Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Employees Launch Matchmaking Startup For Coworkers (geekwire.com)
reifman writes: As posted earlier, Amazon's growth and predominantly male hiring has made dating in Seattle incredibly difficult for everyone. Two Amazon employees, Becca Goldman and Mahvish Gazipura, recently launched DateADev to help coworkers optimize their dating profiles: 'at Amazon [we're] surrounded by software developers and project managers all the time, we just noticed their need. We talk to them all the time about their frustrations with dating.' Goldman's gone on more than 500 dates in the past three years. 'Her experience ... helps her quickly assess an online profile of a potential partner.' Rather than drive its employees into moonlighting, Amazon could just start hiring more women.
Maybe the problem is You ?
Says the forever Virgin -_-
..... or allow its employees to have lives outside of the company. Either/or.
500 dates??!! WTF?!! Be less picking and maybe try talking to them on the phone for a few minutes before you even bother to meet for coffee or a drink. I know a couple of my younger coworkers go on lots of dates for the free dinner but they are kind of tacky like that.
Personally, I stick to the under $10s rule for the first date. Unless you just live in the most boringest place in the world, there are usually enough free places to go that work perfectly for a first date. Spending money is not required and if it is, they are not the right person.
If women *did* like dating engineers (in America), this problem would resolve itself.
Of course, there are reasons why women don't like dating engineers:
1) Social myths and stigmas about engineers.
2) The realities behind the social myths and stigmas about engineers.
3) Engineers tend to be introverts and beta-males, and as such they don't exude the sense of power that makes men attractive to women (despite their wealth).
These are social problems. They need to be fixed by social means. Another online dating service won't accomplish that.
If you're hiring women solely so that the male workers have someone to date, it's just asking for trouble. Anyone who's ever seen a workplace relationship turn bad knows what I'm talking about. Also, from what I've heard about Amazon, it's not the best place to work in terms of work-life balance. I don't think Amazon is actively avoiding women so much as the only people stupid enough to sign up for something like that are young 20-something men who don't have a family yet or the experience to realize what they're signing up for.
it simply won't work. I've lived in Seattle for eleven years, and I've only met one single female that's within -10 and +5 years of my own age. In the current company I work for, there's about 320 men and 80 women, and no unmarried women. I don't know where they're hiding.
Seems like about the third article on the subject...
This will create a similar situation that we have with education.
A child grows up going to school.
Goes to college.
Become a teacher.
Who teaches students
who goes to college
and becomes a teacher.
This creates part of the problem with education where there are still a lot of Victorian values and methods going on, because there is little outside influence in their experience.
Now with Amazon what this will do is match Employees, who work with Amazon values, who will date and possible have children. And portrait such amazon values, in hoping that their kids will go work for amazon. Preventing outside influences allowing changes in the system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Amazon "Could Just" hire more women.
Ok, from where?
The bad thing about hiring quotas by any determinate like race or gender or any pool with a smaller population, is that ALLOF THE COMPANIES are trying to generally do the same thing.
So lets say Amazon does succeed in doubling the hiring rate of women - doesn't that mean there are a LOT of companies now short their "share" of women? In fact is it any wonder that small companies are so devoid of women when so many large companies are trying so desperately to hire women? Centralizing technical women in a small number of companies in fact seems like a terribly bad idea to me and is probably exacerbating all of the technical culture issues people have noticed (which must be said are rooted in Silicon Valley and not nearly so bad outside that echo chamber).
The whole thing makes me sick honestly, and to me seems to objectify women vastly more than, say, porn...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If a woman buys a book on IoT or Spark, and she's young (based on her music purchases) and has weight proportional to height (based on clothing buys), you've got her email address, so send her a nice followup note.
Just say'n
As a male dev who has interviewed and knows people at Amazon, the problem isn't lack of an app. After I went out to talk with them for a day, I came away with the impression that there are a large number of really arrogant and pushy people working there. Undoubtedly, my personal experience isn't statistical representation of the whole company, but I wasn't very impressed with them as people. They seemed stressed, hurried, egotistical, and self-centered. I didn't want to work there for money, so I could imagine that few women would want to date people like that for free.
