Arete3141

1. Many women want the option to stay home and raise their own children, at least for a few years. If a woman marries an otherwise-wonderful man who earns half her salary, she will not be able to easily stay home with her own child while maintaining their former standard of living. So there are some logistical concerns here that just aren't there for men. Perhaps in a country with a lot of paid maternity leave, these issues would not be as pronounced.

2. I have trouble with the blanket statement that women "want established males" "biologically and evolutionarily speaking." We live in a society. Peoples' behavior in a society is not some mystery that can only be deciphered by looking at chimpanzees. Our society has some very messed up rules about who gets to have the most power. People respond to and strategize around their current reality. If that reality were to change -- like, if we had free childcare or 4 years paid maternity leave, or some other radical shift -- many of these calculations would "magically" fall away.

If you work in an office with non-dev's -- like QA's, analysts, regular folks -- ask them. And then listen to what they say.

As a QA, I frequently have the following experience:

me: "This won't make sense to people."

dev: "Oh, but it has to be this way b/c {reasons}"

me: "People are going to get confused. They're going to use it wrong and make errors."

dev: "No, our users are smarter than that."

{6 months later}

dev: "We're redesigning our interface because the users found it too confusing."

FWIW, I've been sensitive to gluten for years, but when I traveled in Spain -- I was fine. Then I came back to the US, and tried wheat again. Nope.

I would not be surprised if the way we're processing / spraying our wheat here is giving some folks problems.

On a similar note, "fear of not looking smart" can make it hard to ask a question. Often when I'm in a meeting and they're going deep into some technical thing I don't understand, I (nowadays) assume that everybody else is confused, too, and I ask the question. And then once I do, everyone else relaxes and follows up. But until that ice is broken, we're all sweating bullets trying to look like we get something we literally do not understand at all.

This is less software-related, but one trap smart folks can fall into is being afraid to seem not smart. Like let's say an authority figure is trying to do something that doesn't feel right to you, and you say something about it. And then Mr. Authority Figure says, "Come now, be reasonable or be rational." The fear of being perceived as "irrational" may stop you from standing up for yourself or someone else.

I had that thought at first, too. But then I thought about it: she has worked on the subtle shades of meaning in words for years in order to translate things. So the more subtle significance of the role of translator is also something she would have pondered for a lot longer than most of us. Perhaps, if someone has thought deeply on a subject and worked in a field for decades, we might listen to what she has to say instead of dismissing it out of hand because it is unfamiliar.

I wish I had known when I was younger that a lot of the people who shoot down ideas, minimize your creativity, and say "that's impossible" aren't smarter than you. They're just more insecure.

It's easier to say no to everything and look like a genius, then to say "I wonder...", and try, and fail, and try some more -- and perhaps (who knows?) actually be a genius. With all of the concomitant messiness and failures and actual real life kept in the mix.

I am also very interested in finding out more about the tech scene in Spain. Questions:

- Are there many opportunities for technical QA -- folks who know SQL, Jmeter, and other technical tools? What would salary ranges be for those types of positions?

- Are there tech scenes in smaller cities like Bilbao, Valencia, Seville?

- What is the culture like at Spanish tech companies?

Muchísimas gracias.

I also second the joys of a part-time job. One of the most productive periods in my working life was when I had a job that was 30 hours a week. I worked 6 hours a day -- so that forced me to get out of bed, shower, and become fully human -- and then in the evenings I had enough time and energy to make real progress on my artistic goals.

I even found that the pay cut wasn't a 25% pay cut, but more like a 10% pay cut, because with the extra time I had, I did more shopping and meal planning, and spent less money overall on conveniences. I could afford to do things the "inconvenient" way.

I wish more companies in tech considered offering part time jobs. I know there would be a lot of people interested in those jobs, and they would be super loyal employees because they would be psyched to have the chance to have a real life.

There are multiple factors, but basic discouragement, starting from childhood, is a big one.

100 years ago, when writing could make you a decent living, women were constantly discouraged from writing. Here's Virginia Woolf's character Lily in To The Lighthouse, dealing with nagging doubts:

"Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t write, women can’t paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it?"

At roughly the same time, women were often employed as "computers" -- that is, people who did complex mathematical calculations. It was thought that women were good for this more tedious math, thus leaving men free for the higher math to which they were more eminently suited.

So, to review: When writers could support a family, women were discouraged from being writers. When math skill was not connected with a good salary, women were accepted as being good at math.

Nowadays, very few writers can make a living, while mathematically-minded coders can. So today's generally accepted wisdom is that girls are naturally good with words (which doesn't pay), while boys are good with math and computers (which does).

The fact that women aren't in coding isn't a bug, but a feature. Remember the Eniac? Programming that was brutally hard, and it was all done by women, and there does not seem to have been a particular amount of money or glory in it. Now there's both, and that's why women are discouraged from joining in the lucrative boys' club.

Once code starts being written by robots and the average developer can't find a job, then you'll see the field fill up with women.

I tried living totally without internet access, and while I felt a lot better overall, I eventually had to give in. Nowadays phone books aren't usually delivered to homes anymore, so if you want to get in touch with a store or find a doctor's office, you need internet to search for it. Since I wasn't driving at the time, I couldn't just head out to an internet cafe when it was something important.

For similar reasons, I've had trouble detangling from Facebook. 10 years ago, if a friend was getting married they'd send out announcements -- now they just "announce" it on Facebook, and if you don't log in that week, you don't find out about it.

So part of the reason it's hard to disconnect is because the previous methods of staying in touch have atrophied in favor of these new, more toxic systems.

Nevertheless, I'm trying a couple of things (with varied success -- I really do much better cold turkey):

- Trying to reward myself with internet time after I score enough points in Habitica (aka HabitRPG)

- Trying to turn off the modem at a certain time of night like 10 pm (I find I sleep better too -- might be coincidence but I've noticed the difference many times)

Ultimately what would help me would be a pay-per-use internet plan versus an "always on" internet plan. If I know that my plan fee increased after 20 hours / month, I'd have access when I needed it, but then I'd have to "save up" for special occasions like streaming a show. As of yet I haven't found an external limit that doesn't also make life too logistically challenging.