As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People • Hacker News Board

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#201

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 3:51 PM UTC

vings wrote: post #179

sudosteph wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy stereotypes, batman. > Women can be great engineers, we just rarely care to become them How do you presume to know what the majority of women care to be? I'm a woman, and I want to be a great engineer. I was extremely fortunate to grow up in an environment with a female technical role model (my mom), so I easily saw myself going this way, despite the societal emphasis on empathetic skills the rest of the world e…

Allow me to clarify some things in my post: I intentionally worked on the basis of stereotypes or generalisations. If 60% of group A wants prefers X over Y while only 40% of group B prefers X over Y, it's accurate to speak in general terms, even if there are many individual exceptions. Any discussion of women in technology _in general_, as opposed to individual women in tech, inherently relies on the ability to make…

[deleted]

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#202

Post by noncoml » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 4:11 PM UTC

learningram wrote: post #195

noncoml wrote: post #30

The memo was making the point that because men have more affinity to things than women, Google should not try for a 50/50 balance between men and women. The author here says that she enjoyed her work but left because the predominant male co-workers had affinity to things and couldn't relate with them. If anything the author makes a case for Google's current strategy of striving for 50/50 men women balance, since that…

Yes, you completely misinterpreted the who argument and twisted it to suit your view point. I think it would have been more dignified if you said you disagreed with the article. Some heights of passive aggressiveness in your comment

Please feel free to correct me.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#203

Post by Mz » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 5:08 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #180

Mz wrote: post #34

I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one of them said: “I built a fiber-channel network in my basement,” and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail. At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people…

Also, just because one male engineer built a network in his weekend doesn't mean we all do. I spend my weekends doing stuff with my kids. Well, not last week, when I went to SHA-2017, but there was a surprising number of children there. 10% someone claimed, which is way more than I'd ever seen at previous hacker festivals. Clearly nerds and hackers are having love lives and kids these days. And although the majority…

Explicitly so, if there's any history of sexism and prejudice.

Actually, they need to be implicitly welcomed, not explicitly.

(For clarity's sake: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/less-exclusi...)

And I apologize for sounding argumentative. Thank you for your great comment, much of which I agree with.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#204

Post by msla » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 5:53 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #182

msla wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a man, I'd never presume to talk too deeply with a coworker about their personal life. It's a gross violation of the boundaries in every sense of the term. Long way of saying I agree with you, I suppose.

In my experience, male co-workers talking about their relationships tend to fall in three categories: * they talk about how hot women are (which makes me a bit uncomfortable, because I don't talk about women that way), * they just divorced and talk about how all women are bitches (which makes me even more uncomfortable) * they talk about their kids (which is often awesome)

I'm happy to say I've never experienced the first two.

I've never experienced any of them, but I'm happy about being ignorant of the first two.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#205

Post by needlessly2 » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 7:33 PM UTC

_jgvg wrote: post #13

I have never seen any career that is so deeply tied to a certain culture as CS/SWE and a certain culture that I'll call X, to avoid any discussions on naming and so on. I see far more diversity in tastes and interests in most other majors and careers, while in CS/SWE, X seems to hold a monopoly. CS/SWE goes far beyond a career, usually becoming close to a religion or way of life. I rarely see doctors, lawyers, or mos…

I kind of disagree with the gaming part.

I'm almost sure that most hardcore gamers actually never become part of the CS/SWE crowd because of video game addiction. Gaming and software development are two very different domains. Hardcore gamers usually are not motivated, accomplish very little, and lack in career development.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#206

Post by needlessly2 » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 8:21 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #33

_jgvg wrote: post #13

I have never seen any career that is so deeply tied to a certain culture as CS/SWE and a certain culture that I'll call X, to avoid any discussions on naming and so on. I see far more diversity in tastes and interests in most other majors and careers, while in CS/SWE, X seems to hold a monopoly. CS/SWE goes far beyond a career, usually becoming close to a religion or way of life. I rarely see doctors, lawyers, or mos…

>There's not a lot of room for people to be in CS/SWE and not take part in all this non-work community. There's actually plenty of room for that type of programmer personality: the jobs at non-software companies where programmers are a cost center . E.g. enterprisey - line-of-business - type of programming. Actually, the "back-office" type of software dev is the majority of programming jobs out there . Yes, there may…

>The founders themselves often started programming as kids

i'm not sure where you get this conclusion that those who enjoy extracurricular programming often started as kids.

