Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

I wish the article connected the dots of her path from studying physics at the University of Pennsylvania to working as an SRE at a San Francisco tech company. It seems like that might be an interesting part of her story.

I loved the anecdote of her buying her own leather jacket when Uber couldn't be bothered to buy them for women. Brilliant.

The title is a bit unfortunate in that it makes her sound like an Attorney General but that's nothing to with her but the NY Time's Maureen Dowd who has a penchant for sensational titles.

View on HN

>Uber couldn't be bothered to buy them for women

Let it be known the manager who made the decision not to buy jackets for women only worked at Uber for a year, made a magnificent mess of SRE, and went back to Google with a more senior position. This same guy made a data science manager (who has a PhD in theoretical chemistry) take notes during his meetings, and who coincidentally was one of his only female reports.

Fuck you NSK.

The fact that the old Uber HR did nothing to prevent sexual harassment clearly puts the blame on (upper) management. Yet, the specific cases involved people lower down the chain, and it is indeed a revolving door between Google, Facebook and other prominent tech companies. The same bad actors are still around and just have moved on.

We currently have two physics doctorates working in the same department as me. The trajectory for both was the same - they wrote code as an integral part of obtaining heir doctorate, and realized they could 1) get a job today and 2) make a lot more money working as entry level SREs than as physicists.

They're both intelligent and willing to learn; traits that mattered a lot more to us than a CS degree. Both also moved to follow the job, and neither regrets it. One worked on her doctorate at CERN, the other at a US facility (I don't recall the name off hand).

Tangentially in the 90's one of my high school classmates got his masters in physics and was working on a PhD in electrical engineering when his research professor had him working on software analyzing state of Texas forestry data ( I thought this was a weird cross pollination). He preferred software to the difficult career path ahead for staying in physics (compete for work in labs /PhD/research/tenure or teaching until tenure) and after getting his PhD worked his way up from programmer to CTO of software companies in Austin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com