Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail • Hacker News Board

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#191

Post by mklim » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 12:20 AM UTC

ci5er wrote: post #190

mklim wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in the US, there are already several universally protected classes (race, gender). Why would a parent knowingly disown and put their gay child out on the street, risking criminal charges and effectively wasting however many years of effort they put into raising their child? I don't know, but ~40% of the homeless American youth population identifies as LGBT. (Source: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/pre…

So, in this case, you were young and irrational and didn't understand the cost of replacing a good developer? I'm still processing your upstream comments, but anecdotally, when I got to spend about a year on the street, Imma gonna to say that in central Texas, there were a lot of people with mental challenges (which is sad) and a whole lot more with drug issues (which is a different problem, and separately sad), and…

I couldn't tell you if I was irrational or not without knowing the number of tech bosses conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh at their desk and strike up pro Tea Party/anti liberal discussions as a way of making casual conversation, and then the number of those that would fire a developer over their sexual orientation. I don't know what that percentage looks like, so I can't say whether or not I justified in my concern. I know I was wrong in this specific instance thankfully, but I don't know what the real probability looks like given my boss' behavior. I had gone through some negative prior experiences that could have made me jumpy, admittedly.

Maybe the methodology was incorrect or the sample unrepresentative, my only personal experience with it is the one friend.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#192

Post by ci5er » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 12:29 AM UTC

mklim wrote: post #191

ci5er wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in this case, you were young and irrational and didn't understand the cost of replacing a good developer? I'm still processing your upstream comments, but anecdotally, when I got to spend about a year on the street, Imma gonna to say that in central Texas, there were a lot of people with mental challenges (which is sad) and a whole lot more with drug issues (which is a different problem, and separately sad), and…

I couldn't tell you if I was irrational or not without knowing the number of tech bosses conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh at their desk and strike up pro Tea Party/anti liberal discussions as a way of making casual conversation, and then the number of those that would fire a developer over their sexual orientation. I don't know what that percentage looks like, so I can't say whether or not I justified in my…

Wow. wow. wow. I find it incomprehensible that this would be a concern. I am sorry that you have been made to feel this way.

I'm probably so far right as to make Rush Limbaugh un-listenable (to me) because: 1) he's irritating and repetitive, and 2) too far left. :-) (that's kinda/sorta a joke)

But I've gotta say that even though they were outnumbered (80/20?), females made up at least half, if not more, of my top developers in a start up in the late 90s. And from what I understood (I was afraid to ask), half of the female developers were homosexual. The point is: I would have had to have been insane to fire them. It would have knocked $20M (maybe $200M) off my market cap the very same day!

I guess I need to thank you. I have a lot to learn about the way that the world works...

(thank yOU!)

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#193

Post by mklim » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 12:47 AM UTC

ci5er wrote: post #192

mklim wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't tell you if I was irrational or not without knowing the number of tech bosses conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh at their desk and strike up pro Tea Party/anti liberal discussions as a way of making casual conversation, and then the number of those that would fire a developer over their sexual orientation. I don't know what that percentage looks like, so I can't say whether or not I justified in my…

Wow. wow. wow. I find it incomprehensible that this would be a concern. I am sorry that you have been made to feel this way. I'm probably so far right as to make Rush Limbaugh un-listenable (to me) because: 1) he's irritating and repetitive, and 2) too far left. :-) (that's kinda/sorta a joke) But I've gotta say that even though they were outnumbered (80/20?), females made up at least half, if not more, of my top dev…

No problem, glad my anecdotes are interesting/helpful!

To be fair, the internship and his mentorship were both invaluable to me, I was very lucky to be hired, I don't want to make it sound like a sob story. Firing over sexual orientation isn't really tracked so there's no hard numbers, but IME it is incredibly rare--never happened to me or anyone that i personally know, to the best of my knowledge. My concern could have been (probably was? your anecdote brings N up to 2, anyway) completely irrational, like the above poster was wondering.

Hah. Reminds of the story about the time Eisenhower reportedly tried to root out lesbian members of the armed forces: https://books.google.com/books?id=HO7IKU79zgAC&lpg=PA47&ots=...

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#194

Post by ci5er » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 1:28 AM UTC

mklim wrote: post #193

ci5er wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. wow. wow. I find it incomprehensible that this would be a concern. I am sorry that you have been made to feel this way. I'm probably so far right as to make Rush Limbaugh un-listenable (to me) because: 1) he's irritating and repetitive, and 2) too far left. :-) (that's kinda/sorta a joke) But I've gotta say that even though they were outnumbered (80/20?), females made up at least half, if not more, of my top dev…

No problem, glad my anecdotes are interesting/helpful! To be fair, the internship and his mentorship were both invaluable to me, I was very lucky to be hired, I don't want to make it sound like a sob story. Firing over sexual orientation isn't really tracked so there's no hard numbers, but IME it is incredibly rare--never happened to me or anyone that i personally know, to the best of my knowledge. My concern could h…

I don't know. I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern".

