You May Have Seen My Face on BART | Hacker News Reader

You May Have Seen My Face on BART

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87 pointsweston25 comments

I think it's a dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9993353

> I didn’t ask for any of this attention, and I’m rather uncomfortable with all of it.

I was on the front page of the New York Times for being "Hooked on Gadgets". I asked for it by agreeing to be the center of the story, didn't know it was going front page when I started, and it still made me uncomfortable when it ran. At the time, it was the most commented story in the history of the New York Times. I stopped reading the comments by people about 20 comments in. My wife made it to about 100 comments before she had to quit.

People say horrible things to each other. They judge each other, they make blaming statements about each other, they speak for other's feelings, they refuse to listen to the real feelings, or thoughts, and love to rationalize away whatever issues they have with themselves that they see in others. At the end of the day, it's easier to fault someone else and draw blame to them than it is to accept their own faults.

When you go online, you open yourself up to these people. There's not a lot you can do about them other than give zero fucks what they think or say. That's a tricky thing sometimes, because you can end up hurting people who care about you while trying to avoid those that don't. I wouldn't say I'm great at it nowadays, but I'm better than I was before as a result of having dealt with it.

It's a process, being excellent to each other, and all I can do is try harder at it tomorrow than I did today. :)

My college did this to me. Hastily thrown together event "Hey, let us take some photos of you for the website". A year or two goes by, and I've left town (graduated), and friends start emailing me photos of my face on the side of a bus. Big campaign, apparently.

To make it better, I looked pretty much like a sociopath in those photos.

And I'm sure I signed some forms saying that they could do this, but they also rushed us through those forms because we were apparently short on time.

The negative opinions about this ad that strangers feel so compelled to share illustrate solid examples of the sexism that plagues tech.

Actually I didn't find the comments highlighted in the illustration all that sexist. It seemed to me that that commenter was not so much weighing in on what engineers are supposed to look like, but rather attempting to analyze the semantic content of the recruitment ad, because most ads/corporate presentations are so heavily designed and the people depicted are often professional models/actors, whether working on commission or selected from a stock photography database. Think of all the generic business websites where everyone in the photographs just happens to have culturally ideal proportions, have perfect skin/hair/teeth and look impeccably stylish. When I see that I don't think that the company is made up of fantastically good-looking people who happened to be photographed at their desks, but that the people depicted were chosen for a mix of attractive looks and professional presentation.

(Now, I don't mean this as dismissive of sexism in the tech industry, which I think is a huge problem, well summed up by the real-life experiences mentioned in the article.)

At the end of the day, this is just an ad campaign and it is targeted at engineers. [...] News flash: this isn’t by any means an attempt to label “what female engineers look like.” This is literally just ME, an example of ONE engineer at OneLogin. The ad is supposed to be authentic.

Yeah, but 'authenticity' is itself a commodity in the world of advertising, and advertising is fundamentally about turning things into commodities. Paying money to display images of people along with a commercial message in front of the largest audience possible is fundamentally different from presenting a portrait of an individual. Here, the commodity bargain is 'be part of a group of friendly cool people, in exchange for performing this kind of work.' I don't believe that people are reacting to you so much as they are responding to the superficiality of advertising in general.

In fact, if you knew me you would probably know that being famous is one of my biggest nightmares

PTSD aside, aren't nightmares where we are most ourselves?

I think there is another issues with these ads.

"My code helps Fortune 500 companies keep their data secure" vs. "My team is great. Everyone is smart, creative, and hilarious"

This gives the impression that the woman is not excited about the 'engineering' work, but instead about the social aspects of the workplace.

This gives the impression that the woman is not excited about the 'engineering' work, but instead about the social aspects of the workplace.

That's a weak objection at best. Talking about how smart and creative your team is is obviously praising their engineering capabilities.

You say that, but "hilarious" isn't normally a word I associate positively with engineering. "Isambard Kingdom Brunel's bridges were hilarious!"

No one is saying their engineering work is hilarious. The idea is that they themselves, the human, is hilarious. We don't judge a person solely based on their technical skills but based on the quality of their character as well. You can work with a genius and hate the job because he's mean. Or you can work with someone who is quite average but a good person to be around and you might love the job.

