[AJRF]

Anyone know what Julia is using for those handwritten slides?

I absolutely love everything Julia writes. She writes in a way that makes absolutely zero assumptions about your level of technical competence. You could be a junior, mid, senior and still get something from most of her articles.

Anecdotally; Almost every female engineer I work with writes and communicates in this fashion and I really bloody wish more of my male counterparts would speak with less jargon/acronyms for the sake of new starts/non-engineers.

[albertgoeswoof]

> Anecdotally; Almost every female engineer I work with writes and communicates in this fashion and I really bloody wish more of my male counterparts would speak with less jargon/acronyms for the sake of new starts/non-engineers.

It’s not a good idea to generalise and push gender stereotypes in this way. You’re saying that female engineers have better communication skills than male ones, setting the bar higher for female engineers.

You might think you’re improving gender equality with statements like this but really you’re setting a different bar of basic competencies for males vs females.

[AJRF]

Honestly couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m not trying to improve anything, I’m stating experience. The clues in the word anecdotally. It’s a shame HN always devolves into contrarian and counter-contrarian tit for tats like this

[yesenadam]

Ohh I was about to reply to your next comment, but it was deleted. I couldn't agree more. That comment was downvoted, but not the 2 replies preceding it containing bizarre and far-fetched accusations. Shameful. What kind of society is it where you can't say: [sorry for quoting at length]

I absolutely love everything Julia writes. She writes in a way that makes absolutely zero assumptions about your level of technical competence. You could be a junior, mid, senior and still get something from most of her articles.

Anecdotally; Almost every female engineer I work with writes and communicates in this fashion and I really bloody wish more of my male counterparts would speak with less jargon/acronyms for the sake of new starts/non-engineers.

- without that apparently not being allowed:

It’s not a good idea to generalise and push gender stereotypes in this way. You’re saying that female engineers have better communication skills than male ones, setting the bar higher for female engineers.

You might think you’re improving gender equality with statements like this but really you’re setting a different bar of basic competencies for males vs females.

The problem is you chose to group your coworkers by gender in the first place, and then assign some trait to that group.

Your comments just end up reaffirming confirmation bias. It also reveals your own bias to automatically associate traits with a certain gender.

Why not group people by color of their eyes, handedness, tallness, and so on? I'm sure if you look at the coworkers with "good communication" you could find common traits that are not related to their gender. So why imply gender as the cause?

Anyways, I think it's something to be avoided and be aware of in your communication.

it’s sexism

What an utter load of rubbish. Hard to know where to start with all the misguidedness in there. (It reminds me of hearing someone say once that to say that men have penises and women vaginas is sexist.) Your reality is clashing with their theory, so your reality must be the thing at fault. Insanity. Does appalling nonsense like this come from vaguely hearing some gender studies stuff at uni? It seems they think they're doing good by their ignorant, condescending attacks on what was enthusiasm + observation.

[AJRF]

Just to comment; I deleted the comment because I don't want to waste any time on arguing against that particular line of insanity.

I wasted my time writing it, but I realise its not worth engaging or even having it open to engaging with further. It's appalling that it devolved to this point. There is something happening with us all, it's as if any form of online discourse has to be bucketed into some form a political container in the minds of some people.

They've got a filter of sorts that scans for words and outputs a response in the form of "This relates to <INSERT_MEME_HERE>".

A program of sorts that states; Your sentence contains the word women and men, oh okay that comment is certifiably a post that is pro liberal agendas, and the poster is 100% guaranteed to be anti conservative. NO! Its a fucking post about the fact that SOMETIMES there are observable differences between different groups of people.

Why can't there be any nuance any more? :(

[yesenadam]

Sure. Well, I didn't think you wasted your time writing it; it was a thoughtful explanation of how there should be nothing offensive to anyone in what you'd said. But sure, life's too short. I don't think you had to delete it though! But being downvoted for trying to communicate like you did is very frustrating, I imagine!

I don't see this happening on here much, though, thank goodness. It did make me think of the documentary The Red Pill, and although this wasn't directly a 'men's issues' matter, you see the same blind—to use that word—SJW mania. So sure they're on the side of right that they don't need to check if they actually are. (I don't fully understand all this, maybe no-one does.) It's much easier/more exhilarating to join a crusade or lynch mob than to put the time in to judge for yourself - thinking is hard work and people don't like doing it.

Anyway, I'm glad you stuck up for yourself, it's a shame you deleted that comment though; it was admirable.

[albertgoeswoof]

Yes but if you said the same about a race or other marginalised group it would get called out on and you would probably agree. It’s not tit for tat, it’s sexism and it’s important we address it collectively.

[splatzone]

The poster above clearly didn't mean what they said as an attack or an attempt to set unfair standards for women, I don't think what you're saying makes any sense.

I work with a lot of gay men and I notice that they can often be more empathic and sensitive than straight men. Different groups behave differently and individuals can act however they like.

