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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.
Personally, I stick to the under $10s rule for the first date...
I'll bet you don't have too many "second" dates...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
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.
One of the absolute worst ideas is having a relationship with someone you work with.
^^^THIS, times a million trillion kabillion. Never date at work, NEVER EVER. It never ends well, and I've seen it more times than I can count.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
According to her own comments in the (comments section of the) article, the dates were not serious and were deliberate research for this start-up. So rather than simply sucking at dating she merely sucks at not using people. Not entirely sure if that's better or worse?
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?
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.