Years ago when I did a brief stint as a technical consultant at Chevron, they were really aggressive about ergonomics and desk set safety.
They had discovered that they paid as much in workers comp for desk workers as they did for hardhats. There are a lot of ways to hurt backs, hands, eyes, necks in the poorly designed non-ergonomic open-plan offices. And those injuries are expensive to diagnose and to treat.
The other thing to keep in mind is that at least half of identified Gifted and Talented kids have some learning differences as well. You cannot GET funding for GT/LD -- one must officially be one or the other.
Which circles back around to the fact that it is necessary to sit quietly and learn the way teachers are told to teach or be left behind. And if you are gifted at art or music, well, you are just sol.
The last time I tried to pick someone up from San Jose airport from San Francisco (long story), it took **three hours**! San Jose is only an hour south of SF in the middle of the night. It is more like 2+, with half the country moving to whatever city on the peninsula is farthest from their job. I used to do contracts in San Jose, but no more. it takes too damned long.
Everything that used to be cool and funky or artistic is now a corporatized landrush -- 80K naked drunks peeing on lawns during Bay to Breakers, just for a start. And there really is a place with $4 toast.
And all the museums suck (except the exploratorium) and the best galleries just got shut down because a start up will pay lots more to rent the building.
The City has been expensive as long as I have been here (roughly 30 yrs), but there were always pockets of interest that weren't insane of busy being bid up by the ignorant.
Back in the day, the City ran on financial services firms, which were very conservative. There was something to be different from. Now, everyone is hip, slick, and cool and goes to work in jean or leggings and drinks too much on the job and is vegan (except on Thursday when the company serves grassfed beef.).
I miss my City, even the times it turned out people I thought I wanted to get to know were junkies.
Oh and it is beautiful and the air is clean and the food is very, very good. As is the tap water.
With the run of successful attacks, bitcoin looks more and more like a pump and dump scheme. The early folk get out with lots of actual money and the latecomers end up holding the empty bag.
Also -- what is with the Mt. Gox orthography. It is MtGOX, which makes the poorly run site and other issues seem easily foreseen.
Oooooh!! Even grannies can learn.
If you could give your arm a rest from patting yourself on the back for being so brilliant you can install an OS, you might notice that 1) lots of olds are not stupid about computers, 2) lots of women are not stupid about computers, 3) lots of old women know about computers. Grace Hopper did not become an idiot the day she got officially old.
No problem assuming the older user (please, could it be grandad in the headline just once?) does not have arthritis in the hands or other problems with holding something and aiming the hand at possibly small targets.
You already force a lot of us out with the threat of punishment -- harassment, assault, just plain being looked over.
If you want us to stay/come back, perhaps you could:
Write job reqs that don't state flat out that you want to hire a "dude, bro, guy."
For those women who got their degrees 12 yrs ago, write job reqs that don't call for a "young guy fresh out of school."
When you post pictures of the team you are hiring for, include at least one woman, even if you have to go get one from the web design firm next door.
Expect to pay a woman you hire exactly what you would pay a man you would hire. I know, sounds simple, but not so common.
Have at least one woman in the interview -- even if it is only the HR person.
That will start letting some of us into the boy's club that STEM still is.
You are reading the stats wrong. Yes, unemployment for the whole of California is high. That is not affected by the fact that there is regulation of for-profit education. It is because we have vast rural areas and a central valley (most of the state) that is strictly farming based. This is not affected by regulation of business.
The most highly regulated businesses exist in the high population density areas -- San Francisco and surrounding counties, Los Angeles and Orange County, San Diego, and, to a lesser extent, Sacramento. The unemployment rate in SF is hovering around 5%.
It is not private in the sense that only you and the entity with which you are doing business knows the information, but it is also not public. It is protected (in theory, at least). The credit reporting companies get the information because they have a contract with the credit card issuers to report your balance and payment information. Again, theoretically, this is to your benefit, since it gives you a credit history that can be depended on and checked. The trouble is that these companies can be kind of skeevy.
I am not certain how I feel about that agency collecting detailed information on individuals. There are ways to de-identify the data and still keep the details separate (that is, not aggregated) and useful.
Thank you. This is such a cogent description of non-violent civil action (was trained by Quakers in the '70s).
The other thing that is essential for non-violent action to succeed is a free press. A really free press, that will cover the beatings and arrests. We really haven't had that in quite some time. The press is commercialized. Dissent is herded into "free speech zones" or waits for a Manning or a Snowden to come around.
