this week that Apple had hired García Martínez for an unspecified role.
Apple did not say what exactly García Martínez' position was, but sources said he was hired for a lower-level engineering role and started last week.
In the petition, first reported by the Verge, employees write: "We demand an investigation into how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored, along with a clear plan of action to prevent this from happening again."
In one passage from "Chaos Monkeys," García Martínez describes women in the Bay Area as "soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.”
This passage was also cited online when García Martínez started writing for Wired magazine.
*Snip*