usmeteora

no, I'm not sure I'm aware its complete crock, and that's why I was asking for feedback on my observations instead of making absolutist statements.

My observations are that I typically see a female CEOs income be the first thing that is ever brought up when they are in the spotlight but I don't ever see that as the first go to with male CEOs. In this case, I'm referring to reading HN for 7 years everyday and watching comments in response to all articles as well as the ones about female CEO, and noticing without(atleast consciously, but maybe I am subconsciously looking for it, or maybe as a female I'm just noticing it more) seeking it out, that over time, pay and negative things seem to jump to in comments first without delay.

Luckily for me I'm not overlapping my perceptions of reddit with HN on how reddit treated both Ellen Pao and Sheryl Sanders (she devil, satanist among other things are names they endured upon their first week in office).

Now CEO pay is clearly an issue across the board, but I would still argue that it seems to be brought up more quickly with female CEOs. Perhaps I've just noted it in the past few years, and perhaps I am wrong and it comes up just as quickly with male CEOs.

I am glad to see other companies now care about child care and it's relevancy in the economic feasibility of raising families and enabling smart parents of both genders to contribute to society in more ways than child bearing. Unfortunately, I did not see Apple jumping into back the notion of childcare needs years ago When Marissa was chastized for having a nursery in her office. I don't even know or have an opinion on what the best potential solution is for the childcare thing in general, but I know it was never a big public issue in the news until a woman went out of her way to take care of her children who was a CEO

I've always wondered why it wasn't an issue for all the men who did not have nurserys in the office for all the decades proceeding this. There has never been a concern about male CEOs not spending enough time with their kids, but if a woman wants to have a nursery next to her office, its conflated as unfair in the face of not letting employees work remotely from home, without any data about how many of those employees are doing it for childcare, when there was data that remote work did not seem to be meeting standards of remote work for competing companies who let their software engineers work remotely. Nevertheless, news articles had no problem joining these two ideas together, and commenters had no problem agreeing how elitist it was.

It's really a just an observation about the things that certain populations seem to choose to critisize and how much those criticisms seem to consistently differ when looking at say 4 female CEOs and 10-15 male CEOS consistently in HN news over the past 5-7 years.

I also find your statement hard to agree with that there is no bias with females in tech, in the face of a billionaire resigning today from the most highly funded started up in Silicon Valley this morning where as of three months ago I believe 1/4 of every VC dollar was tied up in Uber, after claiming that women being on a board will increase the amount of talking. In the face of this as well as Trumps attitude towards women, its a wonder any of them have the patience to deal with these billionaire men who seem terribly inconvenienced by the mere idea that a woman is on the board, and then the fact that now they have to listen to her talk.

To lightly sway aside the idea that this pervasive attitude at the helm of the Country Silicon Valley resides in, along with some of the most well funding prominent board members in the most highly funded startup in silicon valley, in business, as complete crock, without having any data points to back it up (I presume the population here is educated enough on Uber and Trump I don't need to provide data points here about their issues with female bias) is willfully ignorant.

I'm not going to go further into this, because I respect the HN community enough to know your statement is an outlier statement, and I don't need to convince people here bias against women in tech is ongoing pervasive issue, more consciously with men like I've mentioned, but sometimes I think subconsciously as a male dominated communitiy, we are prone to being more interested when a woman does reach CEO status, and maybe thats not HNs imposed bias as much as there is more likely to be more news about a female CEO (including but not limited to additional articles about how great it is there are females CEOs etc) and therefore we tend to subconsciously have more developed opinions about them because we know more about them, and things like their income and flaws never seem to go unannounced.

Myself a woman in tech, I find most forms of sexism Ive experienced are that maybe 1/50 guys are actual jerks and I can downright call them out on needing to fix their behavior. However, for alot of men I interact and have worked with, most actions are somewhat subtle, and typically not conscious or even intentional by men, and usually a genuine approach to them or bringing it up in intelligent conversation while giving them the benefit of the doubt and the time and respect of their ability to reflect on their own actions and analyze their own motivations, as we all should in all areas of our lives, that most men can concede and agree with me if I bring something up. Because I don't bring up every little thing, and I don't accuse all men of being sexist pigs the second I sense a bias I can perceive and therefore claim as sexist, I tend to make more one on one progress changing mens outlooks on how they may intentionally or unintentionally approach situations.

Both male and female CEOS should be subject to scrutiny on income situations, but I find it to be highlighted more frequently with women, which is unfortunate considering so few of them at this point get into the position where they have the opportunity to be scrutinized at such a high level, and furthemore, as described by a commentor validating an aspect of my observations with the "glass cliff" that when they do seem to come into leadership, the cards are highly stacked against them. Therefore, they have an increase in the spotlight for being a minority in their position, and the increased spotlight is more likely to end in failure given the situations in which they come into leadership where the company is literally on the brink of failure.

