exhausted

Posted on 18 May 2012 by nadyne

I’m working at home today, recovering from RADIO.

RADIO is an internal VMware event, and it stands for Research And Development Innovation Off-site.  It’s a huge event intended to get our R&D org thinking about how we can innovate around the company.

I just got home from it, and I’ve got to admit that I’m exhausted.  I was invited to speak there, and gave a talk about how engineers can better learn about our customers.  I also ran a birds-of-a-feather session on a similar topic.  But my exhaustion isn’t just from the preparation (and, I’ll admit, nervousness) from my sessions.  It’s from the sheer amount of awesomeness that I’ve seen going on around the company.

A lot of companies talk about supporting innovation from within the ranks of its team.  VMware delivers.  First of all, the whole of R&D is encouraged to submit their ideas and develop them.  We have features and products that were first suggested at RADIO.  Second, the RADIO folks put a huge amount of effort into helping those who submitted their ideas work on them to get them to a place where they’re ready to be shared with a wide audience.  Everyone who submits gets to go to the event, and other people around R&D get to come if they win a ticket in the lottery.  Attending RADIO is completely paid for by VMware itself, and it doesn’t even come out of our departmental budget.  And we’re given three days to bask in all of this: presentations from our fellow engineers about their awesome ideas, and plenty of time for breaks so that we can meet each other and discuss it.

And now it’s the day after RADIO, and I’ll admit that I’m exhausted.  My plans for today involve going through the mail that built up while I was at RADIO, and thinking about what I learned while I was there.

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Q&A: is “mansplain” sexist?

Posted on 17 May 2012 by nadyne

In my earlier post about sexism in CS, I used the term “mansplain”.  Sam emailed me about it, saying (in part):

I really enjoyed your recent blog post about sexism in CS. As a man in CS it is good to be reminded of such things and to be both cautious and aware of them. In particular I like your optimism and your examples of how you work to achieve a better situation.

I’m not convinced the use of the word mansplain does much beyond switching the sexism back the other way, however. If I were to write a blogpost and use the word womansplain I am sure I would get at least one nasty email, and it would be justified, as it’s not really appropriate for the message. This is because it would be ascribing certain undesirable traits to women writ large, etc, I’m sure you see where I’m going.

It’s an interesting point, and I’ll admit that I haven’t really decided what I think about it.  I was using “mansplain” as a convenient shorthand for the type of patronizing and condescending explanation that a sexist man is wont to use when speaking to a woman about a technical concept.  Perhaps this is a reflection of what I read, but I felt that the word was well-used enough (and self-descriptive enough, certainly in context) to be clear about exactly the behavior that I was describing.  On the other hand, the only instances that I was able to come up with when searching for “womansplain” were parodies of the former, and only a handful of them at all).  Is it sexist to create a portmanteau with man- at all (some interesting examples here)?  Or is it that the behavior described is one that is itself sexist?

Since I haven’t made up my mind about whether the use of “mansplain” is sexist, I decided to turn to an expert.  David Crystal is a noted linguist and has published many books on the English language and its evolution.  In his blog, he often takes on questions about words and phrases.  I wrote to him to ask:

I’m curious about your opinion of the portmanteau “mansplain”, for which Urban Dictionary has several definitions variously involving a man giving a patronizing and condescending explanation.  Inasmuch as a linguist is comfortable commenting on language being sexist, do you think that this is?  Is there a litmus test of sorts that one might be able to apply?  For example, is the reaction to a simple replacement (eg, “womansplain”) such a test?

I wasn’t really expecting a response, but a few days later, he did write back!  (And I have to tell you that my little geek heart, which much enjoys linguistics and that’s how I came to be familiar with his work and an avid reader of his blog, was all a-flutter when I woke up to that email.)  Here’s what he said:

I think it’s too early to say whether mansplain and womansplain have evolved a sexist status, The definitions on urban dictionary can never be properly interpreted, as no information is given about source and context. There’s a lot of idiosyncrasy and invention. So I think we’re going to have to wait a while to see how usage develops. However, I don’t know what a test for such things might look like. Social attitudes to language aren’t usually capable of being tested in a ‘litmus’ sort of way.

I have to admit that I was hoping for a definitive answer, although I’ve read enough about linguistics to know better.

So, audience, what say you?  Do you think that it’s sexist?

