I was introduced to this briefly in college engineering courses to help understand teams and team members. It was an interesting and useful way to understand and think about other people (compared to doing nothing at all). But never encountered it again "out in the field".
It seems like a useful tool for people managers to articulate their "team dynamic" and identify risks from not having a diverse enough team. But doesn't seem like anyone else would particularly be concerned.
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(INTP, at least way back when)
shhh, no one seems to want to talk about that
Not all that many more. NPR misrepresents the situation. For as long as the US Department of Labor has kept records, men have been prevalent in computing.
Engineering has been male dominated throughout history.
The whole "men pushed women out" narrative doesn't hold water.
It may surprise you that in the days before the electronic computer, the word "computer" often referred to a human operator that performed calculations. Most of them were women.
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
The workforce has always been pretty hostile to women, but it wasn't always that way. China and Russia have plenty of women engineers. My Soviet-raised wife always scoffs at these SJW threads because it simply wasn't a problem where she grew up. But for some reason, it's a thing that happens in Western countries.
http://www.paristechreview.com...
There are probably several societal and cultural factors that have been discouraging women from tech fields, but guys being insufferable dicks is the only one I really have personally witnessed. For my part, I just find smart chicks hawt and would prefer working with more women instead of hanging out with a gaggle of dudes all day long.
The best explanation I've heard is that Affirmative Action is how to take the world you live in and turn it into the world you want to live in. A world where the politicians, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, etc. were actually representative of the population they served.
Yes, Affirmative Action is racist / sexist, because people are racist / sexist. It's ingrained into the human psyche. It can have evolutionary advantages at a certain scale that we've long ago exceeded in civilized society. We'll have more success as a species if we start actively managing our racist / sexist tendencies, and the only way to do that is to acknowledge them and actively counteract them to achieve balance and healthy diversity in the ecosystem.
That's what Affirmative Action is. An acknowledgement that racism / sexism exists, and we need to do something about it to achieve true balance. Anyone who says they are completely neutral to racism / sexism are probably lying to themselves and will find that they do poorly in actual tests like : https://implicit.harvard.edu/i...
Yes, this. At some point in the past, women were better represented in the math and sciences. Decades ago, more women were doing technical stuff
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
And then at some point engineering and technology became a "bro" field and pushed a lot of women out, perhaps because of insecurity with their male dominancy hierarchy or whatever, or increased competition from not so many men going off to die in wars, or whatever.
Women are very useful to have in organizations, though. It's not just an equality thing. There are tangible benefits. Teams with women have better communication.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/aw...
Product teams with women on them can develop better products that appeal to women and serve a wider customer base.
These kinds of things explain why a lot of large successful businesses are working hard to put more girls through STEM education to bring things back up from the 10 - 20% gender ratio where they are now. There aren't that many things you can do to effectively double your customer base. But appealing to women is a pretty big one. So yes, women are more highly sought-after than men in the tech industry. It's nothing to be concerned or ashamed of, it's just a real problem that exists and people are trying to address the issue.
Everyone else can stay and whine in silent desperation on your little male-dominated lonely island if you want. Evolution and the free market will take good care of you!
Yep, this! Buy a hard disk for a trusted friend or relative, and rsync your stuff to their server periodically.
I've also started using AWS Glacier for backups of my raw photo archives. (Only the "good" processed photos get published to Google+, where no one really sees them, and maybe cross-posted to Facebook occasionally after some public event like a wedding or something).
Anyway, to upload stuff to Glacier I use the SAGU java client, which is relatively straightforward. It's something like 10 cents per GB per month, so I currently get a bill for 42 cents per month. I can live with that.
Every year or so I tar up the previous year's photos and upload them. Then I copy the manifest to Google Drive or some other thing. I gpg encrypt the sensitive stuff. The private key is on a USB drive in the fire safe, at some point I should get around to writing down the passphrase and tossing it in there too. I joke with my wife that if I get run over by a bus, I'll scrawl the passphrase next to my body in blood. She might be contacting some of y'all to help decipher the 133+5p34k characters, though.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
