And someone took that offer. And I bet he complained about the engineer he got at that price. Summarily launching into a tyrade about how important it is for non management to know their place--manager here--and just like his big brother Bill, didn't understand how non managers were making a manager's salary. Meanwhile, better paid engineers were making the job of many FLMs redundant by turning the employees they manage into scripts. Sounds like a good reason to pay a programmer like a manager, huh?
yeah, i'm searching, digging deep for sympathy for someone naive enough to accept a 35k offer in a 100k+ environment, and i'm failing.
the stress, the hours, the burnout, it's not for passion, it's for MONEY. you can go work on your passions in absolute leisure on a beach in southeast asia and never worry about money, but for the kids out there reading this, don't be tricked into thinking developing throwaway shitbox games for some asshole ex-microsoft millionaire is your passion.
What? You think I accepted that offer? No no no, Instead, I went to a post-IPO company while the stock was down from the dotcom crash and did just fine when it recovered.
In-between, Craig Venter offered me $45k, so glad I have standards. Everyone should have standards, no?
Edit: +1 for "35K is a very different kind of @#$% you money."
RULE 1: You don’t recruit and retain male engineers
you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends
* If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone
* If the relationship breaks down the engineer is gone
* The paycheck goes to HER
* Why does SHE want her husband or BF to work for you?
That's painfully not exactly wrong by itself. Its been good advice to make sure the significant other is very happy with the company, and it is often missed. If children are involved, making "family" life easier will make things better.
// I have no real idea of the history here, I'm just commenting on one rule that can be personally costly not to heed
Obviously the gender assumption is pretty cringeworthy in and of itself, but what I find particularly strange is how he advocates this but then turns around and complains that developers don't want to do 80-hour weeks as a regular requirement of employment. These are not mutually-reconcilable recommendations.
And it just gets better and better from there in later slides .. so much information about the character of one person so readily available. Or would that be an ad hominem? Decisions ..
So this is somewhat OT, but in reading the slides, I noticed this gem:
> Potential money is worth more than actual money.
In very, very rare circumstances, that is true. In the vast majority of cases, it's total B$. It's what company founders tell employees to exploit them, to get them to work overtime as a norm for crap normal-time pay. It's what the founders genuinely hope is true because they own so much of the company, but it rarely turns out that your shares are worth as much as the net-present-value of the delta to an average salary. At least in my experience.
Is this one of those true things we all agree not to talk about? Because I sure don't see anything wrong with it: if a guy's wife is unhappy with his job, then he'll get a new one.
Well in Alex St. John's case, his messy divorce led to him getting fired from Microsoft by performing a George Costanza [1]:
>But perhaps the most telling element of all of this is St. John’s own experience. In an interview by Christopher Redner [2], St. John himself suffered burn out at Microsoft to the point where he “got himself fired”. “He would pass out at his keyboard and straggle into morning meetings with key marks on his face. Worked sucked everything out of him; his marriage disintegrated.”
>According to a Shacknews interview from 2007 [3], St. John was going through a “messy divorce” at the time. He wanted to get fired rather than quit, because that ensured he’d retain his stock options for Microsoft.
The problem here is not that an unhappy spouse will cause the employee to leave, but rather that the author makes the assumption that the employee will be male, and that the male will have a female SO.
One could imply that if one were searching out reasons to get offended over a tongue-in-cheek powerpoint, which in fact features another slide specifically about female engineers.
No the implication is that that's not how you manage female engineers, it's just how you manage male engineers.
He says later that female engineers will go get promoted into non-engineering roles soon enough anyway. The implication there is you don't need to worry about retaining them as engineers as they won't stay that way.
BTW this isn't an endorsement of either his views or his approach. I mean the general thrust of the presentation could be renamed "ways to stiff your staff".
There are bits of it that ring true e.g. the different motivations between newbies, lifers and the rest. The majority though is clearly intended to be provocative.
I think for that the rule 1 would have to state: "You don't hire female engineers. End of rule 1."
There are some rules about male engineers but that doesn't preclude hiring women engineers. It just might have been that it's harder to form rules for them because of historically smaller sample to learn from.
It's one of those things that has a kernel of truth surrounded by an offensive and exaggerated wrapper, and which people love to use as a bludgeon to say that you're denying reality if you try to argue against it.
Yes, you recruit and retain the significant other... too. The engineer (who may have a husband or a boyfriend!) actually does have a significant say as well. They both count.
Stuff like "The paycheck goes to HER" is bullshit and demeans both the engineer and the significant other.
If you ignore all the crazy shit, then yes, what's left is true.
This is also the guy who sent out the email saying that if you're going to the hospital, make sure to take your laptop with you so you can keep working. I'm guessing employee work-life balance is not very high on his list of concerns.
Yes. I've read other stuff he wrote. Pretty crazy. I just hope all the people that come in contact with this guy or others like him, are in position to show them a finger.
I've seen someone put this into action, and open communications with his subordinates' wives. Instead of getting mad at her husband for being paged in the middle of the night, or having to work weird hours, she can angrily text the boss directly.
Wouldn't the benefit be for the employee whose spouse can direct anger not at the employee but their manager? The benefit would thus be employees being less likely to have to choose between their relation or their job.
If I was the husband, I'd rather prioritize being able to swiftly handle my wife's aggressions over brushing off such an intimate challenge for the sake of an employer (who instead gets to do the said challenge).
Anyhow - the purported direct benefit, according to Alex St. John, is for "the wife or GF" as the whole point is to make her happy (from the linked presentation: "If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone").
Hence, my question: how does it help the wife to directly interact with her husband's boss? Put differently, what is it about directly interacting with her husband's boss that makes her happier than directly interacting with her husband?
Yeah, I don't know. The whole thing is a cringe-fest but a good part of that was recognizing myself, wife, parents, and co-workers in there.
His VentureBeat article was pretty horrific but that pdf seems to reflect a certain ground truth. Not saying it reflects a reality anyone should be happy with, but if I was paying him to consult on recruiting and sat through that presentation I wouldn't be asking for my money back..
Well, to be fair, it's true (except for the part about the paycheck) but it's also equally with gender role reversed, so with a female employee and an husband.
If the partner of the employee is unhappy with the job, it will make the employee much more likely to find another job and so as a manager, it's smart to take into account the girlfriends, wives, husbands and boyfriends of your employees.
It's bizarre to even write this slide. Everything in it (the slide, not the presentation) becomes fairly much a reasonable insight if you just say family instead of wife or girlfriend. Hell, even partner would do.
Pretty ugly.. As this article [1] put it, that slide deck is a how-to guide on picking the best potential employees purely for exploitation potential. Real engineers should not demand money, instead work 80 hours a week because passion. Otherwise you have the dreaded "wage slave mentality". Jeez..
I work 80 hour weeks about 50 - 55 for my employer and the rest on my side projects. It's all about passion (I have to keep my job to be able to work on side projects that I'm passionate about), but I don't think I'd be a good candidate to work for this guy.
I kinda agree with a lot. Not everything, but a lot. However it only works when you actually have faith in the leadership and a fan of the product you're building making the whole thing unrealistic. It's unfortunate.
This whole saga has been uncomfortable from the beginning--and now I'm cringing harder ever than ever. Not because I disagree with much of what Amilia has written, but just because it's painful to be, in some way, a witness to the rift that this piece makes evident.
In any case, Amilia is right to highlight this quote:
> Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start
businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks.
This, folks, is a racial (and gender) pathology claim. Unless we interpret Alex as inquiring about the social circumstances that prevent women and 'blacks' from seizing these 'opportunities' (and I don't see how that's a plausible interpretation here), then what Alex is suggesting is that there is something wrong with women and black people, a physiological symptom of their gender or race, that prevents them from seeing or taking these opportunities when presented with them. I find that, if you pay attention, you also see this way of thinking at work behind the scenes in more reasonable-sounding claims about racial and gender politics. Sometimes its overt, but more often its buried in points about, e.g., the corroded norms of "black communities."
>Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks.
I've always wondered if the answer to this was due to the culture and class demographics. The Current crop of tech leaders came from the era where middle class boys were bought computers by their parents as it was seen as a thing for boys to be into and not girls (I think this stereotype is still prevalent but far less powerful now). Computers just were not affordable to working class folks back then. Considering the poverty most minorities families faced then and still do now, it's sadly the case that they couldn't afford computers.
I expect (and hope) that in the next 10 years we'll see the distribution of tech leaders become naturally more diverse. Not because of any activist drive but simply because these kids are much more likely to have access to the tools they were denied in the past.
> I expect (and hope) that in the next 10 years we'll see the distribution of tech leaders to become more diverse. Not because of any activist drive but simply because these kids are much more likely to have access to the tools they were denied in the past.
I don't see much hope of that as the fundamental problem hasn't changed. Lack of STEM training / degrees in pre-K / elementary school teachers and a gender problem worse than tech. We've had a lot of debates about the availability of programmable computers to lower incomes in a lot of threads.
>I've always wondered if the answer to this was due to the culture and class demographics.
The answer is simple. Women are naturally inclined toward social fields. There are few women who want to do something highly technical and not people-oriented. Men do not have the same strong social inclination. The physiological differences between male and female affect their psychology as well as their superficial appearances; let's not kid ourselves.
These are tools called "generalizations", which means they're not universally applicable, but they are helpful for understanding the world.
Hasn't that been demonstrated false? Women (girls) start out just as interested in everything including technology. They are socialized away from math and science. Any physiological bias is in the noise.
a) it's hard enough to demonstrably prove anything in real sciences, data from social sciences rarely reflects anything other than the author's bias. One's ability to contrive a desired result with opaque language should not be used as evidence contrary to the easily observed, near universal reality. Don't let someone else's agenda send you into denial.
b) a loss of interest as a person matures does not necessarily imply that loss is artificial. That unique psychology may emerge naturally over the developmental / maturation process, just as some physical features emerge.
We must all understand that we have our own biases. I'm having a hard time believing anybody can use personal observation to separate physiological differences from socializing influences. In fact I don't believe it at all.
It sounds the same as making up comfortable stories, denying the science that is done so as to absolve oneself of doing anything about the current state of affairs.
Do you have a source that indicates that something in female brain structure during maturation/puberty or hormones associated with puberty causes more socially inclined behavior and career choices?
Actually, serious research tends to point to the opposite of what you say... it's pretty much biological. Even studies with monkeys show that female baby monkeys prefer dolls while males prefer cars as toys...
