In my experience communication happens again and again and again over a period of years until the woman gives up in exasperation and just seethes silently. It's hard to get someone to engage in emotional labor (or as I like to call it, 'giving a fuck') when they simply don't give a fuck, no matter how much you communicate.
Since not caring enough to do the basic gruntwork associated with a decent relationship is almost always a male problem in our society, I'm also gobsmacked that you'd call it sexist. It's about as sexist as calling gun violence or any other widely gendered thing a male problem - there's exceptions out there, but it's not worth being pedantic about.
I think you're arbitrarily privileging "giving a fuck" over "not giving a fuck". Try this:
Alice wants Task X to be done.
Bob does not care whether Task X is done.
Let us stipulate that, if Task X is not done, nobody will be materially, objectively harmed.
Alice says: because I want Task X, you will do Task X. Alice does not ask Bob's opinion on Task X, but rather assumes that Task X is inherently necessary, and therefore Bob's opinion is not worth considering. In fact, Alice is annoyed that Bob hasn't taken the initiative to recognize the inherent necessity of Task X, and complete it on his own without being asked.
Bob does not believe Task X to be inherently necessary.
Option 1: Bob may complete Task X because it makes Alice happy. That's nice of Bob. Unfortunately, Alice is seething that she had to ask Bob in the first place. That's kind of mean of Alice.
Option 2: Bob fails to accomplish Task X, because it isn't his personal priority. That's kind of thoughtless of Bob, but Bob is a human and sometimes we let low-priority items drop off our radar. Alice will do Task X herself, furious that Bob did not do it.
Option 3: Bob fails to accomplish Task X, because it isn't his personal priority. Alice lets go of Task X, leaving it undone, because it's just Task X, and her relationship with Bob matters more to her than Task X. That's nice of Alice.
In a "fair" scenario, Option 3 should be on the table at least half the time. But it never is. Why can Alice not let go of Task X? Why MUST it be done? Why is Alice's perspective on the necessity of Task X to be privileged over that of Bob?
It’s usually because not doing the task has very real negative consequences and due to the sexist nature of modern society the consequences fall most heavily on Alice, not on Bob. Don’t buy the nephews birthday cards? The relatives think badly of Alice, not Bob. Take your son out in mismatched or slightly too small clothes? People pass judgement on Alice, not Bob.
When Bob doesn’t think something is necessary and Alice does, Bob needs to step back and think about why she does, because there’s generally a good reason. Going immediately to game theory isn’t helpful when you’ve got imperfect information due to your own lack of introspection.
> Take your son out in mismatched or slightly too small clothes? People pass judgement on Alice, not Bob.
Or they'll just laugh it off with "I see daddy dressed you today". Meanwhile if Bob dresses his son impeccably, Alice will get all the credit.
If Bob keeps house instead of working overtime, Alice will get all the housekeeping credit and Bob will be judged for not being an effective breadwinner.
It's almost like societal gender roles can screw over both sexes.
Is this true? I couldn't fathom my relatives being upset at my wife for that sort of thing. (Her relatives might be upset at her, since they're the related ones.)
And no one cares what kids wear.
Maybe this article is necessary for some upper crust WASP readers who would feel the way you indicate (since I agree that is sexist and unreasonable), but it's totally foreign to me and my social circle.
Now, I suppose if the wife isn't working, then maybe those sorts of things are her "job", so I can see where it comes from. But among the younger generation I think it's more common for women to work and so people more intuitively understand household things can't just be the women's responsibility anymore.
> When Bob doesn’t think something is necessary and Alice does, Bob needs to step back and think about why she does, because there’s generally a good reason
Again, privileging Alice's perspective. Why shouldn't Alice step back and wonder why Bob DOESN'T think something is necessary?
I agree that there are sometimes social consequences that will fall specifically on Alice for failing to keep her house in order. Similar social consequences will fall on Bob if he, for example, fails to keep a steady job. Society is a bitch, but that isn't Bob's fault.
I think Option 3 happens a lot, but Alice rarely tells Bob. Then when Alice loses patience and gets mad at Bob, it looks like she is freaking out over one single thing when the problem is more systemic.
