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Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

smashcompany.com

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Re: Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

#141

Post by DoreenMichele »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #140
DoreenMichele wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? If it is, why am I so frequently interpreted as playing the victim card when I am displaying my badass scars? Or even simply telling it like it is about my actual life experiences?

Is it? If we accept for the moment, that Lisa was just describing her sense of uneasiness -- her sense of trepidation -- that's different from "displaying my badass scars" or "telling it like it is about my actual life experiences". That does seem like a reasonable reading of the original article. I did start out by asking what dkarl thought about whether or not the original author would have thought differently, if…

Both of those scenarios have a safe fall-back based on gender expectations. When you mix genders, the fall-backs disappear. In tech, this is virtually always a problem faced by a woman in a male-dominated workplace. If she's ever momentarily in doubt, there's no safe direction to err.

This description indicates that women have no real choice but to handle it differently from a man, which kind of makes your question moot.

One of the things I frequently talk about is having been molested and raped as a child. It certainly can happen to boys, but seems much more common for girls. This often gets me comments to the effect of "I am so sorry for what you suffered" as if I am in need of a shoulder to cry on.

Given that I do it often in public on an overwhelmingly male forum, I have difficulty trying to fathom why that isn't interpreted as extremely thick skinned, ballsy bitch instead. But I don't get a whole lot of "Holy cow, woman. You really hold your own!"

And I think I will stop there because I don't really know how to interact with your conclusions, so I am not sure good communication can happen here.

Re: Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

#142

Post by amorphid »

aetherson wrote: post #13

I'm 40, and some of my coworkers are like 25. I'm about two management levels above the basic engineers, but we're a small company and everyone knows everyone. So I'm having lunch with some of the engineers, and one of them shares out of the blue that she regrets getting a computer science degree at her (good) college, and thinks she should've gone into business instead. And my immediate thought is, "For god's sake,…

> (Separately: Don't get an undergraduate degree in business. What a worthless degree.)

As one who has a bachelors in business, I wouldn't my degree completely useless, but I can't think of a reason I'd recommend someone might go down that path. I would say 80% of the value I got from my degree could be achieved by taking courses in 2 or 3 classes, maybe accounting, finance, marketing, and management.

Re: Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

#143

Post by solidsnack9000 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #141
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? If we accept for the moment, that Lisa was just describing her sense of uneasiness -- her sense of trepidation -- that's different from "displaying my badass scars" or "telling it like it is about my actual life experiences". That does seem like a reasonable reading of the original article. I did start out by asking what dkarl thought about whether or not the original author would have thought differently, if…

Both of those scenarios have a safe fall-back based on gender expectations. When you mix genders, the fall-backs disappear. In tech, this is virtually always a problem faced by a woman in a male-dominated workplace. If she's ever momentarily in doubt, there's no safe direction to err. This description indicates that women have no real choice but to handle it differently from a man, which kind of makes your question m…

This description indicates that women have no real choice but to handle it differently from a man, which kind of makes your question moot.

This is a kind of assuming the conclusion. Maybe what dkarl is saying is right, maybe it isn’t; but my question is about investigating those ideas.

Given that I do it often in public on an overwhelmingly male forum, I have difficulty trying to fathom why that isn’t interpreted as extremely thick skinned, ballsy bitch instead.

Please know that I already think of you as someone who holds her own and is up to facing any challenger in this forum.

Re: Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

#144

Post by DoreenMichele »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #143
DoreenMichele wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those scenarios have a safe fall-back based on gender expectations. When you mix genders, the fall-backs disappear. In tech, this is virtually always a problem faced by a woman in a male-dominated workplace. If she's ever momentarily in doubt, there's no safe direction to err. This description indicates that women have no real choice but to handle it differently from a man, which kind of makes your question m…

This description indicates that women have no real choice but to handle it differently from a man, which kind of makes your question moot. This is a kind of assuming the conclusion . Maybe what dkarl is saying is right, maybe it isn’t; but my question is about investigating those ideas. Given that I do it often in public on an overwhelmingly male forum, I have difficulty trying to fathom why that isn’t interpreted as…

I am not assuming any conclusions. I was only trying to add firsthand experience to the mix as food for thought.

I have long gotten a lot of pushback for apparently being pretty oblivious to cultural expectations for my gender. My reaction to that has been to wonder WTH? and then try to find a non confrontational path around it rather than simply cave to such social pressure.

The fact that I have to do that at all suggests that, no, we wouldn't be having this discussion if the candidate had been male. It would have simply gone differently. Period.

It's a little like saying "But what if a guy got his clitoris caught in the machinery?" And the answer is that a guy doesn't have a clitoris to get caught in the machinery (and the pro trans activists can kindly spare me the derail about how that comment is somehow transphobic, thanks).

Women get enormous amounts of social pressure from the get go to straight up behave differently than men. I often fail to behave differently from men in certain metrics. The result is very often a whole lot of drama from people outraged that I am not toeing the line. And that outrage only makes sense if you accept that the rules are different for girls.

I had to research why on earth I was getting so much pushback on HN when I first got here. I was a big fat nobody with an entry level job and no hope of promotion and some pathetic amount of karma. The level of blowback was insanely high for some big fat nobody who just wanted a place to run their damn mouth. It didn't add up until I discovered that I had a lot of karma for a woman, never mind that the amount of karma was not notable at all for the guys. Yet it was making waves.

