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lighthearted cs drama
The grace hopper conference is supposed to be for women and gender minorities. Since they have recruiters there, the job market is tight, and there's no explicit policy against men showing up, men have been showing up. It looks like a lot of people are unhappy about this. The csmajors sub banned discussion of it, but there are still plenty of juicy threads up; in addition to the gender wars, a lot of the guys being international students adds a 'they're taking our jobs' flair to the fire. Since it's basically impossible to gatekeep nonbinary-ness, the challenge for the organizers, if they choose to accept it, is to weed out the men without being accused of being TERFs.
Why isn't the solution to this to say "women and women identifying attendees only" and trust that 99% of cis men / man identifying would be too embarrassed to pretend to be trans to crash the party?
The only difference between what you're suggesting, and what they did, is that they left it open to "non-binary identifying" people as well. Maybe if you enforced a very feminine dress code, some kind of shame would kick in, but then you'd probably be excluding the actually female attendees too.
Ah. Well. That's rough. I got nothing. I'm sure a committee will think really really hard and figure this out.
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What's going on in the U.S.? All these years I was hearing about how us IT europoors should just move to the promised land of the FAANGs, but I can't imagine being so desperate I'd attend a conference for recruitment purposes.
Local bay area coding jobs are seeing 150-650 applications. I'm not even looking at remote jobs at this point.
That's absolutely brutal. Best of luck to you, man.
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Interest rates, that's what's going on.
A lot of the IT markets (if definitely not all) was propped up by cheap money and the expectation that competitors would over hire so you should too. No longer. Now there's been huge layoffs and running a tight ship is back in fashion.
It's not really an issue for good graduates of good universities, but there is a sea of bootcamp people who want in, previously could and can no longer. And I'd grasp at any networking opportunity if I were in that situation.
The ECB is raising rates too. Maybe because we were so underpaid all the time, the European IT labor markets have been at a state of constant shortage, and we're just in a somewhat milder shortage now? All I know is the last few companies I worked for have been BEGGING me to recommend someone else they could hire.
This is another thing that sounds bizarre to me. Good universities teach you to program?! The whole reason I'm in the field is that it's not credentialist. Whatever is going on with you Yankees, can you keep it on your side of the Atlantic?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. For all their faults, universities do still offer Computer Science courses to their students, and most of them are useful. Even if those courses are optional, the fact that they are explicitly offered instead of something you have to seek out on your own means that graduates are more likely to have that knowledge than people who went to a quick bootcamp or were self-taught.
It's not sarcasm. I can't tell you about people who went through a boot camp, and maybe it's a generational thing, but my experience has been that self-taughts have a better understanding of technical subjects in general, because they picked them up out of interest, rather than because they needed to pass an exam. There's also an overlapping cluster of self-taughts who got a degree that might be muddying the picture. We might argue what their success should be attributed to, but I'd attribute it to being self-taught since I seen them breeze through their classes, and their knowledge of the subject predated the participation in the class.
I graduated with a EECS degree. Programmed in C, Matlab,Python, Assembly, Verilog/VHDL for various courses.
When people ask I say I am self taught, because that's the truth. The programming taught in uni is too theoretical to actually make too much of a left or a right for a professional dev. I also partly say it because I think its higher status that I have a job straight out of college that people with fancy degrees and 5+ years of experience have.
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If nothing else, only people with good highschool test scores get into the good universities, and smart people usually stay smart, and it's a lot faster to look for a school name on a resume than investigating someoone's side projects to see if they're actually good
A lot of jobs I applied to preferred to give a simple programming task somewhere during the interview process, rather than just look at degrees / experience. That even made it into rat-adjacent folk-wisdom as 199 out of 200 applicants don't know how to write fizzbuzz. Personally I think the ratio is absurd, but the idea is directionally correct. An ex-boss explicitly told me he got burned on a lot of people who looked good on paper.
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When I sat on the other side of the table interviewing candidates for a not high paying, not AAA games company programming roles there was a noticeable difference in quality between four year degree holders and the self-taughts, four year "schools" and bootcampers. That was observed from checking for quality but I can absolutely see people having done many more interviews like that start filtering resumes on proxies like a credential especially when getting significant numbers of them. Nowadays for field/market specific reasons I mostly deal with people who have a 4 year but not in CS who have "some programming" experience getting hired into professional software roles leading to years upon years of spaghetti.
