Why did I know they are fake?
One, I'm not handsome, neither do I work in those high status companies, why did they reach out to me?
Two, they look more like models than software engineers. Completely bullshit.
Not that I've ever done this. I always respect and obey the computer fraud and abuse act of 1986 vis a vis the section on unauthorized access to a computer system.
He didn't consider it unethical because "you'd have to be really really stupid to think that women are posting their face on a site like AFF".
I kinda thought exploiting the really stupid was still unethical, but his response was given that I worked in adtech, I wasn't really in a place to judge.
Which was hard to argue against, tbh, as I spent a lot of my time then either making popunders work again after Firefox released a new version that broke our old approach, or figuring out how to store our tracking data better.
But now that I've got a few years between me and adtech, I'm totally going to judge you hard, eug1505.
Isn’t there a huge ethical issue there?
> But now that I've got a few years between me and adtech, I'm totally going to judge you hard, eug1505.
I don’t want to put words in the other dude’s mouth, but I think he thinks so too.
Can I push back against this? It’s toxic as fuck. Being a woman in tech blows. You can’t be pretty or you’re considered incompetent and shallow. You can’t be ugly or you’re treated poorly for that.
It’s a loose-loose.
What does a software engineer look like to you, then?
i completely agree with you, a software engineer looks like a person who writes software. but that doesn't change the online experience that i have had as a man, which is namely, if a girl texts you, she's not a girl, and she certainly isn't your friend.
The reason that I ask is that your account is pretty new and this seems a little bit like stowing up discord on social media.
Regardless. There is a difference between a beautiful woman that can code (these are actually getting more and more prevalent) and the trashy looking profile picture that all of us instantly know is some kind of spammer or scammer in our DMs or our inbox.
The fact that they're portrayed as woman has more to do with the loneliness of many men in tech than anything else and pretending that this type of behaviour is non-existent is childish when it's clear that places like LinkedIn and Twitter could do a lot more to detect it and prevent it.
Read my comments. I have been discussing my job in Europe and my work with vectorised optimisations.
Seems like a lot of work for sowing discord, but you make the call.
> It’s toxic as fuck. Being a woman in tech blows. You can’t be pretty or you’re considered incompetent and shallow. You can’t be ugly or you’re treated poorly for that.
One of the best programmers I've ever worked with was a woman. Former Google. I'd prefer not to discuss how attractive she is because it doesn't matter to me. I'm sorry you're having a rough time in Scandinavia and, from your comment history, formerly the USA. I've worked with non-aggressive teams from different places, but I've also observed women being mistreated in both Canada and the USA as well.
That said, I've seen ASD men mistreated as well. Unfortunately there are jerks out there and we can all try to do better.
He didnt say they were random girls like we meet every day, he said model. When men contact me on linkedin for insurance products and they look like Calvin Klein underweare models, Im like "hum" too.
This reminds me of a billboard campaign to hire developers that ran a few years ago, and featured a few SEs, including one woman considered attractive. A lot of people said things along the lines of "this isn't what a real SE looks like", along with many... less nice things. Of course, she actually was a full stack engineer at that company. This prompted her to start a campaign (#ILookLikeAnEngineer). For more details read her blog: https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/you-may-have-seen-my-fa...
Note to some commenters: I'm not saying that you can't tell a fake profile from a not fake profile. I'm saying that a sentence like "they look more like models than software engineers" is implicitly hinting that software engineers are not attractive females. That's the objection that I believe teux was raising, and it's a valid one.
With your line of reasoning, people would be defending phishing emails because "some representatives have bad grammar skills". Think of how lubricous that would be in a discussion on phishing.
I'm specifically saying that saying a phrase like "they don't look like software developers" just because they're good looking women is in itself a bad (and false!) meme to circulate, which in itself is a bad thing, regardless of context.
Just. Saying it sucks to be a woman in tech and statements and sentiments like this are part of the reason why.
Still no one answered my question: “What does a software engineer look like then?”
I think it was a combination of me being not explicit enough and touching on an obviously sore subject for others. But I don’t have the energy to unravel it or debate.
That's not a gendered stereotype, though, that's all technology people.
Of course woman in tech can be pretty. Grace Hopper is 100x more pretty than any model in the world.
And by sex I don't mean the copulation act, but just seeing very handsome and attractive people that trigger your primal mating desires, works in advertising when trying to convince people to buy something from you or give you something (a product, a service, an idea, their time, their money, their attention, their assistance, etc.)
It's why many recruiters, especially in tech, tend to be the attractive female type as it works well enough on the majority male demographic this career attracts.
And why most successful sales people, and to a large degree, managers who managed to climb 'the ladder', tend to be on the tall, athletic, attractive side.
This is completely anecdotal, but I've never ever seen conventionally short males in upper management in any company I worked at so far. It's as if it was a 'jocks club' and you needed the right physique to join.
It it the stereotype that Asians are good at STEM?
I worked with someone (she was on the sales team) who looked like a model. Her mom was a model--go figure. So while unlikely, it does happen.
We had the near opposite experience. We were looking to hire a "Modelling and simulation developer" for Matlab. And some ladies would somehow only see the "modelling experience desired" part and ignore the other technical requirements and flood us with their portfolios of various photo shoots.
I'm sure the hiring guys hated it.
Here's a VPN company advertising "a VPN server located in a region that offers cheaper games, in-app purchases, products, etc." and if other VPN providers don't explicitly advertise this benefit, they know some of their customers are using their product for that reason.
https://www.vpnunlimited.com/help/solutions/saving-with-regi...
She also really, really good at her job.
Her profile on LinkedIn looks like what you describe.
They are both very conventionally attractive people, but it's not their image that makes them good at their jobs per se, IMO it's having the confidence and charm of a person who has gone through life always being attractive.
If a less attractive person had that confidence, charm, charisma, whatever you call it - and some do - they would also be successful.