Career
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Corporate Feminism and Thankless Emotional Labour
→: Corporate Feminism and Thankless Emotional LabourI have been using the phrase “Corporate Feminism” to mean Company-Focused Diversity work, typically pipeline based. There have been other uses of this, much of it critique of Sheryl Sandberg including this analysis from a racial perspective. I don’t think we have an “official” definition and so hope that explains how I am using it here. If you…
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Three Tactics that Block Women from Getting Ahead
→: Three Tactics that Block Women from Getting Ahead1. Undermine and Critique Step 1: Make it really hard for her to achieve something. Step 2: Make completely reasonable comments about her progress. E.g. Nitpick every detail, force her to prove that your suggestions can’t be done. Then complain she is not faster. E.g. Avoid telling her key information up front. When it is…
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Tweeting Shit That Men Say
→: Tweeting Shit That Men SayBackground: Last week was GHC, it included a Male Allies panel (live streamed) and a male keynote event (available to watch online). I tweeted a lot (with others) and wrote a couple of things. The Male Allies panel was followed by a reverse “you talk we listen” event. There was also a Male Allies Focus group…
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Male Allies and GHC
→: Male Allies and GHCThis year will be my 5th year at GHC (Grace Hopper Celebration, the annual conference for technical women from the Anita Borg Institute), my first speaking, and my first in my new post-corporate-job life. It’s been blocked on my calendar since last year, and there has been a long lead time, which means I made the…
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Learning What Not To Do Doesn’t Teach You All That Much
→: Learning What Not To Do Doesn’t Teach You All That MuchEarly on in my career, I worked on something that shipped without tests. And I learned something important: That’s a bad idea. To frame it positively, I learned that any tests were better than no tests. And so I went away and read things, talked to people, and experimented. And over time I’ve learned a lot…
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Things To Write When I’ve Nothing To Say
→: Things To Write When I’ve Nothing To SayI’ve had horrible writers block lately. The list of things I can’t write yet (or maybe ever) drowns out the things I would like to. And so a Deadline Looms because according to the schedule I’m due to write something and I sit with my laptop open, a blank screen in front of me, and try…
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Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
→: Book: The Hard Thing About Hard ThingsI really, really enjoyed The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (Amazon). So much so that I read the whole thing in a day (something I regularly do with novels, but not so regularly with non-fiction). It’s compelling because it’s about difficult answers to shitty situations. Because it’s…
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Exciting News
→: Exciting NewsSometimes you have to do the scary thing. So here it is: I’m leaving Google at the end of the month. Will post more about The Plan at a later date, but for now suffice it to say I’ll be working on some personal projects that I’d love to see if I could turn in to something, and…
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On Leaving (again), Compound Effects and Falling Out Of Love
→: On Leaving (again), Compound Effects and Falling Out Of LoveSomeone tweeted that this post reminded them of my post about leaving. And I read it, finding it oddly compelling (even though I’m not excited by comics, or superheros), and then I found this quote. it seems to me to be the worst thing in the world to want to do something that badly and…