obstinate

Someone seeking a job that you control can probably be said to be like a coworker for the purposes of analyzing power imbalances.

We have been inundated by posts like these lately as these creepy dudes have been outed. I have felt as you do on several of them. IMO, this one comes the closest to being a real apology. Doesn't make up for what he did, not by a mile. Doesn't mean he should ever be allowed to be in a position of authority over women again. But for me it was a positive step.

I wouldn't say perfectionism and sales-orientedness are on the same dimension. However, I have noticed that being given the hard-sell is more often than not associated with the product being sub par. A product or project that is doing very good work often doesn't have to sell quite as hard, because the work speaks for itself. (My experience on this issue mostly deals with internal teams. I don't know how much this applies to external teams.)

This is especially true when two products have teams of about equal size, experience, and expertise. Time spent selling is time not spent making a better product. All other things being equal, every hour spent selling is one less hour spent working on making your product better.

If not fines, then imprisonment for contempt of court is a remedy judges have at their disposal. I'm sure it would not take very long for Kholsa to get the point.

The purpose of sanctions in a situation like this is to compel the recipient of those sanctions to do the court's bidding. They should just ratchet the sanctions up until he does what has been ordered. If ten thousand dollars won't do it, make it a hundred. If that doesn't do it, multiply it by ten again. Eventually he'll either comply or no longer have any assets. Either way, the problem will be solved.

> Actually, such behavior has gotten people killed in those contexts.

Nobody is going to die if you can't date someone.

Again, I advocate a conservative approach to getting a date with a coworker. One request, declined for any reason, should be treated as a firm no absent explicit signals to the contrary (request for a rain check, some other sort of proactive, explicitly date-seeking behavior from the other party). Your odds of getting into trouble under this rule are so vanishingly small as to be nonexistent. If you choose some less conservative rule, including, apparently, whatever rule you've been following up to this point, your risks are higher.

Of course, there's also the issue of not wanting to make your woman coworkers uncomfortable. I would hope that would be something of intrinsic value to you, and that on this basis alone you might change your behavior after seeing its impact in the past. The fact that you're still arguing about this makes me doubt that you do value their comfort the way that I think you should. But I don't know how to tell you that you should care about other people in a way that's going to stick. :(

- Reparations to all he harmed directly.

- Further reparations to groups representing those similarly situated.

- Meaningful engagement with mental health professionals to attempt to work on the source of the problem.

- Less defensive, less self-promotional apologies.

These four are the bare minimum. Until he has done each of these, he's receiving a failing grade from me.

You think that the women you've worked with have been promoted . . . because you were fantasizing about them instead of engaging with them? Not, for e.g., maybe because they were more capable than average?

IMO, you should seek therapy. You sound like you need it more than most.

Normally people have to do some penance before forgiveness, especially as the crimes grow more heinous. Continuing to live the rich and privileged life you were leading before, more or less untouched by the hand of justice, does not count for much in this dimension.

> Disclosure, this comes to mind because of something that happened between me and a colleague of equal rank in a volunteer organization who went directly from "I don't think I can see a movie tonight" to "This situation is making me uncomfortable" with nothing in between.

Did you ask multiple times? This sounds like what could easily happen when someone won't take the initial "no," implicit or not, for an answer. Based on the rest of your comment, I expect so.

A few important points:

1. Repeated asking has been held to be sexual harassment, if repeated for long enough.

2. Here's a simple rule: ask once, and only once. She knows where you work. If she's interested, she'll ask for a rain check and get back to you.

> I just don't think this is suitable verbal behavior for supposedly rational adults

3. Rational adults understand and respond to signalling. They don't demand that all communication happen explicitly and on their terms, because they know that such demands are ineffective for all purposes, will not be heeded, and might make them social pariahs.

I dunno. A 30% code size win is non-trivial. I'm all for filing an issue first and seeing how likely it is that there is uptake from the dev team and desire to fix the problem. However, if no fix is forthcoming . . . code size has fairly well known effects on performance.

Yes, yes. Or governments can enforce a more equitable split through taxes. But you still have to give some benefit to those who save, else there will be no reason to do aught but consume all one produces.

On some level, this is basically "capitalism 101." If I don't need my resources now, I can put them to work so that I can later benefit from them. This leads to me having productive assets, which pay me some return.

If I could not acquire productive assets, there would be much less reason to save. And it's unclear how one would save, as banks would likely not exist either. You can solve this problem somewhat by having a centrally planned economy. But then you have the problems that hit those.

Construction and rent also vary with fanciness. Rent because rent is more expensive in the fancy parts of town. Construction because the quality of finishes is a significant factor in construction costs.

What it costs to open a fancy restaurant with top quality finishes including walls dripped with rose gold resin.