In my experience, you're wrong. See how that works? My wife simply doesn't care as strongly about the house as I do; nor about maintaining her car. Or family finances, grocery shopping, laundry, etc etc. For the first few years of our marriage, this was an issue. Then I learned that it was "my" issue to deal with. I had communicated as much as I could, and she didn't have the same expectations. So we compromised; she doesn't get mad when I stress about something, and I don't feel like it's her job to make me happy and cater to every feeling I have.
So that's my anecdote. Your comment is basically sexist blather.
We have hard data on gun violence, proving it's mostly a male problem. But "emotional labor" is both poorly defined and supported anecdotally, so the discussion around it is often driven by sexist stereotypes, as in this article.
Partners in a marriage - or a business, too - often disagree about who should do what. It's not one-sided as the article presents. Now, there might be some common patterns like, say, women reminding men of their families' birthdays (an example from the article) but there are many opposite-gendered patterns, like remembering to check the oil or air pressure in her car, etc. Note how just mentioning such stereotypes is already kind of sexist - it's saying something bad about a whole gender ("men don't care about details of family life", "women don't care about details of car maintenance").
Stereotypically, women get frustrated by some things their partners don't care as much about, and likewise men get frustrated by other things their partners don't care about. Focusing on the stereotypes isn't productive, though, and not just because they are often wrong.
Nonsense. Associating behaviour with sex, is sexism, pure and simple.
The fact that he is a man has nothing to do with the fact that he doesn't have the same agency - nor the 'right' to complain about it - as his wife does. Making that association a part of the discussion is sexism.
It's weird that the Internet is the first place to say things like: "Maybe women don't WANT to be in tech", "there are biological differences", etc. but also turn around and complain that it's sexist to imply men (on average) have difficulties with emotional communication.
The word "want" describes desire, willingness, and a level of interest.
Saying someone or a group of people are not interested in doing something is entirely different than saying they are less capable.
The proper equivalent to "men (on average) have difficulties with emotional communication" for the example you gave would be "women are not as naturally capable as men when it comes to tech jobs."
Perhaps you're undervaluing the degree to which desire promotes skill. Maybe it's that men have difficulties with emotional communication because they don't have a desire to communicate emotionally and, thus, have not built up the skill set.
Exactly. The lack of self awareness in her comment was astounding. But those are the types of comments we should expect when we think of some people's testimony as "anecdotes" and other's as "Lived Experiences".
Slippery slope arguments like the one in the article are so tiresome. It's perfectly possible to deny service to Nazis without it snowballing into a problem for the rest of society.
After all, plenty of nations have had anti-Nazi laws on the books for generations, and they continue to function just fine for the 99.9999% of society that doesn't want to murder me for my religion.
Yes, it would be nice to see the raw data, but note that they've bucketed Level 1 through Level 6 employees, and have still found gender discrepancies.
Are you suggesting that different jobs might occupy the same level but have widely differing compensation? That might be true - I don't know Google well enough - but that's not how salary bands usually work.
It's exactly how salary bands work - they're designed to be opaque.
If you have women who largely choose to work in Foo with a compensations which puts them at the top of the band 1 and at the bottom of band 2, and men who work in Bar that starts with compensation at the bottom of band 1, but a promotion gets you to the middle of band 2, then you'll get that in band 1, women earn more, but in band 2, men earn more. This is why you must know the actual distributions (which includes weighting and deviation/variance), and the job role.
Indeed, in level 2, seems like women earn more - maybe? might not even be significant though.
In any case, I'll bet job role correlates far more strongly with compensation than gender.
This entire thread is a great example of how many if not most Canadians will passionately defend any old goofy policy, as long as it's different from how the Americans do it.
I've lived in a variety of American states as well as Ontario and I really can't believe what I'm reading - anyone defending the selection, knowledge of the staff, price, hours, pretty much anything relating to the LCBO vs. a privatized but regulated market is a few Timbits short of a Snack Pack. I suspect the very same will be true with The Weed Store once it rolls out - way better than prohibition, but much worse than Colorado or Oregon or Washington.