Because medicine is a social thing that involves meeting and interviewing patients on a daily basis in order to restore and nourish them back to health. It involves a lot of daily interaction with the outside world (it's not an isolated, non-human field; there's a lot of society in it, even as you get increasingly technical). That matches female predispositions exactly.
And yet surgeons are still primarily male. This article[1] I found interesting, since it trots out just about all of the same rationalizing explanations that the programming discussion uses.
The example of surgeons helps your parent comment's point... among doctors, surgeons (together with radiologists and a few others) are among those with the smallest social contact with patients and their families. During most surgeries, the patient can't even speak!
Women make up roughly half of biology graduate students and 40% of postdocs; those degrees aren't inherently more "social" than other technical fields.
The danger here is that you are assuming that the main dominatedness of a field does not alter conditions around it in a way that is potentially self-fulfilling.
What I am suggesting is that while I agree that these disparities were likely due to class differences that manifested themselves in racial and gender inequalities, we now have a world where the industry is dominated by one gender and a few racial groups. Does the present situation makes it less likely for more women and minorities join tech? Without an activist drive, the answer seems likely.
A lot of what the author brings up here are forces today that makes the reversal you are hoping for less likely, unless an equal but opposite activist force is applied.
>I've always wondered if the answer to this was due to the culture and class demographics.
You could probably make a well supported case for why this is true for minorities, but what makes the entire hypothesis shaky is if it was a cultural and class issue, what does that say about middle/upper class white women?
Now let's assume that these women were discriminated/discouraged out of tech. How are we sure that in 10 years those same forces won't do the same to minorities?
I don't have a solution, but I don't think the computer penetration problem sufficiently answers the question.
Its obviously traditional gender roles leaking into the minds of children. We instinctively pick up on what society expects us to be and our personality evolves around those loci. To fix this problem you have to drive out one of the most ingrained aspects of all cultures everywhere. I'm definitely not saying it's right, I'm fairly extreme, I think skirts and high heels are particularly poisonus expressions of this cultural norm.
Perhaps gaming has something to do with this? Leaving aside whether there is something 'male' about gaming and the specific games that are most common, I recall that in my youth gaming was a 'guy thing'. I can imagine that frequently interacting with a computer in the form of gaming easily leads to becoming a programmer or tech worker.
Insightful, but you are so far removed from reality that you don't even realize most of these teens and early 20 somethings can't type at all because the cheap mobile computers are too convenient.
> Considering the poverty most minorities families faced then and still do now, it's sadly the case that they couldn't afford computers.
My father bought me (and my brother) a 2nd hand computer in 1988 (ZX Spectrum+), in communist Czechoslovakia, for a price of more than two monthly salaries.
Was the social situation in the U.S. really that much worse? I seriously doubt it.
Now of course my father was an academic, and was very smart, so he obviously saw a value in it. But it seems to me that being poor is really a poor excuse here.
There's a lot more to poverty than just "not having money." If my bank account suddenly dropped to zero, I lost all my material possessions, and I didn't have a job, I'm pretty confident that, within a few years, I could build things back up again and have a comfortable lifestyle (albeit, one with a very sad retirement account). This isn't the case for most people in poverty [edit: in poverty in the US Obviously, very different depending where they live]
So if you're saying: "You were raised without any sort of education, never had a bank account, are trapped in a cycle of high-interest loans, have never had a good-paying job and don't have the skills to get one, and this is all you've ever seen and all your children have ever seen around them... but it's a really poor excuse for not buying a computer!" then fine. You can certainly have an opinion!
Just keep in mind that it may not be wise to compare those in poverty to a smart, well-educated academic who sees an "obvious" value in computers for his children.
> Just keep in mind that it may not be wise to compare those in poverty to a smart, well-educated academic who sees an "obvious" value in computers for his children.
That was my point - the problem here is cultural, not economic. I was specifically addressing the "cannot afford" wording in the parent's post.
> This, folks, is a racial (and gender) pathology claim.
Could it not also/instead be a social upbringing thing instead?
If the media I see regarding African Americans is indicative to their culture, we have no further to look than BET and the cornucopia of movies like "Hot Tub Time Machine", "Black Coffee", and "Dear White People".
The current african american culture appears broken. Single parent households are everywhere, anti-intellectualism is paramount... Book learning is "white people stuff".
It's always a pleasant shock to meet those from the African nations over here. They're kind, intelligent, and well spoken. It's especially funny/sad when american blacks try to communicate with them, and get distant and nasty when they realize they are from Africa.
Women, on the other hand, are trained from elementary school that they are good at "english, social studies, and soft sciences". Boys do the hard stuff. That is little to do with capability, but bad training from a scholastic age.
There's a form of this point that could be correct--but the way you've framed it is pretty problematic.
1. Your examples of "Black Culture" just reflect the biases of the people who select examples of "Black Culture" for white people (and I'm pretty sure Hot Tub Time Machine, at least, is firmly a product of White Culture--did it have a single black writer?). I think you'd be better off looking at Blackish, Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, and ahem Barack Obama.
2. When you set up an argument like this, I suggest you also explain why you think "Black Culture" is "broken." Because its easy to read what you've written as bottoming out in the claim that black people have created a broken culture. Why? Well there must be something wrong with black people! Lots of people do seem to make this argument (accidentally, of course--its often an attempt to make a racist attitude sound socially acceptable), and I doubt you'd want to be associated with them.
One can point out that a culture is broken without blaming the people in it. Redneck culture is broken too, not least because it's very racist.
(I grew up surrounded by rednecks, including family members. The rednecks in my family are also the ones with the most problems: low income, drug problems etc.)
Yeah "Hot Tub Time Machine" is super bizarre. There were a couple black people in it, I guess? I think it shows the poster's bias more than anything. "It was a trivial movie with stupid humor -- therefore, black culture"
And viewing "African immigrants" as representative of all Africans? More than a little selection bias there. Far fewer Africans immigrate to the US than would like to.
Also, there are far more complicated and varied relationships between native Africans and Americans with African ancestry.
Part of my assumptions also revolve around my experiences with African American (and African) colleagues. We've talked of similar issues, WRT race and culture, and they have expressed similar problems.
Those are most certainly single data points, but they also tell of pervasive issues: being a good student was "bad", book learning was "white", males be a player rather than a father, sexual abuse and general abuse proliferate in their music, movies regularly play to "black" stereotypes....
Obviously all don't ascribe to these. That's the problem with stereotypes. But when the culture gains a critical mass of these 'problems', there needs to be a more critical discussion about the actions.
I'm perfectly fine that a great deal of laws through the last 300 years has caused a great deal of their culture to go a direction. And that falls on us all.
> This whole saga has been uncomfortable from the beginning--and now I'm cringing harder ever than ever. Not because I disagree with much of what Amilia has written, but just because it's painful to be, in some way, a witness to the rift that this piece makes evident.
Yeah. I honestly don't care so much about the idiot father's claims but rather just the fact we are witnessing a rather painfully public collapse of a family.
I felt that way too. I think she has a lot of issues to work through regarding her father, and it may be a lot of that which are fueling her rage. Not saying her arguments are wrong, but I am concerned about her impartiality.
I think, for better or worse, people choose role models who are like them. If you're a white male, your role models end up being white males. If you're a black female, you probably look up to other black females. Not exclusively or consciously, but it's probably the first place you look. "Who should I be like?" "Well, maybe that person who's already a little like me except older and more successful."
When you combine that with the historical situations that people in positions of power have been white males, you have a much broader variety of role models for white males than for anyone else.
That's not to say people can't or shouldn't choose role models who are a different race or gender than they are, just that it might not naturally be their first instinct.
Your first role models are pretty much always going to be the people you have contact with from a young age. So we start with your parents, Extended family and Kindergarten teachers.
Yes, we pick up other role models in our teens, but I think a lot of the "damage" is done by then. The expected roles have started to be processed and internalised.
She makes the exact argument supporting the parent though. That having people who look like her was incredibly important to her decision going into tech.
Which is a real problem IMO. I didn't go to school. Most of the programmers I know didn't. So maybe it's part of that culture. But I didn't have much in the way of peers when I started. It was just the most promising career option I had.
But the people I looked up to in tech weren't much like me other than their (mostly) maleness. And that wasn't a factor (for me). Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob, Matz, Roy Osherove, Jon Lam, Jamie Cansdale. They were just names on a page to me. Never met any of them. But I respected their abilities and what they wrote.
I certainly never had a mentor (though my father in law did get me my first real tech job, subcontracting for minimum wage, busting out the less fun HTML side of things for his work for a few months). I'm incredibly grateful to him, but that wasn't going to build a real career. So I picked up a dozen or so books, read them front-to-back, and a year later was a c# developer.
I feel like you have to want it for yourself. I could be totally wrong, and I have no idea how you'd measure such a thing, but for the non-college crowd at least, I've got to think stories more similar to my own are much more common than stories where someone found a group of people who looked like them they could consider mentors.
I've always been extremely conscious of who my role models are, so this is my preferred explanation for any kind of achievement gaps.
Many people reach out for "race and sex realism", or, historical-material explanations, but I think the power of media and role models rules in this space.
The error here is actually assuming that learning to code is an obvious opportunity. Many people, especially women, consider other things more worthwhile in life, and they have other options. And we only tend to notice the success stories, too, not the accounts of coders toiling away in windowless basements.
{Dad, if you use my face in an offensive slideshow again I beg you to please at least throw me a bone and put in a more flattering picture. As a self absorbed millennial I have provided the internet with a profusion of selfies in a rainbow of sepia tones. Please choose any of those.}
This is some sort of weird public spat between a father and a daughter, it's not newsworthy or even constructive.
> Dad, if you use my face in an offensive slideshow again I beg you to please at least throw me a bone and put in a more flattering picture. As a self absorbed millennial I have provided the internet with a profusion of selfies in a rainbow of sepia tones. Please choose any of those.
He picked an unflattering photo of his daughter and used it as a visual example of a "woman in tech" without her permission? What on earth?
The slide about "real engineers" is priceless. Real engineers don't care about money? They want a "mission"? Ha! Good luck hiring engineers in ad-tech, finance, etc. What's the mission? Showing more annoying ads to users? Yeah!
I guess I'm not a real engineer, cause I care about money. I sell a skill, provide a service, this service has value, pay me.
Now, TBH, a few good advice in this presentation, but often weirdly worded. Making sure the spouse/family is happy is a good advice, but doesn't have to be presented as "the wife/girlfriend".