Some news outlets are reporting the release of information about Professor Davidon and the others who broke into the Media, PA FBI offices in the 70s and exposed the illegal actions of the FBI. They leaked the information and their identities were protected. They were only able to remain at large because there was a statute of limitations on the break-in and no-one was ever charged with treason.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but also the willingness to speak truth to power. Without a press that will report on that truth, one is often speaking into a void. And, especially in these days of panic, it takes a great deal of courage for anyone in the press to report on stolen truth.
No -- you quickly find out who in your circle has been told things they don't want to hear by their employees and are willing to blackball them.
Make very certain that the folk you are blackballing don't all match certain demographics or you could be in for a very large lawsuit. That could be won simply on the blackballing (called restraint of trade in CA, not sure what it is called, other than SOP, in AZ.).
For years, I have had to note to those doing background checks that one group for which I worked gave a "would not rehire" response for anyone who quit. Their name got known, too. If workers come to know who is doing the blackballing/restraint of trade, you might well find yourself unable to hire decent workers, because they can work places that do not discriminate on the basis of one guy whose nose is out of joint. Oh, and I think I know several of the worst offenders in this, just by word of mouth from applicants.
Actually, it started well before the Intel purchase. McAfee hasn't been McAfee since it was bought by Network Associates and NA took over the name. It was a typical Network Associates product package -- lots of expensive pieces that do not play well together. Enterprise AV is not too bad, if that is all you are going to do. Enterprise IDS doesn't do *nix well and doesn't talk to the AV consolidation part. Not McAfee for a long time. One can only hope Intel can dismantle and keep the good parts and reintegrate the rest.
Sounds like a better use of money than cleaning up after major explosions or paying the jackasses from Enron (both of which we have been through comparatively recently). Having anyone in SCADA think forward rather than backward would be glorious.
Or by hiring a bunch of self-taught coders who do not understand the concepts of testing and stability.
The other problem with getting folk to the *nix side is the sysadmins and others one will meet there.
Um, as a woman (note the user name) and someone who has worked in tech for 20+ years, I cannot tell you how wrong you are.
Most of the women in tech that I know share at least some of these cultural preferences, but that is self-selection. The ones who share it are the ones who are comfortable staying.
It is not just women who are put off by the need for constant competition within this culture that goes on in so many programming teams or in the server room. I have a male friend with whom I have worked for years and who is a well-qualified Unix sys admin who was hounded from a job because he does not particularly enjoy video games. Oh, and he was older than the rest of the team, which also made him a pariah (they said so out loud).
Men don't flock to nursing or primary school teaching in large part **because** they are considered feminine but also because they are poorly paid.
Sexist -- absolutely. I know lots of women who have left the field because the harassment (not the lack of social interaction) got to be too much. Too many anecdotes and too much research that shows that women are regularly told to "get the hell out" because we "don't belong." That will lower your rates of participation and also create a bit of an echo chamber.
Culturally restricted -- yes. All the way to racist -- I am not sure (I am white, I would not necessarily experience it). Racism isn't always white people prejudging people of color. Racism is both how things are presented (have you ever seen a black person in a tech presentation?) and who is accepted into a program or hired. And it is the tone of the workplace.
It is well past time, though, that the first response of the tech community to criticism stops being "NO!! YOU'RE BAD!!!! GO AWAY!!!"
The solution sounds a little lame and like ham-handed stereotyping, but I am not in the affected community. If there is an assumption that everyone involved in tech must be engaged in the same culture of science fiction, superhero comics, and video gaming, then, yeah, something trivial might make those who are interested less likely to walk away after hitting the wall of "YOU ARE NOT JUST LIKE ME!!!! SCARY!!!! GO AWAY!!!!"
I really understand that this is what the calls to remove it look like. And I agree (without having seen whether the general sexism was light or included threatening language) that it is over the top to call for people to lose their jobs for public sexism.
Do take a minute and give the women reading this in an environment that is already exclusionary a thought. We are constantly pushed (or driven, with threats of rape or death) away from the possibility of earning a living with our skills. One is jabbed with that day in and day out. Then, in a place one thinks might just be available for one to improve one's skills and employability there is one more, big damned jab, straight in the face. A big "fuck you, bitch, you are ruining my place by wanting to participate." Now, be calm and reasoned in your response. Like yours to the people on Twitter who you see as wanting to "punish anyone who doesn't comply with their demands."
I don't think you know what a daily shit sandwich it can be for women attempting to work in tech. And the people making it a misery are regularly praised for their wit and charm. While the women who "don't comply with the demands" of the exclusionary men to get the hell out of programming and find another way to make a living are "punished."