If it counts for anything I'm a Canadian and I vehemently oppose any policy like this.
The selection and knowledge of my dispensary in Vancouver in invaluable. They even take notes based on experiences of every strain I buy from them so that they can tailor their suggestions to me based on my history and the composition of the strain. I can't just smoke anything, my body only responds well to certain strains, and I trust nobody less than some ignorant, unionized liquor store staff to personalize my experience based on my needs.
The quote by Ms. Roach saying " … The person who smokes high-end cannabis, they don't want shwaggy, mass-produced stuff. They don't want Labatt Blue, they want craft." is completely true.
The LCBO is a business, government run liquor stores and distribution is a policy.
LCBO is a well run organization, government run liquor stores is an absurd policy in my mind. Painting both with the same brush is disingenuous.
You know how sometimes when you're looking at an old codebase, where all the developers who've written it have moved on to other jobs, you see a little bit of code that doesn't seem to make sense? And then you remove that code, and then and only then do you find out exactly why it was there in the first place - usually in a rather painful way?
Well, things like marriage are the societal equivalent of that bit of old code. We're 'stuck' with it because (for the vast majority of people, anyway) it serves a useful purpose, one that only becomes apparent when you go without it. That's not to say we can't and shouldn't change the institution - it not like it hasn't been evolving over the centuries - but it'd be wiser to make changes cautiously, experimentally, and locally rather than just 'moving on' as a society.
As a Canadian citizen married to an American - would voluntarily abandoning your permanent residency (say, to live in your home or a third country for a few years) make it more difficult to re-obtain permanent residency in the future?
Dude, come on. Pointing out that racism and sexism has made things harder for people that aren't white and male is not the same thing as being racist and sexist yourself.
I know you are smart enough to be able to appreciate this difference, so stop being disingenuous.
I know a lot of poor white dudes in West Virginia. Amazing how being white and male brought them luck and overrode all forms of class discrimination against them...
Oh wait, no it didn't.
Funny how I can dress in a hoodie, fake a pimp walk, and get an equal amount of discrimination against me.
Or put in some fake teeth and speak with a southern accent.
Or just be myself and experience discrimination when in a poorer neighborhood.
Its mostly about class nowadays, except in isolated bumfuck areas way out of the cities.
You also are smart enough to understand that socioeconomic disadvantages are orthogonal to racism and sexism and that your 'poor white dudes' would have an even harder time of things if they were, say, black women.
Seriously, cut the crap. This is not a particularly difficult concept to grok.
I am not sure what that means in this context. I will assume I have touched a nerve and you wish to rebut. Your rebuttal asserts that a black woman would enjoy my brothers' advantages, and vice-versa. Except the saying is advice to stop worrying about one's life situation, which seems counterintuitive to whatever point you were trying to make.
Well, there's a lot more to being a poor white dude from West Virginia than "socioeconomic disadvantages". They are, in fact, a racial subgroup that get's discriminated against.
Well, "race" is an antiquated concept, without any coherent biological basis. Black African-Americans just happen to carry particular genes that affect skin color. Many Americans descended from African slaves are nominally white. Including many of those poor white dudes from West Virginia. AncestryDNA and 23andMe have blown many minds ;)
Edit: And about Mormon reaction to the musical. That's just evidence for their coolness :) I mean, can you imagine the reaction to the Islamic equivalent?
No need to be rude, man. I just wanted to call attention to your post because you clearly have had some truly unique life experiences and undoubtedly have important things to say. Perhaps a memoir somewhere down the line?
I also know that while I was lucky, I wouldn't have been in a position to be lucky if I hadn't made some good decisions. I didn't just sit back and wait to be lucky.
The way to maximize the role of luck in your life is to behave like luck has no role in your life.
Where were you born? Was it in a war-torn or poverty-stricken third world circumstance? Were your parents emotionally or physically abusive to you? Were you born with mostly normal cognitive function? Without any significant physical handicap?
I.e. even though you made some good decisions, you were still lucky to be born/raised in an environment and with a body that enabled you to make those good decisions.
