Monthly Archives: April 2015

Support Your Local Female Tech Professional

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

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STOP doing this! (Image courtesy of news.com.au)

I’ve written a few posts about women in high tech, and if you follow my blog at all you’ll know I’m pretty critical of how the high tech industry treats women and behaves around women.  I completely dismiss the argument—and you can see it practically anywhere—that women just have to “suck it up”, that they’re treated “just the same” as men, that they need to “fit in better” to the industry’s culture.

To which I say: Hooey.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot.  One thing that irks me about many columnists is that they spend a lot of time complaining about something, but then when it comes to making suggestions as to how to fix the problem they just spent 15 paragraphs identifying and excoriating, they bail.  “How this will resolve Remains To Be Seen.”  (“Remains to be seen” is a common sign-off line on TV news, and is basically the same as saying, “I have no effin’ idea where this is going, so this piece was pretty much a waste of time.”)  I try to suggest solutions to the things I talk about in my posts, even if the solutions seem silly.  After all, silly or not, any suggestion could get a conversation started, and that’s when better solutions may come up.

But my suggestions for the sexist culture in high tech and what to do about it have been pretty limp and unsatisfying.  At least to me.  Which is why I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and the more I do the more I realize that while yes, we have to get more women into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers, and yes we have to help women throughout their path into these fields.  But we—and by “we” here, I men “we men of the male persuasion”—need to do a lot more than passive cheer-leading and supporting our daughters working towards their C.S. degree.

We need to be proactive.

Now before you become untethered, let me be clear:   I’m not talking about some kind of “affirmative action”/quota kind of thing—though I believe that’s needed—nor am I suggesting that people “carry” poor performers just because they’re women.  (Although I also firmly believe that way too many men use the “she’s a poor performer” excuse as a cover for sexism, similar to “she didn’t quite fit in” or “she was a distraction to the team” or “her style wasn’t compatible with the organization’s needs”, or some other BS excuse that boils down to “We’re a boys club and don’t feel comfortable with girls around”.)

No, what I’m saying is:  We need to be proactive.  We need to actively support the women with whom we work, rather than telling them that they’re “acting bitchy” or “need to suck it up” or “work harder to fit in”.  Or almost as bad, just sit there passively when we see blatant sexism acted out right in our faces.  Let me give you an example:

You’re in a meeting.  There are 10 or so people in the room, and maybe 2 of them are women.  One of the women—the QA manager, say, a relatively tall, quiet, middle-aged woman with over 20 years experience in high tech—speaks up about a problem she sees from her vantage point in QA.  Before she has a chance to finish, some 20-something guy interrupts her, and then basically expresses her exact point.  What do you do?

I’ve seen this hundreds, maybe thousands of times.  You know what usually happens?  Nothing.  Women have had it hammered into them since birth to be quiet, demure, to not object; when they get run over like that, they often just shut up and remain quiet, because that’s what society teaches them.  And if they speak up, if they push back, if they ask (respectfully) to please be allowed to finish, many of the 20-something men (and alas too many of other ages) will complain to their boss or co-worker about what a “bitch” they work with.  She’s “too aggressive”; they “don’t feel comfortable with her on their team”.

Right now, any woman who’s worked in high tech is nodding her head while reading along, thinking, “Well, duh!  You might as well tell me rain is wet.”  While I guarantee you the majority of guys—even the ones guilty of this behavior!—are thinking, “Well, I’m sure that happens sometimes, but I don’t ever do it!”  Yes, you do.  I think about this stuff all the time and sometimes I still blow it.  It’s easy to fall back on the socially-dictated patterns.

What should you do?  Dude, it’s so easy; ask the rude interrupter to please let the woman finish.  “Okay, Biff, but I’d like to hear the end of what Jill was trying to say.”  That’s what I mean by “proactive”.  Don’t just sit there and let some sexist dork be sexist; jump in!  It can absolutely be done without being rude, putting anyone down, or even implying Biff is being a sexist dork.

If you’re running the meeting, go even farther:  Make sure you actively seek the opinions of the women at the table.  Women in high tech have been so hammered on for so long that after a while, many stop trying.  Do you really want to write off 20% of the brainpower in your room?  That’s idiotic!  Ask their opinions!  And further, make sure they get the space to finish their thoughts.  It’s your meeting; if Jill gets cut off, tell Dirk, “Wait a minute please, Dirk; let Jill finish and then you can make your point.”  Not only does this get the opinions of the women out on the table, it also implicitly chastises people for rude and sexist behavior and provides them with a model for how to do it moving forward.

