Is it because you're not one of the guys, or because you didn't bother to get to know them? Or because they don't know that you'd be OK with it, and are afraid of being reported for sexual harassment? I don't hang out with 80% of the guys in my office. Hell, I didn't hang out with anyone in my office, until I made the effort to talk with them and develop common interests. Most people are used to just falling into friendships in college and high school, but I've found that, quite frequently, you have to work at it. Especially if you don't necessarily share much in common with them, or if there's baggage included (think sexual harassment lawsuits).
But the point is, they don't have a reason to go out of their way to include you. I don't get invited or included in social groups even though I'm a guy, why should a girl be any different?
You can blow off everything else as normal office politics. But this one I simply don't get. It makes me feel like I'm in elementary school. Because I took the time to wear an ironed shirt, and maybe add some accessories like a belt or a necklace, that means it's appropriate to for male co-workers to "gently rib" me about my clothing? But what is the joke? Why say anything? I really don't get it.
Theres nothing to get, its just joking around, and the only reason is to have some fun. We had a guy that dressed really sharp in the office, and we used to poke fun at him about it. He'd make fun of our "10 dollar hair cuts" and wrinkled clothes. We were just having fun with each other.
I don't know anything about your coworkers, but is it possible that they were just trying to treat you like one of the guys, and you mistook it? I can sympathize. I wasn't used to this particular brand of humor until I fell into my current groups of friends, and it took me a very very long time to get used to. I felt for a long time that they looked down on me, but in reality they were just trying to treat me as part of the group.
And to be clear, I'm not trying to blow off your problems. I'm simply trying to present an alternate view point to make sure that the usual crap that all of us have to deal with isn't being elevated into sexism, just because you're holding certain unrealistic expectations.
"The Old Boys Club" is basically "If you want to advance in this company, you have to be in good with the higher ups." Its true of most companies, and it applies to both sexes.
At least as a male you can get into it if you play the game. As a female I'm pretty much locked out of the old boys club. I'll never even get to be buddy buddy with my boss.
Not true. I have female bosses and coworkers that are very much buddy-buddy with the higher ups. Being a woman doesn't lock you out of the "old boys club" unless your boss is a dick. But accusing the higher ups of being sexist because they don't go out of their way to acknowledge or include you will.
I have a good friend at work who sometimes repeats to me the horrible conversations that occur between the males at work. They talk at the urinals, they fart and laugh about it infront of each other, they tell each other stories about whatever girls they brought home from the bar, and ugh the worst thing I heard yesterday was my boss likes to go to the strip club and wear thin sweatpants so he can feel everything! (/vomit) He's married w/ a wife and kid. This is the kind of stuff I won't ever be a part of that precludes me from being in the club.
Male and female programmers here hang out with each other all the time. I don't hear fart jokes. People do talk about their dating lives at the office, but the women do too.
I agree with you that your bosses behavior is disgusting, but talking at the urinals? Big deal. Aside from the boss thing, it just seems to me that you don't agree with certain aspects of their behavior, which is a personal thing. A lot of people don't feel that having casual sex is wrong, so talking about taking women home from bars is not a big deal.
I'm sorry, but people are not obligated to talk about things that you are comfortable with or enjoy. I like video games and game development, but my coworkers don't. They're not obligated to go out of their way to accommodate me. They're only obligated to treat me decently and not discriminate.
Basically, you have a shitty workplace and you're generalizing. I sympathize with the shitty workplace, but lets not get carried away.
I work for a fortune 100 company as a software engineer and I face this discrimination all the time. I frequently get this vibe from my male co-workers that they don't take what I say seriously.
Join the club. I get the same feeling. But is it just paranoia? Do you know why or do you just assume its because you're a woman? We have many women at my work place, and they are treated the same as male coworkers. In my case, its because of who I was associate with, my initial work at the company, and my relative lack of experience. Plus I talked too much and listened too little. If you think you're hot shit and show it, then likely people aren't going to take you seriously, male or female.
