491–500 of 510 posts
The most important for me is directing social conversations. Most people think that social event is a time for everybody to talk freely about whatever topics, but no. The point of social event is inclusiveness. I see this scenario happening over and over again: Social event starts off friendly. Gradually, the conversation starts turning very technical or very sci-fi, then women turned away and formed their own social…
People who are good at socializing know how to have conversations with anyone of any background. Many know when people are being left out and will go out of their way to shift the topic or make it more inclusive to the person being left out. If you've ever been at a party where you didn't know anyone, and someone who you didn't know before introduces themselves and is able to make you feel more comfortable being there, then you probably know what a relief these natural socializers can be.
Unfortunately, many engineers (myself included) are not natural socializers or otherwise well-practiced in the "manners" required for creating positive social situations. Folks like me are much more interested in topics I know a lot about and have strong opinions on, so it can be hard to break away once one of those conversations start, even if I know people are being excluded by having this conversation.
I think the important thing here is that socialization should be organic, and if one person is obviously uncomfortable or left out, the polite thing for anyone to do is to bring them in somehow. Every person on the team should strive to improve their ability to make people from different backgrounds feel included, and you're right in saying it's a skill that can be improved through work. This applies equally to women, minorities, immigrants, new people, anyone who doesn't feel like an "in-group" in a particular situation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't quote with code blocks. Use greater-than (>) symbols instead.
Why not? I've actually adopted this habit lately because I think it makes it easier to read, especially if the quote is lengthy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't quote with code blocks. Use greater-than (>) symbols instead.
Why not? I've actually adopted this habit lately because I think it makes it easier to read, especially if the quote is lengthy.
You can quote a long paragraph that is represented as one big line very simply like this:
> That makes no sense. The original text doesn't use preformatted line breaks and is wrapped to the screen width, quite readably. You're not fixing or improving anything in the quoted version of it by code-blocking it. You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting ...
I cut and pasted my own paragraph above. I typed a single > character in front, a space, and a pair of asterisks around it.
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The context here includes the parent comment to the one setting out the scenario, and the reaction of sending a message copied to the boss's boss complaining about it. They make it clear that it was sent to a woman, and that the scenario at the very least was interpreted by the recipient as inappropriate. Yes, there are scenarios where it could be acceptable, but consider that they are (much) narrower than you might…
> or a feeling that you are forced to socialise with your boss Would you feel you'd be fired? Because sometimes getting to know someone is an appropriate pathway to success. Scenarios like this are more common at start-ups, aren't they? If you just want to drone through work, with no social connections, the average american mega-corp might be more appropriate.
In larger companies, on the other hand, you get all kinds of weird little fiefdoms where getting on your managers bad side is potentially far more damaging because if your boss has sufficient support he will be able to musster a much bigger support system.
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I'm not going to explain it any better than the other guy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13970336
First things in that post: > the individual nature of the invitation, the private nature of the venue also: > You don't need to see an agenda behind every invitation to recognize the agenda behind this one. How does "that guy" know what agenda there is? If you can't explain any better then I can't accept your argument.
>Female leaders: Founders, CEOs, CTOs receive far more public criticism AND HOSTILITY than male CEOs and CTOs ie.e Ellen Pao as leader of reddit, Marissa Meyer, Sheryl Sandberg * The things that have been said about these women and their bodies and how evil they are I have never ever heard with male CEOs no matter how evil, nor have I seen criticism as harsh, unrelated to the business issue, cruel and emotionally pun…
Specifically: no more wild, inflammatory generalizations.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969839 and marked it off-topic.
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Your whole objection is to his statement, "you [women] shouldn't complain when it is difficult because you [they] are swimming upstream", but you misunderstood what he was saying. "When it is difficult because you are swimming upstream", he is talking about a case...in the case that it is difficult. It may not be difficult for all women. For a stubborn woman who doesn't have the skills, she shouldn't complain. So his…
Then his whole post is off topic nonsensical rambling...? Parent pretty much doubles down rather than correct me, so I don't think you're correct.
"So now women don't belong in tech not because they're under qualified, because you can't imagine not wanting to have sex with them?"
You choose to draw conclusions that he never made. He said:
"I find this friendship to be almost impossible from a woman's point of view. There are so many hints of sexuality it make a genuine friendship from an older man to a younger girl so to speak almost taboo? really? no sex or favors?"
He's clearly talking about what outside people think of an older man befriending a younger woman, and you draw the conclusion that he "can't imagine not wanting to have sex with them". This is an entirely different thing than articulating what other people think(liberals AND conservatives FYI).
Making it personal doesn't help your argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? I've actually adopted this habit lately because I think it makes it easier to read, especially if the quote is lengthy.
That makes no sense. The original text doesn't use preformatted line breaks and is wrapped to the screen width, quite readably. You're not fixing or improving anything in the quoted version of it by code-blocking it. You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting, and making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if their screen width is narrow, plus triggering a…
>You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting
Not much work, just a handful of keystrokes with the right software, and that's without optimizing the flow much. Could get it down more by making a macro.
>making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if their screen width is narrow
While true, if the quote is indeed lengthy, wouldn't this serve the reader better than a line of text that wraps many times? Those are hard to follow.
>plus triggering a switch to a monospaced font.
Yes, this improves readability by making the barrier between quotation and response more readily visible.
The only downside seems to be that the block may clamp down to a horizontal scrollbox before some reader wants it to do so. For the record, on my computer (3440x1440 raw, some HiDPI settings make effective resolution significantly smaller), I never run across such blocks that require manual scrolling. On my phone, I do need to scroll horizontally, but I think that's nice. I have not yet seen it actually break a page or make it unusable.
I don't think it's a good technique for short line snippets, but yes, I do think it improves readability for long (paragraph-length or longer) quotes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes no sense. The original text doesn't use preformatted line breaks and is wrapped to the screen width, quite readably. You're not fixing or improving anything in the quoted version of it by code-blocking it. You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting, and making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if their screen width is narrow, plus triggering a…
Is the code block format not explicitly designed for quoting lengthy snippets of text in a non-disruptive way? >You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting Not much work, just a handful of keystrokes with the right software, and that's without optimizing the flow much. Could get it down more by making a macro. >making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if…
No, it's designed to preserve alignment and line breaks by using a monospace font and not wrapping, specifically for the purpose of presenting source code. It's modestly useful for tabular data for the same reason. It's not good at all for normal text, especially large blocks of text.