Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

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I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one of them said: “I built a fiber-channel network in my basement,” and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail.

At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people. I liked the work. But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free. Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me.

I actually think some portion of this is strongly culturally determined. Women focus on the private stuff, and I don't think it is just because our brains are full of estrogen. I think a large share of this is culturally/experientially derived.

The guy who built the neural network? That may have been his means to deal with a failed romance. He just didn't say that because his love life is not the business of his office mates. This is a distinction I think men are taught to make more than women: These people you work with? They aren't your friends, your BFF, or your soul mates. These are just people you WORK with and if you bond with them, you need to bond over the WORK.

At least, that's my current working hypothesis.

Also, just because one male engineer built a network in his weekend doesn't mean we all do. I spend my weekends doing stuff with my kids.

Well, not last week, when I went to SHA-2017, but there was a surprising number of children there. 10% someone claimed, which is way more than I'd ever seen at previous hacker festivals. Clearly nerds and hackers are having love lives and kids these days. And although the majority was absolutely typical white male nerds like me, there were also a lot of women.

And that's the core issue, I think. It doesn't have to be a perfect 50/50 split, but women and minorities do have to be welcome. Explicitly so, if there's any history of sexism and prejudice. If women leave the industry because they don't like the content of the work itself, that's fine. But if they leave because they don't like their co-workers or the atmosphere, then you've got a culture problem.

Explicitly so, if there's any history of sexism and prejudice.

Actually, they need to be implicitly welcomed, not explicitly.

(For clarity's sake: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/less-exclusi...)

And I apologize for sounding argumentative. Thank you for your great comment, much of which I agree with.

As a man, I'd never presume to talk too deeply with a coworker about their personal life.

It's a gross violation of the boundaries in every sense of the term.

Long way of saying I agree with you, I suppose.

In my experience, male co-workers talking about their relationships tend to fall in three categories:

* they talk about how hot women are (which makes me a bit uncomfortable, because I don't talk about women that way),

* they just divorced and talk about how all women are bitches (which makes me even more uncomfortable)

* they talk about their kids (which is often awesome)

I'm happy to say I've never experienced the first two.

I've never experienced any of them, but I'm happy about being ignorant of the first two.

I agree with you in part - I find the biological explanations very unsatisfying given the many peculiar things we are socialized to do (proms, engagement proposals, baby showers, amongst many others, likely do not find their origins in our genes).

An analogy I thought of while reading this was that of a broken random number generator function. We're more likely to assess the software/environment in which the code is running than to blame the underlying computer.

This doesn't change my overall conclusions, but I think the role of work colleagues in personal friendships is field-dependent, and even then, workplace dependent. In my industry, some work groups spend inordinate amounts of time together, whereas I would rather go home at the end of a work day. These differences don't map cleanly to gender composition.

To be clearer about what I mean, this is something I wrote recently:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/07/public-priva...

I wrestle a lot with such questions.

This conclusion seemed particularly insightful: "Where men need to prove they are good and caring people who aren't merely using you, I need to prove this is a formal, public sphere relationship, not a private and personal one. "

It reminds me of something one of my professors, a black man, said about how he decides to dress. He felt like he had to start with the assumption that many people would be afraid of him if he were dressed casually, so he compensates by dressing a bit more smartly than even the average professor.

Or they were raised with the belief that if you have nothing nice to say then you say nothing. Maybe they hear about her personal issues all the time and are sick of patronizing her. As you said, they're coworkers not your BFFs. That has nothing to do with being a woman or a man.

> I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free.

This is how you get good at it. If you don't like it as a hobby, maybe it's not a good job fit for you.

I disagree. There are many excellent programmers who don't do it as a hobby. I used to, especially before I was a professional programmer, but I can't find the time or energy for it anymore. Better keep it professional and do something else as a hobby.

Or any woman, apparently, since the author never met one who has a pile of electronic components stored away for some day.

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