Not hiring women (or minorities) can get your company sued for discrimination. Small companies get away with it not only because it's hard to prove (esp. if there's not that many employees so an all-male team doesn't look unusual, unlike some big company with hundreds or thousands), but also because a complainant won't find a lawyer willing to take the case on contingency, because a small company doesn't have much money to go after in a lawsuit. But as a company grows and expands, that changes.
So if you want to keep your company all-male (or even all white male) so you can all act like a bunch of immature assholes, then you need to keep your company extremely small so no one wants to bother going after you.
At it's root, you have a real problem in your workplace aside from sexism. Your coworkers are unprofessional idiots. I would suggest changing companies.
Unless, of course, you (third person) like being around unprofessional idiots.
This seems like a good illustration of the old adage, "birds of a feather fly together".
I agree entirely. The only time I've seen this was in one very small company in my first job out of college when two other guys (one being the owner) and myself (a male) were staying late and were in the back server room together, and the other two were looking at an inappropriate picture that apparently was of a former female employee (who quit after some other employee, a laborer, brought it into work and asked her about it after finding it on the internet). I got out of that company as fast as I could; it wasn't just that incident, the place had a lot of problems.
Since then, I haven't seen much, just an occasional sexist comment when women weren't in earshot ("she's a cupcake", etc.).
Not hiring a woman isn't really an option in many cases, because that'll get you sued for gender discrimination sooner or later. You can get away with it for a while if you're really small, but if this company is expanding, then they have to come out of the basement and join the professional world where employees know how to act professionally.
If they don't want to do this, then they shouldn't expand. Keep the operation extremely small, and no one will bother suing for discrimination (a 5-person company doesn't usually have any assets worth suing for), and you can be as stupid and misogynistic as you want.
Basically the law is the way it is because some people went way too far and ruined it for everyone. When other measures don't work, people finally resort to getting the laws changed, and everyone's stifled. I don't know what the alternative is, however, because without the law in place, the jerks who ruined it for everyone just won't change their behavior. This applies to all kinds of things, not just sexual harassment in the workplace.
He seems like a dick because he wants the company to cover its ass and get medical care for the injured employee? What if the employee is seriously injured, but doesn't realize it? That happens all the time; it's why they always recommend people go to the hospital to be checked out if there's any question.
Now obviously, if the phone didn't actually hit the employee, then we can forgo the medical care (the OP wasn't clear whether the thrown phone actually struck the employee or not). But if someone threw a heavy object at me and struck me, I'd definitely want medical attention to make sure I don't have something wrong, especially if I'm not paying the bill.
I really can't imagine where these people are working that this is even an issue. I'm a professional in the tech industry and I can't imagine anyone I've worked with having any sort of inappropriate interactions with female colleagues (nor have I ever encountered this happening in almost two decades in the industry). Aren't we at least two or three decades past the transitional "women coming into the workplace" period? Aren't practically all the guys that would be old enough for this to even remotely be a problem for already retired?
This is exactly what I thought, and exactly my experience as well, with about 15 years experience in the industry. Women in the workplace are nothing new; even in smaller companies I've worked at, we had plenty of women working there, though not usually as IT people or engineers, but we still had to be around them and interact with them. Women are usually dominant in roles such as HR, after all.
But to read Slashdot, you'd think that programming teams are all full of misogynistic "brogrammers". Maybe you and I have been lucky or something, but most of the tech people I've worked with were married, frequently had kids, and had no trouble with female co-workers (or cow-orkers).
Many employers in IT are expecting you to have your act together enough to work with anybody, regardless of gender, regligion, race, sexual orientation, because they hired you to get your work done, not sit around moaning you can't talk like a 'guy' around a female.
Geez, you people are making me feel like I'm part of management or something...
Exactly, I agree with both points. I'm really shocked and disappointed; maybe I'm lucky, but I never saw these kinds of problems with sexual harassment, "brogramming", and other such bullshit in my career, except at one dinky little company that was my first job out of college and which I left as soon as I could, and they weren't anywhere near big enough to have 10 IT guys, and even then they had some female employees (purchasing, etc.) and the men knew enough to act right when the women were around. Honestly, I think this is really pathetic. If you're hired as a professional, then act like it.
Yes, the submitter sounds totally clueless, and I predict disaster for his company.
My advice is to hire a professional training firm to come on-site and provide workplace training classes for "harassment avoidance". At the large companies I've worked at, this was required of all employees, to avoid exactly this situation. If the people at this company are so clueless they really think some stupid jars or neckties are sufficient to deal with the situation, they're fucked, plain and simple, and they need outside help if they're going to survive.
