Jesus christ you must have SERIOUS emotional issues.
You know how this situation should have been actually handled?
"Hey [groper], get your hands off me, I don't appreciate being touched by someone I don't know and I don't appreciate your remarks either."
10 seconds, situation over. But instead, OP decided to write a novel on this "experience", and generalized to: meetups, women, and tech. Now if other women read this, they will have fear and hostility instilled in them because scumbags like OP don't know how to deal with real life and just want e-attention.
What makes you think that "get your hands off me" would be enough for a statistically significant subset of people who are convinced that this isn't a problem, let alone their problem? On what planet do you live where people won't find yet another way to 20/20 hindsight somebody's past actions?
You and everyone else who reflexively criticizes someone who dares complain about how they're treated? It's social DoS. A single person can't possibly meet the arbitrary demands of a hostile reader. Folks — mostly men — pile on enough reasons why she's Doing It Wrong, and safely write it off.
And the part where it's her fault for instilling "fear and hostility" because a man groped her and she talked about it is a breathtaking feat of inverted logic.
This from the guy who lived in his mom's basement learning to code[1] and whose "goal in life" is to get rich in an acquihire[2]. I have some pretty legitimate doubts that you know the slightest thing about either primitive lifestyles and their hardships, or modern lifestyles and their hardships.
As I'm reading, all I can think "Are you even remotely serious? We now can't have a discussion about gender without rfnslyr derailing the conversation, this time because he wants to harken back to early pioneer days?"
Your trollish derailment of gender threads on HN is rather telling. Or do you have any point related to how this woman was groped without her consent, repeatedly?
Right, this is like responding "first world problems" to anything and everything. Great, so basically anything except food and shelter is meaningless. What would you like to discuss now?
Yeah actually I do. I have a huge problem with it. I have a huge problem with: some douchebag acted less than human towards me -> this is how it is like to be a woman in the tech industry.
Next time somebody gives me an off handed remark about something, I'm going to generalize as well and cry wolf online.
It's blowing up a problem that isn't a problem at all, way out of proportion.
I get groped at bars all the time by women, I don't make a whiny blog post about it. Kind of funny she made the post and claimed to "have a thick skin".
She clearly suffered a fair amount of emotional trauma from this rather mild leg grabbing. Did she do something about it? Of course she didn't.
Women in the tech industry is the next phase of Shakespearean drama.
Every time some retarded bullshit gender article meanders across my front page on HN, I'll shit post it. Why? Because HN is not your personal feminist platform. Flood twitter with your personal garbage.
It's very amusing and ironic to me that you are completely projecting the air of "generalization". I didn't see the author anywhere saying "All bitcoin users are like this" and in fact, you'll find me chiding someone else, here, for saying that.
You just want to reduce this to something that you can dismiss and ignore, because it's complicated and you can't hold your own when it comes to the details. And, in this case, you're just putting words in the author's mouth in order to invent a way to demean and dismiss her. Classy.
>Did she do something about it? Of course she didn't.
I don't even know what "Of course" is supposed to mean there, but I'm pretty sure it says something not-so-great about your default position and open-mindedness on this issue.
edit: Can't keep up with your edits (it's okay, I do it too)
>Kind of funny she made the post and claimed to "have a thick skin".
And again, you'll note that this is very much a recount of what happened. In fact, she explicitly said she doesn't think she was violated (and I disagree with her, but that's her prerogative).
The fact that this article even exists means she didn't do anything about it. It's not a helpless matter at all, but she's acting as if this is such a big event it warranted a whole essay on the matter. Like she just couldn't WAIT to leave the male stronghold of this meetup to seek emotional counselling online.
I am very open minded to problems that matter. There is no problem here. She ran into a super duper asshole, didn't outline her boundaries immediately, and instead is further polluting the tech industry with this gender nonsense. Next time some random grabs me by the shoulder that I don't know, I'm going to write an essay on it as well.
Did she get fired from a company because the CEO hates women? No.
