People are starting to say Elon Musk isn't actually a real engineer. But he definitely said "I don't know why people think Twitter is so complicated. I could fix it in like a weekend." And then proceeded to fuck everything up. That's exactly like an engineer.
Did y'all know that a lot of white people don't have the cultural concept of "real talk"? You know where you stop saying the diplomatic thing and tell people what's really going on. They just don't have it. You try to have a moment of "real talk" and they freak the fuck out.
Here's something I've been studying on here for a bit. A lot of men, seem to have been conditioned to think that telling someone that you disagree is the same as asking them a question. Like the way they learn to engage is by *creating a conflict*.
It's one of the things that makes it difficult for PoC, and Black people especially, to form real trust relationships with white people. Y'all don't know what's going on because no one tells you. And no one tells you because you can't actually handle the truth.
I've come to understand that white people have their own seemingly convoluted way that they decide what's going on and what to do about it. I have a really hard time navigating those rituals. I think a lot of us do. And it damages our ability to be successful in white spaces.
For those who don't know, that's my inside tech joke. Naive developers love to talk about how they could build Twitter in a weekend. It has become a meme. If this whole thing wasn't horrific, it would actually be hilarious in tech circles.
Oh shit. I've definitely experienced this, but I don't think I connected it in this way. If white women are tasked with keeping the peace, it explains a lot about why Black folks so often end up being "intimidating" or "aggressive" in their minds.
This is true, and white women are tasked with sensing that “real talk” might be on the horizon, and “smoothing things over” to keep it from happening. Many of us have internalized the notion that we are responsible for other people arguing to the point that ...
The first question a lot of us need to ask is "why does this person need to hear that I disagree?" Twitter is still largely a uni-directional medium. People post a tweet because they want to express themselves. Not because they're asking each individual if they agree or disagree.
Right. Even those of us who have been relatively successful so far in figuring out how to move in white spaces can eventually run up against this. Failing to figure it out can put a hard limit on PoCs upward mobility.
@polotek
yup. i’ve been noodling on this and the amount of communications misses that happen because of it.
if you violate the “no discussions about conflicts” rule, you have to go. on the flip, Black folks expect real talk and never get it, which ends up putting us at a disadvantage.
Whew. There are a lot of stories in this data. But the message is clear. The media focus on Black Americans not wanting to be vaccinated is incredibly dishonest.
White Americans are by far the least interested in getting a COVID vaccination, per
@Civiqs
data. Net yes:
White: 42%
Black: 70%
Latino: 62%
Other: 55%
I still see a lot of people assuming these layoffs are a money problem. It's not. These massive companies still have lots of money. They could pay you if they wanted to. It might be useful to learn about why they don't wanna pay people right now.
Don't miss this. Cops are resigned because their peers are receiving consequences for harming citizens. Not over the harm itself. But because *they see it as their job to harm citizens*. Their argument is that is what they were sent out to do and they resent being punished for it
57 Buffalo police resign. The union is upset with treatment of the two officers who were suspended. “Our position is these officers... were simply doing their job. I don't know how much contact was made. He did slip in my estimation. He fell backwards."
I see a lot of people struggling with this. Here's the shortest version I can manage.
When discussing what the problems are and how they manifest, defer to those impacted.
When it's time to demand change and push the powers that be to act. That's when you use your voice.
I see a lot of non-Black folks being like "I'm going to be silent right now, listen to Black folks" and I'm not sure this is the way. White silence is violence. We need to be loud right now, not to center ourselves, but to speak up for justice.
Okay. I've been waffling on this, but I'm decided. I don't think there's any other presidential candidate to vote for than Elizabeth Warren. She's the only person who's speaking to me specifically.
"Sen. Warren, is that a substantial answer from Mayor Buttigieg?” Warren: “No.”
Mic drop moment for Elizabeth Warren ↘️
Followed by an answer that is 💯
@ReggieMikel
@monteiro
Y'all pile on us. You really think the issue doesn't weigh on us? And you're so dismissive of the Trust and Safety team. We're all people.
I've talked about this a lot in the past. This is hard because there's this subculture of men that have decided Twitter is some kinda Thunderdome of ideas and direct debate. "Why post something if you didn't want a response?" PLEASE stop doing this.
Can we stop doing this snarky sarcastic shit while the president is leading us towards authoritarianism and war. You're a fucking Senator. Call it what it is. Then fix it.
