161–170 of 200 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I often say, interviews based on the final year algorithms and datastructures exam are just a way to sneak ageism under the HR radar.
What final year algorithms and data structures exam are you referring to?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the Dunning-Kruger thing is a nice idea but it's immediately ruined once you become aware of it, like a Heisenberg uncertainty sort of thing. Not at all! You're being too binary with it. Dunning-Kruger is about the relationship between discernment and capability. In particular, it's saying discernment drives capability. A great way of applying it is this Ira Glass quote: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3094…
I like that Ira Glass quote, maybe some day I'll get there. I think you are just positively improving your work, I don't think what you are saying is an application of Dunning-Kruger. Why in the first instance do you give your negative assessment credence, and have doubts about your positive assessment in the second? Dunning-Kruger says both assessments are likely to be wrong, and in both cases you are striving to im…
http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/...
Incompetent people think they're doing fine because they can't tell the difference between good and bad work. Highly competent people, readily seeing their own flaws, think they don't do as well as they are doing. (At least until you have them grade a bunch of other work, at which point they are better calibrated.) Competent people are competent because their metacognitive ability, their ability to tell good work from bad, drives them forward.
So basically, if I already can see the problems in my work, then my metacognitive ability is sufficient to drive improvement. When I improve enough that my work looks fine to me, further improvement is prevented because I literally can't tell whether changes I make are better or worse. There, the path to improvement is to improve metacognition.
As to the latter, my approach may be common sense, but it is not in fact common. Last I was interviewing developers, most people had never done a pair programming interview before. The default is talk-talk interviews. I'm sure some people did it the other way, of course: science frequently trails practice. But the Dunning-Kruger paper in specific is what convinced me that self-assessments were at best highly unreliable and at worst thoroughly misleading.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you are some sort of compiling automaton? Keep telling it like it is - you stick to your guns. You won't have to walk on eggshells when you're done trust me. Oppressive majority: I meant white male, rather than programming nerd.
And I am pointing out that you can't simply include all white males and say that they are all oppressing majority (for one there are more people who are not white males on this planet) - not only would you have to include nerds, but you would also have to claim that homeless people are oppressing (since they tend to be men).
yep i'm convinced those industry ladies should get thicker skins alright, especially when they are in your industry - they should play by your rules - right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This absolute, unrelenting and incredibly transparent (tech = money, status currently) narrative being sharted at everyone in the tech industry on a daily basis is driving me toward getting out of it altogether. It's not being thrown at the tech industry. It's people within the industry calling out the problem that we have. It's very telling that you think of the industry as a community under siege.
>It's not being thrown at the tech industry. It's people within the industry calling out the problem that we have. It's very telling that you think of the industry as a community under siege. Actually, the vast majority of it is being carried out by people on the fringe of the industry in roles as "journalists" and similar who've never spent a day working within it. And yes, I see the tech industry as being under sie…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there. This is so far from the lived reality of women in tech or any of the data on hiring that you should be embarrassed to open your mouth. On HN most people get that before opining on the merits of functional programming, they should have tried it. Or at the very least spent a fair bit of time reading about what people…
Are you aware that you have not only failed to educate people, but you have only taught them that voicing an opinion that you don't agree with will bring disproportionately furious rebuke? A serious question: do you think you will change how people behave by acting in this way?
First, there are informed opinions versus uninformed ones. I am happy to talk with people who have informed opinions even when we disagree.
Next, there are naively uninformed opinions versus lazily or willfully uninformed opinions. For example, suppose somebody says, "Hey, I'm a high school student thinking of going into tech, and don't understand all this recent discussion about diversity. Can somebody help me out?" I am also very happy to talk with that person; there's no shame in being honestly ignorant but eager to learn. (Most of the time I'm even glad to give the lazy or mildly willful people a chance, although my experience suggests it rarely helps, at least right away.)
Beneath that we have willfully uninformed opinions presented in a way that actively harms the discussion. When somebody doesn't know what's going on, doesn't want to, and perhaps doesn't even want people talking about the topic, then yes, I actually don't want them in this discussion right now.
For the record I believe my reply is proportionately angry. It's a serious problem that harms both the field and actual individuals. We have been discussing it for decades. (Note also that quibbling about tone itself has a long history in these discussions: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument )
So, serious answer: Yes I hope that a) I will reduce the frequency with which the last category of opinion is deployed to halt or degrade useful discussion, b) more people will be able to recognize a particular dumb argument as a dumb argument, and c) some of the lazily or willfully ignorant will actually try to understand the context before opining.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you aware that you have not only failed to educate people, but you have only taught them that voicing an opinion that you don't agree with will bring disproportionately furious rebuke? A serious question: do you think you will change how people behave by acting in this way?
I think the implied ground for your comment is that everybody's opinion is valuable and should be heard. So let me sketch my quick hierarchy of opinions here. First, there are informed opinions versus uninformed ones. I am happy to talk with people who have informed opinions even when we disagree. Next, there are naively uninformed opinions versus lazily or willfully uninformed opinions. For example, suppose somebody…
Please, do not attempt to answer. I would like you to contemplate this. It's not senseless navel-gazing and is quite significant.
