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Software Engineer Liz Bennett Talks About Being a Woman in a Nearly All Male Workplace (Video)

This conversation was generated by a post Eric S. Raymond published on his "Armed and Dangerous" blog that said, "...if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a 'women in tech' advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp." Eric later wrote a post about how Social Justice Warriors may be more of a problem than the problems they complain about.

Whoa! Predatory women in tech trying to entrap people like (and including) Linus Torvalds the way an old-time private eye got the goods on an errant husband as part of a divorce case? Scary! And worrying about thoughtcrime, too? Oh my! But Liz Bennett is an actual software engineer who works at Loggly in San Francisco. She writes for her company's blog when she's not writing Java code, has a (not very active) GitHub account, and plays bassoon. And her attitude is similar to the one espoused by ESR in the second post (above): write great code -- and if you do, they (for any value of they) have no right to be negative about you, period. And, she says, before you take a job you should be sure the company is a good "fit" for you and doesn't harbor people who will work to bring you down -- which is great advice for anyone, in any field of endeavor.

3 of 370 comments (clear)

  1. Insightful observation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    She's pretty hot.

  2. Re:Sigh. She is NOT an engineer. by Crashmarik · · Score: -1, Troll

    Do you have that piece of paper that says you are licensed professional engineer ?

    No ?

    Then you aren't.

  3. Re:Stop Hazing Us by AmiMoJo · · Score: -1, Troll

    A key step you are missing here is a demonstration that there is a solution that we can take here which is better than doing nothing about the problem.

    Well done, you finally admitted that there is a problem. That's the first step.

    Look, understanding the problem is the best way to make sure you aren't a part of it, so even if you plan to do nothing about it you could at least listen. Reading your posts it's clear that you haven't even done that, and worse still object to other people talking about it (no-one forced you to read/watch or comment), which means that you ARE part of the problem.

    If you don't want to be involved, fine, but the rest of us would like to have this conversation.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC