Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Stop hazing us dice. We're just nerds. We're not bad people. We and our industries aren't hostile to women, or minorities, or transgenders, or disabled people.
Stop hazing us. We're not like those sour hipsters who work for/with your offices. We're just nerds. Stop injecting sex and politics and religion into our jobs and pastimes and pursuits. Many of us chose these fields in part to get away from that. Stop labeling programmers as "men", "women", "[RACE HERE]", etc, etc and telling us how we opressed everybody simply by existing. We have usernames and handles to escape our meatspace identities.
This has to stop. These stories have to stop. The politics and the propaganda has to stop.
Tech doesn't have a problem. The media has a problem with tech. This hazing has to stop.
Software engineering is a field in computer science with a focus on applying engineering principles to software development. It is well known that software does not yet have a methodical tool set similar to that of classic engineering disciplines, but it is called software engineering, so you will just have to get over it. Mind you, "proper" engineering didn't start out all rigorous and responsible either. Also, way off topic.
The term engineer predates your little bureaucracy by millennia. Get over it.
The whole summary was disgusting. Roblimo kept trying to bait her into talking about sexism during the interview, and she wouldn't go for it. Then he turns the whole thing into a statement about ESR. If I was Liz I would be pissed.
Who wold have thought. Women in IT want to be treated like people. Not with some special care or preferential treatment, want to be judged on their professional merits rather than having privileges for being the "oppressed sex". They don't want to feel offended, and they don't want to be defended, but it seems they want to, ya know, do their effin' WORK.
Dear SJWs. It's really awesome what you want to do, but maybe, just maybe, try to find out first whether what you fight for actually WANTS you to fight for them? You remind me a lot of those "foreign aid" workers who "helped" those "poor, poor Africans" by sending food there until the local farmers had to shut down production because they couldn't compete with your free food anymore. they were not poor. You made them poor. And I fear the same development here.
There are good and hard working women in IT. No, they are not numerous, but they exist. And they are far from being marginalized. They are part of great teams and they are good at what they're doing. I had the fortune that I managed to work with some of them. They are not here because of their looks, they can easily pull their weight as anyone else. And you will notice that they are usually at the very least a little bit embarrassed by all the shit going down about this "women in IT" thing. Because it does harm their reputation.
A friend of mine recently complained about the problem. She has been in IT for about 15 years now, we worked together before and she is a very good programmer. With more and more women being signed up on no other merit than being a women, stereotypes are starting to grow. Because these women cannot code well. They would not have gotten that job were they men, simply because their skills are lacking. The main reason they were hired is (in HER words, please note that!) to be the "quota bitch".
And that casts a shadow on HER reputation. Because stereotypes are a powerful thing. Just ponder the following scenario and tell me honestly and truthfully what you would think:
The former situation was that the women:men ratio was maybe 1:10, maybe even only 1:20 in IT. Of course, all of these 20, 19 men one woman, would know their trade. That's because they were hired. Now, that "affirmative action" bull takes place and women are hired based more on the fact that they're women than their actual skill levels. You'll probably end up with a 1:1 ratio, even, but that would probably also mean that you really have to scrape the bottom of the barrel because there simply are not as many women as there are men in IT.
So that means you have one "good" women and about 10 mediocre to bad programmers of the female gender.
Question for 100 points: What would you think of "the female coworkers"?
And do you really think that this would aid those women in IT that are really good in their job?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The very best thing you could have done with that particular posting of Eric's would have been to ignore it, and run the story about that nice woman without mentioning it. She can stand on her own and nobody but Eric should be held to account for what he said.
Bruce Perens.
That term is reserved for those who have accountability for what they create and in most of the civilized world have gone through a certification process.
What she is, is a software developer. Part of that process is design and testing, but that alone does not make her an engineer.
Fuck all these people who think otherwise and dilute the word because they want to have a way to place themselves from their peers, because they can't do it with their work.
Maybe she is a Software Engineer. There is such a job title, and you don't even have to go to Engineering school to get it. Your company gives it to you. Get over it. Engineer is not a term reserved only for certified people. Professional Engineer is. Use that instead if you want to feel good about yourself and feel the need to lord it over others who may have many more certifications from many other governing bodies that just don't happen to be the one you worship before.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What was the purpose of the first paragraph?
Provocation. This is the new SlashDice.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Exactly the above. The interviewer was trying to be inflammatory, provocative, and instigating. Smacks of mainstream media. Whoever was asking the questions in this manner is the bigger societal problem in more areas than just women in tech. Liz was 100% real. The interviewer was baiting her with almost every single question and should be called out for it.
Engineering is:
1) That branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and structures.
2) The action of working artfully to bring something about.
3) Work done by an engineer.
Those of us who do software work create structure; we (if we do hardware as well, create and) use and empower machines; we work artfully to bring the desired outcome about; we are therefore, in every sense of the word, doing engineering, and we are engineers. Many are artists as well, in the domain of the very same pursuits.