I find it very strange that President Trump has such a hard time getting along with the leaders of the world's major democracies but feels very comfortable with despots and authoritarian leaders like Putin, Xi Jinping, Duterte and Mohammad Bin Salman.
It’s worth repeating again that the catalyst for all of this was having the audacity to elect a Black person as president. Yes there are many factors. But that is the precise moment when Whiteness lost its shit. And the significance of that simple truth cannot be overstated.
Y'all have to understand something. The shit that is spilling over from the nytimes is happening in almost every company in America. White people being racist and getting away with it. People being silenced internally. People lying to cover it up.
Engaging in the form of a challenge also puts all of the burden on the receiver to unpack what you mean to ask and what kind of response would be appropriate. You are implicitly asking for a tremendous amount of grace when you ask someone to navigate this unexpectedly.
This is an important thing to address. You are not paying reparations personally. You are paying taxes. And our govt uses those taxes to take care of it's financial obligations. That is the contract, and nothing changes just because you don't like the debts America has incurred.
One thing I've learned to accept is that things like quality have never come from the company as a whole. Almost all the time, the quality you see is down to a small number of humans who gave a shit. And when those people leave, it's over.
It has been helpful for me to see this as unintentional conditioning separate from intent. At least for some men (including myself). Ever since this occurred to me, I've noticed how even when men intend to ask "sincere" questions, it often comes in the form of a challenge.
But if there's one thing to take away from this, it's accepting that the internet is not your living room. You're talking to people who don't know you and didn't ask for your opinion. So it helps to approach engagement as you *inviting* them to a conversation. They may decline.
I have had this exchange numerous times. It goes something like this.
Them: I disagree. | I've had a different experience.
Me: I don't care. | What's your point?
Them: Geez, I was just trying to learn. Why are you attacking me?!
This has a bunch of negative effects. It's easily misunderstood as a bad faith challenge rather than an attempt to engage. There are a lot of bad faith challenges out there and they sound exactly the same. In fact those bad actors always hide behind "good intent".
If your goal is actually to gain some new perspective, you would do way better by asking questions and listening to the answers. Creating conflict is not a great environment for learning. In fact it's not a great environment for listening at all.
I don't think this is a small thing. In fact, I think it is the source of a lot of the unintentional frustration that men cause on here. (I'm only talking about those who actually "mean well".)
This is complicated. It can be very difficult to make management into a sustainable role when you're trying to be the kind of empathetic and thoughtful manager that people deserve. I'm taking a break from it right now due to burnout. But here are a few thoughts.
Real question: is burnout for management inevitable for people who actually care about the wellbeing of other people? If no, how does one combat the emotional toll of the job?
Instead, ask yourself what it is that you actually want out of this exchange. Start by framing the conversation you want to have. Do you want them to help you understand their comments? Try saying that first. "I'm not sure I understand, would you be willing to expand on this?"
There's a lot more here, but I wanna drive this one point home. If you've done all of this thinking and you realize your only goal is to tell other people your opinions because you disagree, you could also choose to just not do that. Just sit with that feeling and move on.
When you start off with "I disagree. Here's my perspective", it has the exact opposite effect. People are likely to be more closed and defensive. But also, you've taken over the conversation and challenged THEM to talk about YOUR opinion. That's rude and presumptuous.
Hot take: Everybody hates the current state of frontend web development. Some people are lying to themselves. Some people haven't realized it yet. But everybody can feel that this shit is bad, and we just haven't collectively decided to talk about it yet.
I’ll explain since most can’t comprehend
Dinner with Jay-Z is the better option over $500K because of the knowledge & expertise he has. He’ll give you the blueprint on being wealthy and successful. His knowledge will be worth more long term than the short term $500K.
A friend of mine said something that's really sitting with me.
Github and a bunch of other companies spent years building a *brand* off pretending to care about diversity, equity and inclusion. Now the people they hired are holding them accountable.
I wanna be clear that even though we can give the benefit of the doubt in seeing this as a an unintentional learned behavior, that doesn't the people who do this are off the hook. We still need to do better. We can learn to do better.
Here's an example.
"I hope it's okay if I push back on this a little. I'm not sure if it makes sense because of X. Am I misunderstanding something?"
Most of the language here is about giving people the opportunity to tell you that you're missing part of the story.
Y'all ready for another episode of "white people fail to hold the president accountable"? This is the blockbuster finale. White people finally have the smoking gun that they swore was the thing they were waiting on. Will it matter? Tune in to find out!