Did she get physically assaulted or raped because she's a woman? No.
Is her pay significantly lowered simply due to the fact that she is a woman? No.
Did any significant change occur in her life from this encounter with this ONE douchebag? No.
Those are real problems which beg real discussion. This is an emotionally unstable girl who feels the world revolves around her and her gender. I know the type.
So why do I care? Why is it only women who blog about this emotional hot air?
It creates a false view of the field for other women, and when they go into it after reading crap like this, they assume this is what it's like.
Well not just that. If anyone at the meeting made it clear that the comments that were happening were not appropriate or welcome either I missed it in the article. It most people this creates the perception that it is acceptable behavior according to group standards. I would bet this perception of group standards is studied phenomena that is the default perception by the majority of people. So it seems reasonable that most people would get uncomfortable by the situation.
So you didn't immediately tell him to stop and continue on with your life and fled to the internet just so you can get HN karma? Yeah I stopped reading right there. This is why "women in tech" are a problem, because they constantly put themselves on a pedestal.
You disapproved of someone's response to a situation you have never yourself experienced and stopped reading but you had to come here and post an insulting comment?
I'm just concerned that someone in this community (you) could be so upset about this story that you're posting things that I can only interpret as deliberately inflammatory and hostile. Instead of just assuming that you're a bad person trying to stir up trouble, I was wondering if something else was bothering you.
Yeah I'd say being smart doesn't necessarily help you play good chess - being dumb hurts, though.
I wonder when the last time Gates even played chess? And even though he had way more time than Magnus did, 2 minutes is not a lot of time... Most blitz games are 3 or 5 minutes and if you're not an avid player (or at least used to it) then it's really hard to play fast like that. Magnus probably didn't have to think at all since he already knew the opening, whereas Gates was probably on his own from the third move on.
Skill in chess requires (at Carlsen's level) a great deal of intuition and knowledge and practice. Bill Gates is a talented programmer and businessman. Unless chess was a personal passion or interest, there would be no reason to expect him to be any better than the average person under pressure, faced with a 2-minute clock and a world champion.
Yeah because chess is an INCREDIBLY hard game to get good at regardless of how smart you are. I've been playing for years and going to my local chess club and I'm still trash ahaha.
Do not come to Toronto. Barcelona for me was the friendliest city. I sat down near the beach district (don't remember what it was called) and played guitar with a bunch of randoms and smoked joints while police strolled by and asked us how we were doing. It was surreal. Warm, beautiful, safe, the women in Barcelona are out of this world.
Let me offer a counterpoint on Barcelona, aside from the fact that it would be hard for you to get a visa or work in a company there without actually speaking at least Spanish, if not Catalan. Or find a company you would want to work for. Or the fact that the economy there is shit, despite being among the best in Spain.
1. The catalans are known all over Spain for being cold people. I don't mean cold as in mean, as they are quite nice, but they keep to themselves. You will not get an open arms welcome from the locals. Much like the French, it takes a long time to be welcomed as a true friend by the people there.
2. While Barcelona has tons of expats (Brits, Italians, French, Andalucians), skater kids, and an all around nice "hipster" subcultures, the truth is very few people ever really stay in Barcelona. You will have a very hard time making real long term friends. You can have a ton of fun for a short while, but not for the long haul.
Take it from a guy whose talked to literally hundreds of people who came to visit BCN for a short time (less than a year) and thought it was paradise. It really isn't. It could be if the economy was better, if there was more integration of outsiders and locals, if you would wait a decade or four, but that just isn't the Barcelona that exists now. Barcelona is built around tourism, and to tourists it's a paradise. But like everything built on tourism, it's a transient facade. If you want to have a blast for a few months, Barcelona might be your place, but not for anything serious.
The only Catalans I ever met were extremely open and welcoming. I knew them all for less than an hour, and they were all hugs and kisses, great company, and said their couch is always available if I'm in Barcelona and need a place to stay. You might be right, maybe they're generally more cold, but my experience was the opposite, so I had to add it for balance.