Not exactly, but it's somewhat close: it's a chain that only exists in a few west coast states (CA, AZ, and I believe OR). It's not a nationwide chain by any stretch.
That said, I don't believe in supporting them any more than anyone else. They're not the greatest store to shop at, the employees are seedy, and they have a policy of taking anything that was returned, slapping a 5% off label on it, and restocking it, even if it's completely dead. If they have something I need fairly quickly, I'll go there, otherwise I'll just order from Newegg or someplace else.
No, not exactly. From what I see, the states can be very different from each other. Some are ridiculously corrupt (Louisiana), others are actually run fairly decently (many of the northeast and northwest states from what I can tell). The federal government is basically a mishmash of all of them, so it's better than the worst states, and worse than the best states. However, another big factor is that the federal government is big and powerful, and largely prevents states from doing their own thing if the federal government isn't doing a very good job. Education is also very local, so some school districts can actually be fairly decent, while others in the same state can be horrible.
If the feds took over education, it'd probably end up improving it over the way it is in the very worst of schools, but it'd be worse than 75% of schools are today.
Besides, what federal programs can you point to that are really well-run anyway? They're all either horribly and incompetently managed, or not given enough power to be effective at their mission and subject to too many politics.
Yes, and that's a perfectly reasonable attitude towards war IMO. Unfortunately, Korea was well before my time, and also seems to be "the forgotten war" as when we study American history we mostly skip over WWI except maybe for mentioning archduke Ferdinand and the Red Baron, study WWII thoroughly, then briefly mention Korea and give it about as much time as the Bay of Pigs, and then jump right into Vietnam. But Korea was mostly successful, in that even though it was largely a civil war and a proxy war like Vietnam, the conquering of the south was averted and it is now a stable and prosperous democracy, whereas Vietnam was a totally different case, and Iraq and Afghanistan have been mostly quagmires as well.
Your waitress friend isn't unemployed, she's employed... as a waitress. So according to the government, everything's hunky-dorey for her. The government doesn't recognize the state of "underemployment".
You're right though; in this day and age, you really need to ponder whether it's even worth it to get a degree. For a lot of people, it doesn't seem to be. However, your anecdotal examples are a little telling: math, education, and special ed are not exactly fields with lots of openings.
Of course, great many things are done for the love of it. But as a company, if you rely on your employees to work for the sake of love, you are in for a big surprise.
Exactly. You end up with extremely disloyal employees who will abandon your company for the next job offer that's only slightly higher. And you end up with a shortage of qualified workers, because not many people will bother going into that field, especially when it requires a massive investment in education (and money) to become qualified, and lots of on-the-job time afterwards to become experienced and productive.
The problem is that China actually cares about how many immigrants it admits and is selective. Doesn't sound like a country we all know well and most slashdotters live in.
Subs get fission reactors for two reasons: 1) it lets them hide out underwater indefinitely (especially useful for the "boomer" ballistic missle subs), and 2) they're almost always underwater, so it's not like they have to worry a lot about anyone boarding the ship and taking it over. I'm guessing they probably don't have platoons of marines on board; they don't have the space for it anyway. Aircraft carriers, OTOH, have plenty of space for extra people. But even there, they almost never travel without escorts in a "battle group" (comprising an attack sub, destroyer, etc.), so they probably don't have to worry much about attempts at hostile takeovers.
Yes, and look what happened: The American public elected one warmonger after another, going into Vietnam, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, plus countless smaller campaigns all during that time.
With activities like that, why would anyone want to pay increased property taxes? Besides, those taxes were enough in the past, they should be enough now. Tax revenues aren't a fixed amount, since they're a percentage of some activity, they rise and fall with that activity (in this case, property values). Just because local governements were fat and happy during the real estate bubble due to massively inflated property values doesn't mean they're entitled to those giant revenues forevermore.
They're always complaining there's not enough money for education, yet we spend more on our students, per student, than almost any other country in the world. Yet, teacher pay is always shit, teachers are using their own money in many cases to purchase classroom supplies, and educational quality here is crap. Throwing more money at the problem won't help, it'll just feed the beast, because obviously giving them more money isn't going to result in better-paid teachers. The whole system needs to be torn down and rebuilt.
Batgirl and Supergirl and maybe Thorgirl are definite possibilities. Irongirl is not; the whole thing about Iron Man is that he's usually wearing that suit. With a man, we think it's cool, because the suit looks cool and all, and we don't really care that much about seeing a man's body anyway. With a woman, the whole point of the movie (to male viewers) is to see a scantily-clad woman, and a metal suit is only going to interfere with that.
