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Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

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Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#351

Post by anal_reactor »

Melomololotolo wrote: post #335
anal_reactor wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a student I have personally experienced "sorry, you cannot join the event, you're a boy we're looking for a girl" and instead of me they picked a girl whose only job was to stand, smile, and tick the box "yes I'm a girl, this makes the team diverse". Having such an experience makes my brain heavily biased against all actions supporting gender equality. Which are many. And they're almost always about improving the…

The problem is that for you personally it feels shitty. But you know what? For a lot more woman it feels like this compared to man. It's your duty if an educated person to see thisaccept it and move on for equality sake. And I do not mean this ironic. We are not changing our society without some people having less chances for having a highly undermined group of other people. I would prefer for all of us just sitting…

> for you personally it feels shitty. But you know what? Woman.

This pretty much illustrates why more and more men reject feminism as a way of achieving gender equality.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#352

Post by ndriscoll »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #318
ndriscoll wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife spends around an hour a day in the kitchen. I spend close to eight chained to my computer. If one of us is a slave, it's not her. She's not attending daily stand-ups to report how teaching our daughter the alphabet is going; she chooses how to spend each day with no external pressures at all. Her work taking care of the kids is still more exhausting than mine, but it's also obviously more fulfilling and engag…

> My wife spends around an hour a day in the kitchen. I don’t want to jump to conclusions about your life, but cooking meals for the whole family usually takes more than an hour a day if you are not just putting frozen pizza in the oven. I often spend twice as much. Maybe she’s very efficient. Maybe you don’t really know her. > As it is now, I make more than enough for her to take care of the kids full time and still…

Frozen pizza takes like 2 minutes. You literally just put it in the oven, go do something else, then take it out and slice it. Normally lunch takes about 15-20 minutes. Dinner takes ~45. We usually have overnight oats for breakfast which takes ~5 minutes every 3 days to prepare. Our older one is usually happy to get some combination of cut up fruit, toast, sausage, and cottage cheese for breakfast, which takes like 2-5 minutes to throw together. The time sink is hounding her to actually eat!

My wife never worked a career and never wanted to, so there'd be no "going back", but yeah we were happy on a small fraction of my current salary when we were younger, or half my current salary just a couple years ago. I'm not particularly interested in status or materialism; if I didn't have my family, I'd already be done with my career. There's an endless list of other things to do. Even programming is quite a bit more enjoyable when you're doing it for yourself. I've actually told my last few managers that I'm not specifically trying to get to the top of the career ladder with the extra stress and responsibility, but they inevitably push you toward it anyway. Modern corporations don't seem to know how to deal with someone who isn't motivated by status (or I guess they just need someone who can do the stuff, and I'll do it if they need me to). One of my managers actually told me he thought I was having self-confidence issues when it was exactly the opposite! I think a couple years later he's moved closer to my perspective for himself.

I've also taken all of my paternity leave including the unpaid portions. No regrets there. I feel super fortunate for having had the opportunity and would obviously recommend everyone in tech to do the same.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#353

Post by kelipso »

jrockway wrote: post #186
pbronez wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when that person is the founder? Who created the thing and keeps it going through personal force of will? Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. You want high quality people to be able to focus full time on stuff like this.

I mean, she would make 3x more than that just being a software engineering cog in the machine. To me, a salary of $200k for this position looks like donating $400k a year to it. Plus your time. That seems pretty generous to me.

Here we go with inflated salary guesses that a small percentage of programmers get paid. Also I doubt she decided to start a non-profit because she was good at coding.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#354

Post by pas »

jimbokun wrote: post #300
pas wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... sure, on the other hand way less competition, and smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire promising juniors and do on the job training.

"way less competition"?

excuse my phrasing, I meant fewer applicants for the position, so less competition for job-seekers

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#355

Post by pedalpete »

csande17 wrote: post #121
igor47 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. You'd think all the organizations that attribute their challenges in hiring non-male engineers to a "pipeline problem" would've spent a small fraction of their recruiting budgets helping to fund Girls in Tech...

For what it's worth, Girls Who Code -- an organization more directly focused on improving the "pipeline" through training programs aimed at K-12 and college students -- seems to be thriving, with over $20M in donations from a variety of tech organizations in 2023: https://girlswhocode.com/2023report/

Thank you. I was confusing these as being the same organization, and I thought Gils Who Code is doing quite well.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#356

Post by cmcaleer »

crazygringo wrote: post #183
bitcurious wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comp $ is very reasonable in the abstract, what's not reasonable is comp:revenue. You can't be paying 15% of your revenue to a single individual, because almost by definition they aren't performing well enough to justify that salary.