It seems alot of the critcism is focused on Marissa Meyer but I'm more interested in understanding how Yahoo got to such a bad state where they had to ask Marissa Meyer to come rescue the company, why it was in such dissarray when she got there and what led to her inability to save the company, from a logistical and business standpoint as opposed to just the constant banter about her being a horrible person and her salary being more than everyone elses (I never heard this criticism about the previous Yahoo CEO who let the company fall to pieces before she got there despite having similiar income)

Also, on a separate note, I've noticed multiple multibillion dollar companies who fall into disarray, have CEOs sit quietly in the background, hire a woman to come in and try to save it when to me the finances, business portfolio but most importantly jaded work culture and workforce of thousands of people seems hard to face, and then I see these women get relentless criticism, one particularly being related to their salary, which is comparable to the men previous to them in their position as well as men all over the world who earn a disgusting amount more than they should for their contributions as leaders of their organizations, but I only ever see woman CEOs in the spotlight for making too much money. Is there a slight bias here or is it just me?

Edit: I'd also like to add that I'm not rephrasing your comments as Marissa Meyer hate, just the thousands of non stop comments and general immediate focus on her income and failures as opposed to the failures of yahoo as a company that led to there being a new CEO (male or female) in the first place and what was faced during that time.

From what I know, Marissa Meyer worked many late nights for months going through every line item cost trying to understand what noone was hired under a man to summarize in the line item costs while she was pregnant, but the only news headlines I saw was how unfair it was to her employees that she was going to have a nursery in her office while asking her employees to not work remotely, when I'm pretty sure that decision was made purely based on her line item evaluation and the evaluation that the culture was lacking the accountability other software companies who had remote workers adhered to.

Nonetheless, everything she does or attempts to do seems to be immediately commented/overshadowed by how much money she makes or how its unfair she can afford childcare when noone else can. This is really quite bizarre to me being a woman because I never see overwhelming responses about a man making too much money or their negligence to employees about their ability to take care of their children (or criticism for having or not having nurserys in their offices because obviously why would I man need that when there is a presumed woman at home taking care of them?). Is there a relevance to this and why does it seem to overshadow and be constantly associated with everything she does despite not being the case for every other CEO who has been at the helm of a failed company?

yeh, I work in clean energy, and I'm all about it, which is why casual conflations or assumed relationships like this are irking, because all it does it add to the pile of things parties that still want to reject climate change get to point to show how many arguments are lacking in substance, this being one of them.

I guess its true just about as much as any other correlation can be made with anyone who purchases anything. The more valid and underlying issue I thought would be focused on here is the baby boomers who have paid off their houses, have nice pensions waiting for them and refuse to retire after living 30+ years at the same job, while our generation has to re-educate ourselves 3-4 times over throughout our lifetimes (the first time in college being 500% more calibrated for inflation than baby boomers paid to go to college, many of who didnt need to go to get a good job) and change jobs every 7 years to stay relevant, relocate to follow our industries and/or navigate around jobs where we find out there is not career progress for the next 15 years because our superiors won't retire, or require a large amount of effort to navigate around their information hoarding habits to maintain job security.

This along with the fact that as our generation is laden with college debt and switching jobs to stay relevant, the few who can manage to pay off loans, afford to live in nice cities where the good jobs are and set aside money for buying a home, are competing with baby boomers for starter homes as baby boomers downsize after kids graduate from college, so now many jobs, even most engineering jobs outside of software have us held back from higher positions and catalyzing change due to baby boomers, and their cash offers make it impossible for promising young couples or individuals to mortage houses.

The icing on top of the cake is the passive comments I hear from baby boomers about how we are narcissistic and lazy.

yeh, I work in clean energy, and I'm all about it, which is why casual conflations or assumed relationships like this are irking, because all it does it add to the pile of things parties that still want to reject climate change get to point to show how many arguments are lacking in substance, this being one of them.

I guess its true just about as much as any other correlation can be made with anyone who purchases anything. The more valid and underlying issue I thought would be focused on here is the baby boomers who have paid off their houses, have nice pensions waiting for them and refuse to retire after living 30+ years at the same job, while our generation has to re-educate ourselves 3-4 times over throughout our lifetimes (the first time in college being 500% more calibrated for inflation than baby boomers paid to go to college, many of who didnt need to go to get a good job) and change jobs every 7 on average years to stay relevant and avoid being too niche to niche ourselves out of career growth, which is the opposite approach of most baby boomers, relocate to follow our industries and/or navigate around jobs where we find out there is not career progress for the next 15 years because our superiors won't retire, or require a large amount of effort to navigate around their informaiton hoarding habits to maintain job security.

This along with the fact that as our generation is laden with college debt and switching jobs to stay relevant, the few who can manage to pay off loans, afford to livei nc ities where the good jobs are and set aside money for buying a home, are competing with baby boomers for starter homes as baby boomers downsize after kids graduate from college, so now many jobs, even most engineering jobs outside of software have us held back from higher positions and catalyzing change due to baby boomers, and their cash offers make it impossible for promising young couples or individuals to mortage houses.

The icing on top of the cake is the passive comments I hear from baby boomers about how we are narcissistic and lazy.

I know these are human beings, and they aren ot to just be thrown out as soon as it bcomes inconvenient for society, but moreso than ever I experience a bigoted increase of hatred for our generation couples with a lack of acknowledgement for our hard work, increase in adaptability and refusal and resistance to wanting to grow in any way to even slightly accomodate our generation, and justifying it all under the broad stroke that we are all wasting our lives away taking selfies, and our retirement funds away on avocado toast and urbanoutfitters clothing, most of which is untrue and irrelevant to the group in our generation that works harder and longer hours and puts more time and money in our education to earn stagnant wages, and for those less educated our age who don't have jobs, they have top struggle with being their own brand and selling themselves or personalities in the service industry because there are no factory jobs to send young men of low education into, and I'm sure the baby boomer generation would be experiencing the same issues if factory jobs were not there en masse waiting for them as well.