And then when I do great work, they all try to get their hand in the pot and take credit for things I did, which frustrates me to no end. A male co-worker actually got a promotion which seemed to me (from the little congratulations email went out describing all his wonderful accomplishments), mostly based on MY work. And did I get a promotion? Nope. And when I do, I'll still be at a lower level than most because my raise will be based on a percentage of what I currently make which apparently was pretty low compared to my male counterparts.
Welcome to the reality of office politics. This happens to men just as much. Opportunists will take advantage of your work to promote themselves. They're in every office, and you have to deal with it. Happens in my office, and in pretty much every large group I've been in. Its not a male or female thing. Why should you be any different than the males that don't get credit for their work?
And then there's this whole thing all women have to deal with at work that being aggressive = bitch. And I feel like whenever I try to get other people's names detached from my work, my bosses don't take it seriously and have even gone as far to joke about it infront of other people!
Doing something like that is very hard to do without comming across like a snob, whether you're male or female. I've done the same thing, and its come across very poorly. You have to be political. What you've told me here is not indicative of a sex thing.
Furthermore, could it be that they actually did help on it, and you're trying to remove credit from them?
And whenever I come to work dressed somewhat fashionably I get weird comments, not compliments, they are actually making fun of me I think. What the heck is that about. Sorry I'm not wearing wrinkled khakis and a wrinkled blue dress shirt like the rest of you slobs (we're corporate so don't do the jeans/t-shirts thing).
If I came to work wearing a suit and tie I'd get wierd comments to. People would either think I was looking for a job on the side, or they'd joke around with me about it. Why do you assume they're making fun of you? And if they are "making fun of you," why do you assume its malicious instead of gentle ribbing?
Yeah so the other day I was talking to a female in marketing at my company asking her what it's like there cause it's really not cool in IT.
I haven't seen any women at my office have problems. They're all very cool and part of the team. But they also know how to be political, and recognize the political games for what they are instead of sexism. They don't get defensive when people rib them, and they give ribbings back. They don't automatically assume sexism.
Now, I don't know anything about you, or your work environment, so I may be talking out of my ass. But the fact of the matter is that your post seems to indicate that you expect a certain behavior and if you don't get that, you assume sexism. Maybe its really just the culture not matching your expectations? You can't expect the office to revolve around you.
Being male doesn't get you into the old boys club either. I've found relatively shortly after graduating that success is, in large part, knowing the right people, or being able to establish connections with the right people. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" has been a more valuable tool for me than my programming books.
Not to trivialize women who are having real problems in the work place, but a lot of women who complain about the "old boys club" don't seem to realize that its a problem for the men too. A highly talented male engineer can and will get passed over for a marginal engineer thats buddy-buddy with the boss.
Heck, I had to work up from a low position simply because I was recommended for a job by a friend, who was part of a consulting group that was not well-received by project managers at the office.
Its entirely possible to make commercial GPL software. You can't really charge for the software (yeah yeah, I know Stallman *claims* that you can charge for GPL software, but the reality is that free copy and distribution drives the price of the software to $0), but you can charge for the services in writing or supporting the software, or provide other services for running the software (software is free, hardware costs cash, factor cost of software into the hardware).
iTunes for me has always been a case of "Its the worst music player I've used, except for all those other ones." I don't think I've used a music player that I've ever really liked. I consider iTunes more of a "get music on my iPod" program anyway.
iPhone, for me, continues the love-hate relationship I have with Apple. 90% of what it does it does great, but then theres that 10% that doesn't mesh with how Apple thinks I should be using my hardware, and its that 10 percent that causes the problem.
For example: why, oh why, didn't they have a chat program on the iPhone? I mean, seriously, they could have made a version of iChat for it, right? Thats probably the biggest gap I'm feeling right now. That and the iPhone doesn't seem to want to tell iTunes that I've finished watching a video, so when I remove the video from my iPhone, iTunes will put it right back on unless I fiddle around with the settings.
I doubt its that easy to just "get the hell out of China." Living and working in foreign countries can be quite difficult, even (especially) if you're a skilled laborer.
Re:I'd only recommend the 360 version
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 1
It crashed or locked up every two hours or so on my machine. Disabling high level shaders helped somewhat, but a lot of times I had to do a hard reboot. Theres certainly some issues that effect "lucky" guys like me, but I understand that my experiences are not indicative.
