rw140

I tend to be afraid of learning new skills. This is quite inconvenient, because I love using the skills and improving on existing ones. So I'm pushing myself to learn the skills anyway.

What I'm finding (and this may change, as I've only been doing this a few years) is not that the fear of new things (and being bad at doing new things) goes away, but that I can recognise it as something that will pass, and ignore it until it is no longer there. Because I've seen the pattern enough times to know that that sort of fear always goes away. And I have some shiny new skills to show for it.

Being watched feels kinda creepy. But being able to find the stuff you want is fun.

To a certain extent, this is somewhere where GUIs out-perform command lines - the hierarchical menu system that shows you the functionality available in a way that's fairly easily searchable. Maybe you could implement some sort of tree-structured help on the CLI?

I suspect he does enjoy development. Just doesn't want to do it all day, every day.

He writes in terms of 'enjoying solving hard problems'. If we can assume that's his motivation then 1) as long as his work includes hard problems he'll probably enjoy it and 2) being only allowed to work on the hard problems contained in the field of computing would be counter-productive.

I suspect the presentation was a reflection of the company culture... from the previous post in the series: "The culture and work ethic of Convergent had earned it the title the Marine Corps of Silicon Valley. (Not until I was older and wiser did I realize that this was not always meant as a compliment.)"

And "My boss, the CEO, had just come from a string of successes at Convergent Technologies..."

edit to link Convergent and Ardent re-edit: can't spell

I'm someone else who renames things after writing the code to start with. It's not that my understanding is incomplete - it's more like I'm using different parts of my brain for holding the general shape of the code and coming up with words to explain it.

If I'm trying to get the shape of the code down before I lose it, then I'm thinking about what it does and how it does it. When I'm naming variables etc I'm thinking about explaining what it does in a way that's clear to me now, me later, and whoever else has to understand / maintain my code.

May well be true, although there's a difference between being introverted and not having an opinion.

There are no shortage of extroverts who aren't going to let not having anything to say stop them from saying it. On the other side of the equation, if you manage to persuade your introverts to share their conclusions, you can get a beautiful signal-to-noise ratio.

Actually, I find confident people much easier to evaluate - over time it's pretty easy to tell a bullshitter from someone who knows their stuff. When talking to people who hedge their bets too much (or worse still, don't speak up at all unless I have the time to prompt an answer out of them), I'm left with an unclear idea of their original position, so it's much harder to decide whether to trust them.

My favourite people are still those who state their conclusion, but will happily rattle off the list of assumptions they used to get there as well as how confident they are in that conclusion. But those people are pretty rare.

Tessellated hexagons might be interesting - they have the advantage of being closer to a circular target.

Apparently I'm not the first one to think of that - a quick check threw up http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5805157.html

Well, I've not been employed all that long, no-one's waved a study at me, and I don't know so many girls in my field that I can figure this out just by talking about it to other people (I'd have to talk to an equal number of boys as well, but for some reason they're a lot easier to find).

I already have one (fairly minor) failure under my belt. I seem to have got away with it. I'm still in my job, still working on the same kind of stuff I was before, and no-one told me not to bother my pretty little head about that bit because I'm clearly not so good at things like that.

Yes, I think everyone gets problems if they fail. But my worry is about second chances, and blocking off areas of computing for other people.

Someone I know made an off-hand comment about every girl who has worked in this department has worked on the UI. I don't know if they've ever had a girl on the build team. I don't know if they've ever had a girl working on the really low-level stuff. There certainly aren't any at the moment. Is there an underlying current of 'girls are better at the touchy-feely UI stuff'? Do girls overall really tend to work better with UIs? Am I comparing teams with a high turnover with teams with a low one? Am I trying to generalise from too little data again?

So, let's have a hypothetical opportunity for me to go and work on some arbitrary low-level stuff. Maybe it's to do with networking protocols. And maybe for one reason or another I'm blindingly obviously no good at it whatsoever. Will this affect my ability to go into unrelated areas with similarly few past examples of successful ladies later? Will it affect Alice (who knows not just about networking protocols, but also basic cryptography) when she is hired next week? Will she then have to work harder than Bob to persuade everyone that she is competent in that area? Maybe I should play it safe and work on something that is less challenging and that I know I can succeed at. After all, if Alice fails as well, then Eve may be looked over entirely. And that would make me feel really guilty. So the penalty for failure is higher.

Of course, there's a good chance there is no bias whatsoever. And I'm fairly likely to take a few risks. But you don't need actual bias for this to have an effect. If there is enough fear of bias you'll end up with too much risk-averse behaviour, and thus under-performing ladies.

Sure, "so long as you can deliver". Are we going to be treated equally when we fail? Even worse, are we going to be treated as representatives of half the species (someone's already linked to that XKCD cartoon). It may be paranoia, but it doesn't help.

PS. Mostly I try not to guilt my co-workers about stuff. I don't think it makes them or me any more productive.

You could try 'Hi, everyone'. I suspect it depends on who you have in your audience. Personally the special case irks me more than a general 'Hi chaps', or 'Hi guys'. It simultaneously singles me out and wastes my time.

I wouldn't generalise too far off this list, though. It looks like an amalgam of things that annoy different ladies. I only picked out 5 of them that I agreed with.

True, but not necessarily the case here. I'm an introvert who is getting significantly better at acting outgoing when necessary, but being sociable seems to keep a similar level of effort.

They are different skillsets, but they aren't mutually exclusive. I work in a company which has dual career paths - technical and people management. At the bottom of the career ladder, you have OK programmers with OK people skills. This is the minimum you need to work effectively within a large team. Over time you improve both areas, but specialise in one. We end up with managers with technical backgrounds (which helps a lot in that they understand us and we respect them), and architects who know how to manage a team.

"For example, it would have been interesting to see 20 pictures drawn by girls and 20 pictures by boys, instead she only presented one each." Well, yes, but to me it looked like she was trying to show a typical example from each category. This is a presentation, so the emphasis is necessarily on story-telling, rather than detailed analysis. I would imagine she could have shown a whole load of charts and graphs, but I that would have been rather boring.

"Honestly, I don't believe that girls are always only thinking socially, nice and eco-friendly, while boys dream of guns and bombs." Neither do I. But I think there's a useful point she was making about thinking about the way things interact / what they allow users to do, rather than programs that work fine by themselves but do not play well with others (every morning I load a bunch of stuff and watch them steal focus from each other) and implementing features because it's quite cool that you can do this thing we'll find a use for it later (yay, bloat!).

"Also, where are the campaigns to make more men become school teachers and kindergarden workers?" I don't know. We should probably ought to have some, but expecting them to be provided by the tech industry is a little optimistic.

Yes - their sample selection is a little interesting. As their definition of conservatism included valuing hard work, I wonder if all the study has shown is that 'if you work hard, then you don't have to be as intelligent in order to get into the same university as someone who works less hard'.