
Survival Tips for Women in Tech (2018) - mooreds
https://patricia.no/2018/09/06/survival_tips_for_women_in_tech.html
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0xff00ffee
> Making your work public.

I cannot stress this enough. Regardless of who you are, holy hell some people
WILL steal your work for their own.

My first internship manager in late 1980's took my work and patented it as his
own! I found out about it years later when I was hired permanently. I
confronted him and he told me interns weren't allowed to patent. I learned
this was false years later, but he had already left the company.

In a second instance, that same internship, I also wrote some code that was
published in a corporate whitepaper and the motherfucker replaced my name with
his in the comments. Different guy, same company.

I don't think making it public would have mattered because I was just an
intern and we were treated as shit, but thinking back on it now makes my blood
boil because both the patent and the doc are public record (USPTO) to this
day. Maybe today I would have a fighting chance as an intern.

If you have a good idea, make sure top brass know it came from you. There's no
guarantee it won't be stolen, but it gives you a fighting chance the more
people know that you did it.

Heh. 30+ years later and I'm grumbling about it again. lol.

Also, FTA:

> Avoid everyone who is really enthusiastic about you being a woman.

I always found it creepy how some guys fall all over themselves to remind the
only woman on the team that she is the only woman on the team. It's like,
'yay, thanks for noticing...??' but ... hmmm...

I'm guessing it is just a guy new to workplace diversity, and give him some
slack. In my experience, it is usually older men (50-60's) who are getting the
swing of the new generation of "sexism is bad, mmm'kay" and really want to
show they are trying but know they were inherently trained by society to think
in 80's/90's way about diversity. I get it.

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devchix
I like the list, but don't like the adversarial tone. I don't think it's me
vs. men all the time. Some men are jerks, most are not. More actionables:

* Remove "just" from your vocabulary, emails, talks, everything. "I just want you to be aware that ..." "I'm just doing this to..." "It's just that ..." "Just making sure ..." Trim 100%.

* Bake cakes, participate in office pot-lucks or whatever. Never be part of the setup/cleanup crew (have you noticed they are almost always women, admins type). This makes you a jerk, true, but disassociates you from the soft-skills crew. Until the cleanup crew becomes frequently and mostly men, stay away.

* You're eventually going to have to fight for something you care about. Pick battles 1) that you can win; 2) with someone above your weight. How do you become a blackbelt? By beating a blackbelt. It's no thing to gainsay some design decision made by the FNG, better to convert a decision made by someone seen as your technical equivalent or superior.

~~~
zozbot234
OP in the article is actually saying that you should NOT bake cakes. (Unless
you're working for a baking company, I guess?) The cake is a lie.

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rapsey
There is always at least one guy in a team that makes life difficult for a
woman in a dev team. I feel bad for the amount of shit women have to deal with
to survive as a software dev.

~~~
0xff00ffee
Sad story.

About 10 years ago, I was brought in as a contractor to train a team with 5
junior women engineers, one other junior man, and an older woman manager.

The other guy would constantly shit on EVERY idea presented by a woman. Like,
in the 4 months I worked there, he never once said anything positive in any of
their presentations or our group exercises, and he was like 25 years old and
just as experienced as they were.

One of the woman programmers was exceptionally good and he shat on her the
hardest because her ideas were usually adopted, but she was meek and the
manager faught him (her subordinate!) for said junior woman's ideas. It was so
fucked up.

On my way out, I had a meeting with him and talked about how he was being very
dismissive of perfectly reasonable solutions, and he flat-out told me "women
aren't very good at engineering, I'm a better programmer (he wasn't) and need
to clean up their ideas first, I'll eventually run this group." I was like,
holy shit, there's no reaching you.

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zozbot234
> The other guy would constantly shit on EVERY idea presented by a woman. ...
> "women aren't very good at engineering, I'm a better programmer (he wasn't)
> and need to clean up their ideas first"

Sounds like a toxic narcissist. And sadly, really common - it's the sort of
attitude that's often hiding in these "Group X rules, Group Y are lame!"
controversies.

Just push back calmly and confidently, and you'll find that it's quite
possible to keep these people in check. Ultimately though, I don't think their
attitude is compatible with an effectively-functioning workplace.

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abhchand
Sadly required, but seems very honest and relatable. Would probably share with
any woman in tech.

As a secondary point, I find several of these applicable to me as a guy too,
although that's not the main point of this.

I also really like this formatting and list style - heading and brief to-the-
point description.

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mekane8
This is an amazing collection of advice and experience. I'm not a woman in
tech but I have worked with and managed plenty. I really appreciate this list
being shared and publicized. Hopefully it helps some people stay in the field
longer than they otherwise would have!

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zozbot234
> "On Bad Days try to lose yourself in the work, try to remind yourself why
> you’re in this business"

Really? I'd say that the best "survival tip" in a challenging industry is to
act professionally, and another way of saying this is that "losing yourself in
the work" should not be reserved for bad times!

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hashworks
"HR is not your friend" \- fuck off with this bullshit. If you're actually
being harassed, say something. And your colleagues should be your team, not
your enemies. This rivalry thing in companies is pissing me off.

~~~
rapsey
HR is there to protect the company. It is probably tempting to just remove the
disruptor instead of being fair. It is absolutely valid advice.

~~~
hashworks
If that is the case in your company, leave. Don't take this as something you
have to accept. There are a lot other fish in the sea.

If we make rivalry our norm, what could we ever archive together?

~~~
rapsey
There is always rivalry. The problem for women is they bring it out more in
men with ego problems.

~~~
zozbot234
There's a lot of rivalry amongst women too, it just plays out in different
ways and different domains. You can even see this in OP's distrust of the
"soft skills" 'team' \- that part of the enterprise is precisely where rivalry
tends to matter the most.

