joycey

Source: https://twitter.com/starsandrobots/status/994267277460619265

Here's another example, written before this whole incident: https://twitter.com/corbett/status/994012399656042496

I remember there was an episode on the podcast The Daily where Michael Barbaro interviewed a reporter who worked on the Harvey Weinstein story. I think they said that The New York Times had tried to pursue this story in the past, but they really wanted to make another push for it this year to expose the unreported stories of sexual harassment.

I guess time will tell. Before Travis left Uber was without a COO, CFO, CMO, SVP of business, and SVP of engineering. I recall reading something about how they were having trouble recruiting senior level execs willing to work with Travis. If kicking out Travis can result in Uber hiring competent execs across the board, then maybe.

Anyone who says that this guy's opinion shouldn't matter should consider that he likely interviews female candidates, sits on hiring committees that evaluate female candidates, decides whether or not female engineers get promoted, etc.

As a former Girl Scout I think this is excellent. I think it'll be much easier to get girls to explore STEM activities if it's associated with an organization they're already involved in.

I can't wait for drones to deliver organic quinoa straight to my door.

Especially as a younger female engineer, I consciously try to avoid looking younger since people consistently underestimate my technical abilities. I'm also average height for a woman but typically the shortest one on my team, so if I show up to work wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and converse I can look even more juvenile.

Here's an example of how changes to your casual wardrobe can make a huge difference in how old you look: http://www.extrapetite.com/2010/05/reader-request-how-to-loo...

That's definitely true, and I would argue that "casual work attire" is even more ambiguous for women. One of the things I realized during my first internship is that "casual" and "casual work appropriate" aren't the same thing, even though every recruiter and manager I've spoken to has said to just wear what I'd wear casually on the weekends. There are some types of casual clothing that I wear--such as shorts, low-cut tops, crop tops, strapless anything, shorter dresses or skirts, etc--that are not work appropriate, even if this is not explicitly said or encoded in a company dress code. That being said, I would never sacrifice the luxury of wearing casual clothing to work in exchange for being able to make more straight-forward sartorial decisions.

The gender wage gap does exist. It's simply a fact that women earn less than men. The real question then, is why. Is it because sexist managers pay women less money than men? Are women less likely to negotiate their offers as aggressively as men? Do women on average have to work longer to get promoted (and consequently earn salary raises) and why does this happen? Is it because women are more likely to pursue careers that pay less? Is it because men are seen as more attractive when their income goes up but this doesn't hold true for women? Are women and men just biologically inclined to pursue different career paths? Does the wage gap exist because women are more likely to work part-time? Is it because women are more likely to choose to prioritize child-rearing over their career? Is it because society expects women to prioritize motherhood? Is it because managers pay women less because they assume women will be less committed to their career?

Some of these possible reasons are obviously more concerning than others. If the gender wage gap is 100% due to less concerning reasons, such as women simply making the choice to prioritize motherhood over their career, then you could argue that while the gender gap exists it's not a societal problem that we need to address since it's not caused by institutional discrimination of any sort. The reality is a lot more complicated and nuanced, and it's probable that there are several reasons that can explain the gender gap, that don't necessarily compete with each other.

As another user posted I would say the university Facebook meme pages have filled the void left by Yik Yak: inside jokes for people in your school. It's not anonymous, but the general use case and type of content is very similar.

Suppose the amount of sexism in Silicon Valley is average, or even below average. Do you think that means there's nothing we can do and that we should just accept it as a fact of life? I would say that so long as the amount of sexism is non-zero there's work that can be done.

True, but her claims haven't been denied by anyone. And a lot of her claims should have a paper trail. Either she was propositioned by her manager over corp chat, or she wasn't. Either she emailed HR these screenshots, or she didn't. Either she informed HR about the leather jacket incident, or it didn't happen.

These claims can be easily disproven by Uber if they were false, and the fact that Uber hasn't denied them says a lot.

> To generate excitement for X-Men: Apocalypse, 20th Century Fox ran a Sponsored Lens campaign that let users turn themselves into the iconic characters in the upcoming movie. In one day, people spent a collective 56 years playing with the Sponsored Lenses, which also featured the mutants’ powers. They also incorporated the Sponsored Lens into Snaps they shared with their friends, which yielded over 298 million views for the campaign and greatly amplified awareness and anticipation for the movie. The campaign resulted in a 13 percentage point increase in brand awareness, 7x the mobile norm, as measured by Millward Brown. More importantly, the Sponsored Lens also drove a 25% lift in theater-watch intent, over 3x the mobile norm.

Maybe the X-Men filters didn't get you to watch the film, but it certainly worked on others.

I believe the difference is that Apple/Google are okay with turning over user data on a case-by-case basis provided there's a proper subpoena from a judge, but not okay with building a tool for the FBI that will allow them to look at any user's data. The former is equivalent to allowing the government to open your mail and wander around your house provided that they've obtained a search warrant. The latter is equivalent to building a tool that would allow the government to open anyone's mail and wander around anyone's house without a search warrant.

