I am here to say (as a Tesla owner), that I truly hope this kind of behavior is not being tolerated by Tesla. I would hope Elon Musk or someone high up at the company investigates these claims. If they are baseless, they are baseless, but they are still worth investigating and possibly taking disciplinary and work process steps to fix them.
In regards to Vandenmeyer's story: from what I've read...I'm not sure I think it's super credible. I certainly could be wrong though.
I want to believe in Tesla just as much as the next tech-focused person, but of course I want them to have good corporate ethics and ferret out cases like this/investigate them. I would hope meaningfully!
I think Tesla's and Elon Musk's response of publicly attacking this woman almost certainly indicates that they are at fault.
If this woman's claims were false they would do best to keep quiet and wait for the legal process. They have a huge advantage with both the money to pay lawyers and many fawning media outlets willing to support them so if they were in the right they would be guaranteed to win if they just waited it out.
Going on the offensive is dangerous because it makes them look bad and draws more attention to the story.
Attacking this woman would be very stupid unless they are actually in the wrong, in which case it makes perfect sense as an attempt to intimidate other employees into not speaking out.
> Attacking this woman would be very stupid unless they are actually in the wrong
Or unless they think they are very right. I find them opening their mouth at all to be quite surprising. I find the firing with a reason given even MORE surprising.
This is either complete and total incompetence (not at all impossible), or the Tesla lawyers must think they are on amazingly solid ground.
> This is either complete and total incompetence (not at all impossible), or the Tesla lawyers must think they are on amazingly solid ground.
They seem to feel extremely confident indeed, this is from the previous the Guardian article on this story:
Tesla has continued to strongly reject Vandermeyden’s claims. A spokesperson said the company had “conducted a thorough internal investigation” and “extensively re-reviewed all the facts”, repeatedly concluding that her allegations were false.
Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to say that this means they're at fault and they've messed up just because of what they said, but I do think it's hurting them more than its helping.
As mentioned - yes, this very well could be a legit problem! I don't mean to dismiss this employees' claims lightly. With the person Musk is though, I bet he sees it as a petty "human" distraction towards getting his larger goals for humanity. That doesn't excuse the way he handles it, but just gives perspective on his response. He seems to be a little bit of a robot sometimes - I don't think human empathy is his strong suit.
I agree attacking women or anyone is stupid in general. Instead, hear the person out and promise to investigate. Then take action if necessary and if not, share the facts. I don't think anyone can disagree with that course of action but hotter heads prevail sometimes on short notice like this.
What I see here is a mixture of tech's standard gender issues along with the hazards of "changing the world".
If you think that you're changing the world, it's very easy to dismiss other concerns as less important than your core mission. This problem only gets worse if you actually are changing the world. At the end of the day, even Tesla is just a company with a bunch of people working their day job, you do need to make sure that your employees feel safe and enjoy their time there within reasonable bounds
Even if it was, I think if you're going to work for Elon as "just a regular job" you're not going to last very long. Embrace the personality cult while it lasts and work on something incredible with all of your focus.
They were OK their first year or so, then they went the way of every other reactionary "news" site and peddled clickbait and incendiary political op-eds.
I have to stick up a bit for the community as a whole. There have been at least three relatively (emphasis on relatively—in absolute terms still pretty bad) substantive discussions of sexual harassment on HN recently. This one is certainly much worse, but the trend can't be monotonic; the community is far too large and divided for that. If we judge by all the data points, the trend seems positive. But it's slow.
What's wrong with this place? What's wrong with this world is the question you should be asking, it's not a mistake that sexual harassment has flourished among a population that (clearly -- read the posts in this thread) also discounts it's very legitimacy.
The topic of women and minorities in tech really provokes HN to display its neckbeard plumage. Really, I don't know why I click on the comments of these articles.
People in tech-- nerdy or socially insecure men in particular-- often tie their self worth to their jobs or their skills.
A mere whiff that the reason that they have their position isn't because they're innately better than everyone else threatens that sense of self worth, and a lot of them handle it by getting angrily defensive.
well, there are other possibilities; such as the philosophical-political underpinnings establishing the existence of 'the issues' (whatever that is) being countered.
These kinds of problems aren't really being solved by having a mandatory seminar. There are broad cultural issues at play, and certainly quite a bit of corporate ass covering.
However, I don't think its reasonable for anyone in an employment situation to have to suffer because of the psychological problems of their peers and especially their superiors. Sexual harassment is just one egregious example.
If you are really worried about litigation, stop putting narcissistic sociopaths in your management structure. I know that sounds hard. At least you can try?
