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I knew exactly how she felt

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Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#81

Post by narrator »

narrator wrote: post #59

I'm going to annoyingly meta on this one because I'm feeling really philosophical today. There is a constant dissonance in the western world between assumptions about "ideal" or "moral" statistical probability distributions and actual statistical probability distributions over a large sample size when it comes to any politically sensitive topics like the one implied in the article (i.e women having an interest in sci…

The idea of a normal vs ideal probability distribution makes me think about coin flips following the normal curve. The coins flip distribution over a large sample size will form a normal curve. The "ideal curve activist" will attempt to attract evidence for and possibly find ways to undermine the conspiracy of injustice that flipped the coins after they landed to some non-random pattern making the coin flip distribution appear to correspond to the actual curve.

How are these coins flipped back becomes the topic of interest for the serious activist. Many leads are followed, the evidence and the picture is always murky so suspicions turn to those who deny or ignore the injustice of the actual distribution curve. An odd thing then happens. Denigrating and dis-empowering those who dispute or ignore the ideal curve becomes the mechanism of activism due to the activist's exhaustion of and the murkiness of the task of looking for the assumed malicious coin re-flippers. The coin re-flippers may exist but they may also possess impunity or obscurity such that the activists fail to act against them but it's usually much easier for the activists to direct their energy against assumed shills or fellow conspirators who's proof of membership is their disbelief or disinterest in the ideal curve.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#82

Post by papsosouid »

rdouble wrote: post #11
jerrya wrote: post #9

I said that’s what happens when we hold events for women in IT when there aren’t that many women in this industry – we tend to broaden the definition of women in IT. I can't really speak to this point, but I am curious, when did computer science and software engineering get rolled into IT? 15 years ago, I would not have said software developers, software engineers, or test engineers were part of IT. IT was that depar…

Outside of Silicon Valley anything that has to do with a computer has always been called IT.

I'm pretty far outside of silicon valley, and that hasn't been true here at all. IT has always meant help desk, sysadmins, network admins, etc. Developers could be in IT if they were developing internal tools for IT. But software development in the "make software to sell" was always separate. It has only been recently that people have started to call everything relating to computers IT.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#83

Post by PeterisP »

jerrya wrote: post #9

I said that’s what happens when we hold events for women in IT when there aren’t that many women in this industry – we tend to broaden the definition of women in IT. I can't really speak to this point, but I am curious, when did computer science and software engineering get rolled into IT? 15 years ago, I would not have said software developers, software engineers, or test engineers were part of IT. IT was that depar…

Well, in practice (at least some time ago) the vast majority of programmers/software engineers/whatever work on code that "keeps the corporate computers working" instead of "shipped products".

The ratio used to be that in the industry only 10-20% of code was written in organizations that ship software as the product or inside of a product; maybe now it's a bit different - but it can't be estimated by intuition, simply because in everyday life we see only the external part of the iceberg.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#85

Post by Skywing »

I'm a male software engineer and I had the same experiences going through school, too. Nobody else seemed to care about programming outside of school-related assignments. Very boring few years in school, those were.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#86

Post by dasil003 »

seivan wrote: post #32
memset wrote: post #25

I will offer an experience which is the inverse of this! I am a male software engineer who works in fashion (and before this I worked in wine.) I knew nothing about wine when I started, and my fashion sense is prototypically, well, male-software-centric. People in the wine industry are palpably aware that people view it as "hoity-toity". Professionals I've worked with are usually very gracious in explaining what it m…

The problem isn't PM's know jack about code. The problem is the set where a PM would even be required. That means there's a structural flaw in your process. The idea of having a project manager is ridiculous. People _should_ manage themselves and take ownership of the project. Making the PM useless.

