161–170 of 294 posts
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
Irony: how do you pronounce that? IPA isn't exactly readable.
2) IPA is tough, but in Wikipedia's case, if you mouse-over each IPA symbol, it'll give you a "/ʃ/ 'sh' in 'shy'" and so on.
I guess the reason they form a community in the short time of an IT event, and "the nerds" are always on the fringe is this same dismissive attitude of superiority that makes people fiercely unattractive and isolated. Men or women.
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Hah. Realize that wine is made, literally, by farm boys who spend the year picking and crushing grapes from the field. When you visit a winery you realize how far-removed the winemaking process, which is as down-and-dirty as any other farm work, is from its cultural air. This is my experience with many wine professionals - people who procure, ship, or teach about wine for a living. There is a valid criticism of sommo…
I found wine-types much easier to deal with once I learnt that there's a bunch of chemicals which cause tastes in wine, and there's a list of recognized names that people use to describe those tastes. Still, I would strongly prefer any tasting sessions and reporting to be done double blind. With only a sub-editor knowing the name of the wine and putting that in at the last minute.
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 occasionally meet people who get this - you know your domain and I know mine, and we can still talk to each other without othering. This is so true. Many people are all too quick to show off their knowledge at someone else's expense, when instead it could be so much more: an opportunity to share something that will be completely new to that person; to share a passion and give someone a new perspective or idea or…
The more you repeat something, the more you believe something to be true, the more you will cause it to be true or real.
I suggest men, women, and everyone stop making this a bigger deal than it is (however big it currently is, it can be made bigger), and let's start focusing on real problems. Whoever has complaints about disrespect, belittling, or whatever, should just self-study and create something AWESOME, and then prove to the world by action, instead of blabbering off and causing pointless havoc that won't get us anywhere, let alone possibly make us take steps backward.
This actually explains why more women do not get into tech careers. In the same way that this young woman felt alienated from her schoolmates, many women who are not into geek culture would feel alienated by CS classmates and the tech industry. There's been a lot of talk about getting more women into this industry, and it's often looked at as a failing of the industry itself. What's plainly obvious to me is that many…
As a woman in technology (yes, one who codes, not a marketer or lawyer), I have my own views on this. I am a nerd when it comes to technology. I have a passion for it and could talk about it all day. I don't however, have a significant interest in sci-fi or fantasy films. From first glance, I appear to be stereotypically female: I'd rather talk about make-up than Tolkien--but that has no bearing on my interest in technology.
I can understand why someone might think being interested in science fiction would be correlated with an interest in technology. But technology has become an important part of an individual's world. With women being huge consumers of modern technology, it's not difficult to see how some would be interested in the creation of it too.
I don't have the issue this article discusses--feeling alienated from other women. I don't feel alienated from most men either. It comes from people who believe these interests to be important qualifiers for being a "nerd." I think the article is somewhat interesting, but it's difficult for me to see how her fellow women not being interested in her "geeky" activities is a barrier from entering engineering. In fact, it seems as if she is drawn there because she feels she'll be more accepted, and that her issue is with too many marketers at an IT event. Perhaps some of those women would actually be interested on the side of creating technology, but felt there would be more acceptance of their interests in marketing? It appears to me that these associations (that engineers and programmers love Star Wars) may be its own barrier.
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My great mentor taught me that every time someone might have a blank face at what you say, look at it as an opportunity for learning. Most people love it when you get excited and say "yeah, memset is this awesome way of getting data ready to copy on a computer. You know when you watch a movie on Youtube it preloads while you watch? Memset is helping make sure your computer is prepared so you can watch it without anno…
I see your point, yet I have a really hard time associating something like memset() with "awesome". I think if anyone would actually respond "wow, cool!" to a story like that, the message to me is that this person finds everything (s)he doesn't understand cool.
I'm not sure the author quite understood the seeing Star Wars thing was a super low bar fitness test. Once long ago my new wife asked me why geeks always wear tshirts with obscure references that no one gets. I was slightly put out by the question until I figured it out. They're a uniform. It's how we id the friendlies on the battlefield.
> I figured it out. They're a uniform. I think it's just a way of showing off. Case in point: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12532552/what-part-of-mil... The guy has no idea what the notation means by still wants to wear the t-shirt.
Oh and yeah. I wanted the t-shirt so other hackers would know I was part of their group. Because I was a girl I felt it wasn't obvious.
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…
> 15 years ago, I would not have said software developers, software engineers, or test engineers were part of IT. IT was that department that kept the corporate computers working and worked for the CFO, not part of the department that shipped products and worked for the VP Engineering. When I worked for an enterprise software company close to 15 years ago, there was clear recognition of both IT-as-internal-organizati…
You're right. I've never thought of writing the software for a self-driving car as the outsourced version of configuring Active Directory for IE7, but when you put it that way it seems so obvious!
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But what if it's a better heuristic for finding young men than engineers?
I would argue it is also a very good heuristic for finding Star Wars fans. Your point being?