The entire presentation is essentially a list of "how I think we can get good developers and underpaid them". I don't really care if he invented gaming itself, fuck this guy.
I guess I haven't been paying attention to the latest from a man who would give toddlers a run for their money in the tantrum department (well, other than telling Wild Tangent to leave me alone). Why he's getting the time of day, I have no idea. Sure, he did something something DirectX twenty years ago at Microsoft, but if he's done anything of note since other than run his mouth, I must have missed it.
If anything he has to say upsets you, ask yourself "why?" Because he's a brilliant game dev ala Carmack? Because everyone wants to work for Wild Tangent? Because of those lovely AAA titles Wild Tangent cranks out one after another? The answer to all is "no". So why do you care? Hell, his own offspring doesn't want anything to do with him. You can't stop VentureBeat and TechCrunch from writing it, but you don't have to read it.
He's a particularly bad exponent of what people feel are actually very widely held ideas in the tech community (ie: young > old, work long hours don't complain, etc).
> There's really no pretense that votes are the only factor in ranking stories.
True, however the HN front page has always given me the impression that votes matter the most, and that the front-page is largely reflective of the interests of the HN demographics. The question I'd ask is: why is there no explicit indication (written in the footer, perhaps) of the front-page being vetted by a handful of moderators?
A subtle form of pretense is not speaking of the truth.
http://news.ycombinator.com/active seems to be pretty unadulterated, although it goes by comments not votes. Controversial topics that get flagged as flamewars and drop off the front page (they hit 40 comments before 40 votes iirc) stay on the first page of /active as long as they're still... active.
Also, HN is pretty open about being more heavily moderated than other parts of the net, it's far from secret. And while I don't necessarily share the view that moderation of discussion is a GoodThing™, I find it acceptable since no one is trying to pretend that it's not happening.
> HN is pretty open about being more heavily moderated than other parts of the net [...] I find it acceptable since no one is trying to pretend that it's not happening.
A subtle form of pretence is to not explicitly state the fact. Why is there no explicit indication (written in the footer, perhaps) of the front-page being vetted by a handful of moderators? Why is the 'active' page kept hidden (it is not in the navbar)? Why all this secrecy?
The active page (along with a couple others) are shown on https://news.ycombinator.com/lists (the 'Lists' link in the footer). There's a few more odd pages like newpoll that aren't linked to in any obvious place.
I don't really see any of it as secrecy, as that implies actively and intentionally hiding, to me it seems more like not going out of the way to show/tell people. The Guidelines and FAQs go into it a bit IIRC, and dang has written comments on it as well. I'd describe it more as unintuitive than secretive. It seems like the same reasoning behind keeping HN minimalistic and not webapp 2.0 bloatware. It might chase some people away but it also keeps an eternal september at bay.
Also the front page is not vetted by moderators (if it was they'd be doing a terrible job as dupes and blatant linkbait are common), but there's code in place to mitigate flamewars and such. If you want to see what stories and comments are actually getting killed (by users, not the mods) you can enable showdead in your profile, which imo should be enabled by default but I can understand why it's not.
Generally if you see a story drop off the front page quickly, it's getting comments a lot quicker than it's getting votes. I do think mods will occasionally remove the penalty for this on stories that triggered the flamewar protection without there being a flamewar. Additionally some domains and topics are penalized, and there seem to be filtered words that will auto kill your comment. Try leaving a comment with (Im sorry, gotta avoid it somehow) m@$tur b@t3 in it. But again that's all automated, just unintuitive.
I have mentioned this before. A large enough group of people on HN will flag anything that mentions gender or race. Posts on social issues, unless it's about class, never stay on the frontpage. Probably also why people assume HN is an echo chamber of sexist and racist attitudes. Maybe that's too harsh.
> "I can’t begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work"
I cannot speak for developers in Silicon Valley or other places, but I suspect the feeling of disgust when hearing such things is similar. The problem is that solving design, engineering, computer science and math problems every day can be stressful and exhausting. Do that for more than 8 hours per day and maybe also multitask between projects everyday, in an environment that has toxic management and it's a recipe for burnout, burnout being that deep sense of tiredness, emptiness and helplessness, being nothing less than depression out of which some people never recover.
Now I'm sure that this is way better than digging for blood diamonds to feed your family, as Mr. Alex St. John is saying. But I can't believe that somebody born into privilege can even think to suggest that such jobs aren't so bad compared to African slavery.
If everybody else's lived experience matters, then take into account that this guy grew up in a log cabin in Alaska. I didn't grow up that far off the grid, but doing anything on a computer is a damned sight easier than working all day swinging a chainsaw or turning wrenches on heavy equipment. Pays way better too, and I haven't smashed a finger, lacerated anything, or taken a bath in hydraulic fluid since I became a desk jockey.
Seems like the big thing everyone is missing: you can hate Alex all you want, but he's not making conjectures. He's giving his advice based on successful experience in reality. I'll take his word - as politically incorrect as it is - over 1000 people making arguments off what is 'right'.
If you're running a business and Alex's tactics give you even a 10% edge - take them.
I don't understand - how does his advice hurt anyone? It seems very benign. He's free to run his business how he wants.
1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force. They're not allowed to work anymore because companies get too much flak for hiring them. Instead they starve on the street and resort to crime. It's easy to say 'no work for children!' from your comfy home.
2/ Looking after an employee's wife and trying to find Asperger graduates to employ is not illegal. The environmental test cheating is only having a negative effect because it is illegal, dishonest and fraud. None of the things mentioned by Alex are any of those. He's very up front about it - he's giving presentations on it while his employees are present.
3/ Not necessarily evil. A company could pay $100 to dump some waste in their own country with full regulations, or pay a poor country $10 to dump the waste there. If that $10 means better schooling for children there, then I'd say accepting a bit of waste that can be cleaned up later seems satisfactory. It's actually worked out quite well in some countries.
Basically - you're applying 'justice' that makes you feel better, and not justice that really solves anything. Making people like Alex stop bringing together teams that create things we use every day isn't helping us.
>1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force.
So, maybe fix that (being on the streets, hungry, etc), instead of fixing the laws against having children work?
Starving children (even as young as 10 or less) also willingly have sex with sex tourists for money, in Asia, Africa and elsewhere -- but those pesky laws also forbid them to do so. Instead of proposing we change the laws to enable them to make money this way without issues, how about we fix their situation?
Not that easy I'm afraid. There's more of them every year. People living in conditions where they need to fight to survive don't have time to worry about the survival of others, which means those who can't survive on their own or provide some benefit to others generally don't get any help.
So sure - fixing their situation would be the best! Please come help! We desperately need more real help here.
But barring people jumping on planes to come and help, which from experience doesn't seem to happen terribly often, it's better for these children to be able to survive.
My point is: you're doing this the wrong way around. First you fix their situation, and then you make child labour and sex tourism illegal. If you do it the other way around, you're just hurting people. You're just condemning children who had no other choice to survive to having no means of survival. Sorry to say it, but it's reality.
EDIT: To put it in a more clear example: a village is eating disgusting looking seaweed that tastes horrible because there is no other food nearby. You think nobody should have to eat this seaweed, so you make eating this seaweed illegal so that they can't eat it and offend you. End result? They starve because you didn't provide them with better food before making seaweed illegal.
>My point is: you're doing this the wrong way around. First you fix their situation, and then you make child labour and sex tourism illegal.
And my point is, it's rather the inverse. Legal child labour and an allowed sex tourism industry creates great private interests and political manipulation (legal, developmental, etc) to ensure things do not change.
They're neither "short term problem fixers" not "stepping stones to something better", but part of the reason why the people are held down.
I'm honestly sorry to tell you this: the experiment didn't work. Turns out when we took away the reason for private interests to be interested in these children, the lives of the children didn't improve. It just means now nobody cares if they die anymore. The situation is unfortunately getting steadily worse as before they had companies keeping them alive for profit, and now they have nothing.
I agreed with your point of view years ago. I think everyone did. But the experiment failed. Pretty sad really. Yet another good anecdote on the infamous "don't fix what you don't understand".
>I'm honestly sorry to tell you this: the experiment didn't work. Turns out when we took away the reason for private interests to be interested in these children, the lives of the children didn't improve
I'm not sure where you had this experience. In the US and Europe, when child labor (and children prostitutes) was abolished, circa late 19th - early 20th century, the lives of children improved greatly.
In countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America where it's still either allowed or authorities turn a blind eye, not so much.
Moreover, the very idea of "let the kids be raped for money, lest they starve to death, it's the least we can do" is sick.
1) Provide opportunity for street children to survive, and then ban exploitation of those children.
2) Ban exploitation of children, and ignore them as they die.
3) Leave it alone.
I'm saying we must choose 1 or 3. We must not pick 2. It is criminal. However, in developing countries in Africa, we have picked 2! Picking 2 is the "worst" we can do out of all possible options. It's sickening, and far too many people are still advocating for it.
Authorities in Africa and Asia no longer turn a blind eye because of grant money linked to abolishing child labour. People like you have forced that on them. And the children are now suffering far worse than before. You've made yourself feel better at the expense of those you wanted to help.
I think 2 and 3 make for strong moral arguments (though there are some valid counterpoints), but 1 is a poor example. Child labor is usually the best of a very poor set of options for both the child and their parents, and not allowing the child to work will probably worsen their situation. It may feel like paying children to do work is 'exploitation', but passively forcing them to starve, or suffer the ravages of preventable diseases conveniently out of sight is much worse. If you end child labor by providing a financial incentive for the kids to go to school, I will appluad your achievement, but banning them from working does not necessarily help them.
Labor is a matter of supply and demand, if companies are using child labor that must mean there is a large demand for labor (adults would likely be more efficient at the same task) by removing the child out of the labor pool you increase the bargaining power of his parents. I believe that is why it was originally banned in the United States.
You may increase the wages of the parents, but not necessarily by as much as the family has lost; in fact, there could be situations where a village is no longer worth operating in because the total amount of labor available is not enough to support a viable factory. Much of this depends on the elasticity of demand for labor, the manufacturer's alternatives, and the ease of automating a task. Remember that this is not a power game played by a group of companies on the one side and a bunch of laborers on the other; there are many other factors including mechanization, productivity, consumer demand, etc.
> You may increase the wages of the parents, but not necessarily by as much as the family has lost;
1 year out, maybe. 10 years out after the children have had the benefit of education? Dead wrong. Remember also that the local economy scales with prevailing wages. They would experience a period of deflation but that's fine as they have virtually no assets to speak of.