My impression of DigiPen, after chatting with some graduates, is that they have a higher quality program than your average "game school." I can't speak for others like Fullsail, but it seemed like DigiPen actually did teach some fundamental computer science in addition to game specific stuff.
Most people think of a handfull of game schools, but there are now tons of crappy "game design" programs that can barely qualify as vocational training, much less a real study in computer science.
It also has a lot to do with how much you put into it. Most of the really brilliant people I know put a lot of extra effort into their educations. I wish I had done the same quite regularly.
Agreed. Something as simple as a phone should make it very very difficult to end up with a $5k bill. There are many things these people could have done to avoid the bill, but what they did do shouldn't stick them with such a massive amount.
And lets not forget, this is Apple, who are widely lauded for their user interfaces. Hopefully they will fix the problem on the iPhone, and AT&T will cut them some slack.
I think that the phone should "know" that it is roaming and warn/deactivate stuff like email, or make an option for it to behave like that. I'd also like the ability to turn off the phone portion and leave the WiFi on. Now that theres been a public incident like this, I hope Apple adds these options.
As far as AT&T goes, I'm betting that they cut a deal with the guy, and he upgrades his plan instead of paying the cash. At least when I hear of cases like this, thats what the mobile carrier has usually done. I think that being able to rack up a $5k charge in the first place is pretty absurd. I can't think of any situation where that kind of a bill is acceptable, and they should really put limits too how high your bill can go.
No, that would be ridiculous. When the phone is off, its *off*.
Now if your phone is in sleep mode (screen isn't active, but the phone can still receive calls), then it will receive emails. My perspective is that its fairly obvious that when you set the phone to poll for emails, it will do so even if the phone is not actively being used. Thats pretty much the entire point of setting it to poll for emails.
Plus, when you get an email, the phone will alert you that it has done so.
And yes, I agree that being able to rack up a $4800 bill passively is unacceptable.
Well, I'm not trying to say that the users' are totally at fault. I sympathize with them that it's not necessarily intuitive. I have any easier time with it than non-techies. And Apple's strong point is supposed to be intuitive interfaces.
I also note that some other posters have mentioned that email auto-check is on by default. Mine was not, but my phone is brand new. It could be that Apple changed the defaults, expecting something like this (or maybe they had other complaints, and they just weren't publicized).
Yeah, I just thought it would be nice to use the WiFi in a foreign country... It would be great to have a way to turn off the phone portion but leave the WiFi on.
I'm not counting on Apple adding the feature. I mean, look how long it took them to add actual real right-clicking on their mice (not command-click or whatever you use). And even then, they couldn't just put a button there... they just have to be "special."
Well, its obvious to me what it does, but since I'm a nerd, its a small leap to think "airplane mode must turn off the radio and wifi." But there is a manual included that they could have used. There are many ways they could have avoided this situation:
1) Turn the phone off, instead of putting it in sleep. The guy had it in sleep, not off. 2) Set the mail checking to manual. 3) Airplane mode
Now, I don't blame the guy entirely. The actual method for turning the phone off isn't exactly intuitive, and to your average joe, its not exactly obvious what airplane mode does. He could have read the manual to find out. What I'm wondering is how he didn't notice that automatic mail checking was on. The iPhone will signal you when you get email... I guess he just didn't get any mail? But if thats the case, how did he rack up hundreds of megabytes of traffic?
Set the mail check to manual and don't use the browser/email/etc. It would be nice if they had better granularity on the controls, so you could turn off data, but leave on WiFi, or turn off the phone part but leave the WiFi part on.
The management guy said his own project was successful in the report. That doesn't necessarily mean it is. I've had plenty of managers implement a "silver bullet" project that made life significantly more painful, and then chalk it up as a big win to his superiors. I don't take what managers say at face value.
Certain things like wikis are really nice for development teams. The trick is using the technology for the correct problem.
I see two possible cases here: 1) The IT department is incompetent. 2) Some manager who wants to be able to write that he "synergized the business using new paradigms in a Web 2.0 world" in their resume.
I'm betting on the latter. But thats probably because I'm used to it.
