The problem with Silicon Valley is that it doesn't respect intelligent women any more than the rest of the US. Sure, companies or "startups" will hire women as marketers to pass out badges or tshirts at big I/O events, answer phones, serve lunches, or vacuum the floors, work in the "massage" parlor . . . but being a female professional who actually has talent is about 1000 times harder than any guy who lives there can possibly understand.
I'm a man, but I'm happy to call bullshit on that. There are a long list of successful women who are taken quite seriously all on their own. Leah Culver springs immediately to mind. My wife, who owns a successful accounting startup is another. I've met countless others, including one particularly memorable engineer at Flock (I'll protect her privacy).
The reality is that there are simply very few women that hold the qualifications necessary to be successful in the startup world. When you do find one, the competition for their services is incredibly fierce. In a previous gig I tried desperately to hire a particular woman who had just graduated from MIT. We lost a pretty serious bidding war, not because she was a woman but because her skills were off the charts.
It's funny, there are similar articles written about certain disciplines in academia (like accounting). There too it's just a numbers game. My wife, until her latest birthday, was just 1 of 5 female accounting PhD's in the whole country (including foreign born) under 30. Of course there are precious few female accounting professors, there are very few females pursuing accounting PhD's!
Of course, that means she enjoys a tremendous advantage over her peers. The pressure to promote diversity means she enjoys a better salary and lot more job security than her male counterparts.
The same is true, from my experience, for the few intelligent and talented female engineers that I've met in the valley.
> There are a long list of successful women who are taken quite seriously all on their own. Leah Culver springs immediately to mind.
That's interesting, because Leah Culver is someone who I've frequently heard discussed in the context of who she is dating or who she has dated, with the implication that she's riding on the coattails of her boyfriends. So, maybe that's not such a good example for you to use.
(Disclaimer, in case that wasn't clear enough: I'm relaying things I've heard other people say. I don't personally know enough about Ms. Culver to have any opinions on her abilities.)
I think it's an excellent example. She clearly has the programming ability. She's clearly incredibly intelligent. She's clearly taken seriously. That she also runs in higher profile (At least in the valley) social circles hardly discounts her accomplishments.
Using exec to access object fields? Really? There was also a fiasco a while back where she converted floats to strings in order to compute an average (!). She deleted that post, but if you google "leah culver star ratings" you'll find some discussion of it.
She's a great marketer, but I'd hardly say she has the programming ability.
She's a great marketer, but I'd hardly say she has the programming ability.
Truest words ever written. I can only respect people whose _work_ I admire, and who understand. What has she built? Leah hasn't contributed anything of value to the Internet, unless a few videos or popularity contests count.
Which I find quite interesting. I know plenty of men who are terrible engineers and post pretty bad stuff on their blog, but none get the kinds of evisceration that you are referring to - mentioned over and over again in blogs, forums, etc.
The 'Internet' was/is ruthless in laughing at her and putting her down, in a way that I just don't see happening to guys. Could be just that its more apparent with the fewer # of women - people are more likely to remember these faux pas. Would be interesting to hear of specific technical instances of the same occurring with guys.
I know plenty of men who are terrible engineers and post pretty bad stuff on their blog, but none get the kinds of evisceration that you are referring to - mentioned over and over again in blogs, forums, etc.
Most of those terrible engineers have not been featured in Wired and Technology Review. If Leah Culver were a man, no one would criticize her because no one ever would have heard of her. Do you really think anyone would have cared about her facebook/twitter clone if she weren't pretty?
Would be interesting to hear of specific technical instances of the same occurring with guys.
ESR wrote some crappy code a while back. Comments:
John Graham Cummings: "It's amusing to actually look at the source code of this...Reading it, it looks like a total hack job by a poor programmer..."
Other HN readers:
"He's [esr] certainly a talented self-publicist, but I'd go no further than that. He's the Michael Moore of software. Or the Paris Hilton."
"He's more Nichole Richie. He doesn't rise to the level of Paris, who was surprised by jail, but never surprised by wealth."
"Truth is, he is loud, but... he's not very good at writing software."
Woah! Are you sure that pownce got attention solely because of "Leah's looks"? or do you think its more likely that its because it was founded by Kevin Rose, who has had much bigger press (cover on Business week, TR is peanuts in comparison) and web exposure (like running one of the most popular sites on the Internet)?
(Will grant that ESR is a pretty good example, for Atwood I dont see the attacks reaching as low a level)
I certainly applaud you for thinking that who she associates with is irrelevant, but I'm telling you that there are many people less enlightened. I've probably heard as much gossip about her personal life as discussion of her technical chops, and I see that as good evidence that women in tech generally are not "taken quite seriously all on their own". No one cares who any guy in the tech industry is dating.
Sorry. I left one item of importance off my list: the valley has no respect for intelligent, professional women who aren't camera whores. Leah whatever her name is the worst example you could have cited.
uh, I've had no problem getting hired in silicon valley as a software engineer. They never asked me to pass out t-shirts or give a "massage".
Being a woman and being in tech is certainly different than a man could completely understand, and hard for not exactly the reasons a man would expect. But being a man is hard in different ways.
There are myriad ASP.NET based websites that rank well. Look at the markup on Guthrie's or Hanselman's blog. Both have WebForms artifacts like ViewState, __doPostBack, and generated IDs, but rank well.
WebForms definitely encourages sloppy markup, which I'm no fan of, but that clearly isn't the only issue Justin's having.
The fragmented nature of the mobile device industry is what makes it difficult for any competitor to come in and "dethrone" the big, bad Apple. It's almost like when it comes to smart and progressive mobile apps it's "Apple" vs "everybody else".
So... what needs to happen is a marketplace that's been created specifically for everything that's _not_ Apple iPhone; one that actually focuses more on the software, instead of the hardware, and one that can spell out how that new fun game "Kick the Squirrels off their Bicycles" can work on a Nokia and Motorola, because (as they're all web-enabled), the most important aspect would be the phone's web-browsing capability. Fennec [ https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec ] , for example, could be a pretty good starting point.
Firefox put a significant dent in IE's share of the PC hardware browser; something similar will happen with the iPhone, once people realize that they're getting charged _way_ too much for those iPhone contracts (kinda like ISPs screw[ed] people over by talking them into their 1+ or 2+ year "DSL modem service" contracts).