> Remember that this is not a power game played by a group of companies on the one side and a bunch of laborers on the other; there are many other factors including mechanization, productivity, consumer demand, etc.
In sub $10/day situations mechanization is a tiny factor at best. That machine has to be built in a factory in Germany by highly skilled and expensive engineers it's going to have to be amazing efficient to pay for itself. Then you need skilled labor to work on and maintain it.
Adults are more productive than children, and consumer demand would likely go up if you did not use them to produce your goods.
The western nations didn't get rid of child labor for altruistic reasons. It's a fools errand.
Thats what the winners at the table did, Walmarts, Nikes, Foxconns etc. have done. The only thing they do is have some nominal QC team and outsource all the stinky stuff to sub-contractors. In US that is how you hire "illegals/undocumented" by Big Ag or Big Logistic.
The #4/ to you list, have an structure for "plausible deniability".
If you go deep in the supply chain if you will find all the above.
I am not condoning his advice, nor do I practice these. But reality is not that pretty.
Spot on! Agree completely. Americans have this strange idea lately that all of their companies are squeaky clean when it's really people like Alex that put America on the map. Most of them hide it behind shell companies and lengthy contractor lists.
In fact, all of the big name American companies all started out with terrible practices until they earned enough money and enough ire to hide those practices away from the public eye. And judging by my downvotes, far too many people really believe the world is a much nicer place than it is, and where you can really compete without getting a bit dirty yourself.
Running a business in a residential area.
Shipping electrical products that were not UL tested for fire hazard.
Paying owners in stock rather than taxable income.
No diversity in hiring practices.
Lead in products without a product recycling program in place.
The gist is that you generally have to cut corners somewhere to start up any business unless you already have lots of money.
He's seen certain results, and been through certain circumstances. Unless he has proof that those circumstances -> results, making conjectures is exactly what he's doing.
This is ignoring the fact that effectiveness is not the only metric for a company. In Tim Cook's words, "if you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock".
Works great until the tide changes and you find yourself suddenly on the other side. That's exactly what is happening and some people are really upset. Screw them, this change is long overdue.
Exactly, it's short term vs. long term thinking. I remember listening to a German Businessman once talking about the new eastern (former USSR) countries - and he said, "What these people need to learn is that you can cheat somebody once, or you can do business with them for the rest of your life".
Come on, you're free to hate him, but putting DirectX together - which is the foundation for so much - is just holding a grudge against someone who says things you don't like.
And he didn't "make" DirectX or "put it together". He just advertised it. He's an "evangelist" not a "designer" or "developer" or "programmer". That's marketing, not engineering. And it was successful marketing because it was dishonest, heavy handed, well funded marketing, with no hint of self awareness or irony, which he kicked off by throwing a party that cast Microsoft as the Empire, and developers as slaves to be auctioned off and fed to the lions. The early version of DirectX he was evangelizing was a piece of crap. Look up "Direct3D Retained Mode" some time. [1]
The alternative to "Retained Mode", "Execute Buffers", were just as bad if not worse in their own way [2]:
>Direct3D initially implemented "retained mode" and "immediate mode" 3D APIs. Like other DirectX APIs, such as DirectDraw, both were based on COM. The retained mode was a scene graph API that attained little adoption. Game developers clamored for more direct control of the hardware's activities than the Direct3D retained mode could provide. Only two games that sold a significant volume, Lego Island and Lego Rock Raiders, were based on the Direct3D retained mode, so Microsoft did not update the retained mode after DirectX 3.0.
>For DirectX 2.0 and 3.0, the Direct3D immediate mode used an "execute buffer" programming model that Microsoft hoped hardware vendors would support directly. Execute buffers were intended to be allocated in hardware memory and parsed by the hardware to perform the 3D rendering. They were extremely awkward to program, however, hindering adoption of the new API and prompting calls for Microsoft to adopt OpenGL as the official 3D rendering API for games as well as workstation applications. (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D)
I thought his posts on the subject were a mix of pragmatism and satire? A "this is how the world works, you've got this, here's what you'll face".
Was it not meant to be satirical? Was he genuinely advocating squeezing what you can out of people until they burn out and then tossing them aside?
I guess from the tone I thought he was trying to poke fun at the POV he was espousing? But the only thing I know about him was that he went around evangelizing DirectX at Microsoft Developer conference a long time ago so I could've completely misread.
Definitely not satirical! His own daughter is criticizing him after all.
> Was he genuinely advocating squeezing what you can out of people until they burn out and then tossing them aside?
I don't see this in the presentation at all. Do you mean where he says to churn through employees until you find the ones which fit? Seems like what all companies do, they just don't word it like that. Why else do we have trial periods? He's saying that you get in some employees, give them too much work, get rid of the ones that don't cope and reward the ones that do. Sounds like standard practice in every company I've ever been at.
> Definitely not satirical! His own daughter is criticizing him after all.
I guess that should be obvious at this point. I thought there might still be a discussion until you pointed it out. That does pretty much settle it. Thanks.
As far as the rest, maybe I didn't read closely enough; it's just one of the impressions I walked away with with the "wage slave" language.
It actually does look like satire because it's so over the top. Are we sure it's not some kind of inside joke?
If this is how he actually does treat employees in a serious fashion then I take back everything nice I said about him. You can create a high performance culture while not being inhuman. I still stand by harsh tactics being important in business, but harsh tactics end where someone's health and well-being begin.
Some of us have actually know Alex St John for decades, and are well aware that he really is that way, has always been that way, he is not joking when he says he's that way, and he makes it quite clear that he is not joking if you call him on it. So what's so obvious to you simply isn't true. You should believe his daughter, she's telling the truth. Go over to reddit and ask her.
Yes, Alex thinks that way, but he also satirizes himself by exaggerating "must always work" culture a little bit.
In reality Alex does not really work all the time (for example he spent quite some time on his blog) and he does not require his employees to work all the time too.
Was he being satirical when he threw a Toga Party / Roman Orgy / Slave Auction whose in-your-face theme was that Microsoft was the Empire and game developers were slaves to be sold at auction and fed to the lions?
I hope that if I turn into what can best be described as a self righteous asshole, my children will be smart and capable enough to call me on it, hard and fast.
There are so many incredibly insulting and poorly thought out half-truths in the original presentation referenced that I'm shocked it was given in the context of a professional environment.
I more-or-less said the same thing on Reddit: GOOD FOR HER! If every asshole who had influence or power had such a strong and confident daughter calling them out on their bullshit, this world would be a MUCH better place.
The most surprising fact to me was that she is just 22. Rebelling against parents isn't uncommon at a young age, but writing a full-blown public takedown is uncommon at...any age.
> Worst of all, many women enter into CS majors only to find that they are already hopelessly behind as they discover that their male counterparts already know the material from tinkering in their childhoods.
My college experience was quite different. I never tinkered with computers or electronics during my childhood, and I had no problems getting up to speed. In fact, I'd say most of my peers at the community college I went to had zero programming experience. The instructors didn't assume any prior knowledge, either.
Indeed. The extent of my programming knowledge entering collage was basic HTML/CSS and making and making a form in Visual Basic that swapped the positions of the "Okay" and "Cancel" buttons whenever you moused over one of them.
I knew much less than many of my peers and our school specifically had an introduction to CS class that was geared towards 0 knowledge students. A lot of the CS majors skipped it and went straight to the 2nd class, which I took the following semester.
I guess the idea is to say that, generally speaking, boys will be encourage to tinker with electronics and computers even from an early age without any recrimination. On the other side, girls won't have the same "luxury". Even their toys reflect the kind of life society chooses for them: taking care of babies and taking care of the house.
This isn't to say that your statement isn't true, but I would bet it is just an anecdote.
Same here. I didn't even study CS, nor did I own a computer until I was 23.
And this was back before the internet was ubiquitous so if you wanted to program you had to spend real money on books and developer tools. No free/open source resources at your fingertips.
My first real exposure to programming came after I bluffed my way into a temp gig building spreadsheets in Quattro Pro.
She didn't say "all women", she said "many women." I attend the University of Texas at Austin. I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field. One of the reasons was the fact that although I'd taken AP CS courses in high school, I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late". This attitude came from my peers, the companies that attended our career fairs, and even from my first exposure to the online tech press/blogosphere- I remember reading an essay by Paul Graham wherein he essentially implied that if a woman hasn't started coding by 13 all hope is lost for her. The only people I didn't get that impression from were (most of) my instructors, but that wasn't really enough, especially in the 500+ person intro classes I was in at the time.
Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.
> I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field.
Working in the tech field has almost nothing to do with CS. Many/most developers don't study CS in college, and technical ability is only a very small part of what makes a good developer.
> I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late".
Come on, there are assholes everywhere who use this tactic to make themselves feel superior or to get rid of potential competition, men and women alike. This is not exclusive to CS. A lot of people are worried that they put so much time into something and that someone 'fresh' could make them look bad by picking it up quicker. It makes it that much more satisfying when you beat them.
If it was just a small minority of men in my program, I would have agreed with you, but this attitude seemed also prevalent- and I could be wrong about this- in companies and the larger tech world.
One thing I noticed in particular, was that a hell of a lot of "diversity initiatives" (stuff like code camps, scholarships to diversity conferences, etc) set up by companies like Square and Google and nonprofits like Grace Hopper gave their opportunities mostly to minorities who were already very successful, with internships in prestigious companies. If even the programs explicitly meant to increase the percentage of women/minorities in the industry go largely to very experienced people, I thought at the time, then there's really no hope for me at that point.
In any case, none of this is what led to me deciding I didn't want a tech career, it was just a contributing factor. I probably could have pushed through it, but I realized I didn't like tech enough to do so- I liked coding well enough, but I didn't like or value the work most tech companies were doing.
I have to agree that there are a lot of bad programming jobs out there, but there are some really good ones, too--many times in places that aren't obvious. I'm speaking only from my own experience here, but I'm currently working at a big-name company and they pay well but the work is boring as hell and the culture is not to my liking. I've worked at smaller/no-name companies and had a vastly better experience--more diverse work, more opportunities to develop new skills, and a much friendlier culture as well.
If you have any interest in staying in the field--and I hope you do--don't limit your view of potential jobs to just the high-profile companies. Talk to some of the smaller shops around, you might really like what you find.
On your diversity note. I find it amusing, since when I was at collage the diversity push was all for women, so unless you were an exceptional student all of the scholarships went to women. And now it appears to be being pushed to a smaller and smaller subset.