In aggregate, upstream, you are saying: 1) No: I am not treating them equally, even if I think I am, and 2) Females have some real needs/concerns that I should care about.

Now that I know that I am inadequate to this task - what should I do to be better?

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#195

Post by EmbeddedHook » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 2:30 AM UTC

Kudos -- really interesting, thoughtful and useful summary. However (yes, there's always a however), I'm always surprised and baffled why these kinds of lists rarely attribute startup failures to non/mis-management of the development process. I worked for a couple of successful startups and have consulted for the last six years (performance stuff) and am dumbfounded by the amount of time developers waste on "crap" -- trivial bugs, insignificant performance issues, "enterprise" build/QA automation, etc. At one startup, THE key developer went off for six months rewriting the comm stack for a performance problem that didn't exist -- all the while destabilizing and slowing down the product. At my last "real" job, every time I went to the coffee room, I would ask a developer what they were working on and 90% of the time it was "bugs." That's fine if you're working at IBM on DB2 but NOT if your funding dries up in 12 months. IMHO, it is RARE to find a manager/VP who will pull a developer back out of the weeds. I often see an endless series of stand-ups where the status is "fixed a bug" or "recoded an inefficient loop" or "wrote a Java wrapper for the Jenkins garbage collector." It SOUNDS like progress but six months later POCs are crashing and burning because 2/3 of the core features are still missing. Maybe I've had a totally weird career but how come no one talks about this?

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#196

Post by mklim » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 8:48 PM UTC

ci5er wrote: post #194

mklim wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem, glad my anecdotes are interesting/helpful! To be fair, the internship and his mentorship were both invaluable to me, I was very lucky to be hired, I don't want to make it sound like a sob story. Firing over sexual orientation isn't really tracked so there's no hard numbers, but IME it is incredibly rare--never happened to me or anyone that i personally know, to the best of my knowledge. My concern could h…

I don't know. I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern". In aggregate, upstream, you are saying: 1) No: I am not treating them equally, even if I think I am, and 2) Females have some real needs/concerns that I should care about. Now that I know that I am inadequate to this task - what sh…

>I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern".

FWIW, this is personally my ideal working environment. I can't speak for women in general, and I'm not a moral authority, but this is exactly the kind of treatment I want from my coworkers.

>what should I do to be better?

I don't know, honestly. I know that's an inadequate response, but I'm not sure how to appropriately address ingrained societal sexism either. As far as subconscious bias in hiring goes, having rubrics and standardized interviews goes a long way at eliminating it. I'd theorize that standardized metrics for performance reviews would help on that front, too, though I don't think that's been studied.

If you browse the million and one women in tech posts out there you can see people talking about it at length, though I would be wary of taking somebody's opinion as truth just because they're female, and I would be doubly wary of taking a tech blogger at her word vs an actual female engineer. Your personal set of ethics re: equality of opportunity vs outcome also plays into what you "should do" quite a lot. Some suggestions (like formalized hiring rubrics) are completely valid whether or not you believe in equality of opportunity vs outcome, but others (like instituting diversity quotas in hiring) are not.

This blog post is well cited and worth a read, it has a few good suggestions IMO: https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-i...

And this personal anecdote is a positive story, which I think is just good to keep in mind (that not all individual women necessarily feel or have been through the standard negative Women in Tech narrative): http://lea.verou.me/2015/12/my-positive-experience-as-a-woma...

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#197

Post by usmeteora » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 9:32 PM UTC

ci5er wrote: post #180

mklim wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>anecdotally I happen to be an extreme introvert, and the excessive socializing and advice or notion that if we have an environment where we can all be super girly like omg together is the vibe I get from alot of female focused events in tech. It's actually overwhelming and makes me feel more out of place than not. I'm just one more anecdote and a bit of a living edge case, but this has been painfully true for me as…

I'm assuming based on your use of pronouns that you are a "woman in tech" (if that is incorrect, please correct me). IF that is wrong, then my eventual stated question later is pointless, but I am forging ahead on that assumption... I am an old white straight male. When I started out in my employed career - semiconductor design - Motorola - Tokyo Japan in the late 80s, I had to spend a year in the US for "training",…

Hello, in my case (I wrote the original comment) most men I work with are totally chill and just like you.

Unfortunately, I'd say 1/20-30 guys I work with are going to make a pass at me, or make me feel uncomfortable. Alot of this is encouraged r discouraged based on the culture of the workplace.

