Congratulations and thanks for writing this. It is easy as an American male to overlook how much harder others might have to work to achieve what I think of as very approachable goals. You've not only put in all the work but also had to rely on the good graces of these programs to support you! That work ethic you've cultivated is what you now must rely on to succeed and by far your most valuable asset.
You will still face difficulties because of your gender and ethnicity. It's horrible and wrong, and I hope it changes. But your tenacity and drive will show everybody your real value in the end, and I think you'll do well! I believe you are and can continue to be part of the change.
I think the comment was very reasonable. Yes, it mentions gender/ethnicity/nationality in a way that is likely to incite some people to attack, but in this case gender and ethnicity/nationality was mentioned in the article as a relevant detail, so I think it's reasonable to include it in a comment.
I just feel that it's not reasonable to hold GP responsible for a touchy subject, when the touchy subject is part of the article they're commenting on in the first place. If it came out of nowhere, then obviously that'd be a different story.
Btw, I don't think it's quite true to say that the touchy subject was part of the article. Even if it were, though, the burden is on commenters not to take an HN thread further into flamewar. This is in the site guidelines:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
1) They clearly didn't intend to incite people to attack, and
2) How much responsibility are you really going to lay at their feet for that? If I say in a comment, "yes, we really need to do better at fighting climate change", there will absolutely be some people who will take that as an opportunity to start a flamewar. Some topics are controversial enough to where fairly innocuous statements might get people flaming -- is discouraging the innocuous statements really the right move? You're essentially saying that it's each commenter's job not to offend people, even if the offended parties are being unreasonable. That effectively hands a subject-matter banhammer to them.
I don't entirely disagree with what you're saying about expected value of the subthread, I just think that there's a line there, and in this case the GP stayed well on the right side of it.
I don't think there's much point trying to agree on every case, only on the principles, since different people will always call different cases differently. From my perspective, the comment wasn't innocuous. It clearly steps away from the specifics of the OP's story into generic ideological themes. Asking HN commenters not to do that is standard HN moderation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). It did that repeatedly (though subtly, because it superficially takes the form of a friendly congratulation) in a way that was bound to land as flamebait in the thread. When a friendly congratulation comes with a political agenda, the political agenda will forever be the high-order bit.
"You will still face difficulties because of your gender and ethnicity" seems particularly subject-changing, and also patronizing, since it replaces the author's specific story of her own experience with a generic story based on different filters. We can't know and shouldn't presume to tell her what her future experiences will be.
I feel bad spelling this out because it makes the GP comment sound worse than it was—it doesn't deserve an exhaustive critique. But when people question what I posted, I feel obliged to share my thought process. Which requires figuring out what it was, since a lot of it by now is instinctive pattern-matching.
I was definitely not trying to introduce an agenda. I will admit I was a bit naive about how my words were going to be taken by some (really just a couple people who took my comment in the _worst_ possible light, in my opinion). I really just wanted to thank her for being part of a positive change in society and encourage her to continue.
The specific comment I made about gender/ethnicity seemed to me like an obvious given, not some prophetic word. The article implied this struggle quite clearly, I thought, as well as the tone of the the OP's other comments in this discussion.
I think given how things actually did play out that dang's actions were totally fine here. As a result I'll try and be more conscious of my words, because I don't want to be a part of a flame war anyway. I try to avoid sarcasm and destructive criticism in general. My history on this site shows that, I think.
I’m sincerely sorry. I didn’t realize that the mere mention of gender and ethnic discrimination being a problem in general was all that controversial. I was hoping to be a source of encouragement for OP, but seeing how people responded I understand and appreciate you stepping in. I know keeping a community civil is an important and difficult task, so thanks for all you do dang :)
It stepped noticeably away from the specifics of the article and noticeably into generic flamewar topics. Other commenters predictably responded in kind, just with more indignation and lower-quality comments. This is how flamewars get started and it's clearly traceable to this root. If you want more explanation, I've written more in a sibling (cousin?) comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26255991
The general principles are repeated (ad nauseum, I'm afraid) here:
Not the time for "Remember the Asymptote" here actually. The world is being taken over by new generations free to break the framework. This type of post is about that.
It might also be about spread of corporations into every culture, but here I remember the "Other Conquest" in Central America where it didn't ultimately matter who came into the culture, because the culture held up under force. Both sides changed. I am as excited for Google as for the OP. These moments make the past unreal, and the future becomes about this kind of dream coming true and surpassed.
> You will still face difficulties because of your gender and ethnicity.
She is going to Europe, not USA. Unless she picks a really bad place (but most Google HQs there are in a good place), she won't have any such issues.
Europe doesn't talk as much about gender and race, but they actually do things as well, while in the USA everyone kinda pats their back for "walking out for Black Lifes Matter" and calls it a day.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
While it's true that racial oppression is often less in Europe due to better government regulations and social safety nets and whatnot, on a personal level there's still plenty of bigotry and xenophobia, sometimes moreso than the US.
I'm an American living in Munich (working for Google actually), go ahead and try telling foreigners here that landlords they're talking to while applying for an apartment treat them the same way as native Germans. The idea is laughable.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's a poll on whether people in different countries feel that increasing diversity is a positive change. Note that the US comes out ahead of most of the European countries listed, as well as substantially ahead of the European median: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/04/22/how-people-aro...
