I stand against Google bro

[Saz]

[John Galt]

as an engineer, f**k you saz

while I have several female colleagues I get along with fine, including the ones i used to sleep with remarkably, i do have problems with some and have made some cry or some shit because they think me destroying their idea is personal. it's not. the females i do not have an issue with it do not feel personally insulted when i try to find problems with what they are suggesting. i'm working to find the best way forward and one of my strengths is in finding the weakness of others' ideas. they can come up with something that addresses my concerns and all the sudden their idea is now the best. but no, you gotta cry about it after the first iteration of the damn thing. so i have to worry about feelings getting hurt which is just ridiculous, and it just makes for a passive aggressive environment

i have not had this problem with male colleagues, but perhaps they just hide the pain

[Saz]

[exploited]

Galt's experience with women in a technical workplace mirrors my own. A business I used to work for hired a female graphic designer. It ended in tears, a totally depressed staff who didn't understand her unprofessional display of emotions, and an environment where the programmers were afraid to tell her when her designs were stupid because she would either get angry or passive-aggressive. It was actually pretty bad - she'd be given a project worth maybe a couple thousand of dollars, and create some ridiculously artsy website that was more suited for a major brand. Then she would get terribly angry when the programmers were like "Yeah, no, we're not spending an additional 20 hours making this work because it blows our timeline, it isn't needed, etc."

Keep in mind, she was a fantastic graphic designer. Had a real knack for putting together attractive pieces. But she didn't really understand the job, she did not work well with others, she could not handle criticism and ultimately she was let go because nobody could stand having to deal with that shit. Had she been willing to listen and learn she'd still be working there, because she WAS good.

I'm quite certain there are females out there capable of handling this environment, but goddamn, you can't even exist in the design world without having five-foot-thick skin. If you can't handle criticism, you are beyond useless, because design is not art, it exists to serve a specific function and aesthetic matters are second to that.

Anyways, I can understand where some of the frustration comes from.

[Saz]

Not sure the points of these anecdotes. I see men catch feelings all the time about stupid shit, not sure how it's relevant to the topic.

[John Galt]

[exploited]

Galt and I work in technical fields, fields that have been historically dominated by men and continue to be dominated by men. These fields have ALWAYS, literally always, been reliant on peer review and heavy criticism. It isn't uncommon to put your work up on GitHub or whatever and face flak from hundreds of strangers. There is nothing safe or sacred. Catching feelings is unacceptable in these fields. It is unprofessional to the extreme. Does it happen to men? Hell yes, it does, but they are quickly weeded out and let go. If they want to be like that, they need to be the boss, not the employee.

The reason I'm sharing these anecdotes is to give you some insight into what people who work in these fields actually think. It has nothing to do with being a woman, and everything to do with being able to separate your emotional attachment to a project with the feedback you receive. Stuff like engineering and programming cannot survive a workplace that allows projects to be held up because Person A caught feelings. In my experience, many women have never encountered a workplace that purposefully doesn't give a shit about your feelings, and so they struggle in that environment.

Unfortunately for them, that environment is never going to change. You simply cannot work design or engineering or tech fields without embracing the fact that every decision you make will be reviewed and criticized frankly. That is literally one of the most important parts of the design process. Yes, management can spend the time to work out systems that will allow for the healthy expression of ones feelings, yes, they can dedicate extra resources to making this process more comfortable for people... but they won't. Because those processes are useless HR bullshit that interfere with the productivity of the organization, and in some cases, may actually endanger lives. When you are designing systems to be used by thousands of people, whether digital or IRL, your feelings don't f**k matter. Period. If you can't hack that, don't bother trying to join these projects. That is true for men or women.

[John Galt]

a big part of my day is reviewing other people's code for structural problems. this is mainly men whom i review (actually at this point, it's all men, and mostly russians, who thankfully are very frank). we put notes in there and send it back. "why do you do this here?" "this is an anti-pattern, use this instead" etc.

then the other big part of my day is dealing with the business. here i deal with women business analysts and the current one i have some problems with but she is improving. she seems to have let go of the feelings, which is the first step. because i must try to tear down everything she says before i hand it off to someone else to work on. i want as much of the problems as possible to come out in that stage, not once we're testing.

that's most of my day, criticizing other people

then the rest of it is me making my own stuff and presenting it to others to criticize. if i deal it i must take it, and so i expect there to be criticism

[exploited]

[Saz]