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I'm French for the record. Credentialism is alive and well in Europe, and to a much more powerful degree it ever was in America in my experience.
I also happen to be hiring for my company, but you're missing that whilst this is still a field with a lot opportunity it's one with a lot less opportunity than recently in the past.
It used to be you could barely know some JavaScript and get a really good job if with a lot of competition. Now you have to actually have decent skill to be considered.
Besides, the Euro techie shortage is simply a function of paying miserable wages in comparison with a very small captive market. Most of my English speaking friends have switched to remote working for American companies.
Do they make American salaries? I'm an American developer but I don't like living here. I dream of moving somewhere like France or Spain. But the wage disparity is so high that it is hard to justify. If there is a way to make a US salary and live there, that would be perfect.
Some do, some do not. Depends on specifics like how rare your skills are worldwide and how flexible companies are with timezones. At the end of the day it's all about leverage and the real fair market price of your labor.
That said I know at least three Americans working remotely in my company who moved from the US to Europe for a bunch of reasons including better cost of living. So it is a thing people do.
It can be a really good deal working for international startups if you're flexible and can live in Georgia, Thailand or other low cost and low tax countries. There are tradeoffs though, living among friends and people who share your cultural values is a hard to quantify but heavily underrated good.
Sounds interesting. For me it's the Mediterranean lifestyle and walkability that I am after. I'm still very junior though so I'll probably need to put in more years before I can realistically start aiming for this.
When you do get there check out Malta. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and it's about as quintessentially Mediterranean as you can get, and people all speak English.
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France is the most elitist meritocratic credentialist society in Europe though, and has been since the Napoleonic era. If you go to the right Grande Ecole, you’re set for life, otherwise you’re a pleb unless you’re either well-connected or very lucky.
In Britain, you can be poor and go to Oxbridge and still do poorly in life because you aren’t of the right class, make poor decisions or picked the wrong course. In Germany, you’re born into the bourgeois class, make it in via some pushy parenting and a few lucky programs (and, of course, the Gymnasium), or stay beyond it, no matter what you do. Perhaps those are worse, but they are different.
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Cheap interest rates led to massive VC investment and tech's overall growth meant that 2010-2020 was a huge boom for the industry. Then during the pandemic tech saw a huge surge as people became even more wedded to their devices and their services to make the world run. The hiring during the pandemic period was insane with many tech companies expanding their workforce like never seen before.
Then the fed raised their rates and the amount of money in VC tightened up as everyone buckled down for some sort of recession. That anticipation led to a lot of companies reassessing their workforce and letting a number of people go.
The market is better now than it was 6 months ago. Overall it's still quite robust compared to most other industries, but it's a significant slowdown compared to how crazy things were just two years ago.
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Part of the problem here is that the optimal number of men (from the point of view of the organizers of the conference) is not zero. Having some allies that get their messages about gender discrimination out of the conference is very much so a goal of the conference, albeit not a primary one. Even if they could devise a rule that banned men but not "real" non-binary attendees, it's not actually what they want.
It seems like the actual solution probably looks like getting rid of the recruiters and thereby removing that incentive to attend from people not interested in the supposed main point of the conference.
(This feels parallel to discussions I've been involved in about non-queer people in queer spaces. Although I haven't personally seen such a space get overrun with non-queer people, my understanding is that they generally either have to fight hard to stay queer by being very explicit about being a queer space or end up splitting off and creating a new Really Queer This Time(tm) space every once in a while.)
I think that the recruiters are part of the point for a conference about increasing women and minorities in computer science. I dunno, maybe that’s just my redneck type a personality talking and the point is woke posturing. But it certainly seems like if your goal is ‘more people in computer science who aren’t white men’ then inviting recruiters to a conference of computer science interested people who aren’t white men would serve your goal.
More out of curiosity than anything else, what queer spaces do straight people want anything to do with?
It's certainly the point for a lot of the attendees, recent incident notwithstanding. I'm not going to say no one gives a shit about the talks or presentations, but I'd bet that if you were to split the event into a recruiting event and a pure talk conference, the former would be far better attended.
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I'm just relaying the (a?) classic gentrification story: the weirdos make good art / make the place "cool", more mainstream people notice and eventually overrun the place, outnumbering the people who made it cool in the first place, the vibe is dead. When it happens to a neighborhood, it's (negative connotation) gentrification. But the same pattern happens to social spaces. I've heard people talk about it in relation to kink communities and music subcultures.