(I believe the person running a meeting should draw out opinions from all those at the table, no matter their sex, but that’s a different topic.)

But don’t stop there.  Recommend (qualified) women on your team for high-profile projects, projects that will give them visibility and responsibilities outside of their immediate job area.  Recommend them for training—management training, technical training, whatever.  Be active in helping them advance their careers.  Trumpet their accomplishments to the org at large.  Mention them to upper management.  And on the flip side:  Mention the negative, sexist behavior to management as well—though I would recommend on first offense to limit it to not mentioning the particular perpetrator.  Something like, “Mr. VP, I’ve been noticing some fairly bad sexist behavior among some team members.  Perhaps you could make some kind of overall policy statement about BigCorp’s policy of inclusiveness and having a friendly and non-hostile work environment?  Maybe an email, followed by a few words at the next all-hands?”  Everyone screws up once in a while, and someone should establish a pattern before being called on the carpet, IMO.  But of course if Mr. VP asks, that’s a different matter.

I would also recommend that, should you be in management, you take some time to educate yourself on how men’s and women’s socialized responses differ, and adjust your behavior and expectations accordingly.  For example, when men get pissed off, they frequently yell, punch things, throw tantrums, etc.  Most men overt the age of, say, 25 are more controlled than that, but if you’ve been in high tech for any time at all, you’ve probably seen it; some VP is frustrated, and he yells at someone, or cusses them out.  Or even throws things at the conference room wall.  I’ve seen it happen.

(Yes, I know this isn’t true across the board, and certainly not true for trans and gender fluid folks.  What I’m talking about here are what society and our culture consider “typical” male and female behavior and responses.)

Women, on the other hand, often respond to anger with tears.  These are not tears of sorrow; they’re tears of rage and frustration.  But many men viscerally respond to tears with a subconscious diagnosis of “weakness”, and of course in business, weakness is death.

Unfortunately, women are in a double-bind here.  If a woman yells, curses, and rages, she is “a bitch”, “too emotional”, “needs to dial it back”, etc.  So she can either act like a woman and be punished for it, or act like a man . . . and be punished for it.

To repeat:  The solution is to educate yourself and be more cognizant of how sexes respond differently.  I think one of the best books on this topic is Deborah Tannen’s “You Just Don’t Understand”, but there are plenty of good ones out there.  But if you’re too lazy to read a book, all you have to know is:  Men and women frequently react differently.  Learn to roll with it, and stop putting the women on your team into an impossible double-bind.  Further, when you see them being so defined by others, point it out.

I’ve gone on at length here (and haven’t even touched on other land-mines like how women are supposed to dress, and how men can get away with flirting at work but women can’t, and many other areas), but the bottom line is actually pretty simple:  As men, we’re too lazy and been too passive, and we need to get off our flat behinds and get involved.  We need to work to help women be treated equally.  We need to act.  It’s on us, too.

So get out there, and act!

PS: For some of my other opinions regarding women in high take, feel free to surf on over to:

Business Meetings: Minimizing their Pain

10 Friday Apr 2015

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Dilbert copyrighted by Scott Adams, all rights reserved

On LinkedIn, Jeff Denneen had a post wherein he opined that we should Kill the Weekly Meeting.  In it he talks about the time wasted in pre-scheduled, regular weekly meetings, has a couple of suggestions for making meetings less painful in general, and at the end asks, “Do you have other techniques for making meetings more effective?”

Oh hellz yes; I have a list.

I have long wondered about high tech’s love of regular meetings.  It’s something I noticed almost from the beginning of my career, and a part of the industry that I came quickly to genuinely hate.  But as a modern, 21st Century guy who’s spent plenty of time with various therapists, rather than sit back and seethe and simmer in my meeting rage, when I had the opportunity to run my own meetings—either through being a project lead, a manager, or just because no one else in the room wanted to take charge—I came over time to learn some tactics and techniques to make things better.  At least, I think they do.

