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foobar_femme

35 karma · joined August 12, 2017

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foobar_femme··on Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
Honestly, I found the best way round this was to use IM or now Slack to pre-game my male colleagues one-on-one to create a "cloud of agreement". Typing helps! It really is the most neutral way to present.

That way, one of them usually presents my ideas himself, or all I have to do is provide the seed and the whole idea crystallizes.

If you have any experience with the Socratic method, it's highly useful for convincing your less woke male colleagues they thought of it themselves while allowing them the pleasurable coup of answering your questions in front of others. Think of it as being a midwife to thought: a grubby job but try to think of the lovely babies...

The downside of this is it takes your managers a lot longer to figure out that you are an original thinker. The upside to me is that it's more important to see my ideas executed than to wring my hands over the details of how they gained consensus.

foobar_femme··on Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
As a longtime female engineer at fintech startups, there was absolutely nothing new in Damore's memo. The only thing that gave these tired arguments any cachet at all was Google's name.

And I really wish Google hadn't fired Damore. Special projects exists?!

For years I have worked with and continue to work with guys who think just like this. In fact, thanks to Twitter, I now know all of my followers who also follow Damore. Thanks for that?

When I interview you and ask you a technical question, you don't meet my eyes and then you answer the guy sitting next to me. When I present my own ideas in a group, you ignore them; fine, I'll pregame males colleages and let them present my ideas instead. If I brainstorm as part of the group, you think I'm asking you to explain basic programming concepts to me. You probably think I'm not that smart. And that's OK. Good news: getting things done requires multiple skills. One of mine is overtaking you from behind.

Nobody ever thinks of promoting me first. Whatever I get, I work twice as hard and twice as long for it as you did. The existence of a female networking group does not represent an unfair advantage: it represents barely any advantage at all, on the basis of the ones I've attended. And anyway, I don't have time for that, I'm trying to figure out what's caused the unexplained performance reversion over the past two days.

Whether you think I am a diversity candidate or not, I am here to code. That is all. Statistically speaking, biology does give me one edge: longer life span. I'll imagine I will still be here doing just that long after everyone else has forgot James Damore exists. ;)

foobar_femme··on Why I Was Fired by Google
Brilliant. At last Michael O. Church is not Google's silliest hire.

If only they had not fired this doofus and turned him into an alt-right martyr. They could just have assigned his silly ass to Special Projects and let him ride out the attendant humiliation.