Caveman_Coder

I've told this story on HN before, but when I was first interviewing, companies would ask me for my GitHub/public projects/conferences/etc. and I would say that in my free time I'd rather be outside doing various activities instead of in front of a computer.

Turns out you can still take pride in your craft and be a professional without having to spend every waking minute coding. Some companies seemed taken aback by the fact that I'd rather be hiking or kayaking than working on some pointless open source project. It was kinda weird for me seeing their reactions though.

TLDR:

"...the American state of Arizona — a Republican Party stronghold — is poised to take the lead on energy storage in the country as it tosses up whether to impose an 80% clean energy target by 2050. The proposed clean energy overhaul, called the Energy Modernisation Plan, would require an impressive 3GW energy storage to be installed by 2030, meaning it would overtake California and New York for the biggest storage mandate in the country."

Thanks! The current role I'm in has me working on software that controls the electric grid...pretty cool stuff in my opinion, and it fits in nicely with my electrical trades background. Working mostly with C/Perl/Linux.

I'm not a wordsmith...

Plus, what would I write? It's kind of straightforward sexism.

1. White guy applies for job, no responses.

2. White guy reapplies and only changes name/sex to appear female, receives responses within the week.

3. End.

I could have also just changed my race and the experiment would have had the same results.

Sorry to hear that...

> I can't believe you were downvoted for expressing that merit rather than race and gender should be use for hiring decisions.

This is the new world we unfortunately live in. Words and their meanings are transformed to fit within the ideology ("it isn't discrimination if it favors women over men, or minorities over whites...")...

+1

I have first hand experience with this. As a normal working-class white guy with poor parents and no connections (I worked my way through school), I had a hard time even landing an interview at first. As a social experiment, I changed my name/sex from Joe/male to Joanna/female, kept everything else on my resume the same, and reapplied to all the jobs that didn't want me previously. Every single company that rejected Joe was overjoyed when Joanna applied. In every case I got a email within the week wanting to meet and interview me. It was kind of eye-opening. I didn't follow through as "Joanna" because the sexist hiring policies were enough to put me off working at these companies entirely. I eventually found an employer that wasn't sexist and have been happy with them so far...

I was pulling in 100K (base pay) as a tradesman, granted I was an operator, but it is still considered a "trades" position. Also, a college degree is not required in order to land most power plant/transmission/distribution system operator positions. Hell, you have nuclear power plant reactor operators making > 175k/yr and they don't have any degree whatsoever.

What about hunters? Should they have the right to have a gun?

> Was this an experiment you ran out of desperation?

Well, I wasn't getting any call-backs for a while, so kinda...I'd go check out the career pages and every single one of them had these various sections "women," "minorities," "veterans," etc...pretty much every category other than white guy from average state school that doesn't have rich parents or professional connections...then I clicked on one of the links and all it showed were "women in tech" and how much they supported women...all the pics on their website were of women...it was okay, I get it, you don't want/need any more white guys...I thought it would be funny to apply as a woman without changing a single thing on my resume other than the name...and lo and behold, I called emails/call-backs from every single company I had previously been rejected by...I'm not even kidding, same college, same professional experience, same extra-curricular activities...everything the same other than name/sex.

> When these companies responded to you (as 'Joanna'), did you proceed with the interview process?

I did not...if they were going to be sexist I had no desire to work for them at that point, plus it left such a sour taste in my mouth. I did find a company that wasn't sexist so I ended up going with them in the end.

It isn't just the "soft" roles anymore...when I first started applying for positions I got absolutely nothing when I was applying as a male...I literally only changed my name/sex from Joe/male to Joanna/female, reapplied at all the same companies and within the week I heard back from each and every company...they don't want average males...preference is for women now...at least from my experience

I did this with job applications when I was getting rejected using my real name and sex. I changed it from Joe to Joanna and re-applied. Every single company that turned me down originally called me back when they thought I was a female developer...so from my perspective, their shoes look pretty good...It was an interesting little experiment...turns out my experience was good, but my sex was wrong for the "desired" team makeup.

So doxing kids is your idea of doing "some good"...seems a bit weird to me tbh.

What exactly does the company do and how do they do it? It is kind of unclear and the "Our Mission" section of the website is one of those generic PR sentences that doesn't actually explain anything about the business...

That is exactly what happened with my wife when she was a developer. She only likes coding and solving technical problems, the problem was her entire team was women and promoted this "yay sisterhood" groupthink, even to the point of openly talking about how they hired my wife so they could keep the team devoid of any males...she hated it so much and ended up going to a more technically-inclined and less sexist team before leaving the tech industry for good. She always said the "women-in-tech" groups did more harm than good and thinks its just one big "women/POC-in-tech industry" that unfortunately won't be going away anytime soon since there is now so much money involved.

Yes there are "diversity" hires, that is, people who are hired not based on their technical skill, but based on the desire of management to have more women/POC on the team. There are often financial incentives (bonuses) ties to improving diversity numbers, so there will of course be skepticism when a female junior dev gets promoted to senior dev, then manager in a two years. I've been on hiring committees where the team gave a candidate a low score on technical ability and said "we don't want this person" and because of some desired biological trait they posses, they were hired anyway.

