Mark Zuckerberg and those engineers made this customer service representative a millionaire. She repays them by trashing them in the Wall Street Journal.<p>There is nothing wrong with something "unrepentantly boyish", anything more than there is something wrong with women's only schools. Working class men don't go around apologizing for doing difficult construction jobs, white collar men need to stop apologizing for doing the difficult programming jobs.<p>This woman was in customer service. She was lucky to be put on the Facebook rocket ship. So too was Sheryl Sandberg, a nontechnical and obviously ultrapolitical operator, placed on third base as COO yet thinks she hit a triple. Both Losse and Sandberg consider themselves "women in tech". They're not. They're "women on tech", women carried on the backs of real technologists, male and female alike.
Interesting article. Some people have questioned what the point of it was. I saw it as this:<p><pre><code> A. Enter male to female ratio of 1:50
B. Experience some things that felt wrong/daunting
C. New manager entered scene and "fixed things"
</code></pre>
I wonder if the fact the manager (Sheryl Sandberg) was female
made a big impact on the resulting fixes.<p>Would a different manager have done the same? Possibly not
unless either they thought about it from reading about an
article or having been in a similar position at say Froogle.<p>Really interesting and I think it brings up the something
that we as people should start doing more. Ask questions
if something seems wrong or potentially off. Even
if we're not a "manager" or not female. To at the very
least try to promote `good`.<p>It's good for stories such as these to circulate as hopefully
it will speed up the dilution of sexist issues we keep
hearing of. And by dilution I mean the hopeful removal of
this problem entirely.
More than 50 employees and one master password. Awesome.<p>Most companies start silo-ing waaaaay too early, everybody breaking up into little "that's not my job" cliques. It's just much less painful that way. Sounds like FB actively resisted, whether through design or chance.
One useful point to take away from this is it helps to have an "adult"[1] in a high level position, to whom sensitive concerns can be brought to and dealt with in a discreet, sober, and careful fashion.<p>[1] i.e., someone mature, responsible, sober-minded.
I think she read wayyy to much into that bear photo... The sexual harassment type stuff never surprises me, but they handled it very well.<p>Master password.. shocker. I'm sure there are still ways, just not as simple anymore.
This problem seems pretty circular to me. Girls don't want to join companies like this because it's a boys club, but it stays a boys club because girls don't want to join. I do feel bad for women who wind up in situation like this, and I personally have no problem with girls writing code or managing projects or being involved with the tech world if they want to.<p>About the things that "suburban boys from Harvard would find cool" so that's why they were there, um, duh. They were suburban boys from Harvard who didn't really have a lot of women around the office. Obviously they're going to put things like that on the walls. Speaking from experience, the only thing dumber than a guy is a guy who is still in college. These aren't mature individuals yet, and while that's unfortunate, they have to be treated differently sometimes.<p>Here's my problem with the bearskin thing. We have to remember who picked it up and put it on. Everyone was drunk, everyone was having fun. She picked it up and put it on her head and was being funny. I challenge you to find one drunk person, guy or girl, who would tell someone to stop doing something that is funny. The picture sounds like an issue of most pictures that wind up on Facebook after a party. They were taken at an inopportune moment and you wish that no one would have taken it.<p>Long story short, some guys are dicks, and they have to work somewhere. When they get out of line, the issue should be dealt with like it was. Its unfortunate that the tech world still seems like a boys club, but it's a difficult problem to fix when the people working in the industry don't always see themselves for what they really are.
Can someone explain to me what the author is trying to say? I see two things in the article:<p>1. In the author's eyes, the majority of early Facebook employees acted in a juvenile masculine manner[1].<p>2. Some of those early Facebook employees weren't nice people.<p>Am I missing something more subtle?<p><pre><code> [1] I.e., the manner young males are stereotyped[2].
[2] I'm not accusing the author of stereotyping.</code></pre>
<i>Once we learned how the software worked, he taught us, without batting an eye, the master password with which we could log in as any Facebook user and gain access to all messages and data.</i><p>Yikes!