I'm not sure this is true, having worked in both the US and Europe. The US definitely talks about it more, often to an absurd excess. But I've seen far more real-life examples of casual racism in Europe, stuff that no one would even dream of saying or doing in the US. I'm not hanging out in terrible neighborhoods in either place.
Having worked in both Europe and the US, and being from neither of those places, I can absolutely say that the amount of _open_ racism in Europe was significantly greater than in the US.
One example out of many: while walking on the street in Denmark, there were two instances of passersby on bicycles yelling racial slurs at me as they drove by.
Considering America’s obsession with diversity, I find it hard to believe that she would have an easier time in Europe or anywhere else in the world. In America she would receive countless offers purely as a diversity hire. That’s not to say she wouldn’t deserve the offers based on merit, but Silicon Valley has decided that pure ability is less important to hiring than race and gender. That gives her an enormous advantage over white and asian males.
Errr I’d want to see hard evidence this is the case before I’d take it as a given.
There’s no part of me that finds it easy to believe that a female, minority worker in tech is going to get the same opportunities as a white male anywhere in Europe.
I’d think the more sinister patting of one’s own back is assuming that “at least we’re not like that here” without hard evidence to back up that assumption.
>There’s no part of me that finds it easy to believe that a female, minority worker in tech is going to get the same opportunities as a white male anywhere in Europe.
I agree, she's a woman, she will definitely get much more opportunities than a man. The potential employers will bend over backwards to fill their diversity quotas.
The (billion dollar) company I work for in Europe has a policy that they hire twice as many women as men. Women also get twice as long contracts and better career paths. They are also trying to hire a lot more people of color. Statistically you have an extremely higher chance of getting hired as a black female than a white male.
> Europe doesn't talk as much about gender and race, but they actually do things as well, while in the USA everyone kinda pats their back for "walking out for Black Lifes Matter" and calls it a day.
Please explain how things like 'Zwarte Piet' fit into your narrative? I remember the first time I walked around a town center around the holidays and was accosted by multiple white Europeans in blackface asking for donations.
I think Zwarte Piet is racist only when seen through American lenses. Which unfortunately today is the norm, but that doesn't make it more sensible. Zwarte Piet is basically Santa's little helper, as they exist in many traditions. He's black so he's represented by people with their face painted black. The fact that blackface has a connotation of racism in a country where racial laws where abolished only in 1964 has nothing to do with the substance and meaning of a Dutch Christmas tradition.
I don't think this is the right place to make a EU vs. USA point, to be honest. And a Google HQ itself isn't a safe-haven either.
I'm not as confident as you are about the author of this post getting an easier life in the EU vs. the US. People escaping the wars the EU/US coalition (in whatever form) have started in the middle east are going to find their way to greener pastures through Turkey, Greece, Italy and be shunned every fucking step of the way, no matter where they settle.
But you don't have to be coming from Turkey or be somehow Arabic, or Muslim in appearance, you only have to turn to the UK to see the sheer derision towards Polish people and immigrants further east despite the immense proximity between the countries. Or the attitude to the Romani people across the whole continent.
The author is from Palestine. She will suffer from prejudice purely for having a name that ignorant people will connect to Islam or terrorism, and ignorant people who will take Israel's side on the matter without thought.
If Dalia Awad has an easier time and avoids issues wherever she is, it's because of what she's had to do for it, not because she chose the EU over the US.
I took it too far in that respect, and since I can't do a faithful edit on HN to correct that (without erasing the evidence of me being wrong), it doesn't mean the rest of the post is wrong.
The EU isn't the paradise the parent poster thinks it is.
I suppose everybody's impression of inequity is mostly shaped by their experience and perhaps the anecdotal experience of a few close friends. The US is by no means a model for how to handle inequities but my experience has been that the US actually does a better job handling and talking about it, at least in the sciences, than do lots of places in Europe. IDK, everything is subjective and depends. Bearing that in mind I would encourage you to approach commenting on topics like this without drawing such a hard line in the sand. Whether or not you meant it, your comment comes off as pretty aggressive and somewhat flame-war-y.
Perhaps Europe is better at gender (due to strong social policies), but Europe is't immune to racism.
It's not talked about so loudly like in the US, but I've experienced so much low-key, out in the open racism in Europe towards Arabs, Moroccans, Chinese, Africans and so on.
I'm not white and while I don't feel like my life is in danger, I know from looks and behavior that I'm not on equal footing with a white European.
The US has been grappling with these issues for a long time, so it's normal to discuss it there.
In Germany, I get more of the feeling of, "oh, we don't have those kinds of problems here". It's basically denialism, like when the Dutch defend Zwarte Piet. Not that you don't see that in the US for some people too, but it seems to be more widespread in many European countries, where the very fact that it hasn't been as widely discussed before leads people to believe that it must not exist.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Obviously any mention of Gaza is one step away from major politics, but I don't think it's fair to impose that on the OP.
Unreal how competitive the virtue signaling is on HN, when the reality is that every major tech company is falling over itself to hire anyone who isn’t A) Male and B) either white or Asian/Indian.
You will still face difficulties because of your gender and ethnicity. It's horrible and wrong, and I hope it changes. But your tenacity and drive will show everybody your real value in the end, and I think you'll do well! I believe you are and can continue to be part of the change.