Which could have been used to monitor heart health, which would be useful. Same freaking data, saving lives instead of shaming/guilting women. Who would think that was valuable?
First -- there is a big difference between privacy and anonymity/going off the grid.
I would agree that the ability to do the latter while participating in first world society is effectively impossible.
There is a lot that can be done, both by the individual and by governments, to improve the ability of individuals to control how information about and by themselves is used and transmitted.
Officially (but not enforced to nearly the extent it should be), the EU Data Protection Act states that information about an individual belongs to that individual and there is a basic right to a degree of anonymity. One is supposed to be informed where the data sits, whether it is correct, and how it is being used. We are all learning the extent to which that law is ignored in Europe. It is, however, a beginning and establishes the common sense idea that I own information about myself, including images of myself. The vast majority of countries world-wide have variations of this law.
The US starts from the assumption that data belongs to those who collect or aggregate it. This means that, in order to provide any privacy (in the sense of controlling data from/about oneself), individual bits of that information have to be defined and exempted from that assumption. This is how we got HIPAA (which is extremely narrow and poorly enforced), the cluster of banking privacy acts (again, poorly enforced). Until this changes, it is really difficult to control how/whether data about yourself is used, by whom, and whether it is accurate.
There is some privacy. You do not have to have your SSN tattooed on your forehead, nor do you have to give it to everyone who asks. You should protect your banking information and you don't have to tell your employer about any disability unless you want accommodation. Which is all fine in theory, but in practice, few of us take the time to learn the laws and our privacy rights and even fewer of those who want to collect this information bother to learn the rules or abide by them.
You can go off the grid, but you have to leave everything behind. And, if you really want to, you should find a place to live that uses just paper records.
But cells are not what they are recommending for replacing POTS service -- it is IP phone service (like MagicJack), which relies on internet service being functional, which takes more power than POTS lines, but, with ADSL, is prone to many of the physical service issues (how far from the next hub, how many squirrels have gnawed on the not-yet-replaced copper cables, etc.).
When you hit 60, tell me the same story.
There is extreme age discrimination. A friend my age survived 5 yrs of wiping the butts of 20 somethings for whom the notion of testing code before going live was a novelty.
Oh, and once we hit 65, we are a lot cheaper to insure.
Stupid -- the same way I did. You continue to work (if you are lucky enough to be healthy throughout), take a few weeks off, then maybe work from home if you need or want to, then go back to work. OOOOHHH, here's something you clearly never considered -- one of those woman things might actually earn more than you and you can stay home with the child until you can earn more than child care costs.
Someone in the family with a chronic illness, a house? Burying your parents or making sure they are taken care of?
And you will not necessarily continue to get that money for as long as you need it.
Slashdot Mirror
They had discovered that they paid as much in workers comp for desk workers as they did for hardhats. There are a lot of ways to hurt backs, hands, eyes, necks in the poorly designed non-ergonomic open-plan offices. And those injuries are expensive to diagnose and to treat.
Which circles back around to the fact that it is necessary to sit quietly and learn the way teachers are told to teach or be left behind. And if you are gifted at art or music, well, you are just sol.
Everything that used to be cool and funky or artistic is now a corporatized landrush -- 80K naked drunks peeing on lawns during Bay to Breakers, just for a start. And there really is a place with $4 toast.
And all the museums suck (except the exploratorium) and the best galleries just got shut down because a start up will pay lots more to rent the building.
The City has been expensive as long as I have been here (roughly 30 yrs), but there were always pockets of interest that weren't insane of busy being bid up by the ignorant.
Back in the day, the City ran on financial services firms, which were very conservative. There was something to be different from. Now, everyone is hip, slick, and cool and goes to work in jean or leggings and drinks too much on the job and is vegan (except on Thursday when the company serves grassfed beef.).
I miss my City, even the times it turned out people I thought I wanted to get to know were junkies.
Oh and it is beautiful and the air is clean and the food is very, very good. As is the tap water.
With the run of successful attacks, bitcoin looks more and more like a pump and dump scheme. The early folk get out with lots of actual money and the latecomers end up holding the empty bag. Also -- what is with the Mt. Gox orthography. It is MtGOX, which makes the poorly run site and other issues seem easily foreseen.
Oooooh!! Even grannies can learn. If you could give your arm a rest from patting yourself on the back for being so brilliant you can install an OS, you might notice that 1) lots of olds are not stupid about computers, 2) lots of women are not stupid about computers, 3) lots of old women know about computers. Grace Hopper did not become an idiot the day she got officially old.