Yeh, well thats the problem with Jcrew now, their stuff used to last forever, and it was high quality and was edgy but had more traditional feels.

A good pair of Levis used to be made well too for girls, now everything is this new stretchy material and it's hard to find real denim anymore.

Alot of clothes are made cheaply for high trends and makeup does the same thing.

I don't do makeup and only invest in few high quality clothing and solid colours.

I actually have a really minimal closet, with fewer high quality things and I invest in just a few designers, and wear mostly nice white tshirts with jeans, and sometimes splurge on nice shoes as a girl. If you have a few pair of really nice jeans, and really high quality solid/button down shirts in black white/ 2-3 other colours that complement your eyes/hair/skintone then it's really easy to get dressed in the morning, saves time and I can wear the same thing at night (I don't really go out outside of work, but hypothetically if I did) I could change from flats or tennis shoes which I wear to work, to kitten heels and look like I'm ready for a date.

I'm not into being robbed by clothes and makeup just because I'm a girl. when I was broke in college buying cheap clothes got me by but I was not keeping up with trends.

Now I shop for a few high quality things, and Jcrew used to be a place I could do that.

For high quality minimalist girls clothing I recommend Emerson fry who used to have more tomboy stuff

and

Everlane: https://www.everlane.com/

I streamline my clothing. I don't make impulse buys, I buy nice jeans.

And anyways most girls who have trendy clothing end up wearing the one thing they like over and over again, so why not make sure everything you buy is that one thing you can wear multiple times.

Overall, I would say its not a conscious decision to be trendy but girls have to learn/decondition themselves to this underhanded sexism pressuring girls to feel like they need to buy clothes 600% as much just to not look frumpy.

hmm a working women in Tech who has been shopping/or checking it out, and sometimes buying things from Jcrew for 7ish years. Here are some notes

1. The biggest decline in Jcrew is regardless, regardless of their struggle related to styling, all the styles have gone down in quality of production.

Things just aren't tailored as well. The best thing about Jcrew, regardless of what your "Jcrew style" was, is that it was tailored well, and this matters alot for professional working women, skin tight pants, or pants that dip too low when you sit down, button downs too tight at the bust, all of these relatively minor things add up to you losing all the focus at your presentation or meeting because whether men are trying to be or not, if they can see through your shirt, or your underwear is showing, its a distraction.

jcrew was a go to place for high quality work clothes well tailored and classy. You obviously looked better being thin, but you did not need to be model thin to look good in the clothes and look professional and classy.

That has gone downhill and the quality of their materials and sewing has just gone down.

2. A few years back, Jcrew tried an edgier tomboy/working women look that was still sophisticated and classy, slightly leaning androgenous but still you had colors to choose from and it was a way to be tomboyish without wearing black to prove your "different".

They also tried some European influence and I liked all of it alot as a female in tech, and dressing down and androdgenously is comfortable for me. It turned out not to be popular at all.

3. So here is what JCrew did...they said "ok we can't do the edgy thing" and openly came out with a statement saying they were going back to the classics.

here is what they meant: they went back to housewife classics.

The dresses are for moms on vacation. It's the "sophisticated stay at home mom" look but unfortunately the women buying their clothes are mostly working women, and continually working women who are younger and more progrssive, so the whole "sundress to work" kind of thing was not working out.

They moved their work wear back to 1980's power women workwear, and the rest of the clothing to housewife clothing.

Turns out most working younger women late 20s/early 30's are neither housewives and they reject the queen B power women on wallstreet status style clothing.

JCrew fell flat, got scared in their new explorations and reverted back to the safest and most original lines they had, except this time they were lower quality.

It's a culture problem.

Question: why the job?

Do you need to make money, or are you looking for a validating project to work on/experience? If so I have some other ideas but first things first

1. Make sure you stay focused on grades and definitely do Computer Science/Computer Systems Engineering one or the other. Find a school that welcomes the geek like mentality. While I have heard Harvard and such has good Compsci programs, going to a geekier school might be helpful. For me, going to an Engineering school where 80% of the majors were engineers was kind of awesome, it was like everything was a programming club. If you are into that stuff it's fun. You will get a great education elsewhere, but not the same sense of community and experience. It's really fun.

So in the midst of everything, dont forget to make going to a good college a priority. Theres going to be lots of downvotes and explorations of whether college it worth it or not, but I say its worth it because of my following theme: the people

2. Like many have said "oh I did that once at your age and worked for some mind numbing job somewhere etc"

Don't do that here are some ideas

3. Do you live in a big city? If so, places like LA, Bay Area and NYC WILL hire you for projects if you go to the startup scene.

4. In big cities there are hacker houses, reddit meetup groups etc dedicated to programmers. Find and do all of those things and begin to meet other people in your community who program. Going to a hacker house and meeting college kids doing the same thing as you will give you unprecedented advice, let you work on projects with them and you may get an internship to one of the companies they work with.

