I could never pass a FAANG interview, or get into UCLA, or run a startup. She’s clearly extremely talented.
Let's be honest - all anyone really has against this person is they don’t like that a conventionally attractive confident young woman with a social life and goals is doing better than they are. Good for her - I hope she keeps making them angry.
It's amazing anyone is taking her LinkedIn postings seriously. Making a startup is a LOT of work. People who are famous for doing that in college are mostly also famous for dropping out because they can't do both a company and their course at once. She's claiming she did that three times whilst studying nothing more specific than political science, and then decided none of them were worth pursuing, but instead the pinnacle of ambition was low level PM at Meta? She's using the word "startup" here to trigger progressive ideologies in recruiters, not to indicate an actual serious effort to build a firm.
I suspect you and dleslie are very lucky to not have encountered these sorts of #womenintech before (the hashtag is important here). The sort of people who describe themselves that way invariably have absolutely no interest in tech, let alone in founding companies - unless they get to be a #femalecofounder, which helps unlock more VC money for the male actual founder. These people get jobs by loudly deploying feminist ideology at any possible opportunity and will typically be found on panel discussions about #womenintech complaining that men don't take them seriously enough, invariably blamed on sexism and not, say, their lack of any interest in or knowledge of tech. They certainly will not be found enthusing about a new product idea they had or banging out code at 3am.
"all anyone really has against this person is they don’t like that a conventionally attractive confident young woman with a social life and goals is doing better than they are."
Lol, no. This is HN, a lot of us here have worked for big tech firms in much better paid roles, including me. Junior PM at a company the size of modern day Meta is nothing special. The reason we criticize her video is exactly because of that experience - because we know that such firms increasingly bloated up over time with people who were there for ideological reasons and not because they contributed anything to the team. Another poster called them "plant pots" which sounds about right. They contribute either nothing (best case) or strongly negative value (worst case) and for those of us who have had to deal with them it wasn't a pleasant experience at all. If you never did, be glad!
That really depends on many factors, like whether you've taken on VC funding.
Several of the student business ventures that I'm aware of among my own peers had founders that continued to finish their undergraduate. Some took funding, others did not; all had employees and clients, so they weren't paper tigers.
You really haven't shown a good reason why she shouldn't be believed.
> and will typically be found on panel discussions about #womenintech complaining that men don't take them seriously enough, invariably blamed on sexism and not, say, their lack of any interest in or knowledge of tech.
I suspect the irony is lost on you that you are stating this while arguing that she should not be taken seriously.
> Junior PM at a company the size of modern day Meta is nothing special.
In which case, her stated experience is more than adequate.
Fundamentally, neither of us know her and we're coming from very different places so there's no way to resolve the disagreement. You're taking everything she says at face value with the maximally generous interpretation possible. The video went viral because most people aren't willing to do that. Instead they're applying their priors based on experience with similar people. 23 year old TikTok influencer types who like to post clips of their easy life have a very high correlation with people who aren't entirely honest, and the #womenintech hashtag combined with humanities backgrounds has a very high correlation with women who don't care about tech at all beyond it being a gateway to an easy life. The video does nothing to dispel that impression and absolutely everything to reinforce it. It doesn't help that the PM title can mean anything from a Steve Jobs to a glorified meeting note taker.
But sure, if you want to believe that there's nothing wrong with that video and it says nothing about decadence at Meta then by all means, go ahead. Makes no difference either way. Others will draw their own conclusions.
She should be taken seriously because many people erroneously believe that can't be true.
I've worked in tech for decades, and this doubt you express about a fairly typical-behaving young woman is not unfamiliar to me; and it's rarely proven valid, among my peers. Rather, it's almost always an expression of the jealous misogyny of the complainant.
_Every_ attractive woman I've known in this industry has had to suffer endless doubt about their abilities, beyond what I consider normal.
The widespread scepticism you see isn't woman hating. It's directly created by people like you, who make blind deference of women an ideological imperative. Your defence of this girl is not any evidence of real technical skill or effort but that she's "pro-social". And then you claim - again without evidence - that anyone who points out the obvious (that she doesn't seem to be working very hard) must be motivated by generic sexist hatred. It's an absurd and deeply offensive slur that you can't recognize as such only because the left engages in it so often.
You're also conflating using tiktok with being passionate about tech, another switcheroo.
It's that exact attitude that leads to a decadent culture in which work and skill are devalued, people being hired because of their gender or ideology, and a large population of people who notice that. By the way, I've worked with women who are actually passionate about technology. They hate this stuff too, exactly because it devalues their own work and career. You aren't helping women with this sort of thing, you're hurting them.
Absolutely it is. However there's no evidence that she is at all.
> Hell, she's expressing herself using the technology platform most popular with her generation.
That's an interesting take. Most people would say the _social media_ platform most popular. I know a lot of people who use social media extensively, and it doesn't appear to correlate with a passion for tech. Does your experience differ?
Whilst I don't disagree that sometimes this view is a jealous misogynistic one, I disagree with "almost always". I suspect you've seen the behaviour enough though that you're expecting it and looking for it.
This women having no identifiable technical skillset is a fair reason to question her. It would also be in a man. If you can indicate otherwise (rather than just hand wavey "this is misogyny"), I an very open to being proven wrong.