Ms. Pao and Reddit

‘The world’..?

I guarantee you, stop 20 people in the street this morning & if one has even heard of this woman, I’ll be astounded.

An online petition? Oh, wow. That must be the work of the neoliberal Silicon Valley venture capital establishment.

What you say? The users of reddit think she’s changing the site away from what they like? It’s a communitarian thing?

It must be because she’s a woman, because she’s a woman.

That is how the Left thinks. Your train is delayed? It’s because I’m a lesbian!

Paranoia enshrined as a political ideology and ash of life.

Ellen Pao is a gender hustler pure and simple. Of course the left falls in line behind her.

What staggers me is that the owners of Reddit could have hired such an obvious incompetent.

Tim Newman – “One who was in the middle of litigation against her former employers. There’s a red flag right there.”

Silicon Valley seems to be folding to the Gender hustlers even though they showed off the Race hustlers. They told Jessie Jackson he could go pound sand and didn’t give him much cash. But the feminists are going to get quotas. The things that dorks will do to get laid.

It is not merely the litigation, it is willfully misunderstanding what they have. They do not have a prime piece of internet real estate. They offered a place where computer geeks could come and hang out. Half a dozen sites can and do offer that. So why would they come to Reddit? Because other people come there to hang out. It is familiar and comfortable.

So sane people do not start changing the tone, much less lecturing their frickin’ cash cows on what sexist little pricks they are. Reddit started down this path with GamerGate. Banning computer nerds because they are upset at being manipulated and lied to is not going to endear you to other computer nerds.

What does Reddit have that anyone actually wants?

“it could actually be … that she’s just not very good at the job.”

If the world is going to get angry at everyone who is no bloody good there’s going to be a Vesuvius of anger.

Hmmm…

It goes back to the sex discrimination lawsuit that Pao brought against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Caufield and Byers

Quite. Trumped-up lawsuits don’t make you popular.

In the process, Pao’s personal life, work habits, and emails were raked through the court. She was accused of being aggressive, timid, greedy, manipulative, and so on.

Well, she brought the case to court, accusing her employers – who hired and remunerated her extremely generously – of being the evil bigoted white male partners who abused poor Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.

Should the defendants not have been allowed to defend themselves?

Even though she lost […] the case shone a light on the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley.

Let’s rephrase that: even though she is a proven liar, the media has tried to pretend her failed ambulance-chasing lawsuit was a victory, somehow. Because “diversity”.

“If I’ve helped level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it,” she told reporters

Nah. If she’d won the huge financial damages she was seeking, it’d have been worth it. Instead, like her similarly litigious (and likely soon to be bankrupt) husband, her reputation now lies in tatters and she faces huge legal bills that might sink her.

This would be like me accusing Mary Berry of being a witch who lures children into her gingerbread house, suing her, losing, and then trying to brazen it out by claiming to have helped children not get eaten by witches.

Her move to Reddit, at first glance, seemed incongruous. […] could it be that Pao wanted to clean up what some regard as the biggest online mess of them all?

Could it be she didn’t have any better offers?

Reddit, as well as being a breeding ground for memes and gifs, has a reputation, sometimes hard to square with site users used to its different face, for being a toxic, misogynistic community. A Chinese-American feminist in charge? That’s really interesting.

It’s really not.

Back in the days when Yahoo was the go-to search engine, nobody cared that Jerry Yang was Chinese.

They cared about what Yahoo could do for them.

For it is not from the ethnicity or sex of the butcher, the brewer, or the website CEO that we expect our dinner or cat gifs, but from their regard to their own interest.

SMFS:

“What does Reddit have that anyone actually wants?”

I am guessing that you haven’t browsed Reddit much:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gonewild

I have a post about Ms. Pao’s career failings over at my site. Washing out at firms such as CS&M and KP is no sin; they’re both elite firms. But those failures – coupled with carrying on an adulterous affair with a partner at KP and the infamous KP lawsuit – seems to indicate she may not be the stuff of which great corporate managers are made… to put it mildly.

But everyone’s missing The Point here.

The point is that Conde Nast and Alexis Ohanian bringing in Ellen Pao as CEO has confirmed what much of Reddit’s user base has long suspected… That Reddit’s ownership and senior management neither likes nor respects them. This is exemplified by the way Reddit’s management (well before Pao, by the way) treats its moderators.

Reddit is, by all accounts, a very rough and tumble, un-PC sort of place. (The Jesse Jackson AMA would only come as a shock to those unfamiliar with it.) And Silicon Valley is a very small, insular, self-regarding sort of place. For all intents and purposes it’s a very rich and very glorified 1950s Deep South hick town. Conflict was inevitable.

So what it comes down to is this: Reddit isn’t what its owners want it to be. The hiring of Ellen Pao made that fact public, and Reddit users are voicing their displeasure. What’s bizarre about this is that Alexis Ohanian had a ring-side seat to watch another firm self-destruct because of this sort of gap between ownership/management and customer base: That would be Digg.

