Ask HN: Woman and software engineer on a team with a toxic 'brogrammer' culture
I’m a woman and a software engineer working for the past 4 years in tech. I had a lot of cringe-worthy experiences, but I will focus on the time when I was the only woman in a team where the &#x27;brogrammer&#x27; culture prevailed, and where I stayed for 1 year. As soon as I joined I decided I was going to &quot;play cool&quot; and put everyone at ease and to fit in (terrible idea, I know).<p>There were 2 really bad episodes that happened to me related to the team:<p>1. The most senior member after one company party proposed to &quot;help me with my career&quot; (whatever that might mean) in exchange for sex, which I vehemently rejected by telling him to f* off (btw, the guy is married). I decided to shrug it off, blame it on alcohol - and besides that I don&#x27;t think that our lead or HR would have done anything if I had made a complaint.<p>2. The whole team was in on a prank on me where they connected their keyboard to my laptop&#x27;s docking station, which lasted for more than 1 week and resulted in effectively sabotaging my work for that period of time.<p>I feel that during this time I underperformed and did not learn much; my contributions were not valued and sometimes I was ridiculed in meetings. The senior colleague described in 1. had the habit of making jokes with sexual undertones, targeting me and other colleagues with whom I either worked more closely with or with whom I was friends.<p>I chose to stay in the team as long as I did (1 year) because I did not want to be considered unreliable, as I had already changed teams before in this company (for similar reasons). This was a big mistake. Not all was lost time, because I took the change to do things in parallel. Nevertheless, now I feel I’m somewhat behind, and I am just regaining the confidence in my abilities that I lost during this time.<p>How can I get over this bad experience and make up for lost time? And how can I help others who might be going through the same thing, and make this count?