"IT departments are wisely refusing to spend uneeded man hours and money on technological buzzwords that will not help, and will likely hurt, the business. Management foolishly decided to override them instead of listening."
Slashdot Mirror
Is it because you're not one of the guys, or because you didn't bother to get to know them? Or because they don't know that you'd be OK with it, and are afraid of being reported for sexual harassment? I don't hang out with 80% of the guys in my office. Hell, I didn't hang out with anyone in my office, until I made the effort to talk with them and develop common interests. Most people are used to just falling into friendships in college and high school, but I've found that, quite frequently, you have to work at it. Especially if you don't necessarily share much in common with them, or if there's baggage included (think sexual harassment lawsuits).
But the point is, they don't have a reason to go out of their way to include you. I don't get invited or included in social groups even though I'm a guy, why should a girl be any different?
Theres nothing to get, its just joking around, and the only reason is to have some fun. We had a guy that dressed really sharp in the office, and we used to poke fun at him about it. He'd make fun of our "10 dollar hair cuts" and wrinkled clothes. We were just having fun with each other.
I don't know anything about your coworkers, but is it possible that they were just trying to treat you like one of the guys, and you mistook it? I can sympathize. I wasn't used to this particular brand of humor until I fell into my current groups of friends, and it took me a very very long time to get used to. I felt for a long time that they looked down on me, but in reality they were just trying to treat me as part of the group.
And to be clear, I'm not trying to blow off your problems. I'm simply trying to present an alternate view point to make sure that the usual crap that all of us have to deal with isn't being elevated into sexism, just because you're holding certain unrealistic expectations.
"The Old Boys Club" is basically "If you want to advance in this company, you have to be in good with the higher ups." Its true of most companies, and it applies to both sexes.
Not true. I have female bosses and coworkers that are very much buddy-buddy with the higher ups. Being a woman doesn't lock you out of the "old boys club" unless your boss is a dick. But accusing the higher ups of being sexist because they don't go out of their way to acknowledge or include you will.
I have a good friend at work who sometimes repeats to me the horrible conversations that occur between the males at work. They talk at the urinals, they fart and laugh about it infront of each other, they tell each other stories about whatever girls they brought home from the bar, and ugh the worst thing I heard yesterday was my boss likes to go to the strip club and wear thin sweatpants so he can feel everything! (/vomit) He's married w/ a wife and kid. This is the kind of stuff I won't ever be a part of that precludes me from being in the club.Male and female programmers here hang out with each other all the time. I don't hear fart jokes. People do talk about their dating lives at the office, but the women do too.
I agree with you that your bosses behavior is disgusting, but talking at the urinals? Big deal. Aside from the boss thing, it just seems to me that you don't agree with certain aspects of their behavior, which is a personal thing. A lot of people don't feel that having casual sex is wrong, so talking about taking women home from bars is not a big deal.
I'm sorry, but people are not obligated to talk about things that you are comfortable with or enjoy. I like video games and game development, but my coworkers don't. They're not obligated to go out of their way to accommodate me. They're only obligated to treat me decently and not discriminate.
Basically, you have a shitty workplace and you're generalizing. I sympathize with the shitty workplace, but lets not get carried away.
Join the club. I get the same feeling. But is it just paranoia? Do you know why or do you just assume its because you're a woman? We have many women at my work place, and they are treated the same as male coworkers. In my case, its because of who I was associate with, my initial work at the company, and my relative lack of experience. Plus I talked too much and listened too little. If you think you're hot shit and show it, then likely people aren't going to take you seriously, male or female.
And then when I do great work, they all try to get their hand in the pot and take credit for things I did, which frustrates me to no end. A male co-worker actually got a promotion which seemed to me (from the little congratulations email went out describing all his wonderful accomplishments), mostly based on MY work. And did I get a promotion? Nope. And when I do, I'll still be at a lower level than most because my raise will be based on a percentage of what I currently make which apparently was pretty low compared to my male counterparts.Welcome to the reality of office politics. This happens to men just as much. Opportunists will take advantage of your work to promote themselves. They're in every office, and you have to deal with it. Happens in my office, and in pretty much every large group I've been in. Its not a male or female thing. Why should you be any different than the males that don't get credit for their work?