Um, not exactly. Superman has never been rebooted (unless you're talking about the really old version with George Reeves, and consider Christopher Reeve's version to be a reboot). The one made by Bryan Singer wasn't a reboot, it was a sorta-sequel, just with a different actor. Notice that that movie was extremely ambiguous about exactly what year it was, because Superman said he had been away for 5 years (presumably since one of the previous Reeve movies, though it also left open the idea that one or more of those movies have been been ignored).
I agree about Green Lantern; what a horrible movie that was. The part about the "asteroid belt" was especially ridiculous to me.
Apparently in the case of Spider-Man 3, he fights with the studio a lot, and is thoroughly disappointed by the resulting movie. In other words, apparently some studios aren't allowing directors to do their jobs.
There's nothing wrong with glaziers making money on broken windows. Windows break from time to time: bad weather, kids throwing balls (not so much these days...), etc. They're even more necessary for auto glass for obvious reasons. Norton and McAfee suck, but still they're providing a service needed by Windows users because their platform has serious weaknesses, just like glass windows have a serious weakness (glass is brittle), so an additional service/product is needed to deal with that weakness.
There's security software on Android too; I have one called "Lookout", which scans new apps for malware (not sure how much of a problem this really is in the wild), but also has another convenient function, which is showing you where your phone is if it's lost or stolen.
You can do both; even if your small business has nothing to do with computers, you might find it fun to build your own custom website for that business. Or you might create your own custom software to make your business more efficient.
I don't know that it's just the desert, though. We do have neighborhood parks here and there, but they seem to usually be used for youth groups to play soccer games and such, and they can be a long walk away unless you happen to have a house near one; plus you never see kids outside much during half the year, because it's just too damn hot outside.
It's nothing at all like the subdivisions I remember living in in high school on the east coast; there were no walls there, kids played in the streets, cars didn't drive so fast, there weren't pit bulls running loose because they "just got loose" somehow, and there were usually wooded areas very nearby (like in the back yard) for kids to play in. Heck, I just visited with coworker in the rust belt area, and his house looked just like I remember our east coast houses: no walls, and lots of woods behind.
I think this city (Phoenix) is just a horrible place to raise kids. But I think it's going to be similar in other places where they don't have wooded areas, and use block walls to separate houses, and this probably describes most of the southwest and part of Texas.
Slashdot Mirror
Not hiring women (or minorities) can get your company sued for discrimination. Small companies get away with it not only because it's hard to prove (esp. if there's not that many employees so an all-male team doesn't look unusual, unlike some big company with hundreds or thousands), but also because a complainant won't find a lawyer willing to take the case on contingency, because a small company doesn't have much money to go after in a lawsuit. But as a company grows and expands, that changes.
So if you want to keep your company all-male (or even all white male) so you can all act like a bunch of immature assholes, then you need to keep your company extremely small so no one wants to bother going after you.
At it's root, you have a real problem in your workplace aside from sexism. Your coworkers are unprofessional idiots. I would suggest changing companies.
Unless, of course, you (third person) like being around unprofessional idiots.
This seems like a good illustration of the old adage, "birds of a feather fly together".
I agree entirely. The only time I've seen this was in one very small company in my first job out of college when two other guys (one being the owner) and myself (a male) were staying late and were in the back server room together, and the other two were looking at an inappropriate picture that apparently was of a former female employee (who quit after some other employee, a laborer, brought it into work and asked her about it after finding it on the internet). I got out of that company as fast as I could; it wasn't just that incident, the place had a lot of problems.
Since then, I haven't seen much, just an occasional sexist comment when women weren't in earshot ("she's a cupcake", etc.).
Not hiring a woman isn't really an option in many cases, because that'll get you sued for gender discrimination sooner or later. You can get away with it for a while if you're really small, but if this company is expanding, then they have to come out of the basement and join the professional world where employees know how to act professionally.
If they don't want to do this, then they shouldn't expand. Keep the operation extremely small, and no one will bother suing for discrimination (a 5-person company doesn't usually have any assets worth suing for), and you can be as stupid and misogynistic as you want.
Basically the law is the way it is because some people went way too far and ruined it for everyone. When other measures don't work, people finally resort to getting the laws changed, and everyone's stifled. I don't know what the alternative is, however, because without the law in place, the jerks who ruined it for everyone just won't change their behavior. This applies to all kinds of things, not just sexual harassment in the workplace.
He seems like a dick because he wants the company to cover its ass and get medical care for the injured employee? What if the employee is seriously injured, but doesn't realize it? That happens all the time; it's why they always recommend people go to the hospital to be checked out if there's any question.