For clarity, the jury did *not* agree that she didn’t do well at her job. They simply agreed that she was not a victim of sex discrimination.

(For my take at the time, https://plus.google.com/116842695262460103819/posts/UkL2NYrJD7H)

Well, apparently if your corporate lineup doesn’t look like a cross between the United Colors of Benetton catalogue and The Midwich Cuckoos, that’s appalling. It’s the almost total rhetorical inversion of “it’s not what someone looks like, it’s what’s on the inside that counts”. The SJWs want us all to have the diversity of a bag of Smarties.

One of the reasons there are so few women in SV is that the big tech companies get to bring in huge numbers of (male) software engineers over from India on H1B visas, which restrict the visa holder from switching employers. Cut-rate labor for Google, Facebook, etc. depresses the prevailing wages for tech workers in the US, making tech a less appealing career choice for US-born men and women.

Sam,

The problem with women in tech is that they don’t start early enough and don’t take enough risks. The first 50-100 people in a tech company are nearly all men, which means by the time it’s a 10,000 person company, the company is run by those 50-100 people. The women then eventually come through when it’s a lumbering dinosaur that is on its way out.

Dame “Steve” Shirley

Theophrastus – “Somewhat niche, though? SMFS thinks Reddit has little or nothing that anything wants. Well, nubile exhibitionists seem to be very popular with a particular male demographic and competitive nubile female exhibitionists…”

Yes, but that is not the point. Reddit does not have those pictures. Reddit is providing a place where people who want to post those sort of pictures can post them and where people who want to look at them can find them. It is not providing the porn. It is providing the venue for people who are interested in porn to meet.

And that is their problem. What is so special about Reddit? They have a reputation. They are known. But anyone can run a website where people can meet and swap NSFW pictures. They have no intellectual property worth a damn. They have no legal entitlement to those viewers. All they can do is provide a place porn-swapping geeks want to come. Which is irreconcilable with calling them sexist pigs. In the long run.

@ SMFS
“There is a lot of money in tech and I think everyone is agreed that geeks are entitled to a lot less of it.”
*That* is where you deserve to get flamed. The money in tech has been earned by the geeks who created the tech. Too much is paid to the salesmen, lawyers and bureaucrats.
For avoidance of doubt: I am not a geek: I gave up programming when I was twenty.

John77 – Too much is paid to the salesmen, lawyers and bureaucrats.

Agreed on the last two parts, but salesmen earn every penny of their commission.

Techies are – and I don’t mean to generalise here – smelly autists who often look like homeless people. C-level decision makers don’t want some shifty guy who takes style tips from Worzel Gummidge stinking up their boardroom when they’re thinking of dropping a couple of mil on a new datacentre.

It takes a salesman to, you know, sell the product. Without sales, the greatest gizmo in the world is just scrap.

Salesmen are the heroes of any successful business. They are knights clad in Hugo Boss, sitting aloft their trusty 5 Series as they prepare to battle to bring in orders.

But do they get thanked for keeping all the little people in a job? No! Your reward for being successful in sales is a bigger target next year.

But they don’t complain. The true salesman is a joyful warrior, and should he ever feel underappreciated he keeps his tears between himself and his luxury silk pillow stuffed full of £50 notes.

john77 – 🙁 I thought you were complimenting my karaoke rendition of “Goldfinger”

John77

The assumption at the time was Fanny International made its money on government contracts. Unless you know different?

Tim Newman – “So it’s not really about the capabilities of women per se which indicates the type (and health) of a company, but more the abundance of roles that women normally do.”

I don’t know. I think it may also have something to do with confrontation. Men are raised to talk and behave more frankly. They have ways of dealing with people telling them they are full of sh!t to their face. Not good ways, all too often, but they have ways. Women, in my experience, will do a lot to avoid a confrontation.

But in a big corporation sometimes you need a bit of confrontation. If someone is doing a sh!t job, they need to be told – and it is better to tell them to their face. If someone is making the wrong decision, it is better to have someone who will say so.

@ SMFS
Sorry, I was getting tired.

Tim Newman,

“I’m of the opinion that the more of these functions which are taken away from departmental managers and processed separately, the more fucked the corporation is.”

It’s because they are no longer accountable to that manager.

I’ve seen how small companies do things. We needed a French translator on a project. My boss told me to have a look around on LinkedIn. Find someone who is a pro, with good ratings. I picked out 3 people, we sat down and discussed them for about 15 minutes, then gave 1 a call. Had a bit more of a chat, explained our project. Sent her a confidentiality agreement that came back in an hour and then I sent her the project stuff. In 3 days, with some to-ing and fro-ing, she’d finished the job. I then loaded in her translations and made a site update and we had the site in French in about a week.

In most large companies, I’d have to give a 4-6 week lead time, because of raising a supplier selection processes, raising POs, and once all that was done, and I’d done my bit, going through the change management process.

Or in another example: I did some work at HP and it took me 4 weeks to get a server. I left there and worked in a 4 man business and it took us a couple of days to get a server when we needed one.