No problem assuming the older user (please, could it be grandad in the headline just once?) does not have arthritis in the hands or other problems with holding something and aiming the hand at possibly small targets.
You are naive. Nice, but naive. Yes, some things are a bit better. But are things good? No.
You already force a lot of us out with the threat of punishment -- harassment, assault, just plain being looked over. If you want us to stay/come back, perhaps you could: Write job reqs that don't state flat out that you want to hire a "dude, bro, guy." For those women who got their degrees 12 yrs ago, write job reqs that don't call for a "young guy fresh out of school." When you post pictures of the team you are hiring for, include at least one woman, even if you have to go get one from the web design firm next door. Expect to pay a woman you hire exactly what you would pay a man you would hire. I know, sounds simple, but not so common. Have at least one woman in the interview -- even if it is only the HR person. That will start letting some of us into the boy's club that STEM still is.
Have you tried hiring older workers? You do not get that attitude. Maybe a bit of "trust me, you're doing it wrong," but then, maybe you are.
The most highly regulated businesses exist in the high population density areas -- San Francisco and surrounding counties, Los Angeles and Orange County, San Diego, and, to a lesser extent, Sacramento. The unemployment rate in SF is hovering around 5%.
It is not private in the sense that only you and the entity with which you are doing business knows the information, but it is also not public. It is protected (in theory, at least). The credit reporting companies get the information because they have a contract with the credit card issuers to report your balance and payment information. Again, theoretically, this is to your benefit, since it gives you a credit history that can be depended on and checked. The trouble is that these companies can be kind of skeevy. I am not certain how I feel about that agency collecting detailed information on individuals. There are ways to de-identify the data and still keep the details separate (that is, not aggregated) and useful.
Thank you. This is such a cogent description of non-violent civil action (was trained by Quakers in the '70s). The other thing that is essential for non-violent action to succeed is a free press. A really free press, that will cover the beatings and arrests. We really haven't had that in quite some time. The press is commercialized. Dissent is herded into "free speech zones" or waits for a Manning or a Snowden to come around. Some news outlets are reporting the release of information about Professor Davidon and the others who broke into the Media, PA FBI offices in the 70s and exposed the illegal actions of the FBI. They leaked the information and their identities were protected. They were only able to remain at large because there was a statute of limitations on the break-in and no-one was ever charged with treason. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but also the willingness to speak truth to power. Without a press that will report on that truth, one is often speaking into a void. And, especially in these days of panic, it takes a great deal of courage for anyone in the press to report on stolen truth.
No -- you quickly find out who in your circle has been told things they don't want to hear by their employees and are willing to blackball them. Make very certain that the folk you are blackballing don't all match certain demographics or you could be in for a very large lawsuit. That could be won simply on the blackballing (called restraint of trade in CA, not sure what it is called, other than SOP, in AZ.). For years, I have had to note to those doing background checks that one group for which I worked gave a "would not rehire" response for anyone who quit. Their name got known, too. If workers come to know who is doing the blackballing/restraint of trade, you might well find yourself unable to hire decent workers, because they can work places that do not discriminate on the basis of one guy whose nose is out of joint. Oh, and I think I know several of the worst offenders in this, just by word of mouth from applicants.
Actually, it started well before the Intel purchase. McAfee hasn't been McAfee since it was bought by Network Associates and NA took over the name. It was a typical Network Associates product package -- lots of expensive pieces that do not play well together. Enterprise AV is not too bad, if that is all you are going to do. Enterprise IDS doesn't do *nix well and doesn't talk to the AV consolidation part. Not McAfee for a long time. One can only hope Intel can dismantle and keep the good parts and reintegrate the rest.
Sounds like a better use of money than cleaning up after major explosions or paying the jackasses from Enron (both of which we have been through comparatively recently). Having anyone in SCADA think forward rather than backward would be glorious.
Or by hiring a bunch of self-taught coders who do not understand the concepts of testing and stability. The other problem with getting folk to the *nix side is the sysadmins and others one will meet there.
Most of the women in tech that I know share at least some of these cultural preferences, but that is self-selection. The ones who share it are the ones who are comfortable staying.
It is not just women who are put off by the need for constant competition within this culture that goes on in so many programming teams or in the server room. I have a male friend with whom I have worked for years and who is a well-qualified Unix sys admin who was hounded from a job because he does not particularly enjoy video games. Oh, and he was older than the rest of the team, which also made him a pariah (they said so out loud).