While sitting in his open office with another employee next to me my boss, the owner of the company, bellowed at me "If I were 30 years younger, I'd jump over this table and fuck you!" I laughed. Two months later I received my bonus; the day after that I gave notice. That comment wasn't the worst thing he had said or done to me.
That also wasn't the first time I had been harassed at work. In the beginning it was a little exhausting because I felt I should stick it out - perhaps as some sort psychological rite of passage. However, I eventually learned the easy way to deal with it. Don't fight. Don't argue. Just leave. There are men and women who deal with harassment everyday gracefully.
The tech industry is so expansive and filled with opportunity that the moment I feel an employer doesn't have my back, I know I can split and not care. I don't know why more people don't see it the same way.
> Don't fight. Don't argue. Just leave. There are men and women who deal with harassment everyday gracefully.
That's a horrifically regressive view on this. Why should the person being harassed have to leave? Why can't the person doing the harassing be forced out? And saying that leaving quietly is "handling it gracefully" puts the entire burden on the victim, as if not just graciously accepting someone's sexual advances is causing a nuisance to the rest of the company.
If you expect all women who are the victims of sexual harassment to leave their jobs without making a fuss, you can't be surprised when people write long thinkpieces on the software industry is lacking in female representation.
No, it's a self-efficacious view. I never see myself as a victim. There is no burden. And that's where I can't see eye-to-eye with you on your thoughts.
I've gotten tired of the thinkpieces and the people who write them. They're not doing anything but writing sanctimonious bullshit from their ivory tower. I take action. Whether you think leaving a toxic workplace quietly is not an acceptable response, then that's your opinion.
Perhaps Rosa Parks should have just gone to the back of the bus instead of making a sanctimonious bullshit fuss. That sanctimonious bullshit from the ivory tower is the reason that things are as good as they are today relative to yesterday, as bad as things still are today.
No, it's the fatigue and lack of attention that improves it. That is to say, the course of action that the actual affected individual takes. They stop taking the shit and leave. If this happens enough, then shitty employers go out of business.
You think the employers give a shit? They certainly don't, unless there's a lawsuit against them.
Just leaving doesn't make a statement to them. They don't care. They'll find someone else to fill that job, and if it's another women, they'll get treated just the same. They won't learn anything as long as there are people able to fill the seat, which there always will be.
You're naive if you think they'll go out of business just because you left. You're replaceable. Nearly everyone at every company is replaceable.
There are many many intangible reasons for choosing one qualified person over another (yes, even if one is somewhat more qualified). The engineer passed over will have other opportunities if he or she really is highly qualified.
It's interesting from Darwinian perspective; that as a species we've produced a system that could select a "less fit" candidate. I wonder if there are other examples of this type of behaviour in nature or if we're the first?
Oftentimes when an evolutionary process produces a "less fit" candidate, it's because our intuitive notions of what fitness is are wrong. A bunch of examples from business:
Betamax vs. VHS is often cited as an example of the market rewarding an inferior technical solution. Betamax's picture quality was better, but the key VHS feature was you could fit a 90-100 minute feature film on a single tape (Betamax tapes were 1 hour). The market valued the ability to watch a single movie without changing tapes more than picture quality (and still does - look at all the YouTube videos that do horrible things to picture quality to get a full movie up while evading copyright detection).
Intel x86 is often cited as a terrible instruction architecture. The mistake here is thinking that "ease of learning for newcomers" is the key value in an ISA. Most programmers are using compilers to generate assembly code anyway, and the key value that consumers want is "runs all my existing software, reasonably quickly". Intel correctly preferences backwards compatibility over elegance.
Here's one from biology. Sickle-cell anemia is a terrible disease, leading to extremely painful episodes and often loss of limbs to gangrene. However, it confers increased resistance to malaria. In many of the areas where sickle-cell anemia is endemic, malaria is a bigger killer than gangrene. This is nature optimizing for the actual threat rather than the obvious threat.
I'd be wary of drawing conclusions from a few headlines - often press cycles blow over. But if it turns out that this spate of sexual harassment headlines is the new normal rather than just momentary opportunism, it's possible that old models of who the critical constituency to please is are obsolete, and that women collectively now hold more economic power than the old boy's network. If you build a culture assuming that the old boy's network is the critical constituency, and then it turns out that assumption is invalid, then all of your evolutionary adaptations to that environment go out the window.
That presumes the system was already choosing "more fit" candidates. Given the system's historical inequities that claim seems suspect. How many women or ethnic minorities lost out on opportunities in the past because of who they were?