As far as a license goes, that's in no way a guarantee of competence (any more than a college degree is), nor is the presumptive ability to sue a worthy indirect guarantee. All you have to look at to understand that is take a look at the incredibly incompetent RF systems put in place at a very large number of radio stations by the system designers, and further, at the incredibly incompetent rules and regulations the engineers at the FCC have put in place both to specify the requirements, and to validate the results of said designs. Oh, and WRT RFI as well. (The idiots at the FCC decided that high speed networking over power lines (BPL) was a reasonable idea. In the realm of undertakings that clearly show government licensed engineers up as complete buffoons, that is surely in the running for number one.)
It is perfectly valid to say that professional software types aren't "licensed engineers." But that in no way is the same thing as saying that software engineers aren't engineers at all. Or that they aren't professionals. They are quite often both. And within that context, there are good ones, bad ones, terrific ones, utterly incompetent ones - but still engineers, doing engineering.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Whether it's a good idea to avoid them is based on the danger. It isn't just the number of malicious women that affects the danger. The danger is *also* affected by how easy it is for them to set up a compromising situation. The current sociopolitical climate is not very friendly to presumption of innocence or believing a man's word and has a very broad definition of harassment--which makes setting up a compromising situation easy, and increases the danger.
(Also, while because a random woman is no more likely to be malicious than anyone else, a woman who wants to be alone with you is not random.)
So, My father who has a degree in mechanical engineering, worked for TRW on steering systems, and had the title Senior Engineer was not an engineer, because he did not have a license? He was not required to have a license by his employer or the state. Before he worked on steering systems, he worked on presses for aluminum extrusion (read as involving extremely high pressures).
Both of these positions required him to design systems that if they failed would be vary dangerous and likely seriously injure or kill people. Yet you claim he was not an engineer.
I wonder if you would consider Gustave Eiffel, Henry Ford, Leonardo da Vinci, or James Watt engineers.
Some engineers are licensed in some jurisdictions because it is required by the law or by the employer. However, a license does not make the engineer.
All that other stuff is okay - but playing the bassoon is simply unforgivable.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yeah, I think it's a fair fear.
And a good practice. Male doctors, in modern times, are never with a female patient without a female assistant of some kind. Male police officers and security guards avoid detaining or frisking female suspects if a female officer is available and can do so. Male teachers avoid being in "closed office" situations with female students. On a different subject: most (married) people avoid work lunches or dinners with the opposite sex all by themselves (1:1), even if highly visible it creates the appearance of impropriety that might be difficult to explain.
You can't bypass gender by ignoring it, even if your intentions are honest and your actions clean. There are dishonest people out there, and there are more than enough gossips. In male dominated professions we may be accustomed to working exclusively with other men and not have these concerns so frequently in our lives, but, they exist and we should learn to play it smart. In reality these situations can and probably will arise more frequently in M:M and F:F situations as more homosexual people choose to "come out" (i.e. announce a weakness for predators to leap upon). In the words of Lester Burnham: "Can you prove that you didn't offer to save my job if I let you blow me?"
I think part of the issue is that a lot of conventions and social professional forums have a bit more of a party atmosphere than a professional one, and the guards we remember to use at work sometimes get forgotten.
See: Rebecca Watson, Emma Sulkowicz, Connie St. Louis... the list goes gone. It's a perfectly fair fear, the consequences to women who aren't part of that malicious cult aren't fair, but as feminists are so fond of telling us everyone is "schrodinger's person".
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Women in software keep calling bullshit on that and people just keep repeating it. Funny how for people so obsessed with women they never seem to actually listen to any...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
This was actually my first Slashdot TV video. And it'll be my last. The interviewer's an absolute idiot. Kept asking the same question over and over again.
Thanks for four minutes of my life I'll never get back. And no, I had to stop at the four-minute mark.
You're using his code every day, and so are billions of other people.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Liz here. I knew what the interview was going to be about going in to it (even the part about ESR) so, for the record, I'm not annoyed. I was happy to talk to Roblimo about it.
No they do not. This is complete bullshit. Code is code. It's either, good, or it isn't. If you stop running around like a chicken with your head cut off long enough to actually listen to women in tech, the vast majority do not actually encounter these imaginary issues you think are so rampant.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool left-wing liberal through and through, I love socialism and I want equal opportunity for men and women. But I groan every time I see a woman being celebrated for being a software 'engineer' or somesuch when there is never such praise for men. And it always seems to be from people who are looking to push an agenda. No hard feelings on Ms. Bennet. I'm sure she's a wonderful young lady.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Whilst I'm not sure anyone has been the victim of unfounded allegations by the "womens rights" lot in the IT industry, it has happened elsewhere in science - remember Professor Tim Hunt who spoke at a women's science conference, 3 sentences of his speech were tweeted by a SJW-type and next thing you know, he's out of a job (curing cancer no less) and widely criticised for being a misogynistic white male ba****d.
Turns out the truth is nothing like how its all been blown up to be, but that hasn't got him his job back. I think this is the real issue ESR is talking about, even if he's doing a poor job of highlighting it.