And then there's this whole thing all women have to deal with at work that being aggressive = bitch. And I feel like whenever I try to get other people's names detached from my work, my bosses don't take it seriously and have even gone as far to joke about it infront of other people!Doing something like that is very hard to do without comming across like a snob, whether you're male or female. I've done the same thing, and its come across very poorly. You have to be political. What you've told me here is not indicative of a sex thing.
Furthermore, could it be that they actually did help on it, and you're trying to remove credit from them?
And whenever I come to work dressed somewhat fashionably I get weird comments, not compliments, they are actually making fun of me I think. What the heck is that about. Sorry I'm not wearing wrinkled khakis and a wrinkled blue dress shirt like the rest of you slobs (we're corporate so don't do the jeans/t-shirts thing).If I came to work wearing a suit and tie I'd get wierd comments to. People would either think I was looking for a job on the side, or they'd joke around with me about it. Why do you assume they're making fun of you? And if they are "making fun of you," why do you assume its malicious instead of gentle ribbing?
Yeah so the other day I was talking to a female in marketing at my company asking her what it's like there cause it's really not cool in IT.I haven't seen any women at my office have problems. They're all very cool and part of the team. But they also know how to be political, and recognize the political games for what they are instead of sexism. They don't get defensive when people rib them, and they give ribbings back. They don't automatically assume sexism.
Now, I don't know anything about you, or your work environment, so I may be talking out of my ass. But the fact of the matter is that your post seems to indicate that you expect a certain behavior and if you don't get that, you assume sexism. Maybe its really just the culture not matching your expectations? You can't expect the office to revolve around you.
Being male doesn't get you into the old boys club either. I've found relatively shortly after graduating that success is, in large part, knowing the right people, or being able to establish connections with the right people. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" has been a more valuable tool for me than my programming books.
Not to trivialize women who are having real problems in the work place, but a lot of women who complain about the "old boys club" don't seem to realize that its a problem for the men too. A highly talented male engineer can and will get passed over for a marginal engineer thats buddy-buddy with the boss.
Heck, I had to work up from a low position simply because I was recommended for a job by a friend, who was part of a consulting group that was not well-received by project managers at the office.
Its entirely possible to make commercial GPL software. You can't really charge for the software (yeah yeah, I know Stallman *claims* that you can charge for GPL software, but the reality is that free copy and distribution drives the price of the software to $0), but you can charge for the services in writing or supporting the software, or provide other services for running the software (software is free, hardware costs cash, factor cost of software into the hardware).
iTunes for me has always been a case of "Its the worst music player I've used, except for all those other ones." I don't think I've used a music player that I've ever really liked. I consider iTunes more of a "get music on my iPod" program anyway.
:)
iPhone, for me, continues the love-hate relationship I have with Apple. 90% of what it does it does great, but then theres that 10% that doesn't mesh with how Apple thinks I should be using my hardware, and its that 10 percent that causes the problem.
For example: why, oh why, didn't they have a chat program on the iPhone? I mean, seriously, they could have made a version of iChat for it, right? Thats probably the biggest gap I'm feeling right now. That and the iPhone doesn't seem to want to tell iTunes that I've finished watching a video, so when I remove the video from my iPhone, iTunes will put it right back on unless I fiddle around with the settings.
I still love my phone though.
I doubt its that easy to just "get the hell out of China." Living and working in foreign countries can be quite difficult, even (especially) if you're a skilled laborer.
It crashed or locked up every two hours or so on my machine. Disabling high level shaders helped somewhat, but a lot of times I had to do a hard reboot. Theres certainly some issues that effect "lucky" guys like me, but I understand that my experiences are not indicative.
My impression of DigiPen, after chatting with some graduates, is that they have a higher quality program than your average "game school." I can't speak for others like Fullsail, but it seemed like DigiPen actually did teach some fundamental computer science in addition to game specific stuff.
Most people think of a handfull of game schools, but there are now tons of crappy "game design" programs that can barely qualify as vocational training, much less a real study in computer science.
It also has a lot to do with how much you put into it. Most of the really brilliant people I know put a lot of extra effort into their educations. I wish I had done the same quite regularly.