The idea that you've got to be some sort of obsessive wretch with no life outside of tech in order to successfully fill a role at a tech company is nothing but a pernicious myth. So is the idea that you've got to be some ridiculous super-genius. All you have to do is be reasonably smart and capable of learning on the job.
When interviewers at tech companies mistakenly believe that every successful candidate has to be building atom smashers in their spare time, and especially when interviewers at tech companies unconsciously favor candidates that match what their 'stereotypical' candidate looks like, well, then you get a situation like the one described in the article. But this isn't natural or normal or a product of biology - it's just bias perpetuating itself.
While this is true, knowing someone set up a fibre channel network on the weekend is hardly a reason to call that person an obsessive wretch.
I know a very smart woman who's a professor of English literature at a university, and I know for a fact that she goes home on weekends and reads Sue Grafton murder mysteries ("M for Murder" etc.). This doesn't indicate that she's obsessive or wretched or has no life, and I don't think "are you reading anything at the moment?" would be an inappropriate question for someone in her field. Certainly we wouldn't want to force her to read all the time, and certainly we wouldn't want to force her to read Finnegan's Wake on Saturday morning, but for someone who wants to study literature for a living liking literature is important, and realising you don't might cause an epiphany.
So what do you tell someone who does genuinely enjoy doing that sort of thing in their free time? Someone who isn't a workaholic but who, in the article's conversation, would sooner wrestle a cobra than ask a co-worker about romantic issues (especially considering the potential consequences,) and who doesn't know the difference between a bass guitar and a bassoon?
Should they be recusing themselves from the organization's social structures entirely, if that's a significant problem for others? There's probably enough seclusion outside of work already, but at some point you just start to feel like you're contributing to the problem by existing.
This reminds me back when I worked inside the vfx industry. There was always atleast one clique that criticized that others enjoyed film/video games despite us working on them. That it was somehow bad that we were passionate about our field of study and spent our time learning as much as possible. Hell sometimes we would play a game or watch a movie for inspiration god forbid.
I'm fresh in this industry and it amazes me to be seeing the same pattern repeat itself here.
No, it doesn't. It makes you one-dimensional and particularly poor at building products for others unlike yourself.
The sooner the tech industry realizes that this sort of person is not an asset and that having too many of them around just drives others away, the better off it'll be.
And there's nothing to stop them starting their own companies or being hired by companies that don't subscribe to the prevailing PC orthodoxy. And with their deep obsessiveness they may well write better software. Or are you saying they should not be allowed to?
Of course I'm not saying 'they should not be allowed to'. I'm not quite sure how you'd get that.
I'm saying that their deep obsessiveness, and issues relating to being deeply obsessed, makes their organization as a whole write worse software. They sometimes write good code on their own, especially if they don't have to work with others, but usually they're a net negative.
Honestly, I don't know how this isn't obvious to anyone who's ever worked on a team.
This is the sort of convenient take on things that incites immediate curiosity. Forced to its conclusion, you're arguing that people who code for fun in their spare time don't see any substantial increase in their chances of success as an engineer at all. Do you think that's true?
I would agree with your original comment that you don't have to be obsessive, but without further substantial reasoning, xienze's position sounds like the more reasonable one here.
>It makes you one-dimensional and particularly poor at building products for others unlike yourself.
So they're possibly better at writing backend code.
Let's make an effort to keep them employed by finding positions they can succeed in instead of purging people at the first sign of personality traits we don't like (that they may not have been able to control in the first place).
Amen. Linux and much of all the open source code in most language ecosystems that people rely on are usually written by such people. Purging them is akin to purging the giants whose shoulders many product engineers stand on.
I hear this a lot about building products for others and that you need to have a divers team.
1. When you are building the back end of an online shop you don't care if that shop is for women's (makeup shop) or men (guns shop). When you build breaks for cars you don't care if the car is for women's or men.
2. You don't build a product base only on the experience of one person. You go and ask your target demographics what they want from your product. I am a man but I can't speak for all men.
Are you absolutely sure you arent just convincing yourself?
