“The Discrimination Double Standard” by Liz Gannes:
In Silicon Valley, fighting homophobia is an easy issue. Instant alliances can pop up — as long as the villain is outside of ourselves. But when it comes to the harder topics here at home, and it turns out the enemy is us? That’s a problem that all these genius techies can’t seem to grok quite as easily.
The LA Times asks, “Why are women leaving the tech industry in droves?” and notes:
So far, no company has found a solution for retaining women.
We’ve got to fix not just the pipeline problem (assuming that it actually is a problem) but also the retention problem. I’m glad to see that there’s a lot more interest in this topic since my GHC2014 presentation about it.
For all the dramatic changes between the railway age and the silicon age, America still has the right formula for producing entrepreneurs.
I adore Miss Manners, and so it’s no surprise that I find her article looking back on the women’s pages of the 60s and 70s quite interesting.
The women’s section reported the feminist revolution of the ’60s and ’70s when other parts of the paper mentioned it rarely and then only as a joke. The Women’s Strike for Peace was ridiculed as being a bunch of housewives who should have stayed home, but we took them seriously long before their actions grew into the wider youth movement protesting the war in Vietnam.
Her anecdote about asking President Kennedy a question is an excellent one, too.
The recent New York Times article titled “What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs” is frustrating. It’s frustrating to watch Yahoo! continue to flounder (and oh, flounder it has). It’s frustrating to see a new CEO come in with the goal of righting the ship, but insufficient experience to do so. It’s frustrating to see the Times resort to a clickbait headline involving Steve Jobs. And it’s frustrating that the Times puts the blame solely on the shoulders of the CEO, only noting that Yahoo!’s board of directors had “hesitations”: “One of the Yahoo board’s hesitations upon hiring Mayer was her relative lack of experience as a manager.”
So let me get this straight. The board makes the decision to hire a CEO who doesn’t have sufficient experience leading an organization, and who is well-known to be extremely (one might say excessively) hands-on in an organization. Somehow, though, her failure is solely hers. The board gets no blame for making a poor decision.
Welcome to the glass cliff. I’m relieved that New York Magazine also noticed that the Times story should have been more appropriately titled “Marissa Mayer and the Glass Cliff”. The board of Yahoo! did not set up Marissa Mayer to succeed, and apparently didn’t give her the right resources where she could succeed. And they get to blame her, instead of themselves, if Yahoo! does fail. Nevermind all of their bad decisions long before she came on board (passing up the Microsoft offer is but one of them). No, if Yahoo! fails, the blame will fall solely on her, and she will be pushed off of the glass cliff.
“What Every Young Designer Should Know, From Legendary Apple Designer Susan Kare”:
“People say graphic design is so different now, because you have so many more pixels and colors to work with,” Kare says. “But when you study art history, you see there’s just nothing new under the sun. Mosaics and needlework, it’s all analogous to pixel and bitmap art. And with it all, good design’s not about what medium you’re working in, it’s about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.”
In saying goodbye to VMware, I decided to say hello to a new adventure. As of last Monday, I started a new role at Genentech.
In some respects, Genentech and VMware have a lot in common. Unless you directly work with one of the two companies, you might not have heard of them, but they’re doing important work behind the scenes. VMware is the foundation of the datacenters and the clouds of many Fortune 500 companies. Genentech scientists research treatments for diseases. If you have been prescribed one of the treatments that we make, just like you might not know what software forms the cloud for your company or what is in your bank’s datacenter, you might not look up the name of the company that makes a medical treatment.
At Genentech, I’m working on Access Solutions, which offers coverage and reimbursement support services for patients and health care professionals. I’m here to understand and improve the user experience of Access Solutions. I’m a week and two days in to this new role, and I’m only beginning to understand the complexity of what I’ve undertaken.
Why am I here? The answer is twofold. First, this role scares me. It’s very different in every way possible from working on software. Taking a role like this that scares me is an excellent way to get out of my comfort zone, apply my skills in a new area, and stretch my abilities. Second, as someone with degrees in computer science and math who has spent 15 years working on software, it’s not often that you get this kind of opportunity to make a material impact on the lives of people when they need all the support that they can get. I couldn’t turn this chance down. And so, here I am, sitting in Genentech’s US headquarters in South San Francisco.
I don’t know where this role will take me. I can’t wait to find out.
I joined VMware in November 2010. The past four years have been a fantastic ride. Since joining VMware, I have brought new research methods to the company, introduced an annual UX conference and monthly UX tech talk series, and spoken at many conferences.
Looking over my mail archives, I’ve touched many VMware products. Some of them are probably always going to be VMware applications, like vSphere. Some are no longer part of VMware but continue on, like Zimbra. And some products don’t exist any longer, such as vCloud Director. Looking at my UX projects documented on our internal wiki, I’ve worked on more than 20 VMware products in the past 4 years. It’s been awesome to have the opportunity to work on such a broad range of products across VMware’s portfolio.
After four years, it’s time to try my hand at something new. Thank you, VMware, for everything.
It’s not an existential question, it’s what happens when the TSA encounters a Nobel Prize medal.
“They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’
I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’
They said, ‘What’s in the box?’
I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.
So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’
I said, ‘gold.’
And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’
‘The King of Sweden.’
‘Why did he give this to you?’
‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’
At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”
I’m not entirely convinced that they had a sense of humor to begin with, but we’ll let that one slide.
Those of us at GHC14 got to see the first version of the “Notable Women in Computing” card deck. The people behind it have a Kickstarter for v2:
Women in this card deck were selected after receiving multiple, high-level awards from more than one institution, such as being named an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and receiving the Turing Award. Our deck also seeks to portray the true diversity of women in computing both current and historical, showcasing professionals from a variety of nations, backgrounds, gender identities, orientations and abilities. There are a dozen or more different groupings of notable women we could have turned into this deck; you can make your own using the instructions at the bottom of [the Kickstarter] page.
I kicked in $20 for v2 (one deck for me, one deck to be donated).
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