Taking the time to set context and frame conversations before diving in is a huge part of effective communication. More so, it gives the other person the opportunity to reframe the conversation or tell you they're not interested.
Bitcoin is the latest proof that white men in tech are and have always been just like every other version of white men in history. Extract resources to create wealth for themselves and damn the consequences.
Cause that's really key. We know Twitter is not good for expressing the full context of people's thoughts. We KNOW this. So why not go in assuming that's true and leaving the conversation open for them to tell you more about what they meant?
@GDX1776
@AJentleson
You've uncovered exactly that place where people keep getting it wrong. "Consistency" is not a goal. We are actually asking for people to be cognizant of power dynamics and not act like every joke is the same. But sure, keep pretending you don't understand.
That's because in American political discourse, "crime prevention" doesn't actually mean preventing crime. It means criminalizing people. Many Americans believe *deeply* that the only thing you can do about crime is wait for it to happen and lock up as many people as possible.
The news calls Biden adding 100,000 cops to the largest punishment bureaucracy in world history "crime prevention." It fails to tell readers that science shows investments in housing, education, healthcare and other root causes is how to actually prevent crime.
We're gonna spend a lot of time talking about the Electoral College in the coming days/weeks. But there are 2 conversations.
The bad one goes "if we abolish the EC then we win!"
The good one goes "The EC was always designed to be unfair and to support white supremacy"
The process used to strip someone of US citizenship typically was rare and applied mostly to war criminals who lied on immigration paperwork. A new federal office aims to change that.
Holy shit. I used to work with this woman.
I'll repeat that.
I used to work in the same office with this white woman who is thinking "I wish we could go back to vigilante groups that could just go around hanging people."
Just white woman Michelle Tandler claiming that her fear justifies lynching, reproducing exactly—almost word-for-word—the famed “lynch a thousand times a week” speech of suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton.
A lot of white people still wanna live in this world where you can just not talk about your politics and you're okay. It allows them to continue to be friends with each other, work with each other, defend each other, without taking any responsibility for the impact.
You all,
@prattprattpratt
is as solid a man there is. I know him personally, and instead of casting aspersions, look at how he lives his life. He is just not overtly political as a rule. This is a distraction. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize, friends. We are so close now.
Let's talk about this. It is an increasingly common sentiment. That black people are getting "more" opportunities than white people. We're not. What is happening is the opportunities are not *zero*, and meanwhile we are being singled out and made hyper visible. This is the result
Notice that all of this happens before you get to the part where you talk about what you wanna talk about. If more people did just a little more setup, many exchanges on the internet would go better.
This is wild. We probably don't do enough to unpack what it means when we say "know your worth". It's not just some high minded ideal. It means your labor is important to business operations. You need to find out just *how* important.
You don't have to watch videos of children being shot. You can believe and feel and know that it is wrong without subjecting yourself to that. I promise you can.
I see a lot of men in their feels over this latest example of toxic masculinity. Specifically, men really want someone to acknowledge how rough it is to be rejected by women. Let’s talk about it a little.
White guy goes one a killing spree: "He was a mild-mannered honor student who collected frog sculptures, what a loss for society"
Woman murdered by said guy: "She embarrassed him in front of everyone by not fucking him, how dare she"
So let's say you still want to engage and they seem up for it. You still want to remember that "I disagree" is not a conversation. It's a challenge. If that's what you mean to do, you can choose to soften it so they can decide if you're being a jerk or not.
I'm going on record again just so there is no ambiguity. The current incarnation of cryptocurrency and NFTs can only lead to massive scams and fraud. It should not be trusted in any form. And we should be actively preventing our friends and family from getting sucked into it.
I'm really starting to hate the idea of swag. Don't give me more things I don't need. Don't make me responsible for creating more trash. Especially when you're doing it on the off chance that your brand will stick with me. It won't.
I'm glad this thread is resonating with so many people. I wanna spend a little time on this question, which I've gotten a number of times today. Essentially what's "the right way" to disagree? Be warned that a lot of this is gonna feel unsatisfying.
@polotek
How do you disagree with somebody when you legit “don’t agree?” Do you think it’s as simple as, “I disagree because [rationale]?” I guess I’m asking if you think disagreeing with an actual argument is sufficient to make it good faith? Seems like it, but what’s your experience?
White guys: Why can't you just not care about what happens to other people?
But I am other people. It's happening to me.
White guys: I mean that sucks, but you don't have to bring it to work. Die on your own time, ya know what I mean?