I dont' want this to sound like political networking stuff, I'm saying that in this field the quality of your work matters, but so do the people. Real programmers will be impressed with you and find places for you meeting them in person you would not be able to find elsehwere.

In San Francisco there are hacker houses dedicated to highschool dropouts starting companies and the little sister of the 17yr old female Russian now woman who started Wanelo I think was the one who started it. In big cities you will find open minded things like this. I would focus on finding communities like this ALONGSIDE your search but you may find these communities find you more venues for work/interesting projects for pay/stock options than you initially anticipated.

I dated a guy who by the time he was a freshman in college had worked for multiple startups because of his programming abilities. He grew up in Boston, his dad worked at Oracle and he went to things like MIT startup bootcamp. Sure he was well connected but also motivated, and in big cities like that you have access to things like that.

5. Continue to beef up your github

For you, learn this lesson now, don't sell yourself short, every great aunt, manager, passerby on the street will want you to code their next unicorn app for them and say theyll pay you later once they "figure out the profit" stuff and its no uncommon for people in your position to get caught being overworked and underpaid on less than stellar ideas.

I would say your best bet is to find projects you like, dive into an area of expertise, VR, AI, compression, graphics, whatever you like and find people working on projects like that whether startups, bootcamps, hacker houses, etc and find those people and work with them and don't settle for working on anythign that youre not interested in and getting valuable learnign experience in.

This is why finding other people who can code is important, otherwise youll be treated as a gruntwork engineer doing data entry or writing someones "app"

6. Finally,

7. You can always make your own stuff opensource and host on a website, even if it doesn't make money. I would say at your age unless you really need the money to get buy and have to choose between working shifts at a restaurant or coding, to focus on your knowledge/interests and produce your own projects in areas you are interested in.

8. Again, if money is not number one priority, you can also use community service as a venue. There are probably businesses in your community, clubs or charities at your school etc who could benefit from some development, and then you can not have to spend time on extracurriculars at school just to impress a college, and turn them into real world experience for you.

nope, its not just an anecdotal example, its an entire country, and multiple countries in Europe do this now. They are collectively intelligent enough to agree everyone is better off when you enable people for success instead of punishment, torture, emotional and social isolation, abuse, lack of food and healthy outlets, and give them access to a job, a sense of pride, and allow them to reabilitate themselves.

but this is all based on a deep rooted belief that most people are good, and crime is usually a result of low income/and growing up in places stuck in a cycle of socioeconomic hopelessness (atleast the kind of crime people are imprisoned for, weve already established wallstreet bankers commit crime and dont go to prison), taking people out of these toxic environments and equipping them with a job where they are exposed to society and have a chance to rebuild their lives is beneficial, for them, and society as a whole.

In U.S. politics we have 300million people binned into two extremist views and prison reform is'nt trending hot on twitter right now and if it was it would be used as a litmus test to pit half the country against the other and a debate about whether people deserve the life they have or can better themselves and deserve to be treated better and we all know how that has played out in politics recently. bigotry and stereotyping win.

Very little hope for the incarcerated in this country

So where is the $75k cost to house them coming from? Clearly some contract is too expensive and something is not adding up.

For that price, we should have Harvard classes taught at prisons, and maybe these inmates could have a shot at using their disparate lifestyle extremes to have new ways to employ/create new businesses that can improve society in areas where they see/experience/witness need for improvement, and put our tax payers to good work.

If every prisoner is cooking mopping and doing whatever for free, where is the $75k/yr coming from?

nah, I've worked with companies who rank incoming female Interns by hotness and argue over who gets to date her and try to bash other male employees and fight over them for projects before they ever have the first day at the office.

This has happened in 3 workplaces I know of.

The biggest issue is when guys use new incoming female employees as dating prospects because they don't meet females elsewhere. They may be nice and friendly but I don't want to have to shake off and turn down 6 guys who are fighting to get at me first everywhere I work, its really not ok. It happens at every place I've ever worked and watch the same guys do it to new girls.

They are here for a job, not to supply you with intimacy. It's even more sad to think about how much these women are not viewed as great additions to the team, but how likely you are to get a date with them. It's very frustrating.

The more company advertises being woman friendly, the more they are not on the inside, and are usually trying to convince the public they are after multiple women have spoken out. In fact every company I've worked for who had a woman leave because of issues with men and the company realzied they handled it poorly, ramped up their we have lots of women bs campaign right after, and they bring SWE in once a month and all that crap but it has no effect on yoru day to day quality of interaction as a woman in the workplace.

ignore the hype, tune into the culture.

Youre right this matters for everyone, but there are additional benefits if you are a woman.

Your manager in many ways is your advocate and prescreens his job responsibilities to trickle down to yours. He/she is the one giving your feedback.

if they are inherently biased towards women, youre life becomes more difficult.

Furthermore, people are NOT stupid. they know whats what. People will know if your manager is going to take action if another employee acts against you, and support your through the HR process, or look the other way and ignore it. If your manager is a good person, then its a signal for everyone else to treat you well.

It should not have to be like that, but it is.

When it comes to being a woman, then this translates over to a layer of protection against sexual harassment or other forms of biased based on your gender, in most cases preventing you from ever having to deal with it, and knowing you have support if you do.

