Survival Tips for Women in Tech (2018)

> Making your work public.

I cannot stress this enough. Regardless of who you are, holy hell some people WILL steal your work for their own.

My first internship manager in late 1980's took my work and patented it as his own! I found out about it years later when I was hired permanently. I confronted him and he told me interns weren't allowed to patent. I learned this was false years later, but he had already left the company.

In a second instance, that same internship, I also wrote some code that was published in a corporate whitepaper and the motherfucker replaced my name with his in the comments. Different guy, same company.

I don't think making it public would have mattered because I was just an intern and we were treated as shit, but thinking back on it now makes my blood boil because both the patent and the doc are public record (USPTO) to this day. Maybe today I would have a fighting chance as an intern.

If you have a good idea, make sure top brass know it came from you. There's no guarantee it won't be stolen, but it gives you a fighting chance the more people know that you did it.

Heh. 30+ years later and I'm grumbling about it again. lol.

Also, FTA:

> Avoid everyone who is really enthusiastic about you being a woman.

I always found it creepy how some guys fall all over themselves to remind the only woman on the team that she is the only woman on the team. It's like, 'yay, thanks for noticing...??' but ... hmmm...

I'm guessing it is just a guy new to workplace diversity, and give him some slack. In my experience, it is usually older men (50-60's) who are getting the swing of the new generation of "sexism is bad, mmm'kay" and really want to show they are trying but know they were inherently trained by society to think in 80's/90's way about diversity. I get it.

I like the list, but don't like the adversarial tone. I don't think it's me vs. men all the time. Some men are jerks, most are not. More actionables:

* Remove "just" from your vocabulary, emails, talks, everything. "I just want you to be aware that ..." "I'm just doing this to..." "It's just that ..." "Just making sure ..." Trim 100%.

* Bake cakes, participate in office pot-lucks or whatever. Never be part of the setup/cleanup crew (have you noticed they are almost always women, admins type). This makes you a jerk, true, but disassociates you from the soft-skills crew. Until the cleanup crew becomes frequently and mostly men, stay away.

* You're eventually going to have to fight for something you care about. Pick battles 1) that you can win; 2) with someone above your weight. How do you become a blackbelt? By beating a blackbelt. It's no thing to gainsay some design decision made by the FNG, better to convert a decision made by someone seen as your technical equivalent or superior.

There is always at least one guy in a team that makes life difficult for a woman in a dev team. I feel bad for the amount of shit women have to deal with to survive as a software dev.

Sadly required, but seems very honest and relatable. Would probably share with any woman in tech.

As a secondary point, I find several of these applicable to me as a guy too, although that's not the main point of this.

I also really like this formatting and list style - heading and brief to-the-point description.

This is an amazing collection of advice and experience. I'm not a woman in tech but I have worked with and managed plenty. I really appreciate this list being shared and publicized. Hopefully it helps some people stay in the field longer than they otherwise would have!

> "On Bad Days try to lose yourself in the work, try to remind yourself why you’re in this business"

Really? I'd say that the best "survival tip" in a challenging industry is to act professionally, and another way of saying this is that "losing yourself in the work" should not be reserved for bad times!

"HR is not your friend" - fuck off with this bullshit. If you're actually being harassed, say something. And your colleagues should be your team, not your enemies. This rivalry thing in companies is pissing me off.