In general, I get along with my male coworkers, and I loathe getting special treatment or being given breaks because I'm a girl so I agree with you, you don't need to do anything extra beyond what you normally do.

Unfortunately, not everyone is as awesome as you. It's more just that statistically if females are a minority, and the culture of the workplace allows it, it's likely you might get hit on, and it's possible the female coworkers you hung out with may have gotten hit on inappropriately at work and just never talked to you about it. For sure, none of the guys I worked with who were cool with me knew what I went through.

Same as you, I started in semiconductor. 95% of the guys were totally chill and we worked and ate together etc etc. I did however, get asked out on dinner and dates by four married men in my two years working then, who then avoided me and refused to even do necessary job place coordination with me on daily tasks after I turned them down, making my job harder for me.

The team was 114 people, 6 women, all of us 20 yrs younger than the average age of the men. SO that means 108 of the men were totally awesome, and 4 of them sucked. This is not all that I went through, just a PG version but in general, I'm making the point on average and most men are not like that, instead of trying to hone in on the few bad outlier scenarios I had to encounter.

I definitely don't want these conversations to make men like you feel you are not doing enough. On the contrary, need more men like you that DON"T feel the need to treat us any differently, because thats what we want, atleast for me.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#198

Post by ci5er » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 12:19 AM UTC

usmeteora wrote: post #197

ci5er wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming based on your use of pronouns that you are a "woman in tech" (if that is incorrect, please correct me). IF that is wrong, then my eventual stated question later is pointless, but I am forging ahead on that assumption... I am an old white straight male. When I started out in my employed career - semiconductor design - Motorola - Tokyo Japan in the late 80s, I had to spend a year in the US for "training",…

Hello, in my case (I wrote the original comment) most men I work with are totally chill and just like you. Unfortunately, I'd say 1/20-30 guys I work with are going to make a pass at me, or make me feel uncomfortable. Alot of this is encouraged r discouraged based on the culture of the workplace. In general, I get along with my male coworkers, and I loathe getting special treatment or being given breaks because I'm a…

I'm not awesome and chill -- I'm just old. And I am very very afraid that the rules are changing under my feet and I don't have a handbook.

I don't even know how to count teams that large -- I suspect the way I process "team" and you do are different.

I was getting my sea legs back when I was in semi-conductor, and (I don't recall, to tell the truth, but I think I'd never had a girl friend), I asked a lady for a date. She was very cool and said "no", and that she had a boy friend. I was a little mortified that I didn't already know this, but she was a (the?) sales engineer on on of my two accounts (Canon and Sony were "mine"), and I don't think it would have occurred to me to NOT work with her.

I guess I'm saying that I was embarrassed as hell, but it was my fault for asking for a date in the first place.

I am so sorry you had people (probably people like me) get their own ass embarrassed and treat you like that.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#199

Post by belorn » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 4:00 AM UTC

mklim wrote: post #196

ci5er wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern". In aggregate, upstream, you are saying: 1) No: I am not treating them equally, even if I think I am, and 2) Females have some real needs/concerns that I should care about. Now that I know that I am inadequate to this task - what sh…

>I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern". FWIW, this is personally my ideal working environment. I can't speak for women in general, and I'm not a moral authority, but this is exactly the kind of treatment I want from my coworkers. >what should I do to be better? I don't know, honestly…

Maybe its my interpretation, but it seems that you are in favor of equality of outcome and tools like affirmative action. I have always wondered what proponents for it thinks if it was to be used in gender equal language, like if government would have a policy to always use affirmative action for work groups that has less than 40% women or men. A lot of professions have above 90% of a single gender (a trend that has been increasing in the last 30 years), and universal use of affirmative action would cause a lot of movement from typical male or female professions.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#200

Post by Too » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 9:06 AM UTC

jtbigwoo wrote: post #120

birken wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this line of thinking is that smart companies: 1) Aren't going to hire somebody for a leadership position because they met them networking --- they are going to hire them based on merit 2) The people in charge of smart companies aren't at networking events because networking events are a waste of time Startups are a way to "level up" your career only because you can skip years of moving up a corporat…

>> The best insurance policy for your career is to be really good at your job, which means working on your job instead of networking. This isn't true, in my experience. I have a few pretty good jobs on my resume (System Architect at a Fortune 50 company, Manager of Development at a big ad agency). Last year, when I was looking for work, those titles were pretty much entirely disregarded by the employers I applied to.…

Yes, seriously, never trust titles from other companies. I've been in places where everybody was the "manager" or "architect" of something. Test manager, release manager, system manager, configuration manager, etc etc. Most titles barely had any responsibilities at all and were given even to fresh grads as they joined the team. Essentially it didn't mean anything and in reality all 15 managers were just plain developers.

This was not even a startup where people get a cto-title just by happening to be there. This was a group inside bigco.