Yup, that's pretty much my experience too. I think locals are so used to foreigners in a tourist role that they don't want to get more deeply invested into people who may leave in a year or two anyways.
But i also think all this is true for most European cities, not just Barcelona.
If you failed at using Illustrator or Gimp effectively, then you didn't try hard enough. Follow video tutorials and try to recreate graphics, in time you'll get better.
Ugh, this entire thing is in coffeescript too, now I have to learn coffeescript to make sense of this library.
'The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime'
There really is very little magic with coffeescript. Most of it is syntactic sugar which can be learned at a glance of: http://coffeescript.org/ .
Don't mean to come off as pushy but I think it's well worth learning what coffeescript is. Especially if you are familiar with javascript, as it's a straight upgrade in your toolkit.
As an additional testimony, I've actually been learning coffeescript without really knowing JavasScript, and it has actually gone fairly well. For the most part it's intuitive, and if you're willing to be a little frustrated figuring out some of the syntax changes it can be rewarding.
Basically, the punchline is how ridiculous it is that some people can believe they're entitled to something being a certain way, that they didn't know even existed until a few minutes ago.
"Ugh, this really cool library isn't written in something I already know. What an asshole for doing that."
I think the OP is not saying "it was impossible to learn", but "the amount of effort required to learn wasn't worth the return I would get from it". The latter may well be a sensible decision.
And it's great when someone tries to makes the learning process easier, and even better when they open source it.
Yeah, exactly. I also don't have a need to use any of those heavy weight apps more than a few times a year, so every time I go back, I have to start over again from scratch. Something appealing, lightweight, with good tutorials would be such a boon for web developers who don't have time to learn all the subtleties of Illustrator.
The fact that I'm a 21 year old drop out making nearly 100k because I sat in my mom's basement for a few years and studied software that interested me is pretty crazy.
Market price is market price. These companies are generating massive income. They are paying high wages (and colluding to avoid paying higher ones) because engineers are necessary to that.
The question you should ask during salary negotiations isn't, "Do I, based on my own value judgments and moral code, deserve this much money?" It's: "Are they paying me market price for my skills?"
If market price for your work is more money than you need or you believe you deserve, then take it and give it to somebody you think does deserve it. I promise you that if you let your employer keep the extra, they will not do anything better than you will with it.
Remember this is net rev, what they take in after paying everyone. Assuming the average employee makes $120K, and given that they can't exist long enough to make $1 without the engineers showing up, these companies should be willing to pay everyone up to 2-3x that
What's even crazier: owners of firms get paid millions or billions of dollars for doing much less than you do--literally nothing besides initially deciding to purchase shares, in large companies--merely because they acquired, one way or another, a big bundle of cash earlier in their history.
How do I properly quantify exactly how much value I'm adding to the company I work for and the world to possibly determine how much I'm precisely worth?
You should. I write code in another industry (HFT) and most people coming out of college are getting 400-500k bonuses or more after a year. We joke about how raw of a deal the average developer in SV is getting -- Google has roughly the same net profit/employee that we do (maybe even more), and all they're getting is chump change.
I both hate and admire you for that. One bonus like that is all I need to finish plans for good. I know talented programmers getting the equiv of $50k and I wish I could do something for them.
you aren't paid in proportion to your worth; you are only paid in proportion to your negotiating power. if 50 other people can produce the same worth for your employer, you're going to be paid a lot less than if you are the only one who can produce the same amount of worth.
don't take this as an argument that you are being paid "unfairly" - you're not. just see it this way - you are worth much more than that. set your career sights a lot higher because you deserve it.
You know how this situation should have been actually handled?
"Hey [groper], get your hands off me, I don't appreciate being touched by someone I don't know and I don't appreciate your remarks either."
10 seconds, situation over. But instead, OP decided to write a novel on this "experience", and generalized to: meetups, women, and tech. Now if other women read this, they will have fear and hostility instilled in them because scumbags like OP don't know how to deal with real life and just want e-attention.