No one gets called out when they say Elon Musk is charismatic, and you can't argue the man isn't good at what he does. Having a sense of humor says nothing about your technical ability but says a lot about how enjoyable you are to work with. Just based on your comments here, I would guess that I would not enjoy working beside you. If you don't associate the character description of "hilarious" with anything positive, you and I would not get along. See how that works?

I was responding more to the grandparent's comment that the woman's quote suggests she is more interested in the social aspects of the workplace than the engineering work (versus the quote from the male engineer, which seems more obviously about technical aspects of the job). Smartness and creativity certainly are traits I would appreciate in an engineer, but hilarity is not. All three, however, are traits I would appreciate in a human. Condescension and snap character assessments aren't normally traits I appreciate in anyone, so you're right, we probably wouldn't get along.

>This gives the impression that the woman is not excited about the 'engineering' work, but instead about the social aspects of the workplace."

It only "gives that impression" to people who love being offended by everything and anything.

Bullshit. My work helps Fortune 500 companies keep their data (and money!) secure, but that's not what makes me get up in the morning and go to work. I go to work because the people I work with are extremely good at their jobs, so solving most any challenging problem with them would be interesting.

Well, that's sort of a good thing IMHO. A recruitment ad should answer the question of 'why would I want to work there' and an environment full of smart, creative, and hilarious people is certainly a good reason. I find it a refreshing change from people claiming to be 'passionate about maximizing database performance' or something.

I am slightly confused. So what happened?

People assumed the billboard used a stock photo, rather than a picture of an actual engineer, because she didn't conform to the physical expectations of an engineer. See the picture of the facebook comment thread in the article. It turns out a lot of engineers don't conform to the physical expectations of an engineer. A lot of them are posting to Twitter under the hashtag #ilooklikeanengineer - https://twitter.com/hashtag/ilooklikeanengineer

Conference organizers should probably keep things like this in mind when booking male-dominated lineups ("we just can't find any woman engineers" is a common refrain).

Ah thanks. From the text I inferred she is transgender or something.

same here, not sure what the big deal is after skimming through it

The big deal is that people are judging her capabilities based on her looks. There are also people who are behaving inappropriately towards her in professional settings as a result of her looks (it isn't clear to me that this is a result of the ad). She gives two very clear examples of this unprofessional behavior. Given the limited information I could see the first being a poor attempt at a joke. However, it made her uncomfortable so it definitely wasn't appropriate. The second example is the kind of thing that can get companies sued and employees fired.

Definitely thought the two examples of unprofessional behavior unacceptable, but those happen to people of all professions.

It's good that these behaviors are getting called out but it seems like people are unnecessarily harsh on the cs field on these issues(almost feels like it's a trend to complain everything about this field, maybe that's what happens when it gets popular)

Just because there is also unacceptable behavior in other professions doesn't mean we should ignore it in ours. Change needs to start somewhere and creating awareness of the issue helps to encourage change. Hopefully more people in all professions will speak out against this sort of behavior.

Agree that we shouldn't ignore it, just feels like cs is made the scapegoat sometimes

>"I am a passionate self-taught engineer, extreme introvert, science-nerd, anime-lover, college dropout"

Is engineering not a profession? How can you be an engineer without completing your education in an accredited engineering school?

Software engineering does not require a degree at an accredited engineering school

Engineering is a profession and a title, separately or together. You can graduate with a degree in engineering, at which point you can call yourself an engineer no matter what your job is. Or you can have a job with the title "engineer" at which point you can call yourself an engineer for as long as you have that job title. My job title was engineer for a while, then I switched to consulting. When people asked what I did two years ago, I said "I'm an engineer". Now I say "I'm a consultant". It doesn't matter what my degree is.

If companies pay you to engineer their products, youre an engineer.

Yeah, there's a fair bit of controversy on this topic. In California at least, I believe that the use of the title "engineer" is regulated by the so-called PE act:

  http://www.bpelsg.ca.gov/laws/pe_act.pdf

Regarding public opinion, I myself have a degree in "Computer Science and Engineering" and have worked as a "software engineer" for 21 years, but my engineer friends don't consider computer engineering to be "real engineering", and my scientist friends don't consider computer science to be "real science". :)

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