171–180 of 491 posts
> Invite women you work with for coffee No chance of this being misinterpreted. Invite women you work with for coffee and ask what they like or dislike about their day-to-day. If they mention concerns or problems they’re having, ask if there’s any way you could help make it better.
Wanna grab lunch with me and Bob on Friday?
“Ask a Female Engineer” Why leave other important engineering characteristics out? Are you fat,skinny,tall,short,ugly,pretty , white,or black? I really don't see the importance of sex in relations to engineering. Nor understand the desire to get more fat,skinny,tall,short,ugly,pretty , white, black , male or females involved in engineering.
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One can't live one's whole life worried about this. When I (female) ask male colleagues etc for informational interviews, work coffee, other meetings, I face the same problem. All you can do is be clear in the first place and exit gracefully if misunderstanding persists. "Hey, I'm really interested in your experience teaching kids how to create GUIs using tkinter. Could I ask you about that over coffee?" If there's a…
The natural conclusion of this train of thought is to never ask someone out for coffee to begin with as the OP was suggesting.
How active should men be in actually helping to solve the gender diversity problem vs sitting on the sidelines and sharing the work of women who are solving the problem? I've been working on an initiative to encourage more of my male peers to do more to make their organisations more diverse and was recently criticised by a female software engineer who told me that I shouldn't "come into a feminist space" where "women…
As a guy myself, I am in favor of guys being active. Men, after all, embody most of the problem; leaving it to women to solve is putting a burden on people who are already getting a raw deal. But yes, guys should be aware that their common instinct to come in and dominate a thing will often not be well received. Partly because dudes pushing to dominate is how the problem was created and is maintained. Partly because…
Also "Men, after all, embody most of the problem;" will not be winning many converts to your point of view. Men are not a uniform being. You're painting with some really broad brush strokes and the only people who are going to hear what you say are those that already fully believe it themselves.
“Ask a Female Engineer” Why leave other important engineering characteristics out? Are you fat,skinny,tall,short,ugly,pretty , white,or black? I really don't see the importance of sex in relations to engineering. Nor understand the desire to get more fat,skinny,tall,short,ugly,pretty , white, black , male or females involved in engineering.
For those that are down voting, care to expand on why? Or perhaps explain why the following characteristics are irrelevant or less important when it comes to engineering: fat,skinny,tall,short,ugly,pretty , white,or black?
Here, you can start an "ask a tall engineer" page with some comments from me: office chairs are too small and I have to shift posture constantly; communal desks are too low; and there's nowhere high enough to try a standing desk.
The most mind boggling part of this whole thread is it appears that there are many people who don't know how to begin active communication with another human. What isn't being taught in schools?
I'm personally more surprised that there are people on Hacker News who are surprised by this (although of course it's not true for many people).
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I really do not mean to be confrontational, as I understand that this is a charged topic on all sides, but I'd like to ask why making tech more diverse (in terms of race or gender) is preferable. My first instinct would be to say that if it's more diverse, women or racial minorities are more likely to come into tech because they might feel more comfortable there. But then we're back at square one: why do we want them…
A) I see the tech industry shaping the future for the world. The world is comprised of a diverse group of people. How can a narrow group of people understand the needs of everyone? B) There are a shortage of labor in tech
People should build tech that they find interesting. It's not our job as engineers to try to save the world. I program because I find it inherently fascinating. If other people benefit from my work, great. If not, great.
> There are a shortage of labor in tech
When programmer salaries rival those of upper management then we can say there's a shortage. Right now there's a desire to maximize executive salaries while minimizing programmer costs. That what "women in tech" is really about.
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I think it's totally ok to say, "Sorry if it didn't come across that way, but I'm really just interested in talking professionally." Many women have had previous bad experiences and react with that in mind. It's ok to clarify.
I am fasdf. Basically, I had already been so misunderstood, I thought the best approach was to say no more on the matter. Given how seriously she misunderstood one comment, who's to say how she could misinterpret another? (thinking that I was implying she was unattractive, etc.) She would say, as a group of us headed to an event, etc., "XXXX, we're just going to this as friends, I'm not interested in dating you, you…
Diversity initiatives for the tech world baffle me. The tech world is already very diverse, along lines that transcend race and gender. I am talking about national diversity. Engineering teams are composed of a huge percentage of foreign born workers who carry truly diverse experiences. The difference in experience between nationalities completely trumps the differences in experience between gender and race within th…
How can you say that after reading the first question in the article? Do you think the editor was just cherry picking the most extreme anecdotes they could find?