71–80 of 141 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog—or at least, they didn't until Facebook came along. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.j...
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is an adage which began as the caption of a cartoon by Peter Steiner published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993. (From Wikipedia.) At least they ought to give credit.
In a type of augmented reality where you are no longer seen as a person with an age or skin tone, but rather a person with a simple feedback rating based on your previous interactions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you are a prodigy, you simply haven't had the time yet to become really good at anything. Supposedly it takes 10.000 hours or so of exercise, which would be 9 years at 3 hours daily. I'm not trying to push you down, and anyone not paying you what your work is worth is definitely taking advantage of you.
Very true. But, I don't think that applies to everything. I don't think it takes 10,000 hours of practice to design a decent Wordpress theme. In fact, I would say that most college graduates (even from top universities) would still be quite far away from 10,000 hours in a specific domain of CS/SE, yet, companies do hire them.
Just wanted to clarify, since it seems a lot of people seem to think I'm frustrated with being discriminated against. I'm not. It's a fact of life. I got over it pretty early in life. I love being short, it's fucking awesome. If ever you meet me, you'd probably agree I don't have an issue with it.
I wrote this article to illustrate the power of the internet and this industry we work in. I used two examples of actual stories that I've lived through to show a dichotomy. This is not to say there were people set out on destroying me because I was short. That's crazy. I wanted to point out an amazing thing the internet has brought on, and especially how amazing it can be for people who deal in pixels for a living.
That being said, if ever you find yourself telling someone who talks of discrimination that it's their problem, you should probably re-evaluate your stance. This is why discrimination is so difficult to counteract — it's rarely a conscious or malicious process. I discriminate against people every day, and I'm discriminated against every day. To think otherwise is absurd.
Sometimes being good or even gifted is simply not enough. You need to know when to be pragmatic. When to let someone else win. When to look at everything, not just the lines of code or the pixels but the commercial implications of your decisions.
For example:
> For every hour I worked, the agency billed my time out at a 2,083% markup. To the client (who couldn’t see my height), my time was worth over 20x the amount I was worth to the agency.
That's because they're not just billing for your time. They're billing for the time of the sales person who chased the lead, the time of the team who read the brief and developed the proposal, the time of the people who travelled to the client to deliver the presentation, the time of the secretary who handled the callback and the time of all the people who did all the same things the half a dozen other times where you DIDN'T get the job.
I'm lost - where in the post is the discrimination for being short, and not just having the proper credentials?
I'm going to hazard that they didn't pay you less because you were young- they paid you less knowing that, because you were young, that was your market value. In other words, they paid you a rate competitive with what they thought you could get elsewhere, which tends to be lower when you are younger. I'm still debating this in my head, whether it is discrimination or not if they are saying "This guy is young, his mar…
'Market value' does not exclude discrimination if most players in the market are ageist, sexist, or racist What would stop a company from framing any kind of discrimination as an argument from 'market value'?
Well, in theory the part where the employee goes somewhere else for a much better rate.
'Market value' does not exclude discrimination if most players in the market are ageist, sexist, or racist
Basically my argument is that in that case it is the job market that is racist; individual employers don't have to be racist to match market rates, even if the market is racist. Or at least that's what I'm mulling over.
(Author here) Just wanted to clarify, since it seems a lot of people seem to think I'm frustrated with being discriminated against. I'm not. It's a fact of life. I got over it pretty early in life. I love being short, it's fucking awesome. If ever you meet me, you'd probably agree I don't have an issue with it. I wrote this article to illustrate the power of the internet and this industry we work in. I used two examp…
I was more on the programming side of things at the time, but when I found out the difference between what I was paid and how my hours were billed to clients (also around 20x), I had the same sort of reaction. Since I was just barely starting college at the time (so no degree, but had the skills), I really think this was mostly just a function of the labor market around that area. I had younger/taller/thicker/balder/older co-workers who were similarly 'discriminated' with respect to their salaries as they were starting out there.
The high multiple probably had a lot to do with the type of clients this company was able to land. If I remember correctly, they charged something like 10x market rate for managed hosting, and clients happily paid because of the nature of the product.
Also, I'd say the unique thing about you that made (makes) you really stand out is not just the pixels, it's the glorious combination of both pixels and bits [1].
I started out as a 13-year-old entrepreneur selling stuff on eBay (which was pretty new at the time). There was a loophole when they first opened where you could sign up under someone else's name and switch all of the records over to your name; that way you didn't have to be 18 to register. I first grew to love the Internet as the only real meritocracy I experienced in life. No one knew I was 13. When I talked to peo…
> You don't know who I am from this comment (unless you stalk my bio and find me on Twitter). If you like it you'll upvote it. That's exactly (one of the many reasons) why I love the Internet.
That's the one sad thing, though: as you yourself point out, the Internet is moving in a direction where this concept of an anonymous meritocracy is already becoming more and more difficult - and, eventually, likely impossible.