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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine how frustrating that must be.

But I hate the concept of giving up fighting for yourself. Why not put a few people in their place? If that's just not in your nature, fair enough; but I say make a few guys feel like idiots by stepping up to the plate with your expertise. If they don't like it, that's their problem.

And if that fails, I like davidrobert's idea as well -- maybe wear a shirt that has a really nerdy programming joke on it. Or, better yet, the HN shirt ^_^ -- http://teespring.com/hntees

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OP here: I can put people in their place all day, but if my goal was to make friends, that's not the best foot to start out on.

And yes, I have a lot of geeky T-shirts. I don't like the idea of having to dress a certain way to be taken seriously, it seems very "un-engineering."

Fair enough, but don't give up! If someone is going to be put off by your knowledge, that's probably not someone you'd want to spend time with anyways. I hate the concept of having to pretend that you don't have a wealth of knowledge to offer just because you don't match a stereotype.

The shirt comment was more cheeky, not intended as a serious recommendation =)

Engineers are the group I would expect to understand this the best, since we tend to be proud of our disinterest in selling and marketing ourselves constantly. We want to do competent work, make things happen, keep things working, and move along. Our gold standard for correctness is that no one even knows we exist.

And yet on HN, I regularly find engineers who can't seem to grasp any of these things. Maybe it's because we're in the web age, when so much of our work is visible, or maybe it's because we're in the recession/post-recession era, when self-marketing is often essential to staying afloat in the economy. I don't know. We seem to have forgotten those core bits.

It makes me sad.

I hardly meet any engineers who are proud of their disinterest in selling and marketing themselves. That seems to be the reason to be an engineer anymore. It is sad.

People who want to do their work don't want to spend time "putting people in their place." And once you do, you haven't gained much - there's still many other interactions throughout the day, and are you going to put them all in their place? That's the point, and the frustration: she wants to spend her effort talking about technical things.

Sorry, putting people in their place is probably a bit strong for what I'm trying to say. What I ultimately mean is, it doesn't take long to prove you know what you're talking about in a conversation. Sure, it sucks that she has to do that at all, but I would personally think it's worth it versus the alternative options of just staying silent or playing the role of "just along for the ride with my technical boyfriend."

I feel like you're really missing the point. She did that, and it became tiresome. Then she wished she didn't have to do that, and wrote this post explaining why.

Got my HN shirt a couple of days ago, wearing it right now! Hooray!

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