In huge, cross-team projects involving dozens or even hundreds of people, all working toward a specific goal of releasing on a given date, you do have to have some regular meetings just so everyone is on target.  Really, you can’t avoid it; you can’t do everything by email or IM.  But when you are forced to have those suckers, make them as painless as possible.  Here’s some ideas to chew over, play-tested out in the real high tech business world:

  • Have an agenda, or at least a list of topics that you need to cover in the meeting, even if it’s only scribbled on a piece of scratch paper.
  • Avoid the “round-table status review”. I’ve been in high tech for 27 years and, while I have on occasion needed to know what my coworkers were doing, I never needed to know what they were doing on a low project level. Round-table status is too often used for people to simply puff up their own importance, and tends to waste time.
  • Start your meetings on time. This should be obvious, but alas it is not. (Don’t be a jerk about it like George W. Bush was, though, who apparently locked the door at the appointed time. That’s childish.)
  • Keep track of the time, and help folks be aware of it at need. “We need to pick up the pace in order to finish.”
  • Avoid going down conversational rabbit-holes, finger-pointing, and arguments. If there are disagreements that can’t be resolved in a reasonable (few minutes) amount of time, table the discussion and figure out another way to resolve them.  “Let’s take this off-line” is the common phrase in high tech.
  • Make sure to recognize and draw out opinions from the shyer folks in the room. This is a learned skill, but you have to watch for subtle clues that someone wants to talk, but is too shy or reluctant to “interrupt”. But they’re in the meeting; if their opinion wasn’t wanted, they shouldn’t have been invited. So be sure to try to spot them and give them the space to talk.
  • Deliberately make extra effort to pull the women in the room into the discussion, and protect their speaking time from over-bearing, interrupting, ‘mansplainin’ men.  Our business culture is flamingly sexist, and women are often ignored, interrupted, dismissed, and otherwise relegated to “outsider” status. Don’t let it happen; plenty of times, they’re the smartest ones in the room.  They usually haven’t had a choice; like minorities, they’ve had to be better than most just to get a place at the table.  Get their opinions!  (For more on my take about sexism in high tech, feel free to read High Tech Sexism.)
  • Related to the three previous items: Don’t be afraid to be a bit tyrannical in running your meetings. Don’t let people ramble on to no purpose–cut them off. Don’t let folks be rude or obnoxious to other folks in the room–cut them off, too, with a warning that that kind of thing isn’t productive. Shut people up when they interrupt a speaker who hasn’t finished making her point.  Keep people focused, on task, and ready to listen.  You don’t have to be a douche about it, but be firm.  Very firm.  Exceedingly firm.
  • Let meetings end early. In fact, make it a personal goal to end meetings early. There are few things in business that make people happier than ending a meeting early.
  • Before ending the meeting, go over the action items that came up during the meeting. Make sure people assigned to action items are aware of them. All action items should have a priority associated with them, and a time-frame for completion.

And on a personal note:  Learn how to take notes.  Everyone finds a different note-taking style that works best for them, so find yours.  Mine is based on my observation that for me, meetings have three things I need to keep track of (four if it’s a “bad” meeting):  General notes, questions I want to ask but don’t want to interrupt, and action items I’m given.  I usually start out each meeting by creating three sections in my notes file (I use Evernote) for these three areas.  (The fourth area is “Comments”, i.e. snarky comments to myself that come to mind while being stuck in a terrible, boring, endless meeting from which there is no easy escape.  This section keeps me sane in those situations, especially those where you can’t, for example, play Infinity Blade III or check your Twitter feed or whatever.  You know what kind of meetings I’m talking about.)

Like everything else, running a meeting is a skill. Some people have a natural flair for it, and others struggle with it. But as far as I can tell, everyone needs more practice. Think about some of the above points the next time you call a meeting. Believe me: You end a meeting early with clear action items, people will love you.

The Frustrations of a Long-Distance Tech Writer

10 Friday Apr 2015

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Writer
Image courtesy of Neil Newton

I’ve mentioned before that I am one of those lucky few that (in general) actually enjoys his job.  I like working in high tech, being around smart people, playing with cutting-edge (“bleeding-edge”, we like to joke) tech, while at the same time not writing code or designing hardware, two areas in which I studied and got a degree but for which I am depressingly untalented.  Writing about tech stuff, though; there, I seem to have a degree of ability, thank goodness.

