
FT Person of the Year: Susan Fowler - olivermarks
https://www.ft.com/content/b4bc2a68-dc4f-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482
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itsmemattchung
> Her father was a preacher, prison chaplain and at one stage a high school
> teacher. Ms Fowler never graduated from high school, instead working as a
> babysitter and ranch hand, and teaching herself in the local library.
> Lacking a formal education but determined to go to university, she submitted
> a list of books she had read as part of her college application

> After winning a place at Arizona State University to study philosophy, she
> then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, earning a degree in
> physics. In her final year at Penn, she wrote a blog entitled “If Susan can
> learn physics, so can you”, explaining how she caught up despite having no
> secondary maths education. By the time she reached Uber at age 24, she was a
> physicist and computer scientist, and wrote her first book about software
> architecture while working at the company

Damn. Very impressive.

~~~
muninn_
Does UPenn accept average intelligence people like myself?

I think Susan is great, and she did amazing work, but she's also clearly top
1-5% brilliant. These stories give people like me false hope. As if I can pick
myself up by my intellectual bootstraps and just study hard to be a physics/CS
major and I'll just be able to make it into a top university.

In university I was a C physics student and maybe a B CS student. And that
wasn't at a school known for academic performance. In fact, when I took
calculus (with little secondary (high school education) education because I
worked) even with free tutoring and doing hundreds of practice problems I only
barely passed with Cs.

~~~
magic_beans
Going to a top university doesn't necessary correlate with having a successful
career. You can definitely make a lot of money or find a lot of success even
if your college academics were lacking.

~~~
reaperducer
I once saw a list of successful people who dropped out of either high school
or college. It ranged from Peter Jennings to Steve Jobs to a number of
billionaires. Very interesting.

~~~
iRideUnicornz
As nice of a story it makes, those people are the exceptions. For the vast
overwhelming majority of the population, secondary -> post-secondary ->
graduate studies (last one optional) is the best path to "success". Those
people who are able to succeed even after dropping out are the types of people
who, even if they were enrolled in a small, no-name community college, would
still be able to succeed, not because of their education but rather because of
their personality and drive.

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whatok
Previous winner list:

[https://ig.ft.com/sites/person-of-the-year/](https://ig.ft.com/sites/person-
of-the-year/)

~~~
V-eHGsd_
what a strange list of people to join. I mean, I realize you have to
contextualize these name in the time they were selected but, Trump, Spitzer,
GWB, Rupert Murdoch, Kissinger.

~~~
whatok
Mohamed Bouazizi in 2011 is the only comparable in the list from what I can
tell.

~~~
V-eHGsd_
thankfully susan didn't have to set herself on fire :)

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JumpCrisscross
Hmm. Would Harvey Weinstein have blown up the way he did if Susan Fowler
hadn’t moved first against Uber?

~~~
Joeboy
After the Time person of the year thing there was a bit of an online spat
about who did and didn't get featured on the cover and who was most deserving
of the credit. To me it seems a bit unseemly and unnecessary. I don't think
any of these people themselves are jostling for the position of most heroic
person of 2017.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _I don 't think any of these people themselves are jostling for the position
> of most heroic person of 2017_

I'm curious about the phenomenon. We had mass acceptance of horrifying
behaviour. Switches flipped and what was dirty but tolerable became
unacceptable. If we wish to replicate this process in other domains, it would
be helpful to understand what happened.

~~~
ensignavenger
This seems so odd to me. In the circles I am most familiar with, such behavior
has always been seen as reprehensible. I suppose there have always been rumors
that such behavior was commonly accepted in Hollywood, and as it turns out,
silicon valley doesn't seem too different. Well, I think Washington DC
deserves to be on that list, too. I wonder how common it is for more
"powerful" people in other circles to get away with this kind of malarky?

~~~
archagon
As a non-SV insider, I was struck by something Vi Hart posted on Twitter
recently[1]:

"When we were looking for funding or a home for our VR group, we were warned
in private conversations against SO MANY funders and leaders within companies,
by their equally powerful white dude colleagues. Often several separate
warnings against the same dude. I KNOW YOU KNOW."

Sounds to me like the upper echelons know and don't care.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/938212942356537345](https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/938212942356537345)

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dtf
According to editor Lionel Barber, Fowler was up against the likes of Macron,
Xi, MbS, Musk and Bezos.

[https://www.ft.com/content/7ab21e44-de85-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f...](https://www.ft.com/content/7ab21e44-de85-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f5ce)

~~~
djroomba
Those guys basically rule the world politically or economically, and Susan won
at the Financial Times. That doesnt seem right.

The other people have a extraordinary larger impact on global economics and
politics.

~~~
sremani
You are getting clobbered, I will join you in this one.

There is no rhyme or reason for the basis for selecting a Person of the year.
None what so ever. They are primarily focused in a specific part of the world.
Forget Asia, Africa and other so called Third World.

Selecting a person of the year is not more substantive than sitting in a drum
circle and passing the beer and talking stick. Especially since the newspaper
business is now shadow of itself.

Honestly, I really do not know who the person of the year should be. The world
does not revolve around a person, 10 years from now when one would have to
think about 2017, Susan Folwer's Uber takedown will be very unlikely thing
many would remember.

~~~
eitally
If you just make a tiny grammatical change it will eliminate all that unease.
Change it to "A Person of the Year", rather than "The Person of the Year". :)

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heedlessly2
Side comment, but I started working for Uber recently. Someone on my FB
friendslist unfriended me because of that. Irony was that she works at
Palantir. Pot meets kettle

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SadWebDeveloper
I can't decide if this is good or sad.

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mikekij
Well deserved.

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greywolf
more than deserved, she's definitely this year's hero

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LeoJiWoo
Susan Fowler is a great person but this reeks of a clickbait agenda.

She is important but Xi, Bezos,and Musk are radically changing the face of the
world in a much much greater capacity.

EDIT:

Musk has the hyperloop, tesla, spacex. These are what I consider revolutionary
technologies that could change the face of our global civilization.

Bezos is eating the world with amazon, whole foods, and washington post.
Amazon is leading so many new industries drone deliveries, cloud, and so many
are cities are competing for hq2. What isn't amazon doing lately ?

Xi is changing the face of silicon valley by making SV more like china which
has huge global implications.

I think Fowler is great, but she isn't on the same level.

~~~
KaiserPro
I can assure you its not clickbait.

Fowler's post created ripples, at least in tech. It was a brilliant exposition
of how not to run a company. Bullying happens in every company, what makes a
company special is how you deal with it.

Uber dealt with bullying by pampering its odious alpha-shits and creating a
structure around them that legitimised and encouraged it, in the guise of
"culture".

Musk, Bezos xi et al, are uber rich engineers. Most moderatly intelligent
people with >60 billion can change the world. Getting there in the first place
is the hard part.

writing honestly about an abuse of power, knowing that it will most likley end
your career and result in more persecution, takes a fuck tonne more courage
than ordering a bunch of top people in thier fields to build a rocket/shopping
empire.

in terms of impact, a nobody unseated Kalanick, something the US legal system
never managed to do, despite his companies many legal transgressions.

~~~
Gargoyle
>Fowler's post created ripples, at least in tech.

Has it, though? I see giant names in Hollywood go down. Senators in DC. I'm
not seeing tech figures, though.

I saw Uber do the very definition of a classic ass-covering report.

Is silicon valley really cleaning house?

~~~
edanm
For what it's worth, I remember there were several high profile VCs accused of
harassment, with several of them resigning or being pushed out. Scoble was
also accused.

So yeah, I think tech is changing for the better.

