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Comment by jgj | Hacker News Reader

Interesting read, but I have to say I'm a little put off by the conclusion

> [...] if I could have substituted them all for traditional booth babes, I would have done it in a heartbeat. Then I’d be free to have a great time being what I normally am at conferences: a curiosity, an anomaly, and an excitable nerd.

In my opinion, this trivializes what was, prior to its inclusion, a worthwhile lament. The conclusion makes it sound as if the author is ultimately dismayed not that she was dismissed as being unworthy of unadulterated engineer-speak, but more so bothered by the fact that she was no longer the center of attention and no longer unique. I'm sure in reality she cares much more about being the former, but it was quite a shallow consummation to an otherwise interesting piece.

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Mmm, I think you're reading that wrong.

Her point was that marketers are hiring people as "developer evangelists" (hint) to show up at conferences in plain clothing, attract male attention, and sell products.

This is a pretty basic marketing technique used by probably every brick-and-mortar on the planet. Look at the way that clothing stores hire employees.

The author's issue is that before this became mainstream, she was easily identifiable as not a marketer. She wasn't in a bikini, and wasn't obviously selling anything. She was just in plain clothes attending a conference.

So while she was, in her words, a curiosity, people could reasonably assume that she was attending because she was a dev, not because she wants to "evangelize" at them.

Now that "hire a pretty, bubbly girl to talk to people for you" has become common in tech, people can reasonably assume that the "curiosity" in the crowd is probably there because she was paid to be there.

I don't think that was the point of her statement. I think she was basically saying "At least before, the booth babes were obvious, and other women were assumed to be engineers who belonged there for their technical merits. Now, companies are sending attractive, non-technical female product promoters and others outside of the engineering field dressed in street clothes. Now, it is harder to tell which women are engineers and which are PR/marketing/booth babes/whatever." Seems a valid observation, though I think the real issue is that women need to vet themselves as engineers at all, while it is assumed that men at a conference are technical unless proven otherwise.

Yeah, but you could (1) wish all non-technical women went back to dressing like hookers, or (2) wish there were more technical women at the conference or that there was some other means to distinguish between techie and non-techie.

Don't read too much into it. It was just a wry observation that something that looks very much like progress actually made her life harder.

OP here. Trust me. I wish there were more technical ladies. I don't enjoy being "an oddity," I've just accepted it as a part of life. Thanks for bringing up the point though, I edited the post.

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