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Pixels don’t care

warpspire.com

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Re: Pixels don’t care

#11

Post by ChuckMcM »

sergiotapia wrote: post #5

Good for him that he managed to get around that. But personal, face to face interactions are much better are gauging how a person is going to be when joining a team. Any sort of team. People on paper sound nice, but when you meet them they are a bit off. I have a scary knack for this and can call out caustic people after the initial interaction.

I may be wrong but I think you missed the point. If "working together" is code for "we both have commit access to the same repo and the same functional test criteria and same target ship date" then it really doesn't matter at all if the person likes to work in their underwear and tell cat jokes since you're only interaction with them is going be through commits.

In a strangely wonderful way, people who have conditions that would make their 'productive' work in an office impossible have found work and even success as a remote team member on the other side of an email alias and irc channel.

That said, managers are more comfortable when the know their folks a bit more, but they generally are watching for things to go off the rails and head that off rather than whether or not the code is up to standard.

Re: Pixels don’t care

#12

Post by mjn »

morisy wrote: post #3

I had the totally same experience with early online communities (Everything2, Slashdot), and for a long time made a conscious effort of keeping my avatar off the Internet. It's a little utopian, yes, but being able to deal with people based on their ideas, ideals, and quality of work, and develop fast friendships without ever being aware of so much (Great line: "How could the internet know you were gay? 80 years old?…

One thing I'm not quite sure what to make of is that I felt a lot of that aspect on the BBSs I started out on during high school, despite them being more local. Since there was free local calling but long-distance cost money (possibly a US-specific thing), I dialed up only local BBSs, which made for a certain location specificity. I liked that to some extent, because it made the local BBSs "special" in some way, kept the communities at a manageable size, and made it easier to develop an "audience", so to speak, in a little niche where you weren't competing with everyone on the whole planet for the same audience, like you are in the flat geography of the internet. But, at least in the circles I ended up in, nobody really tried to meet up, or wanted to know much about who you were IRL. So it had this odd feeling of both very cyberspacey, where you could be anyone you wanted online, but still a "clumpy" cyberspace where the clumps were related to RL location.

Re: Pixels don’t care

#13

Post by FireBeyond »

What a strange claim. "Looking back", he can't help but feel discriminated against due to his height.

It couldn't possibly be because of his "no formal eduction, no experience with any big clients", could it?

Re: Pixels don’t care

#14

Post by mpyne »

joshmlewis wrote: post #9

I've always heard of this happening but I never really had a problem with it. I thankfully learned early on about getting things in writing, agreements, etc. after seeing people getting screwed over. I learned that if people didn't want to work with you because of your age, you shouldn't want to work with them either. I heard Zeldman say that he only works with clients that he personally likes. Something to that effe…

> Work hard, meet the right people, and use your gut.

I've done that all, and been successful out of it. But at least in my case there was one even larger element in play: Luck. And I can't even begin to list all the different ways that I've been lucky (and unlucky), but I always keep that in the back of my mind.

I could have born in Somalia, or a Brooklyn ghetto, I could have tried to make my last career move a year earlier or later (when it would have been shot down for sure), or any of 80,000 other reasons I could have failed despite hard work, talking to the right people, and using my gut.

It's easy to say you won't get screwed if you're careful, but be very sure that it isn't just that you've been lucky to interact with good people.

Re: Pixels don’t care

#16

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Silicon Valley has a strange fixation on age which waffles between discrimination and fetishisation.

I started working as a trader at a Swiss bank in New York when I was 20. There were lots of jokes cracked about "traders south of the drinking age" and the number mattered more to some than others, but in the end it was meritocratic.

When I was 21 (after leaving the bank), I interviewed at a well-regarded Palo Alto-based tech firm and painfully remember every round of the interview bringing up that I didn't go to a prestigious enough university and that I looked "baby-faced". Granted, I look older in a suit, but it's a curiously consistent cultural artefact. You don't find anyone lauding over 22-year old hedge fund or energy venture founders as VCs do over over their 19-year old "rock stars".

Re: Pixels don’t care

#17

Post by RandallBrown »

I had a similar experience when I bought my first new car. I was 23 at the time, but could have passed for younger.

I went into the dealership and waited around until FINALLY someone came and talked to me. I talked a little, asked some questions and eventually got to do some test drives. I was already pretty sold on a certain car, but they didn't have any on the lot in the color I wanted. So I ask about it, the salesman tells me that what they have on the lot is all that's available (shipments were delayed by the tsunami in Japan) and that was that. I didn't buy a car that day.

Now, at that point I was borrowing my parents car, and would need to return them the car at some point. Luckily the dealership in my parents town had the car in the right color (according to their website) so I called them up and said I wanted it.

Unfortunately for me, it was already gone. But the guy bent over backwards for me trying to find a new one at other dealerships in the state that matched what I wanted and he eventually found one.

I always wonder how the second dealer would have treated me if he would have seen me before we made the deal.

Re: Pixels don’t care

#18

Post by kevingadd »

mjs wrote: post #15

This is an argument that there's no discrimination in tech? Or less discrimination than in other industries?

I think the suggestion is much simpler: That when everything happens electronically, it is less likely that discrimination will happen because people aren't even given an opportunity to apply their biases and stereotypes to you because they've never seen you in person, just read your text (or perhaps spoken with you over the phone/skype).

In my experience this is true, even if it doesn't wholly eliminate discrimination.

Re: Pixels don’t care

#19

Post by spot »

it's great that this guy got his job and all but let's not pretend it's just about the quality of his work. he was hanging out in a chat room with these people. plenty of personality shows through.

Re: Pixels don’t care

#20

Post by svachalek »

mjn wrote: post #12
morisy wrote: post #3

I had the totally same experience with early online communities (Everything2, Slashdot), and for a long time made a conscious effort of keeping my avatar off the Internet. It's a little utopian, yes, but being able to deal with people based on their ideas, ideals, and quality of work, and develop fast friendships without ever being aware of so much (Great line: "How could the internet know you were gay? 80 years old?…

One thing I'm not quite sure what to make of is that I felt a lot of that aspect on the BBSs I started out on during high school, despite them being more local. Since there was free local calling but long-distance cost money (possibly a US-specific thing), I dialed up only local BBSs, which made for a certain location specificity. I liked that to some extent, because it made the local BBSs "special" in some way, kept…

I was also part of my local BBS community but many/most of us did meet up in person. It was kind of interesting seeing faces to match the online personas as I pretty much always guessed wrong. I never imagined that some of us were women, some were very young, some pretty old, and one was the 6'6" tattooed scary guy at school.
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