That is, straight people aren't drawn to the space because it's queer, from their point of view the queerness is coincidental and often invisible. Of course, this is also the story queer people tell themselves; maybe the queer people aren't actually as cool as they think they are.
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I think 'there's no hard enforced rule against this, but it makes you a jerk and everyone will call you a jerk very publicly and that might affect your career or at minimum your chances of getting laid' is a perfectly fine way to handle this, and many other, social conundrums.
Policing by police with guns, and even by event organizers and security, should only be a fallback for cases where social policing isn't enough; social policing is the default method for discouraging all kinds of negative and antisocial behavior, and that's usually good.
Forget cultural homogeneity; social policing only works when there are actual social skills involved. CS is bound for Stallman-esque situations at best.
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Social policing only works to the extent the polity is culturally homogeneous. CS is fucked.
GHC is fucked, but that's nothing new. CS will be fine, as long as the machines don't care if they're programmed by sweaty white male nerds, Chinese and Indians of all genders, or the occasionally skinny white Eastern European woman.
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I've watched intersectionals take Liberalism apart limb from limb using its own reasoning against it. I think turnabout is fair play.
White women who don't want brown enbies at their conferences are just reactionary bigots who are on the wrong side of history. Et caetera.
The most salient contradiction in this movement has always been the unholy union between the essentialism required to believe in transsexualism and feminism and gender abolition in general. It's been successfully papered over by appealing to how expensive the signal to become transgender is combined with careful political maneuvering inside of feminist circles, but now queer theory has thoroughly walked the whole thing into a trap.
They've spent years undermining the borders of trans to wrest control of it from the medicalists, and in doing so have made any proper friend enemy distinction impossible. I didn't know what the exploitation of that weakness would look like. I guess I do now.
This breach will probably be plugged, since the exploiters are not organized. But I'm not sure how they'll do it since the only way they can do it without folding to essentialism (which they can no longer) is to require political tests which can always be faked.
This isn't as easy as it seems.
You've argued in other comments this opens up attack vectors. Sure. But with the weight behind intersectionality, as it stands today, the only legitimate attackers are still believers (at least in name). A corrupted institution being overtaken by another that's almost indistinguishable doesn't help anyone that's too low on the victimhood index, it's just boring drama and wasted energy.
There is indeed inertia that makes this particular not a useful actual target and a mere object of study. These weaknesses cannot yet be exploited but they are systematic. And someone eventually will exploit them.
I think that's coming sooner than people think, I can see thermidorian forces slowly coalescing together guided by the path of the repression of the current regime and it's growing reliance on ever harder and more obvious forms of power.
Who knows what's going to happen, but something will. This energy has to go somewhere and all the pressure release valves I can see from here are held shut.
What you're seeing is not the beginnings a Thermidorian counterrevolution but that they believe their ultimate victory is in sight; finally, the boot stomping on a human face forever, and the human face will thank the boot and demand more. That the Grace Hopper Conference is being used to practice employment discrimination and the only objection anyone can come up with is that members of the discriminated-against sex are interfering with this is demonstration that they are right.
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Everything can be faked. That's not necessarily bad, seen from the side of the movement.
In Havel's Czechoslovakia, by the time he wrote his 'Power of the Powerless', probably few of the Communist Party members were "real communists". That wasn't really the point, the power of the organization called the "Communist Party" over society was the point. In a sense there was a political test, that everyone was faking, from the greengrocers up. It didn't matter that you faked it, all that mattered is that a) you were aware enough that you knew you were supposed to at least fake it, and b) you were willing to fake it - even just for the sake of personal advancement - rather than insist on honesty. In doing so you were both submitting to the system, and contributing to empowering the system.
Every man who shows up and claims to be nonbinary to get a job is doing something similar. They don't say, this is an unfair way to hire people. They say, I'm an enby so I should get a job too. They legitimize it and empower it and in doing so chain themselves to it. They become part of it.
For all that it looks like undermining the stated goals of the movement, the workers of the world never really did unite either. I doubt that bothered the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia (or the other communist countries) one bit.
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As long as we're all clear that OP just made that up, and the women actually just don't want men at this one conference.
You'll have to elaborate on how he made anything up. It sounds like you're confirming what he said.