Posted in women | 1 Comment

another point about sexism in CS

Posted on 10 May 2012 by nadyne

The thing is, I always wince when I get the question about sexism in CS.  While I do generally think that things are better than they were when I started, when the question comes up in a public forum, someone inevitably comes in and attempts to disprove anything that you might say about improvements in the overall environment.

Let’s take a handful of comments from a single anonymous commenter in that thread:

  • “Be careful – don’t hire women.”
  • “this is the trouble that women cause and I therefore try to avoid hiring them for any roles where one requires steady temperament”
  • “If you are making a consumer product, evidently 50% of your market is going to be women and so it would be good to have a proxy customer.”
  • “most women bench less when it comes to intelligence”
  • “There are exceptional women, but on average, they are not the right candidate for a job that requires analytical skills.”
  • “men are typically better informed, more ambitious and more self confident than most women”
  • “the women were uber-stupid”
  • Women have “an overarching lack of understanding and a willing to understand. There is also a lack of self-confidence that they’ll be able to figure it out.”

On one hand, it’s nice to have examples to prove my point that a lot of sexism is grounded in ignorance and immaturity.  On the other hand, it’s disheartening to have so many examples.

This brings up another point about sexism in CS.  It’s not enough for women to be good engineers.  And it’s not enough for men to simply be not sexist.  Both of these are necessary, but they’re not sufficient.  There have to be men who are willing to stand up when they hear other men make sexist statements or engage in sexist behavior and say that it’s wrong and unacceptable.  Thankfully, there have been men who have been commenting in the thread about the misogyny, which does help improve the situation.  It makes it feel like I’m not the only one who’s willing to say that this guy’s comments are sexist and baseless.

If you’re going to go read the whole comments thread, gird yourself for unsubstantiated rumor and anecdotes without attribution or context from the anonymous commenter.  His comments could constitute a whole course in how to not debate.  However, for each point that he’s raised, I’ve spent some time doing research to see if his points are ones that are borne out by the data.  After all, I am a researcher and thus a data-driven kind of person.  The thread (sorry for the length!) has resulted in me learning some things about the gender gap, so I suppose we can consider that to be a silver lining in this cloud1.

Some of the most interesting things that I’ve found as a result of answering his comments are as follows:

  • Diversity Matters from the University of Michigan – There’s a fair body of work that has been done by researchers at UMich, and it is collected here.  The research therein is about diversity in general, and is not specific to either gender or software engineering.  It’s a good launching point for learning more.
  • “Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance” and the supporting online material by Hyde et al, which considers the gender gap in math scores.  The supporting online material discusses the differences in SAT scores in particular.

I find the research about the gender gap in STEM2 to be interesting.  The gender gap is real, and there are a lot of reasons behind it.  Sexism is only one of the reasons, but it might just be the one that’s hardest to root out.  In the interim, my original advice to women who are experiencing this sexism in CS stands: find your tribe, find the men who aren’t sexist, and find the courage to get yourself out of a bad situation.  It does get better.  Don’t let someone like an anonymous commenter on the internet keep it from getting better for you.

  1. Not cloud like my employer provides, that is.  The silver lining on my employer’s cloud is that they keep on paying me.  Hell, they’ve even promoted me to Staff. ↩
  2. science, technology, engineering, and math ↩
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own your degree

Posted on 7 May 2012 by nadyne

Oh, Yahoo!.  Just when you think they couldn’t do anything dumber, they do.  It turns out that their newly-minted CEO, Scott Thompson, doesn’t have the degree that he claims to have.  He said he’s got a CS degree, when he’s actually got an accounting degree.  Yahoo! claims that this is an inadvertent error, except this so-called “inadvertent error” can also be found on his eBay bio from his days leading PayPal.

Own your degree.  Be proud of it.  My MS is in technical communication, and I’m clear about it on both my about page here as well as on my LinkedIn profile.  I can tell you why I got that degree1, but the fact of the matter is that it’s what my degree is.  In various interviews over the years, I’ve had to explain why my degree is technical communications instead of HCI or design or computer science or software engineering.  But that’s the degree that I got, and I’ve got to be proud of it.  There are things that I learned in my degree that are immensely useful, even if I was cranky about taking them at the time.  A course about how to edit technical content was one of those courses — given how much I have to write now, as well as edit work from others, this course has long since proven its worth.