Believe me it makes a world of difference I've had experiences with managers who want to date every female employee they have to very good professional ones who screen me from the usual suspects and delegate my work in such a way to minimize my interaction with them and we never even have to have a conversation about it. One manager makes my life a living hell, the other one makes me able to focus on my job.

Both managers can be competent and good at their job, and so can you in both cases, but the only difference here is how much one follows policy and respects your right to focus on your job in the work place, and knows that dealing with that stuff in the workplace is, at the very least, distracting and in all cases an emotionally frustrating experience.

Back to the topic, prisons are just another haven for contract robbing. The prison contracts everything from security to mopping. Everything is 3x more expensive. Prison costs are a sink to our society.

Except taxpayers foot the bill. Theres an economic incentive to keeping crime low and right now were all being robbed blind, in this area as well (because yes there are too many to count)

The amount who are released within 5 years with little to no recovery or are going to end up in an even worse state, with even less of an ability to get a job, are more likely to continue to commit crime to make ends meet.

Before we talk about Harvard grads destroying the eocnomy, lets talk about making it less and less likely for 75% of the people imprisoned to ever be able to contribute to society once they are released.

We have a very protestant implementation of prison, they exist to punish people, not to reabilitate people or address the issues, and everyone ends up paying a higher cost with more damage in the end.

Yes people who are doing serious crimes should be put away, but we know that most of the time thats not the case, and furthemore, we know that alot of serious crimes including rape, have men released within 5 years, while a first time offender selling green could land 15 in prison.

Maybe.. http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/11/14/some-european-pri...

Software government contracts from 10million- to around 100-500million a piece per state in which they are utilized in.

If even one company came in and wrote software with

1. an API written by a software engineer

2. code written post 1970s that knew how to write a for loop and allocate memory

Then we would all be better off....I promise...

Its hard for me to...describe how bad it is...

Sure, let me help explain the benefit of moving away from privatised government style external government contracting for software.

First government style contracting in high security scenarios lends itself to 10-20year contracts, no lie, anywhere from 10mil to 100mil a piece. The worst part is, the companies building the software companies are not software companies, they are dinosauric companies slowly dying.

Basically its the technological infrastructure.

So I work for a state mandated company thats an independent group, we actually set competitive markets and openly monitor but not as a government entity, but we are subject to follow state compliance rules as in, no employees who monitor the markets we set, are allowed to invest and profit in those companies in the stock market or have children or be married to people who do etc.

Anyways, in most cases though, because our security is high, we contract software much like the federal government does, and its horrific.

most of the issues you see with cascading flight cancellations, air traffic control issues, gas control problems etc, not being able to keep track of regulations well enough to streamline and lower barrier for new companies etc...is due to horrible..horrible software.

Privatizing and allowing companies to come in and truly compete and new software to come in takes away the 10million dollar ten year government contract software companies who do as little as possible and charge $200k for a new feature that should have been moldularized in the core functionality in the first place.

Want an API? How about 85 pages of doucmentation that took 150 meetings to put together, none by the actual software engineers...

This crap can't continue in large scale infrastructure where competition needs to come in and rescue the crippling energy and transportation issues that burden the people with horrible services and no other choices.

Basically its the technological infrastructure.

So I work for a state mandated company thats an independent group, we actually set competitive markets and openly monitor but not as a government entity, but we are subject to follow state compliance rules as in, no employees who monitor the markets we set, are allowed to invest and profit in those companies in the stock market or have children or be married to people who do etc.

Anyways, in most cases though, because our security is high, we contract software much like the federal government does, and its horrific.

most of the issues you see with cascading flight cancellations, air traffic control issues, gas control problems etc, not being able to keep track of regulations well enough to streamline and lower barrier for new companies etc...is due to horrible..horrible software.

Privatizing and allowing companies to come in and truly compete and new software to come in takes away the 10million dollar ten year government contract software companies who do as little as possible and charge $200k for a new feature that should have been moldularized in the core functionality in the first place.

Want an API? How about 85 pages of doucmentation that took 150 meetings to put together, none by the actual software engineers...

This crap can't continue in large scale infrastructure where competition needs to come in and rescue the crippling energy and transportation issues that burden the people with horrible services and no other choices.

One you step outside of silicon valley, or Seattle or the tech scene in NY, the world is a scary place, and there is alot of low hanging fruit to be had for software for the betterment of everyone.

Do you know how to write a for loop? ok good, you could probably do better...

I'm not joking.

direct manager is number one most important thing

get a job becoming a remote developer for a good software company.

What I stick with is based on what I'm developing and working on. The important part is to not be afraid to learn and try new things. I have not stuck with anything in particular but I stay strong in C/C++ because most of my development has related to efficient memory solutions.

On the other hand, Java is really nice for algorithm testing, and writing for classwork.

Javascript is obviously inescapable in some format if you are doing web development so I jumped right in and have learned it with Angular, Express, the MEAN stack in general etc.

It's better to have actual projects to work on. From there its easier to center around a framework, but I still prefer C/C++ but I am learning to appreciate Java the more I develop GUI applications and test more complex algorithms.