Speaking as a technical lead with a decade and a half of experience shipping web products solo and with small teams never exceeding 10 people, I can assure you that there very much is a place for a product manager in a great many products. In fact we just hired a product manager and it's a huge weight off my shoulders. Requiring all developers to be responsible for strategic thinking at all times is at odds with low-level focus needed to ship great software. A good PM is someone developers can trust to have the high level picture in mind at all times so the devs can focus on the necessary details.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#87

Post by memset »

oijaf888 wrote: post #78
memset wrote: post #25

I will offer an experience which is the inverse of this! I am a male software engineer who works in fashion (and before this I worked in wine.) I knew nothing about wine when I started, and my fashion sense is prototypically, well, male-software-centric. People in the wine industry are palpably aware that people view it as "hoity-toity". Professionals I've worked with are usually very gracious in explaining what it m…

I'm interested in working for a fashion company in tech, do you happen to work for one of the really great ones like Warby Parker? Any tips?

Hahaha, I am the lead engineer at a Brooklyn startup called Classic Specs. We do vintage-inspired eyewear, but our real business is that we work with other fashion brands who want to get into eyewear and design the frames, build their website, etc. We just launched eyewear for our first brand a few weeks ago, and we have several more in the pipeline for the rest of this year!

Send me a note if you are interesting in writing Python!

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#88

Post by oijaf888 »

memset wrote: post #87
oijaf888 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in working for a fashion company in tech, do you happen to work for one of the really great ones like Warby Parker? Any tips?

Hahaha, I am the lead engineer at a Brooklyn startup called Classic Specs. We do vintage-inspired eyewear, but our real business is that we work with other fashion brands who want to get into eyewear and design the frames, build their website, etc. We just launched eyewear for our first brand a few weeks ago, and we have several more in the pipeline for the rest of this year! Send me a note if you are interesting in…

YHBT HAND

See you at Grey Bar.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#89

Post by lost_name »

memset wrote: post #25

I will offer an experience which is the inverse of this! I am a male software engineer who works in fashion (and before this I worked in wine.) I knew nothing about wine when I started, and my fashion sense is prototypically, well, male-software-centric. People in the wine industry are palpably aware that people view it as "hoity-toity". Professionals I've worked with are usually very gracious in explaining what it m…

> I feel like there is a bigger lesson in this story: I've got to stop making people feel silly for not getting my Star Wars references, and they've got to understand that there's no logical reason I'd know anything about the big names in fashion. I occasionally meet people who get this - you know your domain and I know mine, and we can still talk to each other without othering.

> And that skill - of being able to get along with your PM even though they "clearly don't know anything about code" - is one worth developing.

For anyone reading this looking into a career in software development, this is incredibly important. You might speak in code, but the people who you write code for will speak in their business. Odds are they're not going to look at your functioning code, but you're always going to need to understand their business if you want to both help it now and prepare for the future.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#90

Post by newnewnew »

narrator wrote: post #59

I'm going to annoyingly meta on this one because I'm feeling really philosophical today. There is a constant dissonance in the western world between assumptions about "ideal" or "moral" statistical probability distributions and actual statistical probability distributions over a large sample size when it comes to any politically sensitive topics like the one implied in the article (i.e women having an interest in sci…

What we are experiencing is a particular flavor of secular religion called "cultural Marxism". Marxists believe that social forces are best understood through a model of class conflict.

Economic Marxists explained the ills of society through the conflict between rich capitalists and the poor working proletariat. The rise of the middle class threw it a curve ball that it couldn't explain and it fell out of favor (outside of the Soviet union and American academia).

Cultural Marxism uses the same conflict between dominant class and under class to explain social pathologies in the under class. Thus, we all hear about statistics where under classes are not meeting the same performance as the upper class, with the implication that it is the upper class's fault. This is called "oppression".

So we know that women make less than men, but we don't hear much about how men are falling behind in college degrees and high-school education because this does not fit the Marxist narrative.

Furthermore, when there is an underrepresentation of an underclass in some desirable area, we take that to be de facto evidence of oppression (nobody cares that there are no female garbage collectors or miners). We all except the collective guilt for the sins of our class and nobody questions whether or not the Marxist narrative might just be fundamentally flawed.

Modern academic feminism and racial theories are based on Marxist models, which causes them to make many errors of reasoning IMO. There is also a lot of data that they can not explain. For example, racial Marxists have no problem explaining why some minority races do worse in school than white children (oppression!). But I've yet to hear an explanation from a Marxist as to how other minority groups (Asians) do way better than white children.

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