That doesn’t mean, though, that the job doesn’t have frustrations.  Now yes, “Check your privilege”; these are first world problems, and for a cis-gendered, straight, white male.  I don’t have to deal with the rampant sexism in my chosen field (though I try to mitigate it where I can).  I don’t have to deal with racism, except in those rare cases where I have worked in a majority non-American environment (it happened a couple of times).  I don’t have to deal with homophobia or transphobia, and as I don’t go around wearing a yellow Magen David and don’t particularly “look Jewish”, the minor amounts of anti-Semitism I’ve encountered haven’t been a big deal.  Duly noted.

But in nearly three decades of professional tech writing, I have to admit that I’ve gotten pretty tired of some things that happen consistently, again and again and again, no matter how much I try to fix them.

In the high tech world, I should tell you that tech writers are pretty low on the totem pole.  Engineering believes that Marketing, Support, and QA are in the same region, but as Marketing knows they’re not, it never hurts their feelings.  I have on the other hand commiserated plenty with Support and QA folks, who are treated as (at best) necessary evils.

You see, the engineering attitude is, if they write awesome code, there’s no need for Support or QA; why test and provide support for something that’s awesome?  And Marketing?  Ha!  My code is so awesome that it will sell itself; what do I need those suit-wearing, MBA jargon-spouting fools for? (Of course, since Marketing feels similarly about Engineering—”Don’t those idiots know that if we don’t sell their product they wouldn’t even have jobs?”—that part kind of evens out in the end.  And besides, it’s the Marketing folks who tend to move up the ladder and become CEOs.)

Technical content?  Despite the fact that we supposedly live in an era where “content is King”, most people believe that it’s easy, that it’s just “cut and past from the specification”, that it’s just “ink on the page”, that “one of my engineers can do it”, that everyone can write the content if they didn’t have to spend their extremely valuable time writing code/being a manager/doing important Marketing work/whatever.  It’s like breathing; everyone knows how to talk, so everyone knows how to write technical content, right?

Well, um, no.

Like everyone else in high tech, technical writers have spent years (or even decades) honing their skills.  While everyone theoretically can write, the number of people who can write clear, concise, correct colloquial American English is pretty small.  People assume that that because they can speak, they can write. It’s simply not true.  The number of people who can do that and comprehend high tech concepts, software, and hardware is even smaller.

Now then, let’s look at me.  I spent 4 years in college—and plenty of time in high school too—learning computer technology.  I started when I was 15, and got a degree in computer science.  I did the work of going into a job as an engineer.  There’s not too many people who do that and then don’t become engineers.  I also had some inherent skill at writing, and since entering the field, I have spent more than 20 years working on my tech writing skillset–not just my writing, but theories of organization, information architecture, web page design and layout, editing tools, publishing tools, source control tools.  And I’m hardly atypical.

Despite this, tech writers constantly have to remind people of their ability.  I’m often tempted to say, “Hey, I don’t lean over your shoulder and tell you where to put curly brackets and semi-colons in your code, do I?”.

Tech writers also have to teach every new product team that, yes, we do understand technical issues and yes, we are professionals on par with them in our own branch of the high tech industry and, finally, yes, they have to take us and (more importantly) what we do seriously if we want to get the durn product out the door.

And finally, it becomes very tiresome to have to behave like some kind of fascistic, yard-stick weilding equivalent of a Catholic school knuckle-smacking nun in order to get you to do that part of your job that intersects with mine.  Yes, I read the specs; yes, I try to use the product myself; yes, I attend the appropriate training classes (when they exist; for new products, they don’t).  Yes, I do all that.  But I also need a couple of things from you: When we ask for some of your time, rather than being grumpy, snarky, suggesting (either implicitly or explicitly) that we haven’t done my homework, do us the courtesy of providing that time.

Because see, if you give us just a little bit of time, not only will we document everything you tell us about, we’ll probably find other stuff that you and QA missed but that the customers won’t–I have an amazing gift for breaking software and finding odd corner cases–and we’ll document that, too.

Truly:  30 minutes of your time now will save you hours of hassle later.  I’ve been doing this a long time; I know. (Also, it provides you with some good CYA.  “I met with Doug on this; isn’t it in the product documentation?”  See?  Off the hook!)  Wouldn’t you rather spend that time chatting with me instead of arguing with trolls on the forums, dealing with irate customers via phone, or having an exec email you demanding you fix some problem?  It’s a good investment!

