Women in IT

[Karch]

"fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords" present in traditional office environments.

His actual behavior aside, was he not correct in saying this?

[alynnidalar]

I would say those are things that exist in all of society, and are not a problem unique to traditional desk jobs.

[Linguoboy]

"fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords" present in traditional office environments.

His actual behavior aside, was he not correct in saying this?

"What did you think of the play, Mrs Lincoln?"

Hey, for funsies, let's look at the full quote in context:

(I'm thinking of Linus Torvalds, for example, who tried--and for years succeeded--in valorising his abusive behaviour as superior to the "fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords" present in traditional office environments.)

(I added some emphasis just for colour.)

Fake politeness and buzzwords are annoying, lying and backstabbing are reprehensible, as is passive aggressiveness. The solution to these ills, however, is not to replace them with plain aggressiveness, insults, and comments like "[W]hoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not dies as babies, considering that way were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"

[Travis B.]

"fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords" present in traditional office environments.

His actual behavior aside, was he not correct in saying this?

Yes, he is correct in saying this, but replacing them with direct aggressiveness and gratuitous insults is not the way to go either. There is no reason whatsoever why one can have neither fake politeness, lying, office politics, backstabbing, passive aggressiveness, and buzzwords nor the crap that Linus is famous for. Saying that one must have one or the other is a false dichotomy.

[Ares Land]

Speaking of false dichotomies, in my experience direct agressivity, office politics and backstabbing can all happily coexist in the same workspace. Come to think, they all tend to go together.

One annoying bit in IT is that there are some pretty naive expectations. Such as, competent people are allowed to be as unpleasant as they want to; and conversely that unpleasant people are somehow more direct and competent than polite ones.

The thing is, the Grumpy Engineer is a great fiction trope but real life doesn't work that way. Most of the unpleasant guys in IT are not Linus Torvalds, to put it mildly.

[Linguoboy]

One annoying bit in IT is that there are some pretty naive expectations. Such as, competent people are allowed to be as unpleasant as they want to; and conversely that unpleasant people are somehow more direct and competent than polite ones.

IME, there is a definite double-standard accompanying this expectation that correlates strongly with gender.