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I read the whole thing, even though I felt like the author tried to constantly insult me during my read.
I believe the ending is key. It’s just another plot of land she’s having an issue with. Leave it. It’s not all of tech, it’s the Silicon Valley part of tech—maybe. There are plenty of other plots of land which should suit well. And when it comes to the programming part, it’s simply about being responsible. Be that, and look for others that are. They are plenty as well.
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She lives and works in NYC. Silicon Valley has no part in this. I think she’s speaking to the ideals we’re taught to strive for - clean, readable, elegant, “beautiful” code, and the reality of what actually runs in production at most companies.
What about her discomfort did you find insulting?
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Silicon Valley has no part in this.
Silicon Valley has influenced far beyond its physical presence for quite some time now. If I can see it in Stockholm, I’m sure it’s present in New York as well.
Edit: (I see now how confusing my first comment must have been since I continued in “the plot of land” bit. I didn’t mean it as something physical, but rather one of many plots on a big map. That culture she describes isn’t the whole map. [I’m probably just driving he confusion further by trying to explain myself.])
What about her discomfort did you find insulting?
Thank you for asking, and giving me the opportunity to clarify. It had nothing to do with her discomfort, which is highly regrettable.
Instead it was an (unnecessary) comment on how I reacted to her style of writing for this post. I felt that she dictated my reading, and I found all the “that’s cute” both annoying and insulting. But that’s on me, and I regret I made that a part of my comment.
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[Comment from banned user removed]
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Not even a trace: https://github.com/sarony?tab=repositories
What does her github profile have to do with her worth as a programmer? Are you saying that the multitudes of people who work for government, defense contractors, closed think tanks and the like are terrible programmers because they don’t have github profiles?
So much for diversity and “become a coder in 10 easy steps” coding camps…
This is just totally offensive on so many levels I can’t even. What does the fact that she’s a minority woman have to do with her worth as a programmer? It’s utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand.
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Much as I hate to agree with @stefanpalaru here, the fact is that her Github is just a handful of forks of other projects and a lot of really basic work. There’s nothing wrong with that–my own Github is littered with barely-started projects and a lot of dead ends!–but it does suggest her context as not really having a lot of experience on the technical side of the tech industry.
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Gotcha. As I point out in a reply elsewhere here, though, that lack of being a “hard core dev” prevents me from supporting her position, especially as her inexperience shines through. She hasn’t run into enough forms of software development to claim that “she doesn’t belong in tech” anymore than my bad lab in one mechanical engineering class would be grounds to be taken seriously were I to claim “I don’t belong in engineering”.
It’s her perception, sure, but it’s from such a limited vantage point it’s hard to try and draw the conclusions a lot of folks would want to from it.
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she’s still rather new to the technology world
She managed Tech Jobs Academy at Microsoft for over an year, was employed as a junior developer for 6 months before that and was employed as a developer for 9 months before that - fresh out of a 4 months RoR course.
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I think the Silicon Valley cultural menace has already gotten out of its original containment. Open plan offices for programmers are now the norm everywhere, and “Agile” brands of micromanagement will be next. Furthermore, we now have a president-elect who, although he comes from a very different business, has the swagger and attitudes of a Bay Area tech founder. I’m worried, because this thing is definitely spreading.
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I just recently responded to John Saddington’s Medium story The Power of Stoicism with three book recommendations on Stoicism: 1) Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius, and 2) The Obstacle is the Way and 3) The Daily Stoic, both by Ryan Holiday.