Men don't flock to nursing or primary school teaching in large part **because** they are considered feminine but also because they are poorly paid. Sexist -- absolutely. I know lots of women who have left the field because the harassment (not the lack of social interaction) got to be too much. Too many anecdotes and too much research that shows that women are regularly told to "get the hell out" because we "don't belong." That will lower your rates of participation and also create a bit of an echo chamber. Culturally restricted -- yes. All the way to racist -- I am not sure (I am white, I would not necessarily experience it). Racism isn't always white people prejudging people of color. Racism is both how things are presented (have you ever seen a black person in a tech presentation?) and who is accepted into a program or hired. And it is the tone of the workplace. It is well past time, though, that the first response of the tech community to criticism stops being "NO!! YOU'RE BAD!!!! GO AWAY!!!" The solution sounds a little lame and like ham-handed stereotyping, but I am not in the affected community. If there is an assumption that everyone involved in tech must be engaged in the same culture of science fiction, superhero comics, and video gaming, then, yeah, something trivial might make those who are interested less likely to walk away after hitting the wall of "YOU ARE NOT JUST LIKE ME!!!! SCARY!!!! GO AWAY!!!!"
Do take a minute and give the women reading this in an environment that is already exclusionary a thought. We are constantly pushed (or driven, with threats of rape or death) away from the possibility of earning a living with our skills. One is jabbed with that day in and day out. Then, in a place one thinks might just be available for one to improve one's skills and employability there is one more, big damned jab, straight in the face. A big "fuck you, bitch, you are ruining my place by wanting to participate." Now, be calm and reasoned in your response. Like yours to the people on Twitter who you see as wanting to "punish anyone who doesn't comply with their demands."
I don't think you know what a daily shit sandwich it can be for women attempting to work in tech. And the people making it a misery are regularly praised for their wit and charm. While the women who "don't comply with the demands" of the exclusionary men to get the hell out of programming and find another way to make a living are "punished."
eyeroll
First -- there is a big difference between privacy and anonymity/going off the grid.
I would agree that the ability to do the latter while participating in first world society is effectively impossible.
There is a lot that can be done, both by the individual and by governments, to improve the ability of individuals to control how information about and by themselves is used and transmitted.
Officially (but not enforced to nearly the extent it should be), the EU Data Protection Act states that information about an individual belongs to that individual and there is a basic right to a degree of anonymity. One is supposed to be informed where the data sits, whether it is correct, and how it is being used. We are all learning the extent to which that law is ignored in Europe. It is, however, a beginning and establishes the common sense idea that I own information about myself, including images of myself. The vast majority of countries world-wide have variations of this law.
The US starts from the assumption that data belongs to those who collect or aggregate it. This means that, in order to provide any privacy (in the sense of controlling data from/about oneself), individual bits of that information have to be defined and exempted from that assumption. This is how we got HIPAA (which is extremely narrow and poorly enforced), the cluster of banking privacy acts (again, poorly enforced). Until this changes, it is really difficult to control how/whether data about yourself is used, by whom, and whether it is accurate.
There is some privacy. You do not have to have your SSN tattooed on your forehead, nor do you have to give it to everyone who asks. You should protect your banking information and you don't have to tell your employer about any disability unless you want accommodation. Which is all fine in theory, but in practice, few of us take the time to learn the laws and our privacy rights and even fewer of those who want to collect this information bother to learn the rules or abide by them.
You can go off the grid, but you have to leave everything behind. And, if you really want to, you should find a place to live that uses just paper records.
But cells are not what they are recommending for replacing POTS service -- it is IP phone service (like MagicJack), which relies on internet service being functional, which takes more power than POTS lines, but, with ADSL, is prone to many of the physical service issues (how far from the next hub, how many squirrels have gnawed on the not-yet-replaced copper cables, etc.).
When you hit 60, tell me the same story. There is extreme age discrimination. A friend my age survived 5 yrs of wiping the butts of 20 somethings for whom the notion of testing code before going live was a novelty. Oh, and once we hit 65, we are a lot cheaper to insure.
Stupid -- the same way I did. You continue to work (if you are lucky enough to be healthy throughout), take a few weeks off, then maybe work from home if you need or want to, then go back to work. OOOOHHH, here's something you clearly never considered -- one of those woman things might actually earn more than you and you can stay home with the child until you can earn more than child care costs.
Someone in the family with a chronic illness, a house? Burying your parents or making sure they are taken care of? And you will not necessarily continue to get that money for as long as you need it.