Engineering an Interesting Life
Tech culture doles out imposter syndrome on one side, hubris on the other. Originally published in Model View Culture, April 2015. There’s something ironic about the fact that as the deadline for this piece approached, I opened the document and stared blankly at it. Frankly, opening it was progress—I’d been intimidated to come back and […]
Read More
I was listening to the last episode of season 1 of my friend Diana’s podcast “Should We”, and the title of this one is called “Should We Actually Try?” I love Should We because I love Diana, and because there’s something about listening to a podcast where two friends who know each other well are […]
Read More
I gave a talk at Self.Conference the other week called “Some Things I’ve Learned About Color”. There’s no video, and I haven’t shared the transcript – I will eventually share this content, because people have connected with it and because I think it’s important. But I’ve yet to figure out how to do that. It’s […]
Read More
In the nearly four years I spent at The Conglomerate, I did a lot to try and improve the number of women working in engineering. It’s not clear how much effect this had. But I spent a lot of time and energy on it. Eyes open, I knew this wasn’t always the best career move. […]
Read More
Last year I turned 30 in Santiago. I didn’t like Santiago, and I felt bad about turning 30 – it’s hard when a major life milestone occurs in a time when you are feeling somewhat lost, so I dealt with this in my preferred way – I left. I went to Easter Island, and explored, […]
Read More
There’s a theme emerging in my backchannel lately, as my girlfriends and I discuss why we aren’t doing certain events. And often, these are events for women. We used to retreat to these events because we weren’t welcome – or safe – anywhere else. But now, we see lots of technical events working really hard […]
Read More
I was on Less Than or Equal in March, something that I’ve actually been engaging in self-promotion of, because I think it’s one of the better things I’ve done. Largely because Aleen (the host) asked such thoughtful questions, and made me feel so comfortable speaking to her. I’ve also discovered that I just love podcasts […]
Read More
When I started thinking about what would be next for me after my year of funemployment, remote work weighted pretty highly on my list. People who know me might think that it’s because of my geographical indecision, and yes, that was a consideration, but the biggest factor for me was not actually that. I didn’t want to […]
Read More
We know technical interviewing is a problem but rather than asking interviewers to do better, a lot of suggested solutions push that problem off onto people we interview rather than those who are doing the interviewing. This comes up a lot because the hiring process is the second most popular place to improve “diversity” after […]
Read More
When I worked at The Conglomerate, I used to interview mostly women. Not slightly more. We’re talking a 2:1 or even 3:1 ratio. Why? Well The Conglomerate was (probably still is) a Pipeline Organization. They believed that the problem with diversity was that they just needed to Hire More Women. And so they would want […]
Read More