I hope that you've found something you enjoy to go into a career in. I know I studied tech and now work tangentially to it, and sometimes I feel like I made the wrong choice.
I understand the feeling of needing to "catch up" to fit in. For the first three years after I started programming I kept my work almost completely private, I felt so far behind. I wrote several hundred projects that I never showed to anybody, and didn't even keep. I still feel the gap a little bit today (five years in), but it seems mostly gone.
I fit the programmer archetype exactly, and it took me three years of near constant engagement before I felt I could even begin to fit in (culturally) with experienced programmers. I can easily imagine the task is considerably harder if you don't fit the archetype.
On the flip-side - the desire to "catch up", and the solitary nature of the challenge lent me considerably more motivation and creativity than I seem to have now that I have "acclimatized".
----
I'm very interested to see how it is going to turn out for my sister. She's a very talented programmer, but she doesn't try to immerse herself in the culture of it at all, rather she is treating it as an auxiliary skill to her studies in GIS. I feel some smug satisfaction knowing she is coding circles around most of the guys in her classes, despite not taking on the identity of "I am a programmer".
I played around with a Franklin PC 8088 when I was a kid for a couple years that we had it. I tried BASIC but never got close to my goal of writing a Tic Tac Toe program. Didn't know how to read input. Didn't even know that the "^" on the "^SAVE" menu item at the bottom meant to hold down CTRL, so my "programs" never survived more than the hour or two I tried (mostly in vain) to get something to work.
No one in my family or peers really knew much about computers and while the Apple IIe at school were much more impressive, that was just playing trivia games and such. Not writing anything ourselves.
It wasn't until I was about 16 that I touched a computer again. Built my own eventually to play DOOM. I didn't know anything "technical" at that point beyond autoexec.bat and... config something. I forget the other one.
It wasn't until I was 21 that I did my first real "programming". Which consisted of reading a book on HTML and being paid $5/hr by my father in law to write some truly bad markup while he did the real work.
I picked up some books on c#, ASP.NET 1.0, MSSQL Server and did my best to absorb what I could. My father-in-law didn't know/work-with most of that (he did help me figure out some SQL basics though) and I didn't have a peer group or support system or anything. About a year later I had a job paying about as well as Home Depot might writing c#.
Almost 20 years later I'm writing Scala and make a good living.
I don't say this as advice exactly. Just saying the "you can't start late" stuff is bullshit. I've often regretted not having access to college so I could answer "write a binary tree on the board" questions. So I didn't feel inadequate in those ways. But it hasn't stopped me getting a job and I'm overall pretty satisfied with my career (well... there was a dark time when I attempted to manage that was pretty cringe worthy) and accomplishments.
I wish I had something more to offer people who think a career in tech is out of their reach because they couldn't afford college, or they started too late. All I really have to offer is this:
Pick up a book. Remember how practically no one actually read a text-book from front to back in grade school? If they had they'd have had a huge advantage right? Pick up a book. Those that say "I learn by doing" will never ever ever be exposed to the same depth or amount of knowledge as you'll get from the condensed, edited brain-on-paper of accomplished authors. Be well read. It's like cheating. And it's cheap. Often even free (Not talking Blogs. Those are mostly only useful for very specific questions/topics; I'm talking about the free Ruby book, or beg for a copy of haskellbook. Or torrent if you must and pay them back for it later).
People get offended by the idea that "if you find first year COSC courses difficult, then programming is probably not for you" - but in my experience that's completely how it turns out.
All the programmers I know who started at university with no prior experience and went on to happy and successful* have this in common - they found first year COSC courses an absolute breeze, and went way ahead of the coursework in their own time just for the fun of it.
Indeed, not all male computer science students have prior exposure to programming[0]. I didn't when I entered college, and I had several male peers who did. That they had that advantage was definitely intimidating. Yet, at the same time they were clearly participants in a hobby and community that I wanted to be a part of, and when I expressed interest they were quite welcoming. I think in large part they were just glad to find other people with whom they could share their passion.
Now, I'm doing quite well as an engineer and I thoroughly enjoy programming.
I have no prescriptions for women; all I'm suggesting is that we do not over-generalize about the experiences that men have in CS.
[0]Well, I did try to teach myself programming a couple different times, but I failed utterly and concluded that I wasn't cut-out for it. If anything that experience put me in a worse starting position. I started out college studying philosophy and literature.
I think this is the crux of where I started to disagree with her:
> In fact, only 5% of U.S. High schools even offer the Computer Science AP exam in the first place. As a result, many women...
I don't understand why this affects only women. Or more importantly, affects women (and minorities) more than other groups.
There are social stigmas and the like we could examine, but this particular quote as written reads as a non-sequitur to me.
Edit: Just to clarify, I don't want to belittle the very real disparities we are facing in the tech industry. Also worth noting, I thought she was articulate and I appreciated her sources and statistics.
The tone of it was more like: love your job for whatever hours you are there, even if it's 80 hours a week, and if you don't love it, you're not a real engineer, you're in the mediocre majority, and you don't deserve to be there anyway.
Obviously, the entire slide deck is terrible, but, a personal thought about the "The NOT male engineers" slide...
Some people might think "Well, it's a terrible thing to say like that, that women should get the more social jobs, but society/culture/genetics/hormones -- perhaps a grain of truth, right? Women are just social!" You might even think it's a good thing to promote them, or make them the "communicators" or put them in architect positions.
I just want to say that these are the good intentions that made my first few years of out of college job experience absolutely awful, which makes this slide especially upsetting to me. I was an engineering major with a strong CS background, but also a 6' tall, beautiful, outgoing, well-spoken woman. Obviously, I'd be perfect working with clients, or acting as a liaison between developers and designers, or as a technical sales engineer, right!?
So, I was "let go" twice, the first time, just 5 months after graduating, and then again a year later. I missed meetings, told clients their ideas were bad, was a terrible diplomat, didn't prepare very nice-looking reports, complained about using MS Office, constantly forgot to log billable hours, spent too much time writing code... I hated it, I was terrible at it, and yet I kept drifting towards these types of jobs! It was what recruiters showed me, what college counselors showed me, what everyone said I should do, and what I thought I should do!
It took me way too long (to my credit, I was young) to realize that I'm much much happier "just" writing code, and working on a project that I can really take the time to get into. If I'm going to do "collaboration" I'd rather do it with other engineers that share a common(ish) technical background, where we all bounce ideas off of each other and have similar goals for the product or feature. And I'm so much happier not having to worry about what I'm wearing to work every day, or if I need to prepare for a customer meeting in the morning!
So, even if you think that it might be true that women are more social on average (whatever your own personal reasoning is, doesn't matter) PLEASE don't automatically try to lead women into roles like this, or assume that she'll be great at bridging gaps between clients/developers/designers/god-knows-what (because she's a LADY! Amirite!?). Some are, some aren't. Some men are, some aren't. But using these social/cross-discipline positions as kneejerk suggestions for a woman to "move up", or "do something more interesting" may be doing more harm than good to her career if she takes the advice.
Alex St John glorifies the benefits of slavery and Microsoft's imperialistic dominance of game developers in his own words [1], describing his infamous Toga Party / Roman Orgy / Slave Auction he threw in the Spartan Stadium at the 1996 Computer Game Developer Conference:
>"Sex, violence and debauchery were all hallmarks of a great Roman “orgy” and I wanted to come as close to capturing that experience as I could get away with."
>"The slave auction was also a special occasion. The Roman guards were rounding up the losers from the gladiatorial events and anybody who was offending a “senator” or Cleopatra and throwing them in the slave pit. Once a sufficient number of slaves had been collected from the party, Gillian returned to the stage to auction them to the audience for the gold they had won in the games. Gillian could set any base price she wanted for a “specimen”, if the audience wouldn’t pay the price the slave would be “thrown to the lions”. We had configured a “pit” full of foam to one side of the stage and directly in front of the first caged lion. A failed slave would be marched to the edge of the pit at spear point and pushed in by the praetorian guard where they would fall into box full of foam below the audiences line of sight. Then a huge video clip of lions tearing up a wildebeest and roaring would be played on the big screens on either side of the stage accompanied by the sounds of screaming. Down in the foam pit we had a collection of fake bloody body parts that somebody would toss up in the air during the lion feeding. Of course the “victim” was then allowed to sneak out the back and return to the party."
175 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadWildTangent offered me $35K, less than I had made as a post-doc before leaving for industry.
#$%& you Alex...
the stress, the hours, the burnout, it's not for passion, it's for MONEY. you can go work on your passions in absolute leisure on a beach in southeast asia and never worry about money, but for the kids out there reading this, don't be tricked into thinking developing throwaway shitbox games for some asshole ex-microsoft millionaire is your passion.
35k is a very different kind of 'fuck you' money.
In-between, Craig Venter offered me $45k, so glad I have standards. Everyone should have standards, no?
Edit: +1 for "35K is a very different kind of @#$% you money."
// I have no real idea of the history here, I'm just commenting on one rule that can be personally costly not to heed
> Potential money is worth more than actual money.
In very, very rare circumstances, that is true. In the vast majority of cases, it's total B$. It's what company founders tell employees to exploit them, to get them to work overtime as a norm for crap normal-time pay. It's what the founders genuinely hope is true because they own so much of the company, but it rarely turns out that your shares are worth as much as the net-present-value of the delta to an average salary. At least in my experience.
Um, that's precisely his point since he's writing it from the POV of a employer.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
>But perhaps the most telling element of all of this is St. John’s own experience. In an interview by Christopher Redner [2], St. John himself suffered burn out at Microsoft to the point where he “got himself fired”. “He would pass out at his keyboard and straggle into morning meetings with key marks on his face. Worked sucked everything out of him; his marriage disintegrated.”
>According to a Shacknews interview from 2007 [3], St. John was going through a “messy divorce” at the time. He wanted to get fired rather than quit, because that ensured he’d retain his stock options for Microsoft.
[1] http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-g...
[2] http://www.informationtechnologyleaders.com/stvid.html
[3] http://www.shacknews.com/article/46338/alex-st-john-intervie...
> RULE 1: You don’t recruit and retain male engineers you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends"
Reading is fundamental
He says later that female engineers will go get promoted into non-engineering roles soon enough anyway. The implication there is you don't need to worry about retaining them as engineers as they won't stay that way.
BTW this isn't an endorsement of either his views or his approach. I mean the general thrust of the presentation could be renamed "ways to stiff your staff".
