esperluette

I like the idea of Saint Backup Day much better than world backup day ... but why not make it Jan 3, though, the feast day of St. Genevieve, the actual patron saint of disasters? Also in early January most people are in a "let's get organized" mood, anyway.

You can make an educated guess, usually very easily. Not necessarily the clothes, but definitely the shoes, accessories (especially bags, watches, and jewelry), tattoos, and teeth, hair, and skin. Richer people spend more on accessories (and repair their shoes!) and taking care of their bodies, because they can. And it shows.

"Girlfriend Impact" -- bleh. Yeah, I know, 99.99whatever9% of IT workers, esp in the ops role, are guys, but would it have taken so much extra thought to put "family impact"? Or even "balanced life penalty"?

And I say this as someone who has spent a ridiculous amount of money on tech books in the past year (probably four figures) and who is giving up 1.5-2 nights a week, on average, to tech meetups.

another nice big list of these at Wordnik: http://www.wordnik.com/lists/contronympho

Unless you are actively lactating, trying on a bra is more like trying on a shirt than like trying on a pair of boxers.

And if you ARE actively lactating, the last thing you want to do is go try on bras.

It's a ROI question: all that time, week after week, for two hires, one who lasted a year? That's not a great ROI for a good engineer's time.

Loved, loved the "I let him dig the deepest hole he could imagine by doing my best ditzy/derpy voice and just saying things like "they want me to ask about the load... average...?" bit. I do that too. Honestly, if you're patronizing me in the interview, you're gonna be insufferable to work with.

The best candidates light up when they have a chance to explain something cool, no matter who is listening and get even more excited when you ask a question about a detail. Good candidates are patient and thoughtful and ask YOU check-in questions ("so now we have X, right?") Mediocre candidates get a bit lost, sometimes overshoot or undershoot the right level of technical detail, but muddle through and sigh in relief at the end. Asshole candidates try to dump a bunch of smoke and mirrors on you, say shit like "well, if you haven't taken an algorithms class ...," wave off your questions, and pretend they don't have enough time to answer the question "seriously."

If you think in your engineering career you're never going to have to explain "how something works" in at least some detail to a semi- or non-technical person, you are not going to have much of an engineering career.

Many of the most prominent perfumers are men. Frederic Malle comes to mind, plus a large chunk of the ones on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfumer#List_of_notable_perfum...

I think the danger is situational. If you're the kind of person who will give up when you see someone swiping your idea, there is danger. If it makes you work harder ... then it might be an asset. :-)

You have to have faith that it's not just your idea that's valuable, but your idea + you and your experience and what you bring to it.

I actually did have someone steal my idea. I was interviewing for a technical co-founder and talked to a guy who seemed really interested. However, after a couple of conversations I got a weird vibe from him and went with someone else. (Oh, and I had $1M in funding at this point, & I was looking for a full partner, not someone to "just build my idea.")

A few months later I find that he has started a similar company, with a similar name, and is out raising money. He even said that he came up with the idea when he was 'inspired' by his young daughter. (Dragging your kids into your lie is always scummy.)

(This was for a very unusual startup idea, btw, not a game or social app, etc. I am also a recognized expert in this field, 15+ years of experience, national newspaper/magazine profiles, blah blah blah.)

He ended up getting money in Singapore and launching a pretty sucky site that got zero traction. It's been a couple years now and I haven't seen anything else from him (but I've been too busy with my company to really look).

At the time, I was LIVID but after I cooled off I realized that 1) it was pretty great external validation and 2) someone who would "steal" my idea (and make up a story about it!) would never be able to execute, and I was proven right about both things.

My company is now nearly five years old and we're working on our third product extension off the original idea. :-)

It's sad but true that some members of a minority always find that it's in their personal best interest to be the "good" exemplar of a minority in the opinion of the majority. Think about women who enforce the patriarchy as so that they can be metaphorically patted on the head by men (Phyllis Schafly, Ann Coulter). It's extremely common.

I have to disagree ... there are a lot of folks who don't learn well being thrown in at the deep end of "mess around until you understand it", and for whom a Bretian visualization of data would be useful over and over again (especially for bugfinding). And what data needs to be visualized is different for different people; e.g., I can easily visualize most regex, but a lot of people love tools like Rubular because they can't. But I have a lot of trouble intuitively understanding functions like the graphical ones in Bret's examples.

As to "dumbing it down", I think programming can definitely have mass appeal, but there's a lot of "I had to learn closures uphill in the snow both ways" going on among seasoned programmers -- in the same way that current medical doctors often valorize their hours and hours of being on call as residents. A trial by fire may seem useful but in the end you just get a lot of burned people. But unlike MDs, there's no protective guild for programmers ...

I bet you get a lot fewer rape & death threats than the average woman who uses her real name on the internets. "Verboten and punishable", sheesh.

Barely Ok: a subgroup of employees organizes it on their personal time (meaning: not using work email to send an "all@" message, or using work email at all). It's not discussed in the office, and no important work topics are discussed at the event. (So the people who didn't go don't hear "oh yeah we discussed that at Hooter's and decided ...")

Not OK: even if the event is independently organized, pictures posted on company site or circulated via company email; tweets or social-media postings about the event including the company name (including "at Hooter's with my buds from Company X!") all send the wrong message.

If you and your dudes from work HAVE to go to one of these places (keep telling yourself it's "ironic"), you should treat it like buying ointment for an embarrassing disease. Something you do quietly at weird hours hoping nobody you know sees you.

Really well-written and extremely pragmatic -- the best way to discourage inadvertent bad behavior is to provide a face-saving way for the genuinely clueless to get on the right path.

That someone was Socrates: "The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves. So it's not a recipe for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you're equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth. Thanks to you and your invention, your pupils will be widely read without benefit of a teacher's instruction; in consequence, they'll entertain the delusion that they have wide knowledge, while they are, in fact, for the most part incapable of real judgment."