This is what I mean. They aren't scared. They are targeting her. They are targeting her in the way they targeted Obama, and everybody acted like it was the same old political shenanigans. I still get infuriated when I think about "You lie!"
When a brand's reputation starts to go downhill, I don't think "they don't care about quality anymore". Instead I think, "they let somebody awesome walk out the door, and they don't know how to replace them."
You can skip a lot of this setup in settings where there is already a lot of situational context. If you're at a dinner party, active engagement is expected. If you're hanging with friends, you can get away with being a little more gruff because they'll understand.
HR is not your friend. The idea that they are there to protect your interests is the one of the most pervasive and harmful lies every perpetrated against workers.
HR framed it as a communications issue. That I simply wasn’t "hearing" his feedback. That we both needed coaching. And he remained my manager. Approved my coaching plans. Reviewed my progress.
This is the core issue for white people. They really need to start recognizing the lie they've been sold. White supremacy binds *everyone*. Not equally. Not in the same ways. But white people are also in need of liberation. They just don't realize it.
They “teach” someone by withholding information and watching over them paternalistically as they struggle to develop from first principles something that should be easy and free. This is one of the ways men, and white men in particular, continually create the world we live in.
One of my biggest epiphanies in understanding prison abolition was understanding the reason for prisons. They were never about rehabilitation. Prison is about warehousing away those deemed “undesirable”. It’s about creating a place separate from the community to exile people to.
And no I’m not saying jail shouldn’t exist, I’m simply saying it’s doesn’t work. It’s not designed to rehabilitate people, it’s design to treat them like animals.
What do you think happens when you get released back into the world after living like that?
This video makes me upset. But it's worth examining a bit. The main thing I want to note in this moment is that this person doesn't want to have a "rational discussion" about any of this. He has already decided. What he wants is to invalidate people's anger.
This is a former Google and Facebook software engineering manager. These are his views on BLM and racism in the US.
At top tech companies, Black people consistently make up less than 3% of engineers.
Why is diversity and Black retention so low? Because these are our managers.
What's going on between twitter and the white house is wild right now. Like really wild. All I can think about is how much time these tech execs spent sucking up to the Trump administration the last few years. And for what?
I know I'm a broken record. But the real lesson white folks should be learning is that your history is a lie. America has always done this. What's happening now is part of a long American tradition of saying one thing while doing another.
it’s pretty mindblowing that the main question driving the national media conversation right now is anything other than, “why does America have concentration camps now?”
A lot of white people need to be deprogrammed. It felt weird to use that word at first, but I honestly think it’s the right one. Like they’re mostly okay. Then you hit this completely fictional reality written into the firmware and it just causes these glitches.
@SandwichofFarts
@Square
Y'all are doing the same thing, but they're getting a paycheck for it. Are you really thinking you look better in this scenario?
It's important to understand and accept that ignoring problems and pretending they didn't happen is actually what a lot of people think "healing" looks like.
Make no mistake. This is white people asking for there to be no accountability. The answer has to be a very clear "No."
This person has received a ton of crap. But what’s more important is that he doesn’t realize that the culture of software teams is changing. Not only is that type of engineer not welcome anymore, neither is that type of manager who coddles them and makes excuses.
I am surprised by extreme views on 10x engineers. They are great individual contributors. They may not be good with teamwork. So what? They can be phenomenal in the early stage of the product cycle.
Find the best in each & get the best out of them. That's what good managers do.
You know what is bothering the shit out of me these days? How many tech people who were mad at me for criticizing crypto are dead silent right now. I thought you were an advocate and believed in educating people. Where you at?
Lately I've been probing more at this very man-centric culture of "debate". I've said to lots of people on here that not every conversation is a debate or disagreement. I can't tell you how many men have disagreed with that statement.
At some point we need to talk about how this lionizing of white "geniuses" who turn out to be scam artists is also part of the resurgence of white supremacy.
As I realized this, and as I realized that Musk and Tesla were on a trajectory toward increasingly implausible and fraudulent claims (which massively enriched Musk), I realized: TESLA IS NOT AN AUTOMOTIVE STORY, IT IS A CELEBRITY STORY. Faith in Musk personally was what mattered
Let's not turn this into some futuristic sci-fi shit. Thus is regular ass authoritarian rule by fear and force. This isn't about "thought crimes". This is extrajudicial surveillance and neutralization of citizens declared to be dissidents against state authority.