There comes a point in your career where your experience and your accomplishments matter much more than your degree.  So don’t lie about your degree.  Own it.  Be proud of it, and be able to explain how it sets you apart from your competition who have a degree that’s more traditional to your field.

  1. it’s where all of the HCI classes were at my uni. ↩
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the user experience of buying airline tickets

Posted on 3 May 2012 by nadyne

I’ve been in love with the user experience of Hipmunk.  They’ve quickly become my go-to for flight searches.  I love their data presentation.  They show you, clearly and crisply, how long your flight will take, when and where your layovers are, and how much your flight costs.  And their default sort is by “agony”, which they say is a combination of price, duration, and number of stops.  Seriously: go try it.  I’ll wait.

My husband‘s mother is currently visiting, and decided at the last minute that she wanted to visit Las Vegas.  So I went to Hipmunk and looked at flights.  Neither SFO nor SJC were great.  I tried OAK, which I never use, just in case something awesome came up.

And something awesome did come up: $103 from OAK to LAS.  That was less than half than what I was seeing from SFO or SJC, so I booked it for her.

Now, one of the things that I like about Hipmunk is how good they are about showing me information that I care about.  This screenshot doesn’t show it, but they show which flights are wi-fi enabled.  I love that they show which airline handles each leg and what the layover looks like.

But this time, Hipmunk let me down.  They left out a piece of crucial information: Spirit Airlines hates its customers.  Spirit has a whole page on its site dedicated to its optional fees.  Somehow, in Spirit’s world, carry-on luggage has become optional.  It’s thirty bucks for a carry-on bag, and it took quite a lot of digging for me to determine what carry-on bag means.  This site says that it doesn’t include “personal items” like purses, briefcases, and small backpacks.

Baggage fees became the norm some time ago.  But carry-on fees are unique to Spirit, and Hipmunk should’ve disclosed that to me so that I could factor that into my purchase decision.  For that matter, given how utterly obnoxious it is to charge a fee for carry-on luggage, I think that should be considered as part of their “agony” algorithm.

Now, Hipmunk doesn’t actually do the sale of the ticket.  To complete the transaction, they sent me to Orbitz, which shows me this:

Orbitz flight results

Orbitz tells me that “additional baggage fees may apply”, which is what they say for pretty much every itinerary that you could purchase from them.  They had an opportunity to tell me about Spirit’s customer-hating policies, but instead they wimped out behind their generic link.  That generic link, by the way, takes you to a page where you have to select your airline to view their baggage fees.

At no point in this process was it disclosed that Spirit’s policies are quite different from other airlines, even though there were multiple opportunities to do so.  I only happened to find out about it because a news article went by on twitter which mentioned that Spirit is raising its carry-on baggage fee.  That prompted me to go look, and thus find out.  I’m glad that I found out in advance, otherwise my mother-in-law would be standing at OAK on Sunday paying $40 to carry her bag on board the airplane.

The carry-on fee fundamentally changes the cost of the airline ticket.  I think that the vast majority of travellers have both a personal item and a carry-on.  Personally, the only times when I’ve travelled with just a laptop bag as my personal item were the days when I would fly back home that night.  So if we add in $30 each way for her flight, the cost of the flight just went up 60%.  Yes, it’s still less expensive than the other airlines.  Had the real price of the flight been disclosed to me up-front, I wouldn’t be so cranky.  I’d still be appalled that there’s an airline doing such a thing, but I wouldn’t be upset about finding out about it after the fact.

Hipmunk, Orbitz: I expected better of you.  I hope that you update your results to show that Spirit behaves in this fashion so that I can know the true cost of the ticket when I book.

And now, I’m off to explain to my mother-in-law that she’s got to pay a bit more for her flight, and try to come up with a way to explain Spirit’s policies other than “pure evil”.

Posted in travel, user experience | Leave a comment

Project Octopus is now in public beta

Posted on 2 May 2012 by nadyne

At VMworld last year, we previewed Project Octopus.  Octopus is our enterprise-level cloud file-sharing application.  I’m not talking BitTorrent for IT, I’m talking about a safe and secure cloud file store.  I’ve been dogfooding Octopus for months, and have done some research on it too.  It’s been a great way for me to store documents that I’ll need to access on multiple machines (including my iPhone and iPad), and to share documents with my team quickly and easily.

Additional details about this spiffy new public beta are available in the official announcement blog post.  I’m sure that it’ll also be discussed in tomorrow’s End User Computing Virtual Conference.

