Category: women in computer science
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Talking Shine Theory and Other Things on LTOE
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…
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That Remote Work Think Piece Has Some Glaring Omissions (A Rant)
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…
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#GHC15 – Brian Nosek: Solving Implicit Bias in Gender and STEM
Start far from implicit bias, at the implicit associations of the mind. Our understanding is mediated by our sensory systems. The mediation of these and all cognitive architecture, means that reality and our experience of reality, is not the same thing. Lots of inferences our mind makes to help understand reality. This gap. First way…
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Thankless Emotional Labour as Management Training
My first month as a manager I barely had time to think about how I didn’t really know what I was doing, because there was so much that clearly needed to be done. So I accepted that stuff was not writing code, and got on with it. Month two opened, and I kept getting on…
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Bad Interviews are a Company Problem, not a Candidate Problem
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…
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A Story
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…
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Maybe… You Should Apologise
I ran a poll on Twitter this week looking for answers to a question I was curious about. I find the results interesting. On the one hand it encourages me how many people have apologised and it went well. On the other, the number of people who say “no reason to” makes me despondent. The…
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Diversity is an Attention Economy and the Economics Suck
A while ago there was an article about how women got more RTs when they talk about diversity than when they talk about anything else. This wasn’t that surprising to women, I don’t think, although it may have been news to some people. Well before this was news, I had been trying to balance what…
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A Question
There’s a question that I have found myself asking a lot over the last two years: “do you know what a good environment looks like, though?” I ask it when a friend comes to me with anxiety about performance reviews. I ask it to the friend who left a bad environment only to end up in…