This is not true, and sounds like it's written from the perspective of someone who hasn't had to go through this. I don't have personal experience with this, but for many people, it sounds like a very difficult thing to come forward to talk about harassment, with huge potential downsides and stigmas associated with it, even as the wronged party. And anyone prepared to talk about it should be treated with empathy and respect and shouldn't have to face a court of public opinion (like this thread) until whatever appropriate investigations are complete.
Yes, your point is true, that if you act like a sociopath you can exploit this system, but if you act like a sociopath there are many social contracts you can exploit. But I imagine you will find very few people who would actually do this, and it's besides the point for this discussion (and actually counterproductive, if it creates an environment that discourages other people to come forward, thus delaying fixing a very clear and obvious problem for many right now).
I usually try to avoid commenting online on social matters, but there's a lot of unpleasantness here, and it feels important to try and respond to it.
I hear you. I do think there is a better way though, than a) always disbelieving the accuser until proven otherwise or b) always believing the accuser until proven otherwise. Both sides can be exploited. In the case of predators, absolutely, environments that discourage accusers coming forward makes it easy for them to exploit, and that is wrong. In the case of false accusers (more common than I believe most people think), environments that take the side of an accuser makes it easy for them to exploit, and that is also wrong. There's a balance to be struck, and I think we can only consider that balance when we think about all the dynamics of all the actors.
Sometimes specific articles spark a look at a system as a broader whole. I don't see any reason to discourage that.
Also, it's literally a comment using hacker mentality to analyze a system. Why would it not be the top comment on a self-selected-hacker-populated forum?
> The cons being you are fired (which probably would have happened anyways) or you are outed as a false accuser (very hard to prove in the realm of public opinion).
And probably never getting hired again, at least by any reasonably rational male hiring manager. Too much risk.
> it makes the most sense to allege some kind of harassment if you feel you are underperforming in your job and wish to get ahead
That's true for men as much for women. But I have not seen that argument used for men. So, I don't say that you are discriminating against women, as I don't know if you use this argument also when we talk about men, but you should understand that without further information it looks like you are telling us that "women" do this while "men" don't what is ridiculous from a "game theory perspective" as the situation is exactly the same.
I specifically used the words "protected class" in my statement, which covers: race, sex, pregnancy, religion, national origin, disability, age, military service, bankruptcy, genetic information, citizenship status, gender identity, sexual orientation.
Leveling thinly-veiled accusations of sexism ('it looks like you are telling us that "women" do this while "men" don't') is the reason why these topics don't advance from discussion.
Because sex doesn't just mean female. Males are an equally protected class in terms of gender based discrimination laws. So you pointing out that you specified "protected class" doesn't really mean much, since it equally applies.
If the individual were under-performing then that would have been adequate reason to fire them; there would be no need to fire them in retaliation for making the accusation. It certainly would have been a better reason for Tesla to provide, should they care at all about the sensitivity of their public image.
>If the individual were under-performing then that would have been adequate reason to fire them
Not if they had a claim of harassment, which is my point. Now any firing looks like retaliation, similarly to what is being claimed by Vandermeyden's lawyer. According to Tesla, she was fired for false accusations of harassment, as proven by an independent third party investigation (reported in the link). But because she made the claims of harassment, she's been immunized against the repercussions of making false claims, at least in the realm of public opinion. Now the burden is on Tesla to use their time and resources to prove that something didn't happen in order to justify her termination, not the other way around.
If an individual were genuinely under-performing, and the company were decently managed, then there would be a paper trail of feedback and attempts to rectify the situation which would indicate that the individual was not performing adequately.
Such a paper trail is what allows a company to defend itself in wrongful dismissal lawsuits. The sort of lawsuit that arises when an individual is wrongfully dismissed for non-existent performance reasons as a retaliation for other actions they took.
The individual is not, in any way, immunized from making false claims so long as Tesla is operating itself in a manner befitting a company of its size.
poor performance and harassment are discreet issues. both can be true (or both false). as such, any record of performance isn't by nature proof of non-retaliation.
The problem with your argument is that it's impossible to measure or get reliable statistics on, so your game theory argument falls apart on empirical grounds.
Perhaps theoretically your point would stand, however it's entirely too politically charged to do anything but find polarizing responses.
If you lose, you will be out lawyer fees, which will be high to fight a large company like Tesla, and any chance of future employment. The game doesn't work out the way you think.
No matter what we're replying to, the commenting guidelines always apply and this one seriously violates them. The discussions never get better, only predictably worse, when we post like this.