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Q&A: does the sexism in CS ever get better?

Posted on 1 May 2012 by nadyne

I saw this question on Geek Feminism a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t feel like I’ve come up with an answer that is satisfactory yet.  The question is in parts, so I’ll tackle them one at a time.

If you’re a woman in CS, does it ever get better? If it got better for you, where and how did that happen?

Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller famously told gay kids who are being bullied that it gets better.  Their video inspired thousands of others to film their own videos, ranging from all sorts of individuals to the San Francisco Giants to President Obama.  If you’ve watched a lot of these videos, you can often boil their message down to a few points:

  • A lot of homophobia is rooted in ignorance and immaturity.
  • When you’re the only LGBT person that you know about, you feel completely alone.
  • When you’re in a situation where you’re surrounded by homophobia, sometimes the only solution is to get the hell out of there.
  • Once you get the hell out of there, you have to find someplace that is accepting of who you are.

I think that there are a lot of parallels to the sexism that exists today in computer science and software engineering.

A lot of sexism in CS is rooted in ignorance and immaturity.  As men start seeing more accomplished women in CS, it gets better.

When you’re the only woman around, you feel alone because you have experiences that aren’t shared by others.  It gets better when you find another woman who is in a similar situation who you can talk to — it lets you know that you’re not alone.

If you find yourself in a situation where you can’t handle the sexism that you’re dealing with, sometimes the only solution is to get the hell out of there.  I know that finding a job isn’t trivial and isn’t something that you do overnight, but then those LGBT kids have to wait until they’re 18 so that they can leave home too.  Polish up your resume and portfolio like they’ve never been polished before, start applying for jobs, and get the hell out.

As you’re looking for a new job, remember that the interview is a two-way street.  A couple of months ago, I wrote a long post about participating in an on-campus interview, and my last point was that you should ask questions about what’s important to you in your position.  If you’re getting the hell out of a job because of the sexism that you’re dealing with, you should have a lot of questions about the team and its culture.  Obviously you’re not going to ask, “so, how many sexist pigs do you work with?”, but there are plenty of questions that you can ask and observations that you can make that will help you understand what the situation there is like.

If you’ve learned to deal with it, how?

As ever, it depends on the sexism.  Frankly, it also depends on you, too.

Sometimes you simply call ‘em on it.  How you do it depends on the situation and your relationship with those involved.

For example, one day, I was working in my office with the door open.  A bunch of male engineers who I know pretty well were standing in the hallway chatting.  One of the guys, who is single, commented that he always felt like he was behind on stuff: keeping his apartment clean, doing laundry, etc.  Somebody said, “oh, you need a wife!” and the rest of the guys agreed vociferously.  I got up, walked to my door, and simply stood there with an eyebrow raised.  The single guy laughed and said that it wasn’t his idea, and the others backpedaled, including a couple who said that they’re also married to women who work in tech and that it’s a lot easier to manage when you’ve got two people to handle everything.  I didn’t say anything, I certainly didn’t call them sexist, and it ended up being a funny anecdote for all of us.

Sometimes you work on it over time, and you build up your credibility so that the sexist behavior fades away.  Credibility goes a long way towards fixing sexism that’s rooted in ignorance.  I’ll admit that I’ve laid the smackdown on someone who tried to mansplain to me that the problem that we were discussing was NP-complete and what that meant.  As if the mansplaining wasn’t obnoxious enough, he was totally wrong about it being NP-complete — in fact, it was only O(n²), and I proved it.  He wouldn’t meet my eyes in the hallway for weeks afterwards, but a few months later, I heard through the grapevine that he had complimented my technical skills in a meeting.

One thing that you always always do when combating sexism is to be the change that you wish to see in the world.  Do not display any sexism yourself.  For example, don’t use your mom (or the more generic soccer mom) as an example of a non-technical user.  I don’t care if your mom really isn’t technical.  It goes without saying that you should avoid other stereotypes, -isms, and -phobias as well.  Don’t display racist behavior, don’t display homophobic behavior.  Your credibility in trying to address sexism is negated when you make a racist comment yourself.

If being ostracized and viewed as gross and weird for being feminist and female “never gets better,” why stay in CS?

