| It's harem-queen behavior. The Business is the brash alpha male that plays hot-and-cold with us, exhibits blatant favoritism, walks in and mushroom stamps us and leaves us confused as to whether that's a good or bad thing. We're all clawing at each other and trying to tear each other down in a general "out-bitch the other bitches" contest. See, this Tweet: https://twitter.com/MichaelOChurch/status/484126337335324672 Women and programmers share: undeserved low status to the group because
the most popular 5% tear the rest down.
Offensive? For sure. But the underlying reality (in both examples) is offensive, too.We have people who publicly say things like, "We're all terrible at our jobs" (meaning that humans are not great at reasoning about complex systems, and cannot build maintainable systems under the deadlines The Business tends to demand, especially when the requirements are nonsensical and contradictory) or "95% of us are morons who should be fired" (actually, most of those mediocre programmers are bad because no one ever invested in them.) The Business hears this and sees us as a low-status tribe that'll take abuse without fighting back. In a contrast to our self-deprecation and acceptance of low status (and worse pay) we have these brash, 24-year-olds who recently flushed out of McKinsey, or who got "accelerated into the one-year analyst program" at Goldman because they told too many sexist jokes or mistook one too many female MDs for secretaries, but who can talk a good game about "crushing it" and raise millions and become "founders". It's no wonder that The Business has its way with us. It's a legitimately negative situation, but it's mostly not our fault. We need to be more progressive, more self-protecting, more collaborative and organized, and (dare I say it) more political. Mindless optimism is not the way out. |