Agreed. Something as simple as a phone should make it very very difficult to end up with a $5k bill. There are many things these people could have done to avoid the bill, but what they did do shouldn't stick them with such a massive amount.
And lets not forget, this is Apple, who are widely lauded for their user interfaces. Hopefully they will fix the problem on the iPhone, and AT&T will cut them some slack.
I think that the phone should "know" that it is roaming and warn/deactivate stuff like email, or make an option for it to behave like that. I'd also like the ability to turn off the phone portion and leave the WiFi on. Now that theres been a public incident like this, I hope Apple adds these options.
As far as AT&T goes, I'm betting that they cut a deal with the guy, and he upgrades his plan instead of paying the cash. At least when I hear of cases like this, thats what the mobile carrier has usually done. I think that being able to rack up a $5k charge in the first place is pretty absurd. I can't think of any situation where that kind of a bill is acceptable, and they should really put limits too how high your bill can go.
No, that would be ridiculous. When the phone is off, its *off*.
Now if your phone is in sleep mode (screen isn't active, but the phone can still receive calls), then it will receive emails. My perspective is that its fairly obvious that when you set the phone to poll for emails, it will do so even if the phone is not actively being used. Thats pretty much the entire point of setting it to poll for emails.
Plus, when you get an email, the phone will alert you that it has done so.
And yes, I agree that being able to rack up a $4800 bill passively is unacceptable.
I'd rather not have to take out the SIM and keep track of it when its feasible to put a software switch in there. Point taken, though.
Well, I'm not trying to say that the users' are totally at fault. I sympathize with them that it's not necessarily intuitive. I have any easier time with it than non-techies. And Apple's strong point is supposed to be intuitive interfaces.
I also note that some other posters have mentioned that email auto-check is on by default. Mine was not, but my phone is brand new. It could be that Apple changed the defaults, expecting something like this (or maybe they had other complaints, and they just weren't publicized).
Yeah, I just thought it would be nice to use the WiFi in a foreign country... It would be great to have a way to turn off the phone portion but leave the WiFi on.
I'm not counting on Apple adding the feature. I mean, look how long it took them to add actual real right-clicking on their mice (not command-click or whatever you use). And even then, they couldn't just put a button there... they just have to be "special."
Well, its obvious to me what it does, but since I'm a nerd, its a small leap to think "airplane mode must turn off the radio and wifi." But there is a manual included that they could have used. There are many ways they could have avoided this situation:
1) Turn the phone off, instead of putting it in sleep. The guy had it in sleep, not off.
2) Set the mail checking to manual.
3) Airplane mode
Now, I don't blame the guy entirely. The actual method for turning the phone off isn't exactly intuitive, and to your average joe, its not exactly obvious what airplane mode does. He could have read the manual to find out. What I'm wondering is how he didn't notice that automatic mail checking was on. The iPhone will signal you when you get email... I guess he just didn't get any mail? But if thats the case, how did he rack up hundreds of megabytes of traffic?
Set the mail check to manual and don't use the browser/email/etc. It would be nice if they had better granularity on the controls, so you could turn off data, but leave on WiFi, or turn off the phone part but leave the WiFi part on.
The default setting is for the iPhone to not check mail automatically. You have to explicitly turn that on.
There is an airplane mode switch in the settings.
The management guy said his own project was successful in the report. That doesn't necessarily mean it is. I've had plenty of managers implement a "silver bullet" project that made life significantly more painful, and then chalk it up as a big win to his superiors. I don't take what managers say at face value.
Certain things like wikis are really nice for development teams. The trick is using the technology for the correct problem.
I see two possible cases here:
1) The IT department is incompetent.
2) Some manager who wants to be able to write that he "synergized the business using new paradigms in a Web 2.0 world" in their resume.
I'm betting on the latter. But thats probably because I'm used to it.
Dude, everyone knows you need to wait until SP2.
Am I the only one who read this as:
"IT departments are wisely refusing to spend uneeded man hours and money on technological buzzwords that will not help, and will likely hurt, the business. Management foolishly decided to override them instead of listening."
Maybe I'm just jaded.