Tesla's statement is very interesting. They say: "Despite repeatedly receiving special treatment at the expense of others, Ms. Vandermeyden nonetheless chose to pursue a miscarriage of justice by suing Tesla and falsely attacking our company in the press"
So Tesla is claiming that they discriminated against other employees and harmed them at this woman's behest.
Strange claim, since it is actionable by these supposed people who they harmed and admits that Tesla's management is incompetent and engages in gender discrimination.
It seems that like Uber most people with real skill and talent are jumping the Tesla ship before it goes down.
This is a side show compared to Tesla's other problems (just like Uber) but it is in these cases where there is an emotional impact as opposed to boring numbers that people actually take notice of how incompetent the management of a company really is.
I noticed that too, their defense against a sexually discriminatory environment was to admit to discriminating in a different way?
Also, their defense is bordering on the edge of defamatory if it's untrue. It wouldn't be hard for a reasonable jury to see the situation as malicious intent. IANAL.
This is (a) changing the subject, (b) lacking information, (c) partisan flamebait and (d) ideological boilerplate ("Alinsky playbook"). That easily clears the bar to be called political trolling whether you meant it that way or not. On HN we judge that by effect, not intent, because effects are what we're trying to optimize for. (If anyone wants a further explanation see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...).
Bottom line, please stop and please don't post like this to HN.
> I wonder how Thiel has managed to avoid these Alinsky playbook tactics so far.
Partly by being gay, partly by "that shoe dropped a while ago." He co-authored a book titled The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford in 1995.
Per wiki:
> In 2016, Thiel apologized for two statements he made in the book: 1) "The purpose of the rape crisis movement seems as much about vilifying men as about raising 'awareness'" and 2) "But since a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret, a woman might 'realize' that she had been 'raped' the next day or even many days later." He stated: "More than two decades ago, I co-wrote a book with several insensitive, crudely argued statements. As I’ve said before, I wish I’d never written those things. I’m sorry for it. Rape in all forms is a crime. I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise."
> In any company of tens of thousands of people, you can always find a few people who are mistreated
It's how the company handles these situations that matters. If the guy who harassed Susan Fowler was fired instead of promoted, Kalanick would probably still have his job.
If you wish to be taken seriously by intelligent adults, maybe try to find a way to make your point that isn't just a word salad comprised of decade-old shibboleths.
The fact that this comment hasn't been downvoted into oblivion yet (in fact, it may be the top comment on this thread right now) is galling.
I'll go ahead and emphatically state that I did down-vote this, because chalking up someone being mistreated in the workforce to a coordinated liberal agenda will get you banned from the comment section on most real news websites, but apparently it makes you a fuckin' hero around here.
If you lent half the time & energy into reading, researching, and just general thinking about this problem that you have thinking about wild conspiracy theories, we'd all probably live in a better world for it.
But we'll continue living in the bad world, because of it.
No kidding. Knowing how Musk is idolized around here, was anticipating some defense, but the ability to harness Trump to ignore real problems in these companies, that's..wow. And it's the top-most comment right now. How does that work?
If this is levied at me, I will concede the conspiracy theory charge. I have no evidence that this is "paid for by Soros" or anything like that. But to claim misogyny or victim blaming you need to point to some kind of verbiage which supports the claim. Nowhere did I deny that it could have happened (even though the only public source in this case was fired by an independent commission after her claims were found to be unsubstantiated) or that it does happen sometimes.
My main issue is the use of anonymous sources to convict Tesla in the court of public opinion.
Full disclosure: I don't own any Tesla product or stock and have never worked there.
Is it me or we are reading more and more about abuses ? So I'd say this or that company is not specifically problematic, but it's just women tend to be more vocal about the "difficulties" they encounter on the work place (I don't know how to express the fact that I think they are harassed but at the same time, being European, I'm not sure that what I have in mind is the same for those who read this; in my experience the harassment is subtle, it's more like "a subtle dose of socially accepted misogyny" (which I personally find unacceptable (I'm a man :) )
I think for years women felt they didn't have a voice, so it's a bit of a tidal wave right now. Hopefully this flood will elicit enough change to make the changes needed so we hear less of it in the future for the right reasons.
1.) More women are speaking out as they feel they have a voice.
2.) More women are in the higher positions so other women feel someone at the top will listen to them.
In regards to Vandenmeyer's story: from what I've read...I'm not sure I think it's super credible. I certainly could be wrong though.
I want to believe in Tesla just as much as the next tech-focused person, but of course I want them to have good corporate ethics and ferret out cases like this/investigate them. I would hope meaningfully!