Anecdote: If you go on a date and the date goes poorly, the person may have been a jerk. If you go on 10 dates and they all go poorly, chances are you are actually the jerk. If nobody at Amazon can land a date, what does that tell you? A lack of girls in Seattle? For being so smart, you seem pretty slow...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
They're not only not forbidding coworkers to date one another, but actually encouraging it? How is this not a sexual harassment disaster waiting to happen? Or is it all hunky dory because a woman came up with the idea?
An article about more women in Tech, Amazon, and Dating geeks.
The clickbait is strong with this one ;)
That being said, two questions jump to mind. One, I heard that Amazon employees sign contracts that every idea they might have, even if unrelated to their primary job, is the property of Amazon (it is Seattle, so I think the contract is enforceable). Does that hold true here? And secondly, just hire more women?? I never heard of Jeff Reifman, but he sounds like a class act, NOT. His chief tip? "Offer larger signing bonuses for women". Is that even legal?
I have Karma to burn, so I'll ask a question that has been on my mind for a while - is gender balance (in any industry) a goal? Or is it a means to a goal. I often hear "We need more women in Tech", but I don't understand why that is a goal by itself. It might be more clear to say "we need smart people in Tech, and smart women are turned away from STEM, so we need to fix this". Because there might be other ways of achieving the second goal (irrespective of gender), while the only way to achieve the first is to make the hire ratio even.
I suppose it's something that an employer is sympathetic to what we might call lifestyle deficiencies of its employees, but what are they planning to add to the equation? Matchmaking is thousands of years old.
Maybe they think they can do it "on a computer" and get a patent, but I'm pretty sure there's some prior art.
500 dates in 3 years is about 3-4 dates a week. Are each of them with different guys? Sounds exhausting.
Let's see; 500 dates in, say, 1200 days comes out to another date every 2.4 days.
Assuming that a date often consists of dinner and maybe a movie, we'll say it occupies about 4 hours per date.
If the average person sleeps 7 hours per day, during those 1200 days, she was awake 20,400 hours.
Of those waking hours, we'll estimate that she worked approx 8500 hours, leaving 11,900 hours for everything not sleep or work related.
Take away at least 2 hours per day for various daily, unavoidable activities like showers, breakfast, dressing, cleaning... So that's another 2400 hours.
That makes 9500 hours that might fit into the category of discretionary time.
The dates occupied 2000 hours, or roughly 21% of all her discretionary time.
I'd call that throwing yourself into your work...
If there are plenty of women out there, and they want to date engineers, and there are a bunch of single engineers right here, and they can't land dates...what might the reason be?
Might it be because those same engineers don't know how to make themselves attractive to women?
If true, the we must infer that the default behavior of a (typical) engineer is not attractive to women...so they need to be taught how to change their ways.
If false, what other cause would there be for such a disparity?
Given their reputation, I suspect the problem is getting women to accept offers of employment. At least the women I know were far too intelligent to want to be trapped into that lifestyle.
Or are you suggesting that Amazon should change itself so that there's some semblance of work-life balance, because I don't see that happening anytime soon.
How would hiring more women help? One of the absolute worst ideas is having a relationship with someone you work with. Jesus fucking christ I'd be amazed if you were actually able to dress yourself.
Sure, hire more women to make the male devs happy! In fact, to make them really happy, why not hire women as cocktail waitresses, masseuses, and exotic dancers, right?
The sexism of social justice warriors really knows no bounds.
*cough*firstworldproblem*cough*
Why won't they check their fucking cis privilege? All they do is ruin the hugbox that is supposed to be the workplace.
"Goldman's gone on more than 500 dates in the past three years. 'Her experience ... helps her quickly assess an online profile of a potential partner.'"
Lol, apparently her experience does NOT help "her quickly assess ... a potential partner".
No offense, Ms Date-a-holic, but if you've gone on 500 dates and haven't found a partner...the problem is YOU, beyond any reasonable doubt.
After 50 or 100 dates you better start looking in the mirror at just who you are, and that goes for guys as well as gals. Either your standards are ridiculously high or unrealistic, or you're repulsive beyond belief.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
500 dates in three years is roughly 1 date every 3 days non stop for 3 years... that's bullshit.
so workers can have a life between working hours.