Now obviously, if the phone didn't actually hit the employee, then we can forgo the medical care (the OP wasn't clear whether the thrown phone actually struck the employee or not). But if someone threw a heavy object at me and struck me, I'd definitely want medical attention to make sure I don't have something wrong, especially if I'm not paying the bill.
I really can't imagine where these people are working that this is even an issue. I'm a professional in the tech industry and I can't imagine anyone I've worked with having any sort of inappropriate interactions with female colleagues (nor have I ever encountered this happening in almost two decades in the industry). Aren't we at least two or three decades past the transitional "women coming into the workplace" period? Aren't practically all the guys that would be old enough for this to even remotely be a problem for already retired?
This is exactly what I thought, and exactly my experience as well, with about 15 years experience in the industry. Women in the workplace are nothing new; even in smaller companies I've worked at, we had plenty of women working there, though not usually as IT people or engineers, but we still had to be around them and interact with them. Women are usually dominant in roles such as HR, after all.
But to read Slashdot, you'd think that programming teams are all full of misogynistic "brogrammers". Maybe you and I have been lucky or something, but most of the tech people I've worked with were married, frequently had kids, and had no trouble with female co-workers (or cow-orkers).
Many employers in IT are expecting you to have your act together enough to work with anybody, regardless of gender, regligion, race, sexual orientation, because they hired you to get your work done, not sit around moaning you can't talk like a 'guy' around a female.
Geez, you people are making me feel like I'm part of management or something ...
Exactly, I agree with both points. I'm really shocked and disappointed; maybe I'm lucky, but I never saw these kinds of problems with sexual harassment, "brogramming", and other such bullshit in my career, except at one dinky little company that was my first job out of college and which I left as soon as I could, and they weren't anywhere near big enough to have 10 IT guys, and even then they had some female employees (purchasing, etc.) and the men knew enough to act right when the women were around. Honestly, I think this is really pathetic. If you're hired as a professional, then act like it.
Yes, the submitter sounds totally clueless, and I predict disaster for his company.
My advice is to hire a professional training firm to come on-site and provide workplace training classes for "harassment avoidance". At the large companies I've worked at, this was required of all employees, to avoid exactly this situation. If the people at this company are so clueless they really think some stupid jars or neckties are sufficient to deal with the situation, they're fucked, plain and simple, and they need outside help if they're going to survive.
Interesting, looks like they've expanded farther east than I had realized.
Not exactly, but it's somewhat close: it's a chain that only exists in a few west coast states (CA, AZ, and I believe OR). It's not a nationwide chain by any stretch.
That said, I don't believe in supporting them any more than anyone else. They're not the greatest store to shop at, the employees are seedy, and they have a policy of taking anything that was returned, slapping a 5% off label on it, and restocking it, even if it's completely dead. If they have something I need fairly quickly, I'll go there, otherwise I'll just order from Newegg or someplace else.
No, not exactly. From what I see, the states can be very different from each other. Some are ridiculously corrupt (Louisiana), others are actually run fairly decently (many of the northeast and northwest states from what I can tell). The federal government is basically a mishmash of all of them, so it's better than the worst states, and worse than the best states. However, another big factor is that the federal government is big and powerful, and largely prevents states from doing their own thing if the federal government isn't doing a very good job. Education is also very local, so some school districts can actually be fairly decent, while others in the same state can be horrible.
If the feds took over education, it'd probably end up improving it over the way it is in the very worst of schools, but it'd be worse than 75% of schools are today.
Besides, what federal programs can you point to that are really well-run anyway? They're all either horribly and incompetently managed, or not given enough power to be effective at their mission and subject to too many politics.
Yes, and that's a perfectly reasonable attitude towards war IMO. Unfortunately, Korea was well before my time, and also seems to be "the forgotten war" as when we study American history we mostly skip over WWI except maybe for mentioning archduke Ferdinand and the Red Baron, study WWII thoroughly, then briefly mention Korea and give it about as much time as the Bay of Pigs, and then jump right into Vietnam. But Korea was mostly successful, in that even though it was largely a civil war and a proxy war like Vietnam, the conquering of the south was averted and it is now a stable and prosperous democracy, whereas Vietnam was a totally different case, and Iraq and Afghanistan have been mostly quagmires as well.
Your waitress friend isn't unemployed, she's employed... as a waitress. So according to the government, everything's hunky-dorey for her. The government doesn't recognize the state of "underemployment".
You're right though; in this day and age, you really need to ponder whether it's even worth it to get a degree. For a lot of people, it doesn't seem to be. However, your anecdotal examples are a little telling: math, education, and special ed are not exactly fields with lots of openings.