I reject that it “never gets better”.  It might not get better in certain situations.  Buy me a cocktail sometime and I’ll tell you about the manager who wanted to know when I planned to get pregnant so that he could include it in his schedule for our next release.  I doubt that he’s ever going to get better.  But you can find situations where it is better, and you embrace them, and you try to make it better for other women too.

Even in a bad situation, one of the reasons that you stay in CS is because you love it.  If you don’t love it, and if it’s a bad situation, you don’t have a good reason to stay.  This isn’t to say that sometimes the sexism just gets overwhelming and you can’t take it anymore, and so you do go off and do something else.  If that’s the decision that you make, that’s valid.  There have been some pretty nasty examples out there.  If I try to put myself in those shoes, I’m not sure if I wouldn’t've walked away myself.  But, thankfully, I haven’t been that unlucky with sexism in CS.

I think that it’s incumbent upon technical women to make ourselves available for mentorship.  It’s hard to find a technical woman for a mentor, especially ones who have been in tech for several years.  So for those of us who have, I think that we should help out the younger women who are experiencing a lot of the same things that we did, and hopefully helping to avoid having women drop out of the field because they just can’t take the sexism any longer.  I do this at VMware, mentoring some of the younger women on my team1 and reaching out to them when I think that they could use a hand.  It’s also one of the reasons why I write this Q&A series of blog posts, to exemplify the behavior that I think that a senior technical woman should have.

Ultimately, I think that the way that sexism in CS gets better for us as individual women in CS is to find your tribe.  Find the other women who have walked the same path that you want to walk.  Find the men who aren’t sexist.  Find the courage to get yourself out of a bad situation.  It gets better, and it requires you to help make it get better.

  1. Men aren’t left out. I’m currently mentoring the newest researcher on my team, who is male. ↩
Posted in Q&A, women | 31 Comments

unintended consequences

Posted on 26 April 2012 by nadyne

In software engineering, things that you think are a joke sometimes take on a life of their own.  To wit: the humble origins of the blink tag.  A bunch of Netscape engineers got together for beers in Mountain View one night, where one lamented that none of the HTML extensions would work with Lynx.

There were two unintended consequences to this beer-fueled conversation:

  1. The blink tag was coded up that very night
  2. The engineer who made the lamentation met the woman who ultimately became his wife.

You never know what will come out of happy hour conversations.  They often have unintended consequences.

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James Dempsey and the Breakpoints album coming!

Posted on 23 April 2012 by nadyne

It warms the cockles of my little geek heart to know that James Dempsey and the Breakpoints are in the studio recording a song tentatively titled “Endian Reservations“.

Longtime WWDC attendees have probably seen James perform before.  For your geek pleasure, here’s the classic “MVC Song”:

Edited on 5/2 – James emailed me to let me know that “Endian Reservations” is a song, not the album title, so I fixed that.

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oh, Sony, how can you get it so wrong?

Posted on 19 April 2012 by nadyne

A few months ago, I was deeply in love with PopMarket.  It’s a daily deal website for music, and I went through an intense phase of buying lots of music from them.  But then it became clear how bad this relationship was for me, in the form of a botched order.  Last September, I ordered a three-album set, one of which was a double-disc version of Janis Joplin’s seminal Pearl.  When I got the order, I discovered a manufacturing error: instead of Pearl, the discs inside the packaging were of Earth, Wind, & Fire.

I wrote to PopMarket, got an almost instantaneous response where they sent me a replacement, and thus entered the rabbit hole.  The replacement had the same error, and then the replacement for the replacement had the same error.  After a few weeks of trying to get them to either send me correct discs or refund the order, I gave up.  And I haven’t ordered from PopMarket again.

Last week, I got an email saying that my order of Johnny Cash’s The Legend had shipped.   This is one of the albums that I had ordered, back in those heady days, but I received it months ago.  I thought that their system must have hiccuped and sent a confirmation mail out again, so ignored it, but then the album showed up on my doorstep.  So I wrote to them again, asking (a) what to do with this album that they’ve entirely inexplicably sent me, and (b) whether they have any intent at all of sending the order that they still haven’t completed.  The response is rather opaque:

I’m sorry for any inconvenience that may have caused. I’ve forwarded your message to our warehouse department for review. As soon as I receive any further information I will let you know via email.

Err, yeah.  You’ll excuse me if I don’t hold my breath on that one.

I still get the daily PopMarket emails, and sometimes I want to click through to order, but I always hold myself back.  I’ve learned my lesson.

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