As someone who does actually love all this stuff so much that work doesnt start and hobby doesnt really stop... We meet and work with people like you all the time. We like the diversity. There are many ways to contribute to the end result and any smart company hires both of us.
But your resentment is mean spirited. Get over yourself. We are not driving any one away. From operations to sales we are all needed to make the engine work. But if you come here arguing that those who love their job should be fired so there is place for you without you trying so hard, that just silly. Here is the thing: from all disciplines i know there are people who love and breathe their job. If thats not the case in engineering for you, then you likely want to find the field that does make you that happy.
That might just be a smarter plan than trying to convince yourself by convincing us that in a field dominated by people who love it, you can be competitive while considering it just a safe career path. You'll just end up miserable.
Absolutely nobody has argued that people who code in their spare time should be fired. That's something you introduced, pointlessly and disruptively, to the thread.
What a tire fire all these threads are. And people are surprised they get flagged!
I think that's very close to what gyardley argued.
First paragraph is a claim that people who code in their spare time are liabilities rather than assets. Second paragraph is a claim that the tech industry as a whole should recognize this, and take steps to make sure there aren't too many around.
That's not actually arguing for firing (I mean, it might be arguing for that, but not necessarily), but it's at a minimum arguing for actively choosing non-hobby-programmers over hobby-programmers for programming jobs.
ralfn is not the one who turned this thread into a tire fire. If it is one, which I dispute, the culprits would be some combination of you and now me.
'Coding in your spare time' isn't quite as extreme as having no life outside of tech. Hey, I code a bit in my spare time too, so let me clarify.
It's the people who don't do anything else but code that I've, in my experience, had real issues with - they might make great computer scientists, but as a group they're not very good in a team of software developers. Arrogance, problems cooperating with others, excessive nitpicking, 'engineer's disease', poor social skills...
I'm not saying you're guaranteed to have any or all of those problems if all you do 24/7 is code, but I've seen it one hell of a lot, and I'm perplexed why this type of person tends to be preferred over more well-rounded individuals. It's not like they're actually better at their jobs.
I'm not arguing for going through an organization and sacking everyone who codes on the weekend. But I strongly suspect that if interviewers didn't glorify the obsessive 24/7 coder, either deliberately or subconsciously as 'what a real developer looks like', we'd have both a much more diverse tech industry and a much more functional one.
> much more diverse tech industry and a much more functional one.
As a Darwinist of sorts, I'm afraid that if this actually were true, we would be seeing some serious disruption of those nerds by much more functional diverse teams. The cat's been of the bag for so many years that somebody ought to have exploited it by now. But so far, it seems that one poster child example of a company which made tons of money bringing computing to the masses is Apple, under the lead of no one else but You Know Who, and (allegedly) with quite obsessive, arrogant, nitpicking and abrasive people working under him.
>>But I strongly suspect that if interviewers didn't glorify the obsessive 24/7 coder
Software industry isn't the first or the last place you will see this.
The world as a whole is giant stack ranking system. Every thing from college admissions to interviews is basically a comparative process, sort of a close-to-merit ecosystem where those who put above average effort, get above average returns.
And hubris isn't new to tech. Doctors, Politicians, in fact hubris is a dominant psychological trait among top people in any field.
I attempted to make my previous comment neutral about the correctness of your claims; it was intended to be a refutation of tptacek's comment. And I apologize for oversimplifying your assertion to be about "coding in your spare time", which was inaccurate (although your original phrasing, "obsessive wretch", was sufficiently shitty that I thought I was doing you a favour by rephrasing, but I now agree that I didn't do the correct rephrasing).
As for your claim itself, I think you have a good point, but you're a bit overextending its consequences, and ralfn's upthread response to you is right on.
I think you're totally right that diversity of opinion and interest is a super useful supplementary skill. And I strongly agree that a team needs to have that diversity on the product side to product useful products. And I agree that a team somewhat benefits from having not just a few product specialists who have that diversity; it's essential to have a few, but it's also helpful to have lots of people with diverse perspectives. And sure, being extremely tech focused (being an "obsessive wretch") is obviously inimical to that diversity. And yeah, there's some unreasonable glorification going on.
