Entries Tagged 'technology' ↓

Catching up with my feed reading, I see that lately there’s been some buzz in the ’sphere around Let’s All Evolve Past This: The Barriers Women Face in Tech Communities. It is indeed a very insightful article.

In particular, I am pleased to see someone talking about the differences in handling sub-optimal communication and how it affects the whole ‘women in tech’ issue. The bit under the heading Men are generally very good at ignoring bad behavior is spot on.

But even though the article gives some good advice on building communities with better communication patterns, it does not give any advice to women as to how to help themselves to better cope with difference in communication modes. For example, it would help if more women were aware of these differences and would try to contemplate harsh things said by their colleagues in the context of the colleague’s overall behavior and character, and avoid over-analyzing these comments.

Quite a few of the problems faced by women in tech could be addressed by working on women’s self-efficacy. Among other things, people with higher self-efficacy are more comfortable taking harsh criticism, are more likely to voice their opinions, have higher motivation, and are more willing to take some risks and experiment. So maybe we should all be working on that. I, for one, will try to work on mine.

I want one of these for my desk. Pretty please?

More on Bathsheba’s homepage.

Boing Boing talks about a company that automatically rejected all candidates that applied for an “internet expert” position and provided a Hotmail address. Why? Because you can’t pretend being an internet expert and use a Hotmail account at the same time.

A great idea, this one, that should be expanded to other position/technology pairs.

I, for one, find it disturbing to have to look at CVs of coders that insist in sending them in Microsoft Word format. WTF, people? If you want to come across as an IT professional, give me something that I can read on any platform, and make it non-proprietary, while you are at it.

(Disclaimer: these opinions are solely my own and in no way represent those of my employer or its hiring practices.)

I just finished reading a most excellent book: Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning… Was the Command Line.

The title might seem to indicate that this is a very nerdy book, directed at very geeky people that are interested in the history of computer interfaces. But it is no such thing. It is, in fact, a highly entertaining and thought-provoking essay about the dangerous tendency that the so-called modern western culture has to over-simplify things.

Semi-random quote here:

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself - and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces and embracing graphical or sensorial ones - a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney?

Of course, in this book Stephenson talks also about the history of OSes so far (well, that far, because the book was written in 1999, so according to this book Apple is still on the brink of bankruptcy), the fickle nature of users and their irrational behaviour, and why selling OSes is a bad business idea. But that is not what really caught my attention.

What interested me most were the bits about how we (i.e. citizens of the ‘civilized western world’) are increasingly giving up our ability to make choices and judgements in favor of easier-to-digest, simplified versions of life, the universe and everything. It almost made me feel guilty not only for owning an Apple machine, but also for actually *using* the sexy OS it came with. Luckily, in my old age I am becoming less and less dogmatic about OSes, life, the universe and everything, and even editors (!), so I am now using whatever system suits best my current mood and needs (in that order).

But I am babbling. I just meant to say that it is a cool book, and you should read it if (a) you are interested in computers, or (b) you are interested in modern culture, or (c) you enjoy easy-flowing, witty writing. (NOTE: the ORs in the previous sentence are inclusive ORs, not XORs.)

For the outstanding female engineers-in-the-making out there, here is a snippet from the website for the Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship 2007:

Through the scholarship, we aim to encourage women to excel in computing and technology, and become active role models and leaders.

Scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of candidates’ academic background and engagement within the technology community. A group of female BSc, MSc, and PhD student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. The scholarship recipients, selected from the finalists, will each receive a €5,000 (or equivalent) scholarship for the 2007/2008 academic year.

In May 2007, all finalists will be invited to visit Google’s European Engineering centre in Zurich for a networking retreat. It will include workshops with a series of speakers, breakout sessions and social activities, and will provide an opportunity for all finalists to meet and share their experiences.

Application form opens next Sunday, 1st of October. More details here.