Also, tone matters because we're dealing with real human beings who respond to tone as well as substance. To say "That's a tone argument!" as a form of dismissal is to miss that the whole point is supposed to be persuasion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there. This is so far from the lived reality of women in tech or any of the data on hiring that you should be embarrassed to open your mouth. On HN most people get that before opining on the merits of functional programming, they should have tried it. Or at the very least spent a fair bit of time reading about what people…
I'm not certain how you can structure your argument such that it does not also imply that professions that are majority female discriminate against men. Your introduction of that graph appears to be an attempt at making an improper inference based on conditional probabilities. You can't just flip-flop between probability of woman, given job, and probability of job, given woman. There's math involved, based on additio…
If you're saying what careers people choose is a complex function with many inputs and interactions with the social context, I agree. I am arguing against the view that career mainly driven by a simple, stable, gender-based biological intrinsic, which is the usual thing meant by "women just X", as in "women just can't science" or "women just want want to stay at home with babies".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X." Depending on what X is, and on context, it can be obvious that "worked on X" simply means that they worked on X, but that doesn't mean that others did not also work on it, with them. Especially if "X" is too big and complex for one person to do on ones own. In particular,…
"But this interpretation doesn't fit with the usual men-are-egotistical-narcissists-compared-to-women. So pay this comment no mind." I'm just reporting the patterns I saw. That's all. I wouldn't say "egotistical narcissist," just that the culture probably holds out different behavioral expectations for men and women and that gives rise to differences in how people present themselves.
Well let's not kid ourselves. :) If a pattern you happened to observe reflected poorly on women - like if you observed that many more of them were incompetent than men[1] - you wouldn't report on it here. Or else you would just get downvoted or ignored. Can you honestly object to that?
Casually reporting on something which shows women as a group (or subgroup, like in tech) is viewed at best as being in poor taste, or at worst as sexism or misogyny. And there are good arguments for calling it that. But do the same for men and it's just innocuous "observations".
[1] For the sake of the argument: totally hypothetical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price of the privilege and prestige of being a member of the oppressive majority is eternal vigilance against overstepping the mark. Sure it's inconvenient, but politeness doesn't cost much effort. Eggshells is a good way of putting it. If you or anyone you see steps over the line, get an apology out there and discuss it and move on. Over time what constitutes a transgression seems to get more minor and trivial i…
>The price of the privilege and prestige of being a member of the oppressive majority That sure sounds like most nerds I know - we are just so high on the social scale, even pop stars wish they were us. And let me put it this way: I have no intention of walking on eggshells my entire career, never knowing when I hurt some delicate being. I don't for a second believe women are that delicate (there are far too many wom…
i actually hate working with and being around people who hold your viewpoint.
keep shooting from the hip buddy, everybody who finds you offensive is a delicate being - right on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the implied ground for your comment is that everybody's opinion is valuable and should be heard. So let me sketch my quick hierarchy of opinions here. First, there are informed opinions versus uninformed ones. I am happy to talk with people who have informed opinions even when we disagree. Next, there are naively uninformed opinions versus lazily or willfully uninformed opinions. For example, suppose somebody…
So, serious response: you are perpetuating the notion that it's acceptable to attempt to silence an opinion that you disagree with sufficiently. Is this the norm you wish to encourage? That it's OK to exclude people who don't think sufficiently like you? Please, do not attempt to answer. I would like you to contemplate this. It's not senseless navel-gazing and is quite significant. Also, tone matters because we're de…
I think any opinion is welcome in honest dialog between people who are pursuing sincere understanding and are acting with sufficient empathy toward all participants. I also think that is about 1% of public discussion, and that it takes an immense amount of effort to create the proper preconditions for that.
Outside of that, no, I think there are plenty of opinions that merit social opprobrium for their straightforward expression. And I'd bet you do, too. If you can't name 5 in the next 30 seconds, you aren't trying. Speech has consequences. And I think it has to. [1]
I also think that regardless of opinion, there are ways to engage in dialog that are so harmful that they should be called out. And you think that too, or you wouldn't be giving me your more-in-sorrow, think-about-what-you've-done routine. The only difference is that we have different standards for what merits objection.
I agree that tone matters, which is why I chose the tone I did. If your goal is to personally persuade every sexist goof to come to a considered realization that they have made a deep mistake, then godspeed. (If that is your goal, though then your recent comments history doesn't show you working very hard at that.)
But that's not my goal. My goal is to fix the goddamn problem. It's hurting my field, it's hurting people I know, and it's hurting a lot of people I don't know. I want the ongoing harm to end.
History suggests that a lot of people never get over the idiotic opinions they grew up around. This is true even for very smart people; Planck wrote, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
So consider today's KKK. Do I want everybody to be not racist? Yes. Would I like every member of the KKK to realize that they have been assholes all their lives and start making up for lost time? Sure. If some rando starts talking to me about the inferiority of black people, am I going to patiently talk to him about what the research really shows? Fuck no. I am going to tell him that he's an asshole, and that I don't want to hear his racist bullshit around me. If he ever wonders why, he can hop on Wikipedia and read a little history. He won't, of course, because the problem here isn't primarily his ideas; it's his biases.
[1] See, e.g.: https://www.popehat.com/2013/09/10/speech-and-consequences/