Some people, (edit) men/women do this so much that I punish the behavior. Instead of then saying "I would rather you not do X" they come up with some cryptic encoded message that leaves you wondering why they said it and what they want. The one issuing cryptic messages often gets angry when things do not change the way they expected. When people do this to me, I go out of my way to not read their mind and not give them what they want. If you are going to communicate like a 6 year old then expect that you wont always get your way.
And people wonder why women feel excluded from technical forums. Yikes.
(The edit makes it better, but the fact that this was written about "some women" in the abstract who need to be "punished" for doing it remains really disturbing. This was a complete tangent to the linked article, not a point that really needed to be made. How would you react if you pulled up a forum comment where the top post talked about how "Some geeks are so socially awkward that I can't understand them. So I punish them for it". See the point? What you did was deliberately exclusionary: it's just plain mean. Stop it.)
If I did find a comment like that, complaining about a predominantly male behavior on a forum for some female-dominated hobby/profession/interest, I wouldn't be surprised or outraged. Some patterns of behavior are more common among one sex than the other; some of those patterns of behavior bother the opposite sex; sometimes people complain about things that bother them.
Which is what I'd expect you to say to your peers on the predominately male-dominated forums you frequent. :) I suspect (based on my own personality) that your personality isn't nearly so confident when you're out of your comfort zone. Now picture a world where that zone outside your comfort is an important part of the career path.
To tickle the startup thing: picture a site where a bunch of VCs sit around talking about money stuff. You want to get into that world and you know you need to be part of this site to do it. Yet half the time you start posting you find the people you want to interact with complaining about how infuriating "tech people" are to deal with. Think hard about what you'd do: jump into the conversation anyway or just stay silent until you have something "serious" to say? I know what I'd do.
> just stay silent until you have something "serious" to say
That's my MO on any new forum. I only stopped following that rule on HN as HN itself got increasingly sillier.
And really, your VC example, in reverse, is in full display on HN. There are always articles complaining about unfair shit that VC's pull, and VC's probably talk about unfair shit founders pull. The proper response, assuming you're a VC that doesn't pull unfair shit, is to say "yeah, I hate that shit and I never do that." Look at how Peroni (a recruiter) contributes to the perennial complaining-about-recruiters threads.
The OP is about using indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques to close sales. I think it's fair game to complain about indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques and the people who use them, and if someone observes that it tends to be women more often than men, so be it. If you're a woman who doesn't use indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques, you come into this thread in the same position that Peroni comes into the multitude of threads about how useless recruiters are.
(late reply to late reply, but I couldn't let this one go)
'I think it's fair game to complain about indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques and the people who use them"
Good grief. No. Just no. Not when the "people who use them" are generalized (maeon3 didn't even hedge with "tend to" like you did) to half the species.
Sorry, that's not objective argumentation, it's plain bigotry.
Would you have stepped up in the same way if he had jumped into to say the darkies are lazy and dumb? That the muslim faith is evil?
I'll just repeat my original "yikes" and leave it at that. People like you make me sad for humanity.
I don't think he implied anywhere that all or even most women (mis-) communicate that way, but rather that most people who mis-communicate that way are women. That is a fair observation, and similar comments about men largely pass without comment.
The original post has been edited, but the phrasing was "some women [do this], so I punish them for it". And he went on to use the female pronouns throughout. It was a rant, not an argument. And there wasn't even a tiny nod to the idea that anyone other than a woman would be so afflicted.
True, but unrelated to my point. I was reacting to maeon3's use of a link to a list of sales techniques (!) as a springboard for a rant about "some women" communicating badly and needing to be "punished" for it. It may be true or not, but it's uncalled for and exclusionary.
It's the moral equivalent of walking around telling every german you meet that the Nazis killed six million jews and that the holocaust is the worst thing in history. Might be true of "some germans" but it's not something polite people do. And in the context of underrepresented demographics like women programmers it's really hurtful to all of us.