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Of course. And Kyle Rittenhouse never shot any black people.
Framing is everything.
The rare miss. People forget about Maurice Freeland.
he shot at jump kick man, but did not hit him, and jump kick man's identity was not known at the time of the trial.
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Why is that the only way they can do it? Isn't the classic obscenity test - "I know it when I see it" - good enough? Arguably, the current regime is just that with more steps designed to obfuscate it. This ties into my thoughts on your first statement:
which is cromulent enough on its face, but which doesn't account for the defenses that the "intersectionals" (first time I've encountered this term used as a noun to refer to the people - I like it) have built against this very sort of thing. After all, if you master how to exploit a vulnerability, you also often learn how to fix them. In this case, it's just rejecting the concept of "using reasoning or logic to draw conclusions" as an oppressive made-up structure, in favor of "listening to marginalized voices." Which, given the degrees of freedom in determining what a "marginalized voice" is, in the context of some conference discriminating its attendants, is just another version of "I know it when I see it."
To address the core of your argument, I disagree that intersectional greatness on the attack translates into a learned defense. That may be how strategy works sometimes but not all the time.
Indeed most of the gambits that are and were deployed to sustain breaches, up and including the use of arbitrary power to break principles where contradiction is effective, are not translatable to the defense.
Progressives are not good at building or sustaining solid institutions. They are great at taking over existing ones and getting their effort's worth out of the ruins they end up holding, but builders and stewards they are not.
To take this specific example, the use of arbitrary power to maintain a "i know it when i see it" standard requires the constant deployment of political capital to defend a blatant injustice that can easily be attacked. This is not a problem if this is used to exploit a breach, such as in the case of preferential admissions into an institution as one's power can grow faster than is spent, but it's not something that can be maintained in the long term without a legitimizing principle.
Eventually someone you don't like gets the arbitrary power and can wipe you out since all restraints are gone. If it is "i'll know it when I see it", then you may very well say that only neo-post-chisto-integralist women are real women for these purposes, insofar as you have a coalition backing you.
I've long predicted that intersectionalism is going to have to mutate into a proper imperial religion if it seeks to maintain its gains as Christianity had to do. Either that or it'll end up being the same sort of flash in the pan as the Terreur or the Cultural Revolution. But I'm not sure which is more likely even now.
These are fair points, and I particularly find the note about having to expend political capital to be a very good one. But what if these people believe that they have effectively infinite political capital, and what if they're right? We can talk about how naked power moves make the populace less likely to politically support you, but I think the protection they developed against the vulnerabilities they exploited can keep that at bay such that the long term is the long term. At some point as that long term gets lengthened, it becomes effectively infinite for someone living in 2023.
I'm not sure either. After all, even tracing all the way back to the intellectual roots in the 20th century, it's barely a blip so far in historical terms. I don't know what a "proper imperial religion" is, but by my lights, I think it has already mutated - or perhaps "evolved" or "ascended" - to a proper religion at this point. I see it as one possible next evolution of religion, one that's developed in response to the greater materialistic and scientific thinking by the populace of the past couple centuries in comparison to most times before, which has greatly weakened the status of traditional religions which often directly contradict materialism or science. The religion that succeeds in this environment is the religion that convinces its believers that it's not a religion or even that it's antithetical to religion, and I think intersectionality (or CRT or wokeness or idpol or whatever name its adherents refuse to let others label it by) is proving to be extremely successful at this.
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It’s easy enough for organizers to implement “I know it when I see it.” It also opens up new attack surfaces. “Live by the sword…”
...Isn't this just reimplementing monarchy with extra steps? The liberal thing is supposed to be figuring out how to run things on rules, but the rules don't work so we get "I know it when I see it", but that just hands power to an "I"; what's the difference between "I know it when I see it" and "‘L’etat c’est moi’"?
I knew there was a reason I didn't trust NrX...
I have been to night clubs where they obviously wanted to limit the number of straight regular white men, but this is in a country where face checks are just not a thing and would really enrage people. So they put an alt black female security at the door who would have a short chat with you at the door asking questions like "what does tolerance mean to you". Unless you really believe all the bromides (or you have an autistic level of cynical knowledge of social justice thinking like me and my friends), it is very difficult to give a fake correct answer.
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Figuring out how to run things on rules works when you have a unified culture where people interpret the rules in the same way, but fails when that ceases to be true.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood but haven’t you said the same many times?