Usually those who started as a kid means they were fortunate enough to have parents who were programmers. Even if they're parents weren't that case, then usually its the case of just doing html/css on myspace

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#207

Post by danso » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 8:27 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #191

danso wrote: post #133

> James Damore should probably have used fewer words with high negative emotional indices, when more neutral ones were available. But he was basically making the same point that I am: that women seem to have less interest in working with inanimate objects, and that ignoring this is going to lead to a lot of useless or even counterproductive diversity initiatives. Hard to take this piece seriously. I've worked in tech…

I think that in the context of the article having less interest in working with inanimate object means wanting to work with the objects is not a reason one takes the job. Yes, successful investigative journalists work with documents. But do they become investigative journalists because they want to work with documents? Or do they become investigative journalists because they want to uncover the truth behind stories,…

> But do they become investigative journalists because they want to work with documents? Or do they become investigative journalists because they want to uncover the truth behind stories, and documents are simply tools used as part of that?

Does it matter? A major component of investigative journalism is following document trails and understanding records/laws. If you don't have the stomach for it, your chances for success are greatly diminished.

It's not different from tech. Programming could be reduced to a "tool" for success, too.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#208

Post by needlessly2 » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 8:35 PM UTC

qq66 wrote: post #120

_jgvg wrote: post #13

I have never seen any career that is so deeply tied to a certain culture as CS/SWE and a certain culture that I'll call X, to avoid any discussions on naming and so on. I see far more diversity in tastes and interests in most other majors and careers, while in CS/SWE, X seems to hold a monopoly. CS/SWE goes far beyond a career, usually becoming close to a religion or way of life. I rarely see doctors, lawyers, or mos…

> I rarely see doctors, lawyers, or most professions engaging in their practice outside work as a hobby That's more because it's hard to engage in medicine or law outside of an institution, which makes it hard to hobby with on the weekends. Plenty of auto mechanics fix cars on the weekend, plenty of graphic designers do personal art projects on the weekends. There are also plenty who don't.

also doctors and lawyers already have 70+ hour weeks. They're too exhausted for any side projects. Easier to do that if you have a 40 hour week

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#209

Post by rabboRubble » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 8:38 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #5

Great article and hits on what I think is the main difference between men and women: men seem to be far more likely to become obsessive and devote massive amounts of time to hobbies and study. I mean if you're not popular and girls aren't interested in you, what else are you going to do? And spending years being obsessed with computers is naturally going to lead you down a path towards a degree and job in computers,…

Wow.

Apparently my grandmother's lifetime of quilt making, she made 1 for each of her children and grandchildren, doesn't count as a hobby. Each quilt taking 1 to 2 years to complete. Only her husband's shop work and his steam engine restoration efforts were as a hobby.

Everything she did was merely... a what? What is the appropriate word for what she did?

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#210

Post by needlessly2 » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:04 PM UTC

js8 wrote: post #58

tptacek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, his argument is straightforward and lots of other people have made it before. A shorter way of saying it would be "if you don't like the same kinds of video games as most other developers, you are likely to be made to feel unwelcome".

> "if you don't like the same kinds of video games as most other developers, you are likely to be made to feel unwelcome" Funny, I don't like the same kinds of video games as most other developers. I like Minecraft, and only one colleague I know who enjoys it is a (very smart) woman, although she is a tech writer, not a developer (she is perfectly capable of programming, in fact it is her hobby, she just likes writin…

i'm a guy and i don't enjoy video games any more. I just feel i've grown out of that phase when I was 15. I'd rather go swimming, hiking, and try out different restaurants/bars.