572 karma · joined July 25, 2011
Currently a mildly-employed Youtuber.
I work on one of the edges of those engineering efforts. On one side I see first hand how detached engineers at Google are from the things they build and on the other I see people's lives being defined by using those products / services. That impact is real and I think it's at a level that very few googlers respect because they're not lucky enough to be on an outside edge like me.
These smart, awesome people never get to be "trained programmers" because attitudes like this allow casual, often unintentional behaviors to ruin their days.
Claiming this is a funnel problem is short sighted. We definitely need people in the funnel, but we also need to ensure they have an amazing time as they integrate into tech culture.
I've been programming for a while and I'm pretty sure I've never heard someone gender a function
In response to your issues...
A) If you really wanted, you could make HTTP requests to the REST API (https://www.firebase.com/docs/rest/api/) and that would not force you to use any long standing connection or any more battery life than other options.
B) I think this is a matter of preference. Firebase chooses simplicity over power in this case. The vast majority of developers and applications don't call for custom conflict resolution strategies. Firebase lets you focus on your app, not on these fine-grained details.
C) The SaaS-only argument is valid if you have a huge ops team who you can dedicate to running a complicated, stateful, realtime system like Firebase. However, 99% of the time, we don't have this luxury, so we pay the Firebase team to do it. I look at the SaaS-only aspect as a big plus. I know they're running Firebase in an ideal situation on ideal machines and I don't have to think farther than that. Once again, it just lets me focus on my app, not the details.
I can't disagree, if you have very low-level / complex sync needs, Firebase probably isn't a good fit for that app, but in terms of upgrade path, it doesn't have one because it is unique and exceptional. It's a little crummy that there aren't competitors you could hop to if Firebase went away, but Firebase doesn't have many competitors because they do such a good job and blow others out of the water when they pop up.
Regardless, I don't know your app, so it could very well not be a great fit, but it definitely has legions of benefits over Pouchdb/etc/etc in a huge number of situations.
That being said, I didn't say we shouldn't speak. I said we shouldn't speak for others. This article wasn't written as "here's how I feel when this happens" it was "here's how women feel when you do this". Generalizing in this way is just as sexist as any of the issues she brings up, if not more so, but because she wraps her sexism in good intentions we ignore it.
It's hard to qualify disliking certain adjectives as worse "shit" then anything else you have to go through as a professional. We're specifically talking about microagressions here, not firing someone for not sleeping with you, not excluding women from events, etc. These are not major issues, they are small things that make some people uncomfortable.
I understand it can suck when a company's culture doesn't fit, I deal with a fair share of bad culture fit as I consultant for many companies. I'm a 20yo male bisexual who doesn't drink or smoke. I just spent time with a company where the entire staff went to the bar and I wasn't just invited, but pressured to go and I felt very outside when I had to repeatedly refuse. I had a different client make unwarranted comments about us cuddling and he brought up multiple times who would be the big spoon (I'm unsure if he knew my orientation, I suspect he did). I later had a very negative falling out with him, was it because I ignored his advances? Who knows. My point is that we're all different and you're extremely unlikely to mesh perfectly with every member of a group, but being successful often means putting aside these things and doing business regardless. It sucks, but it's an issue that will always exist and isn't exclusive to women. It's not called work because it's super fun, it's called work because you put up with crap and all these "microaggressions" are on the level of all this other crap.
To your final disagreement about me saying that men feeling bad are stereotyping women's needs/issues, imagine you take what I've just told you about me and imagine we're hanging out one night and we're quite close, so you want to share some story about your sexual exploits from the night before. You start to tell your story but then think "well, he's bisexual, I probably shouldn't tell him this story because he's confused about his sexuality and trying to figure himself out". That's you stereotyping, obviously. It's no different than saying "she's a women, I shouldn't call this software sexy". If you knew me personally and I had said "don't talk about sex around me" then you would have grounds to think that. Similarly if I'm working with a women and she says "hey don't call me a guy" then I say okay and I don't do that anymore. But by assuming she'd be offended, I'm stereotyping.
The goal of communication isn't to make everyone feel great all the time, you shouldn't err on the side of inclusion, you should err on the side of openness, so if you say something that makes someone feel bad or out of place, they can say "hey bud, pls don't". By shuttering communication and wildly speculating about what all people of any group dislike or are offended by, you're belittling their individuality and overall moving communication in the wrong direction.
Some women might be offended by saying "guys" but some others might feel that it's a term of endearment (as it is probably intended) and they might feel saying "men and women" is silly. But I don't know, because I'm a dude.
What I do know is that every single successful person puts up with crap. That crap is often months of working on a project with a manager you dislike or putting in extra time to get things done when you'd rather be sitting around eating Cheetos. Work is a constant struggle and if you're throwing in the towel on your passion because someone called something sexy, then you clearly weren't meant to work with people, let alone in tech.