There are bits of it that ring true e.g. the different motivations between newbies, lifers and the rest. The majority though is clearly intended to be provocative.
There are some rules about male engineers but that doesn't preclude hiring women engineers. It just might have been that it's harder to form rules for them because of historically smaller sample to learn from.
Yes, you recruit and retain the significant other... too. The engineer (who may have a husband or a boyfriend!) actually does have a significant say as well. They both count.
Stuff like "The paycheck goes to HER" is bullshit and demeans both the engineer and the significant other.
If you ignore all the crazy shit, then yes, what's left is true.
I'm sure the guy wrote a lot of worse things but this one is not particularly deranged.
Anyhow - the purported direct benefit, according to Alex St. John, is for "the wife or GF" as the whole point is to make her happy (from the linked presentation: "If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone").
Hence, my question: how does it help the wife to directly interact with her husband's boss? Put differently, what is it about directly interacting with her husband's boss that makes her happier than directly interacting with her husband?
His VentureBeat article was pretty horrific but that pdf seems to reflect a certain ground truth. Not saying it reflects a reality anyone should be happy with, but if I was paying him to consult on recruiting and sat through that presentation I wouldn't be asking for my money back..
If the partner of the employee is unhappy with the job, it will make the employee much more likely to find another job and so as a manager, it's smart to take into account the girlfriends, wives, husbands and boyfriends of your employees.
1: http://www.geek.com/news/developer-bro-alex-st-john-want-a-g...
In any case, Amilia is right to highlight this quote:
> Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks.
This, folks, is a racial (and gender) pathology claim. Unless we interpret Alex as inquiring about the social circumstances that prevent women and 'blacks' from seizing these 'opportunities' (and I don't see how that's a plausible interpretation here), then what Alex is suggesting is that there is something wrong with women and black people, a physiological symptom of their gender or race, that prevents them from seeing or taking these opportunities when presented with them. I find that, if you pay attention, you also see this way of thinking at work behind the scenes in more reasonable-sounding claims about racial and gender politics. Sometimes its overt, but more often its buried in points about, e.g., the corroded norms of "black communities."
But let's not let facts get in the way of argumentation shall we?
I've always wondered if the answer to this was due to the culture and class demographics. The Current crop of tech leaders came from the era where middle class boys were bought computers by their parents as it was seen as a thing for boys to be into and not girls (I think this stereotype is still prevalent but far less powerful now). Computers just were not affordable to working class folks back then. Considering the poverty most minorities families faced then and still do now, it's sadly the case that they couldn't afford computers.
I expect (and hope) that in the next 10 years we'll see the distribution of tech leaders become naturally more diverse. Not because of any activist drive but simply because these kids are much more likely to have access to the tools they were denied in the past.
I don't see much hope of that as the fundamental problem hasn't changed. Lack of STEM training / degrees in pre-K / elementary school teachers and a gender problem worse than tech. We've had a lot of debates about the availability of programmable computers to lower incomes in a lot of threads.
The answer is simple. Women are naturally inclined toward social fields. There are few women who want to do something highly technical and not people-oriented. Men do not have the same strong social inclination. The physiological differences between male and female affect their psychology as well as their superficial appearances; let's not kid ourselves.
These are tools called "generalizations", which means they're not universally applicable, but they are helpful for understanding the world.
b) a loss of interest as a person matures does not necessarily imply that loss is artificial. That unique psychology may emerge naturally over the developmental / maturation process, just as some physical features emerge.
It sounds the same as making up comfortable stories, denying the science that is done so as to absolve oneself of doing anything about the current state of affairs.
Is that a problem to be solved or just the nature of reality?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/24/gender-toys-childre...
Unfortunately, there are so much political agendas and sensitive issues at play here that this kind of science is not disseminated too much.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3706651/
http://news.mit.edu/2014/research-reveals-gender-gap-nations...
What I am suggesting is that while I agree that these disparities were likely due to class differences that manifested themselves in racial and gender inequalities, we now have a world where the industry is dominated by one gender and a few racial groups. Does the present situation makes it less likely for more women and minorities join tech? Without an activist drive, the answer seems likely.
A lot of what the author brings up here are forces today that makes the reversal you are hoping for less likely, unless an equal but opposite activist force is applied.
You could probably make a well supported case for why this is true for minorities, but what makes the entire hypothesis shaky is if it was a cultural and class issue, what does that say about middle/upper class white women?
Now let's assume that these women were discriminated/discouraged out of tech. How are we sure that in 10 years those same forces won't do the same to minorities?
I don't have a solution, but I don't think the computer penetration problem sufficiently answers the question.
My father bought me (and my brother) a 2nd hand computer in 1988 (ZX Spectrum+), in communist Czechoslovakia, for a price of more than two monthly salaries.
Was the social situation in the U.S. really that much worse? I seriously doubt it.
Now of course my father was an academic, and was very smart, so he obviously saw a value in it. But it seems to me that being poor is really a poor excuse here.
So if you're saying: "You were raised without any sort of education, never had a bank account, are trapped in a cycle of high-interest loans, have never had a good-paying job and don't have the skills to get one, and this is all you've ever seen and all your children have ever seen around them... but it's a really poor excuse for not buying a computer!" then fine. You can certainly have an opinion!
Just keep in mind that it may not be wise to compare those in poverty to a smart, well-educated academic who sees an "obvious" value in computers for his children.
That was my point - the problem here is cultural, not economic. I was specifically addressing the "cannot afford" wording in the parent's post.
Could it not also/instead be a social upbringing thing instead?
If the media I see regarding African Americans is indicative to their culture, we have no further to look than BET and the cornucopia of movies like "Hot Tub Time Machine", "Black Coffee", and "Dear White People".
The current african american culture appears broken. Single parent households are everywhere, anti-intellectualism is paramount... Book learning is "white people stuff".
It's always a pleasant shock to meet those from the African nations over here. They're kind, intelligent, and well spoken. It's especially funny/sad when american blacks try to communicate with them, and get distant and nasty when they realize they are from Africa.
Women, on the other hand, are trained from elementary school that they are good at "english, social studies, and soft sciences". Boys do the hard stuff. That is little to do with capability, but bad training from a scholastic age.
1. Your examples of "Black Culture" just reflect the biases of the people who select examples of "Black Culture" for white people (and I'm pretty sure Hot Tub Time Machine, at least, is firmly a product of White Culture--did it have a single black writer?). I think you'd be better off looking at Blackish, Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, and ahem Barack Obama.
2. When you set up an argument like this, I suggest you also explain why you think "Black Culture" is "broken." Because its easy to read what you've written as bottoming out in the claim that black people have created a broken culture. Why? Well there must be something wrong with black people! Lots of people do seem to make this argument (accidentally, of course--its often an attempt to make a racist attitude sound socially acceptable), and I doubt you'd want to be associated with them.
(I grew up surrounded by rednecks, including family members. The rednecks in my family are also the ones with the most problems: low income, drug problems etc.)
And viewing "African immigrants" as representative of all Africans? More than a little selection bias there. Far fewer Africans immigrate to the US than would like to.
Also, there are far more complicated and varied relationships between native Africans and Americans with African ancestry.
Those are most certainly single data points, but they also tell of pervasive issues: being a good student was "bad", book learning was "white", males be a player rather than a father, sexual abuse and general abuse proliferate in their music, movies regularly play to "black" stereotypes....
Obviously all don't ascribe to these. That's the problem with stereotypes. But when the culture gains a critical mass of these 'problems', there needs to be a more critical discussion about the actions.
I'm perfectly fine that a great deal of laws through the last 300 years has caused a great deal of their culture to go a direction. And that falls on us all.
Yeah. I honestly don't care so much about the idiot father's claims but rather just the fact we are witnessing a rather painfully public collapse of a family.
When you combine that with the historical situations that people in positions of power have been white males, you have a much broader variety of role models for white males than for anyone else.
That's not to say people can't or shouldn't choose role models who are a different race or gender than they are, just that it might not naturally be their first instinct.
Yes, we pick up other role models in our teens, but I think a lot of the "damage" is done by then. The expected roles have started to be processed and internalised.
They are likely more influential than teachers.
(That they aren't "further along" doesn't mean that their behaviors and attitudes will not be adopted)
Which is a real problem IMO. I didn't go to school. Most of the programmers I know didn't. So maybe it's part of that culture. But I didn't have much in the way of peers when I started. It was just the most promising career option I had.
But the people I looked up to in tech weren't much like me other than their (mostly) maleness. And that wasn't a factor (for me). Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob, Matz, Roy Osherove, Jon Lam, Jamie Cansdale. They were just names on a page to me. Never met any of them. But I respected their abilities and what they wrote.
I certainly never had a mentor (though my father in law did get me my first real tech job, subcontracting for minimum wage, busting out the less fun HTML side of things for his work for a few months). I'm incredibly grateful to him, but that wasn't going to build a real career. So I picked up a dozen or so books, read them front-to-back, and a year later was a c# developer.
I feel like you have to want it for yourself. I could be totally wrong, and I have no idea how you'd measure such a thing, but for the non-college crowd at least, I've got to think stories more similar to my own are much more common than stories where someone found a group of people who looked like them they could consider mentors.
Many people reach out for "race and sex realism", or, historical-material explanations, but I think the power of media and role models rules in this space.
{Dad, if you use my face in an offensive slideshow again I beg you to please at least throw me a bone and put in a more flattering picture. As a self absorbed millennial I have provided the internet with a profusion of selfies in a rainbow of sepia tones. Please choose any of those.}
This is some sort of weird public spat between a father and a daughter, it's not newsworthy or even constructive.
He picked an unflattering photo of his daughter and used it as a visual example of a "woman in tech" without her permission? What on earth?
I guess I'm not a real engineer, cause I care about money. I sell a skill, provide a service, this service has value, pay me.
Now, TBH, a few good advice in this presentation, but often weirdly worded. Making sure the spouse/family is happy is a good advice, but doesn't have to be presented as "the wife/girlfriend".
If anything he has to say upsets you, ask yourself "why?" Because he's a brilliant game dev ala Carmack? Because everyone wants to work for Wild Tangent? Because of those lovely AAA titles Wild Tangent cranks out one after another? The answer to all is "no". So why do you care? Hell, his own offspring doesn't want anything to do with him. You can't stop VentureBeat and TechCrunch from writing it, but you don't have to read it.
That is obviously not true. She even wrote blog post about him. That is a clear indication that, as a minimum, she cares a lot about him.