Recently I'm trying to test out an idea for an app, so the first thing I knew is I wanted it to be cross platform, so I've had to learn alot more javascript/ionic framework, etc. cordova and how phonegap is a version of that, and learn android and ios app dev to understand how phonegap links the two, and of course theres a movement to use react to dev natively, and Kotlin is coming in strong in the Android space with cross platform app dev, so there is alot you have to learn once you have an idea, and need to learn what helps you implement that idea/project, and you learn more that way instead of saying "I'm going to create something pretty with javascript". You will learn 20x more by making an entire project from design to implementation, and become familiar with how to navigate when and when not to use languages, frameworks technologies, you have to try stuff and fail alot and keep going and continue to make time to put thousands of hours of work into it.

You have to like it to do that, I really enjoy it.

Interesting.

I am getting the same kind of offers. Theres alot of subsidies and VC investment in "clean" energy and "smart grid" so developers left and right have a new market to apply their software development skills to.

In my experience, I am not being used as a reference book, and my long term investment in coding/Minor in Compsci and personal projects make me able to translate enegineering speak to software speak. I have not had the experience that the developers think software is the answer and that power is trivial.

I think the real clash of cultures is the culture of software development realizing how much beuracracy surrounds the power grid, and how much resistance there is to change within the industry, because the industry really does not understand how 95% of their day manually editing excel workbooks that output fortran run files from the 80s could be deleted and improved, and of course, most of them don't want to improve since there is a 30yr generational gap in the power industry.

Half of the people I work with don't believe in climate change and think Elon Musk is taking their jobs. This industry is ripe for disruption and I don't think the mentality that software/smart grid stuff can improve it is incorrect, but I do think the naivete that everyone in every industry is as openminded and continually putting in effort to learn and produce working products, which is a mindset required by successful growing software firms, is proving to be a big barrier and wake up call to software companies trying to come in an help.

I honestly blame our industry over software developers, but yeh, theres also a goldrush in "smartgrid" "clean energy" stuff and everyone want's to be apart of it.

Definitely as a Power Engineer it leaves you getting lots of opportunities and having to sort through who is willing to invest in understanding the complexities of innovating on the power grid, and who is going to cop out once they realize you can't whip up an app and make money off users the way snapchat will.

Theres also, and for good reason, lots of cybersecurity policies surrounding software running on the power grid, because hacking the grid has detrimental effects that can quickly translate to coast wide blackouts etc. That also means the newest github release of that multiplatform coffeescript spinoff is not going to be allowed to be used in alot of the grid side applications, and there is more work involveded with vetting development.

All of these things really quickly weed out the devs who are looking for quick stardom and the next easiest cashcow, and landing on the latest buzzwords related to clean energy. It can be frustrating weeding out the companies who try to hire you from that perspective.

It doesn't mean the grid doesnt need better software, it just means people, even developers who want to cash in on hot finance markets are going to take the path of least resistance, and the powergrid is not the path of least resistance (no pun intended) when it comes to quick cash and unicorn apps.

You have to actually CARE about innovating on the grid, and not just to pretend to care because theres billions sitting around in funding waiting to fund good smart energy innovation. Regardless, because this money is there now, and there's the backing of social reinforcement of being able to herald your startup as bleeding edge world saving technology thats going to stop societies impending doom from global warming, is a very compelling emotional appeal that makes marketing and justifying your product easy.

It's hot right now and in then ext ten years we will see who is around to grab quick cash and feel good about being the poster child for saving the climate and who is willing to invest in truly renovating the powergrid and enabling clean energy as a sutainable long term solution that is eocnomically viable without startup subsidies to cover the cost of initial investments.

Eventually these companies have to show a profit...

It is frustrating to be in the industry as an Engineer under the age of 35, and also have exposure to Compsci and friends working at Amazon and Google, and having to explain a hyperlink to a coworker 3 levels above you.

It's also frustrating to take graduate level classes and do research and R&D and have spent years designing power grid and actually being on the power grid and seeing construction and putting in hard work to learn Electrical Power before it was "cool" and then have an insurmountable rush of developers who want you to help them change the world. They are the CEO, you are the reference book engineer.

I get that, but its important to look past that and see there is true benefit to the innovation. And for the most part they are right, this industry has been sitting in static mode riding comfortably for a long time in many ways when it comes to trying to stay technologicially relevant, and maintain sustainable infrastructure that allows for growth. So it is frustrating, but ultimately the software/tech community is in the right. It's time for a change and this industry needs to admit it kind of sucked at changing itself for decades.

It also helps that I have 8 years of coding experience I put in on my own time to help ease this barrier but I am an exception to the rule as I have been told by recruiters doing smart grid dev.

this is true

You need self esteem from yourself and acceptance of yourself

but at the same time

it does not mean there is not benefit to continual positive self regard. I still stand that this term is fundamentally different than self esteem inflation that requires trophies and grade inflation and caccooning kids from consequences of their actions as the author writes.

agreed, and this happens in academics too. The helicopter parents who make their kids feel worthless outside of their GPA and ability to get accepted into the top 10 colleges, is disconcerting.

One of my college roommates parents was a Professor at MIT, and even though he got into an engienering school ranked right under it, his parents treated him liek the failure of the family and despite him being capable of great things, he had already been labeled as the failure in his family for ONLY having a 3.8GPA at the number 3 school in the world and mine as well work at McDonalds if he was going to destroy the family tradition of going to MIT, producing 45 patents, getting a PhD and writing 3 textbooks before the age of 30.