But I think there's also something reasonable about that glorification. Although deciding what to build is a huge part of the team's job, also building it is a huge part. Invariably the part that takes more person-hours, at least in a business large enough to have employees. And in my experience, the "obsessive wretches" actually do tend to be somewhat better at this part of the job. Not overwhelmingly better, but better. Not universally so, but as a tendency. That's just my observation from my medium-length career, and I accept your claim that you have different anecdata; if you have useful actual data I'm open to persuasion.
Moreover, very frequently in this industry we hire people who frankly are not currently knowledgeable enough to do the job we're hiring for, but we hire them anyway because it often works out, and we don't want to pay the asking price of the people who already know how to do the job we're hiring for. Call it good (it allows new entrants), call it bad (lots of wheel-reinvention, ageism, etc), but I allege that it's very common. So, who's going to learn faster? My bet is on the monomaniac; maybe this is unfounded. So, I think this is a rational reason to prefer the obsessives.
And I guess I should add that someone who has literally no other interests... okay, I'm with you. That person is likely to be a problem. But I will continue to favour people for whom outside study is one of their primary hobbies over people who do it a bit, and I'll continue to favour people who do it a bit over people who don't do it at all. And note that the example in TFA was not about someone with no other interests.... it was about one individual who did build a fibre-channel network over the weekend, and another individual who realized that they would never do so.
>No, it doesn't. It makes you one-dimensional and particularly poor at building products for others unlike yourself.
Translation - you are bad at your job
>The sooner the tech industry realizes that this sort of person is not an asset and that having too many of them around just drives others away, the better off it'll be.
reply
Translation - we should get rid of these people who are not assets
You've been practicing some serious selective reading in these threads.
When it's the Enemy, you seem eager to read between the lines for dark intent, but when an Ally says something like "poor at building products", "this sort of person is not an asset" and "having too many of them around just drives others away" you demand a precise, literal reading that somehow doesn't conclude that this is a call to fire, or not hire, the type of person described.
>>The idea that you've got to be some sort of obsessive wretch with no life outside of tech in order to successfully fill a role at a tech company is nothing but a pernicious myth.
Right. But being good in this world is you vs your-peer-group. And if others in your peer group are too awesome, putting in insane hours and time getting ahead, sooner or later the top spots will be taken. And nobody likes to be stuck being ranked average despite the best they can do.
>>So is the idea that you've got to be some ridiculous super-genius.
Reminds me of this movie - "The Gambler"- A literature professor tells his students the difference between somebody who can write good stuff and being the next William Shakespeare. Everybody has to face this fact sooner or later. Special things happen only when you are ready to put in special effort. While reminding them, there is absolutely nothing wrong in being a electrician or a plumber.
>>All you have to do is be reasonably smart and capable of learning on the job.
Being good and not good enough will only take you that far. Of course, you can still do your job and get paid. But remember other people will likely take the top spots.
>>When interviewers at tech companies mistakenly believe that every successful candidate has to be building atom smashers in their spare time
Tech and especially fast changing ecosystem in Tech have seen large concentration of Nerds. Kind of people who've wanted to build video games, or win science fairs at school. When too many people of same type arrive at a place it becomes a culture.
>>But this isn't natural or normal or a product of biology - it's just bias perpetuating itself.
This is the most important part.
I had a friend who quit programming to do MBA and built a career there. He realized there is no way he would like to spend weekends exploring new tools that keep launching every few months and endless push to use bleeding edge stuff, work insane hours, weekends and with the overall fast paced, failure ridden culture of tech.
He is doing pretty well with managing business now.
> The idea that you've got to be some sort of obsessive wretch with no life outside of tech in order to successfully fill a role at a tech company is nothing but a pernicious myth.
There's plenty of people for whom it's not at all obvious - in particular, people who're being sold educational materials and courses so they can get those big tech salaries.
Since not caring enough to do the basic gruntwork associated with a decent relationship is almost always a male problem in our society, I'm also gobsmacked that you'd call it sexist. It's about as sexist as calling gun violence or any other widely gendered thing a male problem - there's exceptions out there, but it's not worth being pedantic about.