If you're saying this to suggest that students from Stanford or similar schools are able to attain better offers, then sure. If you're saying this to suggest that companies give students from Stanford vs students from "worse" schools better offers, that's not true.

Sometimes the district lines can change depending on what year you enter the school, which could split up siblings, but I'm pretty sure this is still the exception and not the norm.

Regressive taxes are usually not very popular.

I haven't been able to find an academic study specifically looking at software engineering or tech jobs, but there are other studies I've seen that send out identical resumes (with just the name changed) suggesting that men are generally perceived to be more competent.

Science faculty reading resumes for a "laboratory manager" position prefer the male candidate http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract

Academic psychologists are more likely to suggest hiring the male candidate http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf

I use GitHub, but I concede Bitbucket has cooler features (free private repos, password protected repos, etc). It can't beat GitHub's UI/UX and community though.

I've contributed to the development of Signal 2.0, and you can also check out this blog post. https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal/

On Android you can use RedPhone for secure calls and TextSecure for secure text messages. These calls and text messages are compatible with calls and text messages in Signal iOS. Someday TextSecure and RedPhone on Android will be integrated into one unified product called Signal.

For desktop- https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure-Browser

I grew up in the Bay Area and that sounds about right. To live comfortably while raising a family in a South Bay suburb you pretty much need both parents making six figure salaries.

Here's something I think should get more love and is pretty relevant: a service that will automatically pay a percentage of Bitcoin donations for every submission to a GitHub repository: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/BitHub

So if you donate to Open Whisper Systems, you can see that your donations are going directly to those that are contributing to the project, and you get paid more if you're contributing more. I've sent in a few PR's to their iOS repo, and it'd be awesome to see it implemented in other privacy OSS projects. It's obviously not a perfect system, but I think it's a pretty cool way of funding OSS.

They are not eliminating testing. This was really bad wording. When I interviewed in Redmond with Microsoft, I was told that Microsoft used to hire SDE's (software development engineers) and SDET's (software development engineers in testing) as two distinct positions. Now, if you are hired as a "software engineer", you are responsible for writing software as well as writing tests. This was done to decrease friction between what used to be the "software development team" and the "QA testing team", and hopefully lead to faster software releases.

Facebook's ad revenue share has been increasing, while Google's has been decreasing. In just two years, Google has gone from owning 10x as much ad revenue share as Facebook to just 2x [0]. Facebook has much more data on its users (age, location, school, etc) than Google which allows advertisers to target their ads much easier. It seems like Facebook is better if you want to narrowly reach a specific demographic since they know so much about their users, whereas Google is better if you just want to broadly reach a lot of people since they have such a dominant presence on the web. It depends on what you want as an advertiser, but there's definitely people who would prefer to spend their advertising dollars on a specific demographic.

[0]: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Driven-by-Facebook-Google-M...

Obviously tech is more of a meritocracy than other industries, but I think this article is meant to be a critique of the often-told narrative that the tech industry is a pure meritocracy where everything is fair and even and perfect. Just because tech is doing better than other industries doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement.

You're right. The focus should be on ensuring men and women have equal opportunities, but the only way to measure that is by measuring participation. And from the disparity in participation, this either means that women have less opportunities than men or that women don't like tech as much and thus are willing to drop out at higher rates. I personally think it's some combination of both.

Well, that's the thing. You can't even prove that any factor has any effect at all. All I know is that from my anecdotal experience a lot of my male peers got into programming tangentially through gaming because they liked playing games and wanted to learn how to make games. And there's a fair amount of proof that young boys are more likely to play video games than young girls.

As for whether or not it'll rectify itself, I'm a little more skeptical. Girls are more likely to be casual gamers, and casual gamers are less likely to like games enough to want to build their own. Of course, this could easily be my projection bias showing, as I am a casual gamer who has never felt a strong passion to build my own game.

Sure. I found some fun stats you can look through. With regards to women dropping out of a software development role, it looks like women are dropping out at higher rates than men because they either want to pursue a non-technical career or they drop out of the workforce entirely because women are expected to be the primary caregiver. And when kids come along and a couple has to choose between sacrificing a husband's career or a wife's career, usually the wife will choose to leave.

> On women dropping out of CS at a higher rate I can't seem to find any hard numbers on how women are more likely to drop out of CS in college, but I imagine it is because if a woman gets a lower grade (such as a B) in a class she is less likely to major in it than her male counterpart [0]. While that study only refers to one professor's economics students, in my experience the effect holds very true. Women who receive C's (which are like harvard B's) are much less confident in their technical capabilities than their male classmates who receive C's.

> On women dropping out of tech after getting a technical degree After 10 years of experience working in high tech, 17% of males will quit and 41% of females will quit. These women will either take on a non-technical job or take time off the workforce (presumably motherhood). But at some point after 10-20 years of experience, around 56% of women will drop out. [1, page 18] It's a pretty well-documented phenomenon that women are perceived as the primary caretaker, and are thus more likely to sacrifice their job to care for children but here's how that, in conjunction with the fact that technical women leave for non-technical jobs, plays out.

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-wom...

[1] http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/ncwit_the...