The kid was capable and accomplished an amazing amount but he really viewed himself as quite worthless and had a hard time getting a job after college due to his crushing lack of self esteem.

This is the opposite extreme but so is getting 35 trophies for a 5th grade soccer team.

I think both are extremes and the conversation needs to be recentered around the idea of grade inflation and positive self regard.

Again, you can have positive self regard for kids and NOT give them a trophy just for showing up to school. Theres a large medium here.

The biggest benefit of consistent positive self regard (which can exist without trophies and claps for every minor positive step in life) is the ability to prevent downward spirals where kids beat themselves up and begin to internalize the negative feedback and continually snowball their lack of self esteem to where they really handicap their ability to grow, as illustrated by my friend in the example above.

if a child is labeled as bottom 30% of the class or the team in middle school, negative feedback is more likely to keep him locked in the negative self image he has, instead of the belief by teachers that he/she has the ability to improve.

Regardless of if the kid will ever be the top 10% or is naturally more talented than the top 10%, thats NOT the point of continual positive self regard. The point is to continue trying and learning and self improvement. Labeling kdis in boxes really does limit their ability to grow and change their status and lets be honest, teachers are NOT always the best/the most right about knowing who is more intelligent and smarter, and these things can change alot from middle school to highschool.

You don't have to give the bottom 30% of the kids the same grades or trophies, but you can treat them with positive regard, and by doing that remind them they are human and that you believe in their ability to grow.

Nothing sucks worse than a teacher immediately writing off a kid as locked in a certain status range. They might actually begin to believe it, and if you don't beleive individuals have the ability to grow and learn beyond their initial casting/grade heirarchy then you really shouldn't be teaching and furthermore, I find these justifications by teachers more of an excuse for the fact that the U.S. is bottom ranked globally right now as a first world country for education. Youre a TEACHER. you job is to enable learning not say its just the way it is that the Straight A kids will always be the straight A kids and vise versa and really you have no control over it. If you feel that way, then please go find another job.

I would say negative feedback is far more damaging, and furthermore, the lack of negative feedback does not require trophies and delusional inflations of self worth that apparently according to the author also equal caccooning children from the consequences of life at every step. This is just false.

I agree.

The immediate conflation that positive self regaurd = caccooning growing adults form their consequences was a good thing to lump together and assume the readers would accept.

You can have positive self regard for kids and let them make their own decisions, experience mistakes and struggle to some degree to find their way out.

The idea that they need your negative judgment on top of the consequences life will hand them for their actions anyways is the logical flaw and conflation here.

Meh

1. "prioritising their feelings of self-worth, telling them they are special and amazing, and cocooning them from everyday consequences."

This annoys me, when people throw in an entirely new assumption at the end of a sentence "...cocooning them from everyday consequences"

You can entirely regaurd growing adults with positive self regard AND let them experience the consequences of their actions.

The worriesome part about this is the conflation that consequences = lack of positive self regaurd to the growing adult.

If you truly uncaccoon growing adults from consequences and let them experience the results of their mistakes, they don't need your lecture of negative judgment on top of it, life will be there to teach them, and you can positively regard them as humans that make mistakes, and by not caccooning them expect them to solve the problems.

I mean honestly, the parents who believe their kids need a lecture about every mistake they make and judgment are the ones who are known as helicoptor parents and actually those kids end up being the least capable of being their own advocates because their parents never back off and allow them to make their own mistakes and struggle to find their way out.

This is why the Standford admissions office did an article on this, supposed Helicoptor parenting which was basically Stanford having problems with all these kids with 4.9 GPAs, 87 AP exams, science fair admissions with PhD level work put into them, who were held to hardcore high standards all work no play no emotion work work work your life = your GPA and the school you get into, and saying these kids literally could not solve the simplest everyday life problems and their parents called the school everyday trying to micromanage them or argue with Professors if their kids got less than B+s on exams

Its also why after the Gunn highschool suicide incident, highschool kids posted online to the parents to "back off" and quit pushing their kids so hard.

It's hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously, but I read on...

This is to show the other extreme and REAL effect of the opposite of show no compassion, only regard growing adults based on their accomplishments relative to everyone else.

If you take this attitude in life youre not helping your kid grow, you suffocating them, and debilitating their own sense of life navigation. This isn't about them, its about YOU imposing your self worth and narcissism and identify and your own self worth on how far along you can get your kid in life, and you need to back off.

I've witnessed this first hand going to university, and was really disturbed by helicopter parents versus my upbringing which was not helicopter parenting at all. Never seen kids more miserable in their life. I'm not even sure it was their life, they were walking poster children for their parents to show society look what I can do. Very few times did I see the kids who grew up like this get to make any of their own decisions. Very sad.

2. Grade inflation IS NOT there to boost self esteem, its there to allow elite institutions to maintain elitism by getting ivy kids good jobs and preparing them well for exams.

2/3s of all grades made at Brown University are As. It's there so everyone can get good jobs at high end consulting firms if they choose to instead of using their Political Science degree for some less profitable career path where the need is great, and grades/competition/elite ivy names matter less.