Of course, great many things are done for the love of it. But as a company, if you rely on your employees to work for the sake of love, you are in for a big surprise.
Exactly. You end up with extremely disloyal employees who will abandon your company for the next job offer that's only slightly higher. And you end up with a shortage of qualified workers, because not many people will bother going into that field, especially when it requires a massive investment in education (and money) to become qualified, and lots of on-the-job time afterwards to become experienced and productive.
The problem is that China actually cares about how many immigrants it admits and is selective.
Doesn't sound like a country we all know well and most slashdotters live in.
Sounds exactly like Canada.
Subs get fission reactors for two reasons: 1) it lets them hide out underwater indefinitely (especially useful for the "boomer" ballistic missle subs), and 2) they're almost always underwater, so it's not like they have to worry a lot about anyone boarding the ship and taking it over. I'm guessing they probably don't have platoons of marines on board; they don't have the space for it anyway. Aircraft carriers, OTOH, have plenty of space for extra people. But even there, they almost never travel without escorts in a "battle group" (comprising an attack sub, destroyer, etc.), so they probably don't have to worry much about attempts at hostile takeovers.
Yes, and look what happened: The American public elected one warmonger after another, going into Vietnam, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, plus countless smaller campaigns all during that time.
With activities like that, why would anyone want to pay increased property taxes? Besides, those taxes were enough in the past, they should be enough now. Tax revenues aren't a fixed amount, since they're a percentage of some activity, they rise and fall with that activity (in this case, property values). Just because local governements were fat and happy during the real estate bubble due to massively inflated property values doesn't mean they're entitled to those giant revenues forevermore.
They're always complaining there's not enough money for education, yet we spend more on our students, per student, than almost any other country in the world. Yet, teacher pay is always shit, teachers are using their own money in many cases to purchase classroom supplies, and educational quality here is crap. Throwing more money at the problem won't help, it'll just feed the beast, because obviously giving them more money isn't going to result in better-paid teachers. The whole system needs to be torn down and rebuilt.
Batgirl and Supergirl and maybe Thorgirl are definite possibilities. Irongirl is not; the whole thing about Iron Man is that he's usually wearing that suit. With a man, we think it's cool, because the suit looks cool and all, and we don't really care that much about seeing a man's body anyway. With a woman, the whole point of the movie (to male viewers) is to see a scantily-clad woman, and a metal suit is only going to interfere with that.
Um, not exactly. Superman has never been rebooted (unless you're talking about the really old version with George Reeves, and consider Christopher Reeve's version to be a reboot). The one made by Bryan Singer wasn't a reboot, it was a sorta-sequel, just with a different actor. Notice that that movie was extremely ambiguous about exactly what year it was, because Superman said he had been away for 5 years (presumably since one of the previous Reeve movies, though it also left open the idea that one or more of those movies have been been ignored).
I agree about Green Lantern; what a horrible movie that was. The part about the "asteroid belt" was especially ridiculous to me.
Apparently in the case of Spider-Man 3, he fights with the studio a lot, and is thoroughly disappointed by the resulting movie. In other words, apparently some studios aren't allowing directors to do their jobs.
There's nothing wrong with glaziers making money on broken windows. Windows break from time to time: bad weather, kids throwing balls (not so much these days...), etc. They're even more necessary for auto glass for obvious reasons. Norton and McAfee suck, but still they're providing a service needed by Windows users because their platform has serious weaknesses, just like glass windows have a serious weakness (glass is brittle), so an additional service/product is needed to deal with that weakness.
There's security software on Android too; I have one called "Lookout", which scans new apps for malware (not sure how much of a problem this really is in the wild), but also has another convenient function, which is showing you where your phone is if it's lost or stolen.
You can do both; even if your small business has nothing to do with computers, you might find it fun to build your own custom website for that business. Or you might create your own custom software to make your business more efficient.
I don't know that it's just the desert, though. We do have neighborhood parks here and there, but they seem to usually be used for youth groups to play soccer games and such, and they can be a long walk away unless you happen to have a house near one; plus you never see kids outside much during half the year, because it's just too damn hot outside.
It's nothing at all like the subdivisions I remember living in in high school on the east coast; there were no walls there, kids played in the streets, cars didn't drive so fast, there weren't pit bulls running loose because they "just got loose" somehow, and there were usually wooded areas very nearby (like in the back yard) for kids to play in. Heck, I just visited with coworker in the rust belt area, and his house looked just like I remember our east coast houses: no walls, and lots of woods behind.
I think this city (Phoenix) is just a horrible place to raise kids. But I think it's going to be similar in other places where they don't have wooded areas, and use block walls to separate houses, and this probably describes most of the southwest and part of Texas.