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I don’t belong in tech

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Re: I don’t belong in tech

#111

Post by thesimpsons1022 »

s_q_b wrote: post #48

I apologize if you assumed this was a story about a difference rooted in race and gender, because it is not. That’s not where we are going. That's not an apology. You deliberately manipulated your audience by playing on their fears of being deemed discriminatory, their anxiety over real ethnic tensions, and perhaps most egregiously, you intentionally encouraged gender stereotyping of women for your own purpose of obt…

found it pretty toxic and regressive when she talked about explaining stuff to her boyfriend likes he's 5. idk if i'll ever be able to relate to all the emotional stuff she talked about.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#112

Post by wycats »

threatofrain wrote: post #50
zachlatta wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps they would be happier as a designer, where they can make everything fit into perfectly neat boxes. Typically I'd just downvote, but was that condescending comment really needed? This is the sort of toxicity that turns people away from our community.

That comment about being a designer is an obvious aggression -- notwithstanding whether aggression is net useful. However, saying that someone's speech is characterized by condescension and toxicity is aggressive -- notwithstanding whether aggression is net useful. Given that you do not possess the prerogative to control the costs of your potential mistakes, ought not calls of toxicity be restrained toward obvious ca…

This thread is full of obvious cases of toxicity.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#113

Post by s_q_b »

karmajunkie wrote: post #87
s_q_b wrote: post #48

I apologize if you assumed this was a story about a difference rooted in race and gender, because it is not. That’s not where we are going. That's not an apology. You deliberately manipulated your audience by playing on their fears of being deemed discriminatory, their anxiety over real ethnic tensions, and perhaps most egregiously, you intentionally encouraged gender stereotyping of women for your own purpose of obt…

My goodness, I didn't realize there were so many Black Friday sales on self-righteous indignation. Giving it out for Christmahannukwanzakah, are we? Personally I felt quite a bit of sympathy for the author. Some of us are builders. Some of us are growers. Some of us are finishers. Unfortunately the former two often unintentionally conspire to make life difficult for the latter, whether by poor architecture, bad code,…

It is never right to attribute negative characteristics to an entire race or gender. Anyone who does so under any circumstances will find me speaking in opposition.

--------------

EDIT in Reply:

1. Your comment is, however unintentionally, quite interesting.

Never have I seen someone so self-righteously accuse another of self-righteousness. The closest analogy I can devise is an infinite regression of ignorance, a perfectly formed fractal of feces. Maintaining that level of willful lack of self-awareness must be exhausting.

My goodness.

2. Overt racism is a heuristic I use to determine whether to take a person's other viewpoints seriously. This article did not pass that test.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#114

Post by thesimpsons1022 »

akvadrako wrote: post #100
thro32 wrote: post #74

I agree. As someone with wrong gender, I strugle to find good job in tech. With right gender my chances would be twice better.

Sure it seems a little unfair that women get an advantage, but they are only a small percentage of the workforce. So if everyone was equal your chances wouldn't be twice as good - only about 5% better. That's a more reasonable view.

sad that these people focus on complaining about women getting jobs when they could just focus on being better than the worst man with a job. reason they don't have one isn't because women took their spot but because they're worse than the 90 pct chunk that are men that got the job

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#115

Post by angersock »

danso wrote: post #31
angersock wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a fair comment. In design you at least have a chance at clean work safe from messy reality.

It's a condescending comment because there are many designers who have to design for the real world. It's no less condescending than saying someone should go into programming where they just have to type out code all day and not face the real world.

That's exactly why software engineering is more attractive than hardware engineering though?

A condescending comment would be something like: "Maybe you should stick to your pretty R graphs for 'journalism' and leave discussion of software engineering to the professionals who actually get paid to build systems and who haven't, as a profession, fucked up on every metric in the last decade even without including the most recent election."

That would be a condescending comment--the one you are remarking on can be interpreted as "hey, designers get to make pretty things unfettered by layers of shaky abstractions and stupid imposed by business and deadlines".

Please don't rush to aid the theoretically aggrieved; especially when there are folks in this same subthread going "yep, as a designer, that's the truth".

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#116

Post by enraged_camel »

rm999 wrote: post #23

The author makes some great points that I initially wanted to dismiss, but I think are actually really interesting. Unlike many other types of engineering/craft, most experienced software developers have settled on an aversion to perfectionism. A good carpenter wants to build a solid house even if no one will ever see its frame. Ditto to an auto engineer at BMW, or a hardware engineer at Apple, or a mechanical engine…

I would posit that's the main difference between a craftsman and an engineer. A craftsman pours his heart and soul into his work and aims for perfection. An engineer, on the other hand, has to work within certain constraints, such as time and budget.

Of course, the definition of "perfect" is different for everyone. The point is that craftsmen can wait until they're fully satisfied with what they are working on before releasing it. Engineers don't have that luxury.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#117

Post by matt_wulfeck »

> But that’s where the anger ended, in not being white or a man or coding since I was two or some combination of the three. This wasn’t going to work. Coding wasn’t going to work. I didn’t belong.

What's interesting is that white men, with no gender or racial bogeyman to hide behind, have created the term "imposter syndrome" to explain feelings that are almost universal in this field, and also very evident in this woman's essay. You don't belong. You don't think like them. Your mind is different. If only you programmed since you were 5 on your family's Amiga.

It's sad for me to see gender and race become the focus of her disappointment in her career. In a twisted way it puts even more distance between her and other engineers who invariably feel the same way but are trying to cope with it on their own.

Maybe she's worried they'll "say wrong things, and then I have to explain why those things are wrong" ...

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#118

Post by threatofrain »

user5994461 wrote: post #89
bsg75 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfection is the opposite extreme from minimum viable product. There could be a "happy medium" where a ship schedule incorporates a reasonable level of quality in v1. Minimum viable is too often implemented as ship as fast as possible, and viable gets perverted into first post release patch.

Objection! Perfection is the ultimate minimum viable product, as mandated by the condition to achieve it. (12) Perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925

I don't understand, don't you obviously want both conditions? Isn't that a far better definition for minimalism?

Given objectives, constraints, and means, the most fit set of solutions are the "perfect" ones.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#119

Post by Slartie »

Illniyar wrote: post #41
Slartie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally seconding this. Just trying to "quick fix" apparent bugs, without having understood the complex problem in its entirety beforehand, is a pretty bad approach in quite some areas of the tech world. This is true for most server-side work, for example - you just can't put a band-aid type solution on a problem created by a weird race condition between different requests processed in parallel, because you most like…

"You just can't put a band-aid type solution on a problem created by a weird race condition" Oh yes you can, and do, often, in payment processing code. I've done it (with a simple sleep for x seconds I think), and I can assure you the higher ups couldn't have been happier.

Oh, so maybe THAT is the reason why one of our customers had funny cases of thousands of his customers being double-billed on card payments by the payment processing provider!

As a developer (of the cash register software, which wasn't at fault in this case), I was kinda amused by the whole thing. But I can assure you, the higher-up business people weren't amused at all.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#120

Post by thesimpsons1022 »

DanFeldman wrote: post #70

This level of attention to detail, perfection, and craftsmanship is found largely at bigger companies with more to lose with their products. Automakers, manufacturing, aerospace. When I worked at GM, this sort of thinking was necessary at every step. Perfection and correctness was written into every process. Also, about 40% of the engineers in my group were female (active safety/autonomous vehicles. We solved awesome…

>> Perfection and correctness was written into every process.

you say that but the industries you mentioned have some of the worst code possible.

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