So, I don't know how to engage your comment effectively because I am not assuming a conclusion. I am trying to sum up 52 years of "if I do the same thing a guy does, wow, does that not go at all like it does for the guys and I can only conclude sexism has to be a factor in there somewhere."

And you can do with that testimony as you see fit in terms of trying to understand what is going on in the world.

Re: Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

#145

Post by nubbins »

rainbowmverse wrote: post #45
ianai wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

34 never married no kids. Probably because the sentiment that someone doesn’t want to talk about family makes little sense to someone who’s life revolves around family. I give people blank stares when they talk football to me. I still try to relate. “Yeah my family chose all loser teams so the game lost me.” It’s not a great sentiment to hear for someone who loves football, but they get why I’m out of the discussion.…

Football is pretty much chess with guided missiles. The basic rule is easy enough to remember (4 tries to go 10 yards or the other team gets the ball), and I've never met a football fan who minded filling in the gaps of the current discussion. It's the same with kids. I have no trouble finding things to talk about with my friend who's raising a kid at a similar age. It often starts with talking about how we were rais…

I can't talk about football with serious fans because they are obsessed with minutia, personalities, who did what, what games they have to win etc. In a way its revealing of who cares enough because you have to invest (waste) hours to keep up with that sort of stuff. What you're describing sounds like kind of a meta-football discussion about rules etc that I'd enjoy.

Re: Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

#146

Post by rainbowmverse »

nubbins wrote: post #145
rainbowmverse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Football is pretty much chess with guided missiles. The basic rule is easy enough to remember (4 tries to go 10 yards or the other team gets the ball), and I've never met a football fan who minded filling in the gaps of the current discussion. It's the same with kids. I have no trouble finding things to talk about with my friend who's raising a kid at a similar age. It often starts with talking about how we were rais…

I can't talk about football with serious fans because they are obsessed with minutia, personalities, who did what, what games they have to win etc. In a way its revealing of who cares enough because you have to invest (waste) hours to keep up with that sort of stuff. What you're describing sounds like kind of a meta-football discussion about rules etc that I'd enjoy.

It only seems like a waste because it's not your thing. I don't care for it, but I also don't care for 90% of what's in the tech press. Most of it is meaningless (who will remember that random funding round/the player who won't last a season five years from now?), but it's fine entertainment if that's what you want.

Re: Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

#147

Post by ravitation »

I've read a couple of your Smash Company articles now. I broke down in relative detail the indescribably huge problems there are with the one extolling the virtues of using one-on-one instead of group meetings. I'm not going to do that here...

I'll just say a couple things... First editorial stuff... The structure and flow of this article does not work. Much of it is unnecessary, there are entire groups of paragraphs that, more or less, repeat themselves, and there are anecdotes that are basically nonsensical. Also, "discretion" is too poorly defined, it is used far too loosely (an unfortunate tweet or a youthful blunder is pretty much incomparable to being vulnerable with your coworkers - it's honestly laughable to put them in the same category).

Second... The culture/gender thing... It's pretty much summed up in your final full paragraph. Just keep doing stuff the way we (i.e. I) have been until you inevitably shouldn't anymore because the culture expectations have changed? That's terrible advice, in absolutely any context, but especially this one. I'd be fairly confident in saying that any piece of advice that ends in that kind of qualifier should be thrown out immediately.

Third... The point... Honestly, I don't need to know anything else about your "2 years" with Lisa to know that you were better off for her willingness to be vulnerable (a huge plus when looking at a new hire, by the way). Would you have preferred her to be dishonestly confident (that would have been easy), or at least noncommittally vague (easy, but comes off as unsurprisingly insincere)? No. You don't want that in an employee. Knowing the limitations and concerns (actual concerns) is always better. Sorry, it is. The rest of your anecdotes aren't strong enough to make me even consider questioning that she did anything wrong. She did something that was hard, yes. She did something that could have cost her that job, yes. But she did something that improved her (and your) ability to do the job, and you were better off for it.

To be perfectly honest, it probably is a generational thing. And, to be perfectly honest again, I welcome the cultural changes (they are already getting here) that will come as the working generations shift. We, and our businesses, will be (i.e. are) better off for them.

P.S. You should take some time for a hard think about what "professionalism" means. Too often it is used as a crutch to support some archaic, and frankly harmful (across all possible meanings of the word), business practices.

Re: Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

#148

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Re: Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

#149

Post by jclos »

aetherson wrote: post #13

I'm 40, and some of my coworkers are like 25. I'm about two management levels above the basic engineers, but we're a small company and everyone knows everyone. So I'm having lunch with some of the engineers, and one of them shares out of the blue that she regrets getting a computer science degree at her (good) college, and thinks she should've gone into business instead. And my immediate thought is, "For god's sake,…

Why not use that information to see whether there is a better place for her in your company? Ultimately it's in your (the company's) best interest to keep smart people around, and the transversal skills obtained from forming an engineer in business practices can be extremely valuable.

I agree with your statement on informality - there is a very thin line that's right inbetween boring formality and obnoxious casualness and it takes some time to learn how to walk it, but I don't think your engineer's words are that bad. A good manager (even N+2) should have some idea of the career aspirations of their employees, and your employee sounds like she'd rather be moved to a different position with less computer science stuff than be promoted for more of the same thing.

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