And Alex is proud of his daughter:
http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/21/i-apologize/
> (2015-10-16) The people behind the scenes at Hacker News now hand pick stories they want on the front page. It's not a user-generated voting-controlled news site. But it pretends to be one and tries to look like one. It's deeply dishonest. http://www.curi.us/1612-anti-israel-bias-at-hacker-news / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10402465
This is outrageous, and I will find a way to create a front-page list that is "unadulterated".
Here's the moderator commenting about the many factors:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20rank&sort=byPopulari...
(not all the results are applicable, enough are)
True, however the HN front page has always given me the impression that votes matter the most, and that the front-page is largely reflective of the interests of the HN demographics. The question I'd ask is: why is there no explicit indication (written in the footer, perhaps) of the front-page being vetted by a handful of moderators?
A subtle form of pretense is not speaking of the truth.
Also, HN is pretty open about being more heavily moderated than other parts of the net, it's far from secret. And while I don't necessarily share the view that moderation of discussion is a GoodThing™, I find it acceptable since no one is trying to pretend that it's not happening.
> HN is pretty open about being more heavily moderated than other parts of the net [...] I find it acceptable since no one is trying to pretend that it's not happening.
A subtle form of pretence is to not explicitly state the fact. Why is there no explicit indication (written in the footer, perhaps) of the front-page being vetted by a handful of moderators? Why is the 'active' page kept hidden (it is not in the navbar)? Why all this secrecy?
I don't really see any of it as secrecy, as that implies actively and intentionally hiding, to me it seems more like not going out of the way to show/tell people. The Guidelines and FAQs go into it a bit IIRC, and dang has written comments on it as well. I'd describe it more as unintuitive than secretive. It seems like the same reasoning behind keeping HN minimalistic and not webapp 2.0 bloatware. It might chase some people away but it also keeps an eternal september at bay.
Also the front page is not vetted by moderators (if it was they'd be doing a terrible job as dupes and blatant linkbait are common), but there's code in place to mitigate flamewars and such. If you want to see what stories and comments are actually getting killed (by users, not the mods) you can enable showdead in your profile, which imo should be enabled by default but I can understand why it's not.
Generally if you see a story drop off the front page quickly, it's getting comments a lot quicker than it's getting votes. I do think mods will occasionally remove the penalty for this on stories that triggered the flamewar protection without there being a flamewar. Additionally some domains and topics are penalized, and there seem to be filtered words that will auto kill your comment. Try leaving a comment with (Im sorry, gotta avoid it somehow) m@$tur b@t3 in it. But again that's all automated, just unintuitive.
> "I can’t begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work"
I cannot speak for developers in Silicon Valley or other places, but I suspect the feeling of disgust when hearing such things is similar. The problem is that solving design, engineering, computer science and math problems every day can be stressful and exhausting. Do that for more than 8 hours per day and maybe also multitask between projects everyday, in an environment that has toxic management and it's a recipe for burnout, burnout being that deep sense of tiredness, emptiness and helplessness, being nothing less than depression out of which some people never recover.
Now I'm sure that this is way better than digging for blood diamonds to feed your family, as Mr. Alex St. John is saying. But I can't believe that somebody born into privilege can even think to suggest that such jobs aren't so bad compared to African slavery.
If you're running a business and Alex's tactics give you even a 10% edge - take them.
1/ use children as Labor in 3rd world countries since they are cheaper and more pliable
2/ cheat in environmental tests (eg: Volkswagen)
3/ dump toxic waste into poor countries since they don't have environmental protections, and it's cheaper than processing/dispoaing them correctly
Basically you can get an edge by doing a lot of ethically wrong things. But should you? And should we celebrate anyone who wins by doing such things?
1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force. They're not allowed to work anymore because companies get too much flak for hiring them. Instead they starve on the street and resort to crime. It's easy to say 'no work for children!' from your comfy home.
2/ Looking after an employee's wife and trying to find Asperger graduates to employ is not illegal. The environmental test cheating is only having a negative effect because it is illegal, dishonest and fraud. None of the things mentioned by Alex are any of those. He's very up front about it - he's giving presentations on it while his employees are present.
3/ Not necessarily evil. A company could pay $100 to dump some waste in their own country with full regulations, or pay a poor country $10 to dump the waste there. If that $10 means better schooling for children there, then I'd say accepting a bit of waste that can be cleaned up later seems satisfactory. It's actually worked out quite well in some countries.
Basically - you're applying 'justice' that makes you feel better, and not justice that really solves anything. Making people like Alex stop bringing together teams that create things we use every day isn't helping us.
So, maybe fix that (being on the streets, hungry, etc), instead of fixing the laws against having children work?
Starving children (even as young as 10 or less) also willingly have sex with sex tourists for money, in Asia, Africa and elsewhere -- but those pesky laws also forbid them to do so. Instead of proposing we change the laws to enable them to make money this way without issues, how about we fix their situation?
So sure - fixing their situation would be the best! Please come help! We desperately need more real help here.
But barring people jumping on planes to come and help, which from experience doesn't seem to happen terribly often, it's better for these children to be able to survive.
My point is: you're doing this the wrong way around. First you fix their situation, and then you make child labour and sex tourism illegal. If you do it the other way around, you're just hurting people. You're just condemning children who had no other choice to survive to having no means of survival. Sorry to say it, but it's reality.
EDIT: To put it in a more clear example: a village is eating disgusting looking seaweed that tastes horrible because there is no other food nearby. You think nobody should have to eat this seaweed, so you make eating this seaweed illegal so that they can't eat it and offend you. End result? They starve because you didn't provide them with better food before making seaweed illegal.
And my point is, it's rather the inverse. Legal child labour and an allowed sex tourism industry creates great private interests and political manipulation (legal, developmental, etc) to ensure things do not change.
They're neither "short term problem fixers" not "stepping stones to something better", but part of the reason why the people are held down.
I agreed with your point of view years ago. I think everyone did. But the experiment failed. Pretty sad really. Yet another good anecdote on the infamous "don't fix what you don't understand".
I'm not sure where you had this experience. In the US and Europe, when child labor (and children prostitutes) was abolished, circa late 19th - early 20th century, the lives of children improved greatly.
In countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America where it's still either allowed or authorities turn a blind eye, not so much.
Moreover, the very idea of "let the kids be raped for money, lest they starve to death, it's the least we can do" is sick.
It's not by any means the "least" we can do.
There were no aliens who forced that child labor abolition on the US and Europe.
We have 3 choices:
1) Provide opportunity for street children to survive, and then ban exploitation of those children.
2) Ban exploitation of children, and ignore them as they die.
3) Leave it alone.
I'm saying we must choose 1 or 3. We must not pick 2. It is criminal. However, in developing countries in Africa, we have picked 2! Picking 2 is the "worst" we can do out of all possible options. It's sickening, and far too many people are still advocating for it.
Authorities in Africa and Asia no longer turn a blind eye because of grant money linked to abolishing child labour. People like you have forced that on them. And the children are now suffering far worse than before. You've made yourself feel better at the expense of those you wanted to help.
1 year out, maybe. 10 years out after the children have had the benefit of education? Dead wrong. Remember also that the local economy scales with prevailing wages. They would experience a period of deflation but that's fine as they have virtually no assets to speak of.
> Remember that this is not a power game played by a group of companies on the one side and a bunch of laborers on the other; there are many other factors including mechanization, productivity, consumer demand, etc.
In sub $10/day situations mechanization is a tiny factor at best. That machine has to be built in a factory in Germany by highly skilled and expensive engineers it's going to have to be amazing efficient to pay for itself. Then you need skilled labor to work on and maintain it.
Adults are more productive than children, and consumer demand would likely go up if you did not use them to produce your goods.
The western nations didn't get rid of child labor for altruistic reasons. It's a fools errand.
If you go deep in the supply chain if you will find all the above.
I am not condoning his advice, nor do I practice these. But reality is not that pretty.
In fact, all of the big name American companies all started out with terrible practices until they earned enough money and enough ire to hide those practices away from the public eye. And judging by my downvotes, far too many people really believe the world is a much nicer place than it is, and where you can really compete without getting a bit dirty yourself.
Running a business in a residential area. Shipping electrical products that were not UL tested for fire hazard. Paying owners in stock rather than taxable income. No diversity in hiring practices. Lead in products without a product recycling program in place.
The gist is that you generally have to cut corners somewhere to start up any business unless you already have lots of money.
This is ignoring the fact that effectiveness is not the only metric for a company. In Tim Cook's words, "if you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock".
Tim Cook was all about ROI when he implemented Apple's global supply chain.
Not just the easterners, methinks.
Come on, you're free to hate him, but putting DirectX together - which is the foundation for so much - is just holding a grudge against someone who says things you don't like.
And he didn't "make" DirectX or "put it together". He just advertised it. He's an "evangelist" not a "designer" or "developer" or "programmer". That's marketing, not engineering. And it was successful marketing because it was dishonest, heavy handed, well funded marketing, with no hint of self awareness or irony, which he kicked off by throwing a party that cast Microsoft as the Empire, and developers as slaves to be auctioned off and fed to the lions. The early version of DirectX he was evangelizing was a piece of crap. Look up "Direct3D Retained Mode" some time. [1]
[1] Direct3D Retained Mode removed from Windows Vista: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/969150
The alternative to "Retained Mode", "Execute Buffers", were just as bad if not worse in their own way [2]:
>Direct3D initially implemented "retained mode" and "immediate mode" 3D APIs. Like other DirectX APIs, such as DirectDraw, both were based on COM. The retained mode was a scene graph API that attained little adoption. Game developers clamored for more direct control of the hardware's activities than the Direct3D retained mode could provide. Only two games that sold a significant volume, Lego Island and Lego Rock Raiders, were based on the Direct3D retained mode, so Microsoft did not update the retained mode after DirectX 3.0.
>For DirectX 2.0 and 3.0, the Direct3D immediate mode used an "execute buffer" programming model that Microsoft hoped hardware vendors would support directly. Execute buffers were intended to be allocated in hardware memory and parsed by the hardware to perform the 3D rendering. They were extremely awkward to program, however, hindering adoption of the new API and prompting calls for Microsoft to adopt OpenGL as the official 3D rendering API for games as well as workstation applications. (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D#Direct3D_2.0_and_3.0
Was it not meant to be satirical? Was he genuinely advocating squeezing what you can out of people until they burn out and then tossing them aside?
