Blameful Post Mortem: Privilege, Hype and Hubris

Blameful Post Mortem

We’ve got two stories for the Blameful Post Mortem this week. First, incredibly violent, disturbing and misogynistic behavior at Uber: “A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.”

Then, this article in The New Yorker about a talent firm for “rock-star developers” (unironically called “10x”) is so bad we couldn’t even read it all. The article uncritically reproduces the worst tropes of privilege, hype and hubris in the industry. Why does mainstream media refuse to improve its tech coverage, even as the body of thoughtful, critical frameworks for writing about tech grows by the day? The article is also condemnable for contributing to the (false) mythology of the “talent shortage,” even as marginalized tech workers are systemically driven from the industry or found “not a culture fit” for open positions.

Tech, Culture and Diversity News

Have tips on news we should include in this section? Tweet us @ModelViewMedia.

OKCupid has implemented more options for gender and orientation on its platform.

In Bloomberg: What It’s Like to Be Black or Female in Silicon Valley.

Girls Who Code is hiring!! “Girls Who Code’s vision is to reach gender parity in computing fields. We believe this is paramount to ensure the economic prosperity of women, families, and communities across the globe, and to equip citizens with the 21st century tools for innovation and social change. We believe that more girls exposed to computer science at a young age will lead to more women working in the technology and engineering fields.”

An illustration series by Susie Cagle on How San Francisco Sold a Majority Stake to Tech.

A look at the UK’s growing tech scene: According to a new study, UK tech startups are hiring for more than 8,500 positions, which is an 80% increase since last year.

On the PagerDuty blog, discussion of social media harassment and their new policy addressing it. This is notable as much of the discussion around anti-harassment policies has revolved around industry events, and not necessarily its online spaces.

A write-up on how Pandora is building diversity at its company, and what it’s still working on.

The Latest from Model View Culture

Technical Interviews Are Bullshit: I don’t want to be on an engineering team with people who were primarily chosen by their ability to write code on a whiteboard.

Learning the Rules: Empathy and Enforcement: On project teams and in workplace culture, enforcer roles fall to women regardless of their job titles.

How Blacks and Latin@s Are Left Out of Tech Hiring: Having more white women attendees at a conference this year than last is hardly diverse, and hardly a reason to celebrate diversity when Blacks and Latin@s still make up only 5% of people in tech.