In the absence of a shared understanding, the reification of a local or federal “I” is the only alternative to full anarchy.
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Quite.
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They won’t accept it. They’ll trumpet their inclusion of diverse gender identities if it comes to that.
To the point of letting an obvious troll in? If Catgirl Kulak tries to get in, I don’t believe the inclusivity will last.
Obvious trolls/bad actors have been exploiting the various Anglosphere policies on trans women in prisons and sports for years with little to no pushback from the TRAs themselves. I'd be surprised if a tech conference proves to be the straw that breaks the camel's back, although I suppose stranger things have happened. "Academic politics are the most bitter because the stakes are so low" and all that.
How did this meme ever catch on? It’s obviously false.
People die over “real” politics. People go to prison, lives are ruined. The same cannot be said of academic politics, for the most part.
I think that ruthlessness and venom are two quite different things. Often they’re related, but not always. Imagine two soldiers who have a professional respect for each other but nevertheless kill (again, far from universal, but not uncommon) vs somebody who writes a bad review of your paper and makes it clear at every opportunity that they consider you vermin.
It seems to be harder than it used to be to play the game (whatever it is) to win without getting your feelings mixed up in things. That might just be historical distance though.
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Issa joke
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I've heard an Afghanistan war veteran say he'd rather deal with the Taliban, than with progressives engaging in petty politics back home. The former might kill you, but reportedly are nowhere near as vicious.
Sounds like the premise for a sappy movie. Local Farmboy Returns From War to find his hometown irrevocably…woke.
Reminds me of the Battle of Athens, America's own Scouring of the Shire.
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Nah, Demolition Man already did it.
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Maybe you’re right.
My reasoning is that the people clamoring to kick men from this conference are the ones who would be directly affected by trolls and bad actors. This isn’t the case for separate populations like prisoners and athletes. It is much easier to err on the side of credulity when it’s someone else at risk.
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I’m pretty sure rule 0 at this event, like most others of its kind, is ‘you’re cancelled for offending anyone who doesn’t claim to be male’, which an obvious troll would do quite quickly. They might declare that him saying hi to a woman in an elevator is sexual assault or something, but uberwoke events have historically been quite good at expelling ridiculous trolls(often for even more ridiculous reasons).
Does the lady in the elevator make a complaint, and then people who've never met her line up on her side to enforce that complaint?
Or does the lady in the elevator make a complaint, and then her friends and allies megaphone that complaint to the entire community, in and outside, creating the impression of both internal consensus and external judgement, cementing a narrative through mass propaganda?
...Who can say in a hypothetical? It seems to me that the real-world cases I've observed have resembled the latter more than the former, though. That is to say, you're talking about a fundamentally nepotistic/tribal social process, and what makes it work isn't any sort of formal rules structure, but rather the social machine the attackers have built. If this is correct, then trolls are unlikely to have that sort of structure ready to go. They run in and try to troll, and the tight-knit activist types simply shut them down.
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Matt Walsh showing up to this thing will just get railroaded out by activists, and our own kulak revolt will get railroaded out rather more quickly.
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This is hilarious because the narrative is that women are discriminated against in hiring for CS jobs but the men are going to women's conferences because that's where the jobs are easiest to get. Honestly, there's really nothing to say at this point. This is just how it is now and while I'd like it to change I'm just one person going up against massive institutions who smear your character for dissent. And the only people who would be sympathetic to my cause are people I really wouldn't want to be associated with either.
If your enemies care about winning at any cost and you care about looking gift horses in the mouth, the outcome is already decided.
Everyone is an enemy compared to what I want out of government
Then you're never getting what you want. It's as simple as that.
Which makes it a silly thing to want in the first place.
I doubt your appraisal of everyone is accurate though.
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As Nybbler once succinctly put it, tribalism as a strategy dominants non-tribalism.
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Ambitious!
I do have to wonder if Title VII covers employers hiring from discriminatory events. I’d expect recruiting at a Klan rally to be verboten, but I’m not very confident in that.
Title VII doesn't even cover outright employment discrimination, such as internships which exclude white men, when the discrimination goes the "right" direction. Something like hiring at a discriminatory event doesn't stand a chance; the EEOC and courts will accept any fig leaf offered (e.g. "the event is open to anyone") and if none is offered they'll make one up.
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