GPA grade inflation is about highschools gaining and maintaining status to justify private school tuition, and college does the same equivalent but has the double incentive of increasing competition to admissions for more room to choose the cream of the crop, and increasing the dowry back to the school from happy and financially successful alumni.

Both appeals to the idea that

a. negative judgment from their parents or teachers is the only way to allow growing adults to experience consequences of their actions

b. grade inflation is for the self esteem boost of individuals.

are false and the rest of this article rides on these astounding assumptions the author assumes you will buy into

*Note: I do understand the everyone is a winner, and clapping for every extracurricular club your kid joins, and treating them like little geniuses who Harvard would be at a loss of not having because youve decided thats the case for your baby since he showed his genius capabilities by bring two months early on the growth scale for expected timeline for piecing legos together, and ever since youve just been doing your job by providing the best past of growth for your little genius...yeh yeh yeh I know that happens

but that has nothing to do with needing negative judgment to grow, or the motivation behind grade inflation, which is strictly for the long term financial benefit of the institutions providing it.

mm, perhaps but I'm echoing documented hiring philosophies of the companies. They are aware they make mistakes. But they feel confident they filter out a majority of false positives along with many false negatives. They have their own metrics for determining this in relation to how many people they hire are able to complete a minimum satisfactory work.

They have documented people who can do this in relation to the people they hire, and even have internal portfolios tracking employees by age, experience, major, and schools, as well as how they performed on interviews. This is a fact.

Everything is subjective. But ultimately a company decides based on its own subjective priorities how an employee meets up to their subjectively defined needs for the position that person fills, and they can pretty onjectively within that context evaluate whether the person can do the work or not, and even track commitments, errors, time to cdoe to completion, amount of bugs, amount of time team has to spend fixing their bugs, etc, and parse out a pretty good idea of performance.

Thats why theres multiple books written by these companies designed to help you pass their interviews, as they have identified indicators of low performance in interviews....

All companies can do this, but many don't, and many arent based in software and therefore do not have embedded ability to track performance metrics the way code commits can.

small companies can do it too, but big companies who also have this system in place can take advantage of larger sets of data for more accurate indicators that seem to correlate with low performance.

sometimes.

However, if a company has gimpy organization and technical APIs for many complex pieces of software and or processes in which making mistakes is costly and expensive, it is economical to raise someones salary $15k than have to invest in a newb to spend the next 7 months being able to operate as quickly as you do. It took me about 7months to be up and running efficiently with everything and be able to train other people. I still had to perform at full capacity on day one, but I was less efficient and because mistakes were so costly, I would have to wait 30-45minutes to find someone else to confirm an operation before making one, instead of making a mistake in production, until I knew how to do it myself.

In the manufactoring line, bottlenecks for tools being down was calculated by the millions per hour, because linear bottlenecks in product production actually cascade down a 4 months timeline for meeting product deadlines, which have payment associated with them, and significant penalties for being late.

Additionally, metrology tools to check errors sometimes cannot, based on chemistry and physics, detect errors in production until multiple steps down the line. So if there is a mistake in a base design, it won't get picked up for 3 weeks, and the entire line has to be restarted, so it really helps to have people know how to not screw up even if there isn't an official process for it.

They kept me on because I worked hard, and because I knew how to use over 18 different independent horrible pieces of software with no APIs, and run them simultaneously in realtime in production while operating a team of 15 people.

Losing me was uneconomical for them.

In my personal experience, the codebase is not the problem, but the people and the culture who made the codebase.

We sent people to the moon with the computing power of a calculator, and with enough good people and effort, and version control, you can rewrite any legacy codebase to meet rigorous standards and meet the performance needs of the users.

Out of all the things humanity is trying and has accomplished, this is not unacheivable.

If the people don't want it, and the culture does not lend itself to high standards, often people will not see the same pain a developer will experience when they see poor code performing poorly. They may complain about the output and all the other things wrong about the platform, but that doesn't mean the company is going to support a legacy reboot, that just means the company has an accepted culture of low performance and complaining.

I say this in the context of a non software development company relying on alot of software.

my most recent form of personal torture I have endured is watching my IT department take a 45 yr old blackbox piece of software from a very old outdated engineering firm who never specialized in software, and actually trying to port it to AWS, thinking it will speed up performance AND save costs. They have no idea if there is capability for the kernel to exploit concurrency of the algorithms on the inside.

What they do know is there was a bug in the code, and it took 8 months to fix embedded in 1500 lines of code, it had no API and all the developers were dead or unemployed by the original company. They pay millions of dollars annually for this liscense and additionally millions more for an "HPC" to run it on.

They would never consider rewriting it, or contracting a new firm with a timeline, performance standards, needs and competitive cost recruiting. They don't know how. They don't understand how.

This is the way of the world outside of software development companies.

It's....painful...

If youre wondering how I exist in such a painful environment, I'm an Electrical Engineer, and I do not work for a software company. I get to mentor under some of the most brilliant and game changing Engineers in my industry, but it has very little to do with software development.

It could have alot to do with it, but the engineers have no interest in taking advantage of software. They have to be able to first understand the advantages software can provide but..I mean, some of the engineers I work with don't know what a GPU is. Never heard of it.

I write all my own code for my own work from scratch.