That's not necessarily true, because revenue can be a poor measure of capturing value and scale in organizations that are mostly volunteer. If that individual is managing the process of successfully getting 1,000 people who volunteer 15 hrs/wk, which you'd otherwise have to pay let's say $30/hr including taxes, then that would be the equivalent of $22.5 million in annual revenue. Suddenly $285K in executive compensat…

Your job as the top executive isn’t to get labor, it is to run a company (which sometimes involves getting labor). In order to do that you must manage your expenses.

If you overspend on your salary such that you put the company in a position where the company is begging for 4 months of your salary as runway, you have failed at your job and you demonstrably were irresponsible, reckless in your spending and unable to make tough choices to ensure survival. In other words, you were not worth $285k.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#357

Post by riehwvfbk »

jimbokun wrote: post #284
riehwvfbk wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a great book (written by a female engineer, Tanya Riley) called "The Staff Engineer's Path". I've learned a lot from the book, but one part of Tanya's experience that I could not relate to was having mentors who would encourage me and provide "you can do this" kind of pep talks. For a male engineer the usual experience is the opposite: we are expected to be competitive, and if we display any doubts then the…

> This is probably because women are expected to have a high degree of self doubt and there is no assumption that they are defective if they admit to it. A simpler explanation is that there is a perceived need to increase the number of women in management positions.

That would imply that women aren't deserving of the promotion, and that aggressive posturing is somehow a requirement for the job (and women get a free pass).

However, if the book is any indication, Tanya is a great staff engineer, probably among the best of any gender.

This of course begs the question: could it be that discriminating against men who don't display the stereotypical behaviors is detrimental to diversity? And increasing the number of women may actually help here: they may be able to empathize with people who don't fit the traditional mold.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#358

Post by fennecbutt »

elric wrote: post #269

This is such a difficult topic. When I started my undergraduate in CompSci, the department of 300 students had exactly 3 women. The faculty had way more female instructors than it did students. The Commucation Sciences department, which was on the same campus, had the inverse student population. I'm all in favour for letting students making their own study (and career) choices, but when the imbalance is this great, I…

Or completely invisible (well mostly) perspectives based on sexuality, etc as well.

There's pretty much never been a call for more diversity in terms of queer developers that I've seen.

Even at my current job, women in tech is a big thing that we try to do a lot about, but I feel scared to bring up that there's more to diversity than race and gender.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#359

Post by riehwvfbk »

Aperocky wrote: post #274
riehwvfbk wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a great book (written by a female engineer, Tanya Riley) called "The Staff Engineer's Path". I've learned a lot from the book, but one part of Tanya's experience that I could not relate to was having mentors who would encourage me and provide "you can do this" kind of pep talks. For a male engineer the usual experience is the opposite: we are expected to be competitive, and if we display any doubts then the…

Maybe better compensated, but not sure about more prestigious. I have no interest seeing the day to day of that job.

Organizing apes to do things is always more prestigious than a single ape doing the work. The organizer ape gets to claim that they did the work of the group.

Think about a plaque on a bridge. Who does it say built the bridge? The guy who never touched a shovel after the ground breaking ceremony.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#360

Post by petsfed »

_dzsv wrote: post #268
petsfed wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the perception of engineering as a "men's field" factors into that. Like "every engineering role I've ever had, I was condescended to by some other engineer who though he knew more than me because he was a man, maybe the culture is different around 'designer'". Likewise for "technologist". More broadly, it seems to me that a lot of engineers' perception of inequity within their field basically devolves to…

>I was condescended to by some other engineer who though he knew more than me because he was a man In my experience this isn't "because he was a man" but because he was an engineer. And from what I've seen it also has nothing to do with you being a woman. Engineers tend to be condensing, and will do so indiscriminately. Or said different being "condescended to by some other engineer" means they are treating you equal…

Perhaps, but I've seen it directed towards numerous female engineers, from less senior engineers who were noticeably deferential to male engineers, at or below the seniority of the female engineer.

I think there's this perception amongst male would-be engineers that starts in college or earlier that women in that space are not sincere enough in their desire to become engineers, are physiologically incapable of doing the work at the same level as men, or that women have entered the space by means unrelated to the mastery of the materials.

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