That being said, I've seen it with males as well, but it has been more of the one guy on the team gets his MBA/college buddy hired kind of thing. In both cases, employees would be rightfully skeptical because of outside influences in the hiring/promotion process that are trying to purposefully achieve some end goal.

My wife, who formerly worked as a software dev, hated this aspect of the industry because there were so many women-in-tech groups that were trying to help (a.k.a. coddle) her achieve something she could easily achieve on her own by her own technical acumen. In similar vain, I've gotten jobs because of who I know more than what I know before (in my case it was because I'm a submarine vet and the hiring manager was also a former submariner), and yeah, it does undermine the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing something on your own.

Exactly...my wife struggles with the judgement of her former co-workers/classmates who deride her decision to forgo a career coding for some megacorp...I don't really get why there is such hoopla over going to work and trading your precious time for some money...I get why it is necessary, but not why it is celebrated as a defining thing about a person...a company can easily find someone else who can build/maintain their simple CRUD app, your kid cannot as easily find replacement parents.

I think it depends on how one defines "bullies"...

> "Ayn Rand basically turned enjoyment of other's suffering into a philosophy"

I'm no Randian by any means, but I'd still treat her ideas honestly. By your statement, you either haven't read her works, don't understand them, or understand them and you are simply being dishonest in your representation of them. In any case, her philosophy, whether it is correct or not, is not one that "turned enjoyment of other's suffering into a philosophy."

It turns out you can treat her Objectivist philosophy like any other philosophy and actually attack the premises of her arguments. Disagree with her supposed solution to the "is-ought" problem, fine, present an argument against it...in my opinion, that is a much better route to take than completely misrepresenting her philosophy.

+1

Conservatives at Google know this all too well. They've seen eng-misc and memegen and know that there is a very limited spectrum of "acceptable" opinion. The problem wasn't that political content was posted, as that happens all the time, it was that it was political content that was deemed to be "wrong."

Ask conservatives/GOP supporters how they felt after Trump was elected and the TGIF presenter tried to comfort the audience, which they assumed all voted for Clinton...talk about ostracizing your workforce that may hold a different private opinion

I'd say he gained followers by publicly saying that which "can't be said publicly"...people value honest and raw communication over the scripting corporate PR non-sense most of hear day-in and day-out.

Even if it is something we disagree with, it is still refreshing to hear people speak honestly about their real opinions on whatever the topic happens to be.

> "I would surely like there to be more women in CS. There are literally no women at my office, and the only women I met for the last six months are from HR. I am single, and so is about 50% of my coworkers - this is not a particularly good position to be in on the 'relationship market'."

The workplace shouldn't be your dating pool...

I'm familiar with the SCADA part (I work as an EMS/SCADA devloper), but before my current role I was actually an operator and we used "red-line" drawings in conjunction with the SCADA system to troubleshoot down lines/relays/lockouts/etc. They were all digital for ease of use. On the transmission side of the house we didn't use GIS all that much, but the DOC folks used it as their primary source.

> "Having to spend their free time studying just to keep up with the latest fashion, doing overtime, going through the interview gauntlet every damn time, getting shafted by incompetent business leaders and managers."

This is why my wife left the industry to be a full-time mom/homemaker. The problems she solves are more rewarding and the time/energy she spends on things are more worth it according to her. Why would she want to get out of bed every morning to churn out JS for some scummy corporation every day when she could be spending time with our kid, teaching them new things, hiking/backbacking/kayaking/fishing with them, etc.?

She's appreciative that I go to work everyday to pay the bills and sees her position as the more ideal one.

Check out Nietzsche's concept of slave morality...the way I see it now is that the various slave moralities are battling it out to see which one will be the dominant one...from that perspective it becomes kind of interesting and entertaining so watch the "Oppression Olympics"...who will win the Gold? Will it be women, or perhaps Black women, or maybe LGBTQLMNOP Iranians...who will win? Stay tuned...sponsored by GirlDevelopIt

It reminds me of the master-slave morality that Nietzsche wrote about. Unable to compete by the current rules of the game (master morality), minorities/women have adopted a new set of rules by which they judge people (slave morality), and that is seen by the weird "Oppression Olympics" we see playing out right now by the "oppressed" groups on the left [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality

> "When I pursue a career in this field, how will my coworkers perceive me?"

In all honesty, recently I've seen underperforming women get promoted to positions they shouldn't have been promoted to because of political pressures, so there is going to be some sense of "is she competent or is she a diversity hire/promotion?" They also might think, does she really enjoy tech, is she a nerd like me, or is she just looking for a cushy office job in software that the "diversity/women-in-X" groups are so loudly promoting.

I always thought it was more of an aversion towards credit/debit rather than an addiction to cash...

Do your system operators us GIS to sectionalize lines and troubleshoot transmission/distribution issues, or are you talking about the engineers/planners?

> "Another problem that must be considered is that utility workers, while highly competent at their profession, are not always great with working on computers."

You're absolutely correct on this point. When I was working as a transmission system operator the older guys (all in the 50s and 60s) would complain all day and night about the new "computer apps" that were introduced in our day to day workflow. They all preferred the old "pen and paper" way of doing things...Like you said, I'd be the who would end up putting the written switching procedures into the application we used since the older guys basically refused to learn it...