The most alienating thing that happened to me as a female engineer • Hacker News Board

Re: The most alienating thing that happened to me as a female engineer

#101

Post by Turing_Machine » Fri, Jun 17, 2016, 2:26 PM UTC

EliRivers wrote: post #31

adwn wrote: post #19

To summarize: Most of the team wants to watch progam A; watching program A during dinner is an established team ritual; author wants to change channel to program B, which is "met with incredulity and laughter". Some time later, program B is running; team members come in and want to change the channel to program A. And that latter event is the most alienating during her time at Microsoft. Wat. It gets better: Because…

You have misrepresented the case, although I do agree that it's not overtly a male/female thing. People are in a shared TV-viewing area. There is something being shown on TV. New person enters and decides to change the channel without asking. This is the action of a total dickhead. I don't care what the established ritual is. If a group of people are clearly watching something else (and they must be, because here the…

"People are in a shared TV-viewing area. There is something being shown on TV. New person enters and decides to change the channel without asking. This is the action of a total dickhead."

If it were a random situation, perhaps. If it is the established norm that a specific program is watched at a specific time, not so much.

Re: The most alienating thing that happened to me as a female engineer

#102

Post by nikki-9696 » Fri, Jun 17, 2016, 3:44 PM UTC

I'm a girl, and let me just say that if someone wanted to watch Friends, I'd laugh at them too. Have we considered that the show is just stupid and everyone there knew it except OP? Look, there's no accounting for taste, but if I watch something that no one else on my team watches, but they all watch something else, I would not consider that to be alienating. I also wouldn't make them change the channel. I would, however, make fun of baseball the entire time I was sitting there watching it, because I hate it, and all my co-workers will tell you how much I enjoy making fun of sports. They are never offended by this. They find it amusing. And we all get along just fine.

Re: The most alienating thing that happened to me as a female engineer

#103

Post by ap3 » Fri, Jun 17, 2016, 5:10 PM UTC

King-Aaron wrote: post #6

I really don't want to make this sound like I'm diminishing OP's experience, because from the sounds of that the experience sounded awful. However I've experienced pretty much identical treatment over a very similar thing (music) and I'm a male software dev. Wanting to listen to something quiet because the loud commercial radio/adverts that always run are pretty distracting. I can completely relate to her experience…

Do they play the radio soneveryone can hear?

That is annoying and distracting - I used to do that myself at my previous work and never thought it was annoying and distracting until someone pointed it out to me.

Re: The most alienating thing that happened to me as a female engineer

#104

Post by dang » Fri, Jun 17, 2016, 7:16 PM UTC

fleitz wrote: post #16

Want to know the most alienating thing that ever happened to me as a female engineer? Someone told me to suck their dick in front of the CEO. Suck it the fuck up buttercup.

This comment breaks the HN guidelines by being uncivil, which unfortunately you've done quite a few times before as well. We ban accounts that do that. To keep commenting here, please post civil, substantive comments only.

Worse, lying in a provocative way about an inflammatory topic ("me as a female engineer") is outright trolling. That's an abuse of this site, and if you do it again we will ban you.

Re: The most alienating thing that happened to me as a female engineer

#105

Post by elevenfist » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 10:14 PM UTC

emsy wrote: post #71

elevenfist wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with identity, it's just common bullying. I imagine the thought process may be something like "We're the majority, we don't care, so we're not going to share the tv. "

From that perspective, democracy is bullying.

...You're overgeneralizing my comment. The solution to this small scale problem is to share, and be open to trying new things.