I guess from the tone I thought he was trying to poke fun at the POV he was espousing? But the only thing I know about him was that he went around evangelizing DirectX at Microsoft Developer conference a long time ago so I could've completely misread.
> Was he genuinely advocating squeezing what you can out of people until they burn out and then tossing them aside?
I don't see this in the presentation at all. Do you mean where he says to churn through employees until you find the ones which fit? Seems like what all companies do, they just don't word it like that. Why else do we have trial periods? He's saying that you get in some employees, give them too much work, get rid of the ones that don't cope and reward the ones that do. Sounds like standard practice in every company I've ever been at.
I guess that should be obvious at this point. I thought there might still be a discussion until you pointed it out. That does pretty much settle it. Thanks.
As far as the rest, maybe I didn't read closely enough; it's just one of the impressions I walked away with with the "wage slave" language.
[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgP-xKKUkAIxXph.jpg:large
If this is how he actually does treat employees in a serious fashion then I take back everything nice I said about him. You can create a high performance culture while not being inhuman. I still stand by harsh tactics being important in business, but harsh tactics end where someone's health and well-being begin.
[0] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/17/wage-slaves/#comment... [1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rCVIzSi...
I mean, come on. Mr. Burns couldn't send that email seriously.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rCVIzSi...
tarage> This is the type of person you are. Just so everyone is aware.
TheSaint> Yes it is, and Selle is an amazing guy. That’s EXACTLY who I am.
In reality Alex does not really work all the time (for example he spent quite some time on his blog) and he does not require his employees to work all the time too.
There are so many incredibly insulting and poorly thought out half-truths in the original presentation referenced that I'm shocked it was given in the context of a professional environment.
My college experience was quite different. I never tinkered with computers or electronics during my childhood, and I had no problems getting up to speed. In fact, I'd say most of my peers at the community college I went to had zero programming experience. The instructors didn't assume any prior knowledge, either.
I knew much less than many of my peers and our school specifically had an introduction to CS class that was geared towards 0 knowledge students. A lot of the CS majors skipped it and went straight to the 2nd class, which I took the following semester.
This isn't to say that your statement isn't true, but I would bet it is just an anecdote.
[edit]grammar and more ideas[/edit]
And this was back before the internet was ubiquitous so if you wanted to program you had to spend real money on books and developer tools. No free/open source resources at your fingertips.
My first real exposure to programming came after I bluffed my way into a temp gig building spreadsheets in Quattro Pro.
Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.
Working in the tech field has almost nothing to do with CS. Many/most developers don't study CS in college, and technical ability is only a very small part of what makes a good developer.
Come on, there are assholes everywhere who use this tactic to make themselves feel superior or to get rid of potential competition, men and women alike. This is not exclusive to CS. A lot of people are worried that they put so much time into something and that someone 'fresh' could make them look bad by picking it up quicker. It makes it that much more satisfying when you beat them.
One thing I noticed in particular, was that a hell of a lot of "diversity initiatives" (stuff like code camps, scholarships to diversity conferences, etc) set up by companies like Square and Google and nonprofits like Grace Hopper gave their opportunities mostly to minorities who were already very successful, with internships in prestigious companies. If even the programs explicitly meant to increase the percentage of women/minorities in the industry go largely to very experienced people, I thought at the time, then there's really no hope for me at that point.
In any case, none of this is what led to me deciding I didn't want a tech career, it was just a contributing factor. I probably could have pushed through it, but I realized I didn't like tech enough to do so- I liked coding well enough, but I didn't like or value the work most tech companies were doing.
If you have any interest in staying in the field--and I hope you do--don't limit your view of potential jobs to just the high-profile companies. Talk to some of the smaller shops around, you might really like what you find.
I hope that you've found something you enjoy to go into a career in. I know I studied tech and now work tangentially to it, and sometimes I feel like I made the wrong choice.
I fit the programmer archetype exactly, and it took me three years of near constant engagement before I felt I could even begin to fit in (culturally) with experienced programmers. I can easily imagine the task is considerably harder if you don't fit the archetype.
On the flip-side - the desire to "catch up", and the solitary nature of the challenge lent me considerably more motivation and creativity than I seem to have now that I have "acclimatized".
----
I'm very interested to see how it is going to turn out for my sister. She's a very talented programmer, but she doesn't try to immerse herself in the culture of it at all, rather she is treating it as an auxiliary skill to her studies in GIS. I feel some smug satisfaction knowing she is coding circles around most of the guys in her classes, despite not taking on the identity of "I am a programmer".
No one in my family or peers really knew much about computers and while the Apple IIe at school were much more impressive, that was just playing trivia games and such. Not writing anything ourselves.
It wasn't until I was about 16 that I touched a computer again. Built my own eventually to play DOOM. I didn't know anything "technical" at that point beyond autoexec.bat and... config something. I forget the other one.
It wasn't until I was 21 that I did my first real "programming". Which consisted of reading a book on HTML and being paid $5/hr by my father in law to write some truly bad markup while he did the real work.
I picked up some books on c#, ASP.NET 1.0, MSSQL Server and did my best to absorb what I could. My father-in-law didn't know/work-with most of that (he did help me figure out some SQL basics though) and I didn't have a peer group or support system or anything. About a year later I had a job paying about as well as Home Depot might writing c#.
Almost 20 years later I'm writing Scala and make a good living.
I don't say this as advice exactly. Just saying the "you can't start late" stuff is bullshit. I've often regretted not having access to college so I could answer "write a binary tree on the board" questions. So I didn't feel inadequate in those ways. But it hasn't stopped me getting a job and I'm overall pretty satisfied with my career (well... there was a dark time when I attempted to manage that was pretty cringe worthy) and accomplishments.
I wish I had something more to offer people who think a career in tech is out of their reach because they couldn't afford college, or they started too late. All I really have to offer is this:
Pick up a book. Remember how practically no one actually read a text-book from front to back in grade school? If they had they'd have had a huge advantage right? Pick up a book. Those that say "I learn by doing" will never ever ever be exposed to the same depth or amount of knowledge as you'll get from the condensed, edited brain-on-paper of accomplished authors. Be well read. It's like cheating. And it's cheap. Often even free (Not talking Blogs. Those are mostly only useful for very specific questions/topics; I'm talking about the free Ruby book, or beg for a copy of haskellbook. Or torrent if you must and pay them back for it later).
My 2c.
People get offended by the idea that "if you find first year COSC courses difficult, then programming is probably not for you" - but in my experience that's completely how it turns out.
All the programmers I know who started at university with no prior experience and went on to happy and successful* have this in common - they found first year COSC courses an absolute breeze, and went way ahead of the coursework in their own time just for the fun of it.
(*includes myself and my sister)
Now, I'm doing quite well as an engineer and I thoroughly enjoy programming.
I have no prescriptions for women; all I'm suggesting is that we do not over-generalize about the experiences that men have in CS.
[0]Well, I did try to teach myself programming a couple different times, but I failed utterly and concluded that I wasn't cut-out for it. If anything that experience put me in a worse starting position. I started out college studying philosophy and literature.
edit: removed formatting issue.
> In fact, only 5% of U.S. High schools even offer the Computer Science AP exam in the first place. As a result, many women...
I don't understand why this affects only women. Or more importantly, affects women (and minorities) more than other groups.
There are social stigmas and the like we could examine, but this particular quote as written reads as a non-sequitur to me.
Edit: Just to clarify, I don't want to belittle the very real disparities we are facing in the tech industry. Also worth noting, I thought she was articulate and I appreciated her sources and statistics.
Negativity begets negativity, but thinking positive and thinking big is just as contagious.
http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pd...
Some people might think "Well, it's a terrible thing to say like that, that women should get the more social jobs, but society/culture/genetics/hormones -- perhaps a grain of truth, right? Women are just social!" You might even think it's a good thing to promote them, or make them the "communicators" or put them in architect positions.
I just want to say that these are the good intentions that made my first few years of out of college job experience absolutely awful, which makes this slide especially upsetting to me. I was an engineering major with a strong CS background, but also a 6' tall, beautiful, outgoing, well-spoken woman. Obviously, I'd be perfect working with clients, or acting as a liaison between developers and designers, or as a technical sales engineer, right!?
So, I was "let go" twice, the first time, just 5 months after graduating, and then again a year later. I missed meetings, told clients their ideas were bad, was a terrible diplomat, didn't prepare very nice-looking reports, complained about using MS Office, constantly forgot to log billable hours, spent too much time writing code... I hated it, I was terrible at it, and yet I kept drifting towards these types of jobs! It was what recruiters showed me, what college counselors showed me, what everyone said I should do, and what I thought I should do!
It took me way too long (to my credit, I was young) to realize that I'm much much happier "just" writing code, and working on a project that I can really take the time to get into. If I'm going to do "collaboration" I'd rather do it with other engineers that share a common(ish) technical background, where we all bounce ideas off of each other and have similar goals for the product or feature. And I'm so much happier not having to worry about what I'm wearing to work every day, or if I need to prepare for a customer meeting in the morning!
So, even if you think that it might be true that women are more social on average (whatever your own personal reasoning is, doesn't matter) PLEASE don't automatically try to lead women into roles like this, or assume that she'll be great at bridging gaps between clients/developers/designers/god-knows-what (because she's a LADY! Amirite!?). Some are, some aren't. Some men are, some aren't. But using these social/cross-discipline positions as kneejerk suggestions for a woman to "move up", or "do something more interesting" may be doing more harm than good to her career if she takes the advice.
>"Sex, violence and debauchery were all hallmarks of a great Roman “orgy” and I wanted to come as close to capturing that experience as I could get away with."
>"The slave auction was also a special occasion. The Roman guards were rounding up the losers from the gladiatorial events and anybody who was offending a “senator” or Cleopatra and throwing them in the slave pit. Once a sufficient number of slaves had been collected from the party, Gillian returned to the stage to auction them to the audience for the gold they had won in the games. Gillian could set any base price she wanted for a “specimen”, if the audience wouldn’t pay the price the slave would be “thrown to the lions”. We had configured a “pit” full of foam to one side of the stage and directly in front of the first caged lion. A failed slave would be marched to the edge of the pit at spear point and pushed in by the praetorian guard where they would fall into box full of foam below the audiences line of sight. Then a huge video clip of lions tearing up a wildebeest and roaring would be played on the big screens on either side of the stage accompanied by the sounds of screaming. Down in the foam pit we had a collection of fake bloody body parts that somebody would toss up in the air during the lion feeding. Of course the “victim” was then allowed to sneak out the back and return to the party."
[1] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/