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> the only woman engineer on the team spends the night sipping on her drink quietly wishing she found these topics more interesting or wishing she took more CS classes so she could appreciate the intensity of the conversation

Women might have different interests than men, but why do you think they might be stymied by technical conversation? She's an engineer the same as the rest, unless she was hired because of tokenism she should absolutely be able to hold her own in a technical conversation.

A friend graduated from a bootcamp and she loves coding. But sometimes there are conversations that goes deep into SSDs vs HDDs, bitcoin mining, and other topics unrelated to work that alienated her and she couldn't participate.

I was trying to share what I learned from speaking with a few of my friends. Put yourself in the shoes of a woman who wanted a career change and joined a bootcamp. You learned the necessary skill and took an engineering job on a predominantly male team. Already, you are self conscious about not having a 4 year CS degree. Now they consistently talk about cryptography, hardware, that doesn't seem to relate to your work. As if gender wasn't an issue already, now there is also a technical exclusion.

I am also open to suggestions. Is this an okay scenario?

Are there stats that there are more women who career change and come from bootcamps or don't have as rigid technical backgrounds? Are bootcamp graduates not technical enough or interested in technical subjects? These generalizations are unsettling to me.

There's a general flow of conversation in any social situation that organically arises from the composition of the group of people involved. Unless your friend's teammates are jerks, she should be able to easily influence the direction of the conversation. Perhaps instead of suffering from an issue because she is a woman, she is simply too shy. Maybe this industry or society at large is bad at including shy people general.

How would a manager even know where to direct the discussion if the person who feels alienated doesn't speak up during the conversation? The last thing I want is a manager to try to point the discussion to movies, pop music, fashion, makeup, or whatever else women are supposed to like. I would absolutely be offended.

OK, that makes sense, I thought you were talking in the general, not discussing a particular subset. But I'd argue the issue is more due to not having a 4 year degree than being a woman in a male-dominated field, though that certainly doesn't help. I don't know the statistics, are women in tech more likely to be from bootcamps than men?

However, this does remind me of a phenomenon in child psychology, where girls in a classroom setting are much more likely to participate in class if it's an all-girl class vs a mixed-gender setting. I believe the literature says this is largely due to some learned cultural behavior in early childhood, but I can't remember the specifics. I don't know if this phenomenon persists into adulthood to some degree, but your example reminded me of that.

The percentage of bootcamp grads that are female is much higher than the average across tech (~30% for bootcamps v ~15% across industry/university). I don't think bootcamps make up a large enough group for that to make it 'likely' that any given woman is from a bootcamp, but it probably means there's a few pockets where all the women at a company went through a bootcamp.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3050171/where-are-the-women-in-t...

I think this can happen to a lot of people, depending on the discussion. Personally, I've taken almost no CS classes; I'm a EE by degree and moved into programming (mainly embedded) on-the-job.

So when people start getting into heavy CS discussions about algorithms or whatever, that can alienate me to an extent too. I've read the basics and all and picked up a lot, but only what I really needed to know for this kind of work. I'm more interested in getting hardware to work and programming near the hardware level than some B-tree or whatever.

Another thing that really alienates me: when men at work talk about sports. I don't give two shits about spectator sports, and I think they're a complete waste of time. I'm a male, of course, but unlike many men I really hate sports and sports fanaticism. I don't see this too much at work (as it seems my attitude toward sports isn't that uncommon among men in tech), but I do see it now and then, especially with older and more outgoing/managerial type men.

So I don't think it's entirely a male vs. female issue: certain groups of people working together will frequently have certain common interests, which will not be shared by other people in that workplace. If I worked with a bunch of women and they all started talking about some current TV show, I'd also be alienated, because I don't own a TV or watch any current TV shows (except Game of Thrones...). Should I insist that women refrain from talking about TV shows? That seems a bit extreme.

And if someone in tech isn't interested in tech and doesn't like conversations about tech and feels excluded when others talk about tech... remind me again why they are in tech?

"Tech" is a very broad and very diverse term. If an employee is design focused and a group is having conversations about the latest Linux kernel API change there is a very good chance the design focused employee won't be able to follow the conversation making them feel left out. Not to discourage design field, they have their own deep technical niches.

Not everyone can participate in every thread of a conversation but it's important to change the topic often enough to allow people to contribute meaningfully to the conversation.

Thank you for understanding.

> The most important for me is directing social conversations.

You want the manager to micro-manage a happy hour? Sounds like torture.

Why would a work group be going to a happy hour in the first place? That's bad because it assumes everyone is OK with drinking alcohol. Now you're alienating Mormons, ex-alcoholics, people who choose not to drink, and people who get physically ill from drinking alcohol. How about keeping workplace socialization at the workplace instead? Or perhaps at a decent sit-down restaurant where people can order food instead of getting liquored up and potentially saying or doing something embarrassing or harassing?

Food restrictions can cause alienation as well, unfortunately. I agree that that the expectation that socializing=drinking is a problem.

> Or perhaps at a decent sit-down restaurant

And what about people who choose not to go to restaurants?

Seems like you have a chip on your shoulder about drinking.

A "chip"? So what's your answer to people who get physically ill when consuming alcohol? Don't get a job? Because in American drinking culture, they're going to look bad if they don't drink with everyone else at one of these stupid happy hours.

Sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about people who don't participate in American drinking culture and binge drinking.

I become ill at the smell of alcohol.

I sit out the usual Friday bar nights and have to turn down the occasional offers of alcohol from coworkers that don't interact with me frequently (and thus either don't know or have forgotten that I don't drink)

They get to go get wasted at the local bar. I get to enjoy my Friday night playing video games alone. Win-win. If they do something like GoKarting I get dragged into something I'd rather not be doing since I feel obliged to attend since I sit out of the many alcohol-related events.

I'm agreeing with Chris2048 here. Sounds like a chip. They can enjoy their alcohol without me being a downer about it or forcing the majority of the company to comply with my wishes of non-alcoholic expenditures.

If they have fun drinking, let them have fun I say. I'll go home and play some video games.

Right, and then you miss out on important work dealings and decision-making, you're seen as "not a team player", you're passed over for promotions, etc. Staying out of all work "team-building" events eventually looks really bad for you and will work against you.

Maybe I've been extremely fortunate - but that just hasn't the case at where I work. I'm very clear about why I don't attend these things and people are very understanding.

Perhaps it is because I have a very visible impact on my department or maybe because all decision making is done during office hours. The bar is for play and karaoke - not to talk about work. The company culture treats any work discussion during team outings as taboo. You won't be punished for it but you'll be told kindly to shut up and have fun - work will be back again next Monday. Talk about it then. :)

If I had to guess, that probably plays a huge part into why the company doesn't have those sort of problems.

>The company culture treats any work discussion during team outings as taboo. You won't be punished for it but you'll be told kindly to shut up and have fun - work will be back again next Monday.

Many places are not like this.

How do you know? Is this fact, or fear?

If you deserve promotion for a non-social role, but aren't because you don't go out with the team, that is not good, but that's a tangent to banning work related drinking events.

Another question is, do you go to non-alcohol related work events?

> So what's your answer to people who get physically ill when consuming alcohol

My answer is it's a rarity, and a distraction that you included it.

> Sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about people who don't participate in American drinking culture and binge drinking.

Does it? Strange given I neither binge drink (which isn't the same as a drink after work anyway, and so I reiterate that you have a chip) nor am I American.

I couldn't care less if people don't want to participate, I'm not going to suggest they be forced - unlike your suggestion that people be forced not to.

When your team visits this hypothetical restaurant, will you ban anyone from ordering steaks, because because a baby can't chew it...

Yes, but how else would you build empathy and diversity amongst your team? Say you hired a minority who has different interest with the majority on the team. If left unchecked, the minority will always feel excluded (unless they have a strong personality).

If I were on a team where management tried to micro-manage conversion toward some ideal of "diversity", then believe me, "empathy" would not be the emotion I would be feeling.

Okay, make me unhappy. I'm just another toxic male. I can go, right? My leaving will just make the rest of the team more vibrant or whatever.

Well, I produce 10x more code than the rest of the team put together, so good luck.

Hi, please take the time to self evaluate and see if your approach will lead you to where you want to be in life, whether it be having alot of money, being happy, being a great parent, etc. From your comment, I'm getting this vibe "If people don't like me, fuck it. I'm better than everybody else."

It sounds like you are a very intelligent and motivated person , so lets think about this logically.

Here's an alternative scenario: lets say you take the time and effort to get your team to like you and inspire them to improve to your skill level. If you are the 10x engineer, then produce code at 1x and spend the other 9x learning and doing what it takes to inspire the rest of the team to get to your productivity. If it takes the team 1 year to get to your productivity and the team has size of 10, then the team collectively will have 100x productivity by the end of the year. You would be able to accomplish way more than what you could have accomplished yourself. (Obviously, I generalized the math. But you get the point).

Counter argument: "I don't plan to stay in the company for that long to reap the benefits"

Fortunately, if you inspire somebody to become 10x the person they were, you would have made a lasting impact in their lives. Companies come and go, but relationships stick around. If you leave to do your startup, chances are these 10x engineers would be more than happy to join (at various stages of success during the life of the startup).

This is all I have time to write. I hope this helps. Good luck.

Someone else already addressed the issues with your "woman = less technical" implication, but I think the meat of your topic is actually going in the right direction.

People who are good at socializing know how to have conversations with anyone of any background. Many know when people are being left out and will go out of their way to shift the topic or make it more inclusive to the person being left out. If you've ever been at a party where you didn't know anyone, and someone who you didn't know before introduces themselves and is able to make you feel more comfortable being there, then you probably know what a relief these natural socializers can be.

Unfortunately, many engineers (myself included) are not natural socializers or otherwise well-practiced in the "manners" required for creating positive social situations. Folks like me are much more interested in topics I know a lot about and have strong opinions on, so it can be hard to break away once one of those conversations start, even if I know people are being excluded by having this conversation.

I think the important thing here is that socialization should be organic, and if one person is obviously uncomfortable or left out, the polite thing for anyone to do is to bring them in somehow. Every person on the team should strive to improve their ability to make people from different backgrounds feel included, and you're right in saying it's a skill that can be improved through work. This applies equally to women, minorities, immigrants, new people, anyone who doesn't feel like an "in-group" in a particular situation.