Dating is only one part of life.
The question is, how many cows signed up?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Initial Consultation $99.00 ....
not bad rofl.... fucking ferengis...
Have gnu, will travel.
I dunno. Do you really want to trust the judgment of someone who hasn't yet found a partner after 500 dates?
TRP cured my bad back. True story. I walk taller since spending time there and my 20 year back problem has disappeared. I don't go there much anymore because the right wingers have taken the place over and there's only so many times you can read "cultural Marxism" before you think "oh piss off".
You've clearly not spent any real time there if you think TRP is full of nice guy types. The underlying attitude is to treat women badly not to orbit them in the hope of some attention.
Using that tedious feminist phrase about nice guy tokens illustrates my point about shaming perfectly.
Another dating site with all the foibles: 500 emotionally or socially inadequate men who think women will 'settle' for them, plus 20 women who think they'll fuck Brad Pitt. Then add the 200 fake women so the site looks like an opportunity to meet women.
It solves a few problems and I think you are adding meaning that was not actually there.
In short, monocultures suck. Having someone from outside your home town avoids the embarrassment of local slang on your website confusing the fuck out of visitors and excluding half the human race from consideration narrows perspective and can lead to fuckups. Look at how out of touch some people in politics are on occasion for an example - when only employ people from a shallow pool (cronies, relatives etc) mistakes happen that we all assume could have been stopped by "general knowledge".
However it's been a feedback loop going on for decades so why would these women want to work twelve hour days in a place like a locker room with offsite meetings in strip clubs? Why would they want to work in an industry where attempting to take a year off is a career ending move? IT people really like to pretend they are "engineers" but the workplace behaviour does not remotely resemble anything a professional engineer would call professional.
I hope you can get the wisdom you seek to improve your chances with women, because you have wrongheaded ideas about what women are looking for in a man. :(
I have been with the same girl for over 20 years. We are quite happily married, I really don't need to improve my chances with women. Also, women don't want pushy arrogant men, many seem to like men who are confident, bold, and decisive, but nobody with a healthy psychology gravitates towards people who are belittling and abusive. I think you might be the one who has a slightly warped view of female psychology.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
As far as doing work which is engineering... you need the socially awkward culture. And like it or not for the most part that isn't women. That's a different kind of intelligence. Being polite and politically correct is not what you need in engineering. You need straightforwardness. You need to be sure of what you say and not be afraid to say it. You can't be afraid to be wrong.
What could be possible is social, speaking and communications training. And while the men would also benefit from social training I think women women would benefit more by adapting to and understanding the social conventions of men. Learn to be politically incorrect. Love ideas and what you do; not people. Be problem focused. Male nerds don't necessarily like each other; it's more we only tolerate each other. We are rude to each other and we are all headstrong.
500 'dates' in 3 years?
What's a date then?
Going out for drink or a meal?
Going out for drink or meal with someone of the opposite sex (or gender spectrum)?
The above but with potential romantic considerations?
And does two dates with the same person count? After all, 500 dates with the same three people doesn't say much about your ability to find dates.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
The workaholic management says that the workaholic employees must not do anything to reduce the 100 hour weeks they are required to work.
What does the gender makeup of Amazon's employees have to do with problems dating in Seattle?! If I work at Amazon, I'm not dating coworkers -- you know, because I AM NOT A FUCKING IDIOT -- so unless Seattle itself is almost entirely men, the makeup of Amazon itself is fucking irrelevant to my dating life.
.. what more could any dev need?
Maybe someone should start slashdate.org
Please stop giving advice on what young women want from men, you have no idea what you're talking about.
...Or based on evidence of a long, successful relationship, I know exactly what I am talking about. I think you are the one here who needs help, you have some, um, 'interesting' ideas about how women think.
And, 'pushy and arrogant' == abusive. Perhaps not in the 'slap a woman around' sense of the word, but someone who values themselves above others and subtly belittles others is abusive. There is a huge difference in arrogance and confidence, and while you might not recognize it, most women certainly do. I suggest you figure it out if you want to improve your chances with them.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!