It's not sexist or homophobic to notice trends. We stand to gain a lot from noticing how people behave and reflecting on how we act ourselves.

[albertgoeswoof]

The intentions are not the issue. The problem is demonstrated in your comment - the poster has presented an anecdote and you have interpreted it as trend.

You can’t just say women are like X and men are like Y unless you actually have reasonable evidence to back it up. Prefixing it with the word it’s an anecdote is just a get out clause that makes it seem ok. In the end the effect is negative on both men and women, even if it’s a positive trait.

You probably aren’t noticing actual trends, you’re just reaffirming thoughts you already have by picking specifics traits out. It’s perfectly natural and normal behaviour, but it’s still not right and we should avoid it where possible.

[bostonpete]

I don't think people generally get called out for mentioning their positive impressions of people of a race or other marginalised group.

I get that they can affect expectations but we shouldn't allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the conceivable negative effects of our well-intentioned comments.

[nvarsj]

The problem is you chose to group your coworkers by gender in the first place, and then assign some trait to that group.

Your comments just end up reaffirming confirmation bias. It also reveals your own bias to automatically associate traits with a certain gender.

Why not group people by color of their eyes, handedness, tallness, and so on? I'm sure if you look at the coworkers with "good communication" you could find common traits that are not related to their gender. So why imply gender as the cause?

Anyways, I think it's something to be avoided and be aware of in your communication. I assume you didn't do it on purpose.

[dentemple]

If there's a generalization worth making, it's that software engineers--as a whole--are generally garbage at communicating technical concepts.

The talk presented here is a great example of what we could be doing instead.

[fabricexpert]

That's true (and it's not because they're male, it's because they spend a massive amount of time communicating with machines and not so much other humans)

And yes, this talk is very very good.

[TomasSedovic]

Julia uses Squid for Android for her zines:

https://jvns.ca/teach-tech-with-cartoons/#tools-that-make-it...

Presumably, she uses the same to do the slides. Here she talks some more about her tools:

https://usesthis.com/interviews/julia.evans/

[ant6n]

Julia's now using Ipad with pencil and the Notability app. She previously used a Samsung Chromebook Plus with Squid.

She actually wrote a blog post about reverse engineering the file formats when transitioning between them: https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/03/31/reverse-engineering-notabili...

(btw, if you go through her drawings over the years, they got better and better. I think a lot of what makes them great nowadays is practice, practice, practice)

[AJRF]

Oh that looks like an interesting read, i've previously missed that post.

I'll check both out, going to give that presentation style a try.

Cheers for the links.

[TomasSedovic]

Ah right, I thought she was using an ipad, but I couldn't find the source so I blamed a faulty memory. Thanks.

[AJRF]

Thank you very much Tomas!

[seanmcdirmid]

Have you ever seen Guy Steele’s “growing a language” talk? If you like hand written slides, you’ll like that one. He did require an old fashioned OHP though, since it was all done on transparencies with crayons! Unfortunately that wasn’t very video friendly, so he had to use traditional ones for the recording, you only get the OHP treatment by seeing the talk in person.

[randomsearch]

Very controversial topic to wade into, but: I do think that our field suffers from poor explanation of technical topics. I heard this described at a place I used to work as a "macho culture" - where it was deliberate behaviour as display of aggression, rather than sheer incompetence. Arguably this does relate to traits that men exhibit more than women (on average).

[fullstackchris]

I think it is also out of laziness or simply forgetting to step out of one's own shoes sometimes. It's sometimes hard to explain all the technical parts of a project well to a newcomer who has 0 experience with a particular project when its something you've been working on for months at an in-depth level. We're all guilty of skipping small parts of explanation simply because subconsciously we've done it so much, or it is such a 'trivial' component of a given process or system.

These poor explanation and documentation patterns I find most often in open source (though it does indeed occur in industry software as well). A huge number of GitHub READMEs reflect this notion (even in npm packages, for example, that are downloaded 1000+ a week!).

To the author of software, the README may be perfectly clear, but for first time users of the software, it can be totally lacking and/or just plain confusing. I always try to be explicit as possible in my instructions and documentation in hopes to battle the field's poor explanation reputation. It's definitely a skill I always try to work on and get better at.

[zerogvt]

I cannot upvote enough your comment (and I am a guy). Computer Engineering and IT are overcrowded with males and male behaviors which hurt the field and drive away a lot of people that are smart and eager to offer but they cannot tolerate the machismo of the field. A sad state of affairs for any profession.

I'm not saying that all males are exhibiting these behaviors but the ones that do are prevalent (and it seems that by doing so they're gaining an edge which makes them successful memes that stick and expand).

[Koshkin]

> zero assumptions

I think this means "the assumption of zero knowledge." I love when Scientific American or articles on the web try to give the reader an idea of a recent advance in physics, say, by starting to explain that "atoms are these tiny thingies which are so small that you cannot see them with a naked eye and which were first conceived of by the ancient Greeks." In certain contexts, you cannot make an assumption like that.