271–280 of 357 posts
Is this just an issue in the USA, or perhaps just radical San Francisco? In other countries men and women tend to work together quite happily in SW development jobs without all of this nonsense.
If we want to have a meaningful discussion about sexism in tech, it's time to talk about what we're up against, and it involves all of us: not just women and minorities. If it doesn't involve us now, it will in 20 years when we're two decades older, because ageism is just as much of a problem in the tech industry as the other "isms". There isn't an above-baseline sexism among long-term professional programmers. Sure,…
So, let's see here; Meredith Patterson has: * "...posted an idea for a new feature to the developers’ mailing list for an open-source project...[but on list she had no access to, it was] dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it." The feature only became available because she had the opportunity to implement it in such a way that it became a "rousing success". (I should stop right here because th…
I don't necessarily agree, but she may not be wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does "emotionally brilliant" mean, and how would it benefit users? The best interpretation I can think of is building software which exploits user's emotional responses in order to gain acceptance and widespread usage (e.g. Zynga), but I'm not sure why this is something the world needs more of.
Well, no, not that. I'm not sure. I myself see the emotional landscape only dimly. My life got a lot better when two things changed for me. One: I accepted that some people around me ("that happened to be" female) were remarkably better than I am at understanding my motivations and predicting my behavior than I am. Same for third parties. A fascinating aside: People (including me) are motivated more powerfully by emo…
Setting goals? Maybe tactical, rather than strategic, goals. E.g., emotional intelligence may say "exploit tribalism to get users to feel loyalty towards us" (a tactical goal) which would help in achieving the strategic goal of having more users and lower churn.
In another reply, you suggest: "products need to be less harmful --> ... --> putting more emotionally competent people in the industry", but it's far from clear to me how the latter gets to the former. If anything, I'd suspect that emotionally competent people are better at building harmful products and exploiting flaws in the brain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a weird lens to look at slavery through. The circumstances in the US were unique: intense economic coupling to slavery, very large regional identity defined by slavery, &c. More importantly, I'm not sure what this has to do with Rayiner's point. The realization that many plantation slaves would be better utilized as doctors and lawyers did not free the slaves, nor did economic competition from non-slaveholdin…
IMO the blame lies at least partly on American hyper-competitive mentality, where you have people on both sides willing to go to war over slavery, or "wage cultural war on homophobes" today. My link was intended to show that not all countries are like that. I just can't agree with Rayiner that we should escalate more because the current conflict is all-important. Game theory tells us that if everyone thinks that way,…
There had been interest, but one of the committers had dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it. It was the funniest thing I’d heard in months — I literally doubled over laughing at how nonplussed he must have been to see it not only implemented, but implemented to rousing success. Now that's a woman I respect. Instead of whining around, she just implements it. Suckerpunched the misogynist. You…
And if she complains about being treated this way for being a woman, she wouldn't have your respect?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So... more perceptive women, who see from the outset [...] Way to diss the authors' intelligence.
I'm criticizing her emotional perception, not her intelligence. She self-identifies as ASD, and the problems of ASD people with emotional perception/empathy/mindblindness/etc are very well-documented. Would you rather take coding advice from the person who wrote a ball of mud in PHP, or John Carmack?
Depends on what I'm doing. Maybe I'm indeed going to write some ball of mud (unmaintainable, one-off, but perhaps faster to write) PHP code? I reject your hero worship.
Interesting that she is autistic. Autism is apparently more common among boys than girls. Could this be one reason why tech attracts more men than women? Arguably, a slightly autistic personality is helpful for a programmer. Possibly it could also be a big reason for many future programmers to turn to tech in the first place, where you deal with strict, deterministic rules instead of emotions. This would obviously no…
> Interesting that she is autistic. Autism is apparently more common among boys than girls. Could this be one reason why tech attracts more men than women? "Maybe this group of people has more of X because X is more likely to have a neurodevelopmental disorder"? Nice. Thank you so much for associating a whole industry with autism. A disorder that apparently 1-2 out of 1,000 people have, at that.
You have it flipped. "This group of people with a neurodevelopmental disorder are more inclined to X and therefore industry of X has more of them."
Which is an entirely valid thing to say, by the way.
I'd be willing to bet that people with higher-than-normal levels of empathy and an outgoing attitude are more inclined to work social jobs than solitary jobs. Would you disagree with that?
I can understand a displeasure that the association is with something "negative", but that doesn't immediately invalidate the statement.
>A disorder that apparently 1-2 out of 1,000 people have, at that.
And how many people work in "the Tech industry", specifically coding/engineering related fields, compared to other areas like Marketing, Sales, Design, Social Workers, etc? Maybe 1 or 2 in 1,000? If this is your biggest defense against their statement being "wrong" I have to find it unconvincing at best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Further, eradicating racism, sexism, etc.. IS EVERYONE'S CALLING. I've got a friend who is very white and very male and very straight, and honestly, it's worked out pretty well for him. What is his incentive for abolishing racism, sexism, etc.? That incentive is certainly not outweighed by what he gives up. Your argument (such as it is) is as foolish and baseless as his is practical and repugnant. EDIT: Downvotes as…
If you stock a team of people attacking a problem with people who fit one precise mold, you'll miss out on the breadth of problems that people from other backgrounds face. More importantly, you'll miss out on their solutions to those problems. You're trading global progress for a blip of personal comfort extracted at a high cost from more vulnerable people. Seriously in the most crass cynical context imaginable, dive…
If I'm building an algorithm for packing bytes into an array, inverting matrices, or some similarly technological issue, why would insights into police profiling or sexual harassment be useful?
Seriously in the most crass cynical context imaginable, diverse teams should be expected to outperform homogenous ones.
I note that two of your examples are from science fiction television, and the third is a (good) comedy routine.
I don't disagree with the spirit of the common-sense "should" in your sentence. I do question--because Lord knows we'd all be better off with concrete numbers so we can put this to bed and win a decisive victory for diversity--whether or not this diversity actually results in better outcomes reliably.
You're trading global progress for a blip of personal comfort extracted at a high cost from more vulnerable people.
Well, yes...that's pretty much the definition of capitalism as currently implemented: running arbitrage on scarcity of material or knowledge so as to enrich oneself and one's stakeholders.
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Again, I'm all for diversity and these things. I'm just pointing out that these arguments would benefit from much more intellectual and practical rigor than many seem to possess.
If we want to have a meaningful discussion about sexism in tech, it's time to talk about what we're up against, and it involves all of us: not just women and minorities. If it doesn't involve us now, it will in 20 years when we're two decades older, because ageism is just as much of a problem in the tech industry as the other "isms". There isn't an above-baseline sexism among long-term professional programmers. Sure,…
Sad that you're downvoted. I don't have much perspective to judge the veracity of your interpretation, but it seems perfectly plausible. I wonder which invisible boundaries of narrative you've been punished for crossing.