The other thing we ask is that, when we send you something to review, review it.  Look, I know reading technical content is the last thing you want to do.  I know it’s dull.  I know you think your time is too valuable for it, that someone else should be doing it, that I should have gotten it right the first time, that there’s no time in the schedule for you to review content.  I’ve heard it all, believe me.  (And if there’s no time, please tell me; I will go all the way up to executive VPs to get time built into your schedule for it.  Trust me; I’ve done it.  Ask my friend Margaret.)

But unless the experts—”subject matter experts” we call ’em, or SMEs (because in high tech it’s not important until it’s been assigned an acronym, even when that acronym is made up of other acronyms)—go over my content, it’s going to be wrong.  I’ll catch most stuff; hell, I’ll think up plenty of stuff you folks never would (remember my lecture on how much experience I have earlier on?).  But there are technical minutae that I will miss.  I can’t help it; you’ve been coding that project for six months and I’ve only been playing with it for a few weeks; how could it be otherwise?  If you didn’t know more about it than me, we would be switching jobs no matter how lame my coding skills are.  That’s what review teams are for: To catch the stuff I miss.

(And by the way, don’t worry about my grammar, punctuation, and other writing-specific things.  I know there’s a terrible temptation to mark those things up; it’s easy, it’s obvious, and it gives you a way to get back at the person who’s “wasting your time”.  Resist.  I know you can do it.)

So there you have it.  As writers, we don’t ask much.  Just

  • Treat your content people as fellow professionals whose time is also valuable even though they don’t code or design hardware
  • Give them the time they ask for (and if they’re asking for too much, go to their managers)
  • Give them the feedback they request

Do that and not only will your content person be really happy with you, they’ll do you favors.  They’ll post bugs that they found in the product that everyone else missed; they’ll help you re-word that email to the exec to help you get off the hoook for that major screw-up; they’ll advise you on your resume when you’re ready to head on to new challenges; they’ll give you solid advice on your web site that you never would have thought of.  This is the kind of stuff we do.  Leverage it.

The few; the proud; the technical content creators.  It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.  No, seriously.

Some Thoughts on Clothes

06 Monday Apr 2015

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gnvnk8ks-1390951257
Seriously, I think the guy on the left looks pretty good
(Photo courtesy of The Conversation)

My Twitter feed is–how shall I say this?–eclectic. Some nerds talking coding, of course. Some writers. A (very) few celebrities–Stephen King, Alan Tudyk–some writers like David Brin and James Fallows, some marketing people, sex workers, GLBT folks, goofy ones like PourMoreCoffee, and of course a bunch of friends. The cool thing is that I get a lot of different topics coming in at me. And today one that rolled my way was about clothing, where a sex worker gave the business to a guy who asked, “Why do lesbians wear men’s clothes?”

Well, I’ve been wondering something similar for a long time, but from a completely different angle. I was lucky enough to spend a huge percent of my life in California, where the climate is very mild. Even more, I was in Santa Cruz for 12 years, where the fog off the Monterey Bay keeps the hot air from the Central Valley from killing us every summer.

But even in Santa Cruz–and without any question now I’m in Texas–it can get hot, and make you wish you had a wider variety of clothing options.  So for example, when I was working in the cafeteria on a hot day, I would watch the women in their light cotton skirts and think, “Man, why can’t I wear something like that?  A kilt, say?  What’s the problem?”  And the problem is, it was against the “dress code”.  Men were required to wear long pants “on duty”.

This was similar when I went to work as a security guard; there were very strict requirements for what one could wear on duty, said requirements being tightly defined to established gender roles.  So that, for example, when my supervisor saw my earring, he immediately ordered me to take it off.  (After combing through the regulations, I found nothing that said men couldn’t wear earrings; there was only a note–obviously directed at female employees but not worded specifically to indicate this–that you couldn’t wear dangly earrings while on duty.  As I was wearing a stud I was prepared to argue, but not prepared enough to get fired.  But that’s another story.)

This not only offends my sense of equality, as an ally of transgender rights it irks me.  My trans friends want to wear what they want to wear, and get endless flack for it.  What could help more than the normalizing of “cross-dressing” by the rest of the population, much as “lesbians wear man clothes”?  My first girlfriend, who was very slender, liked to wear overalls.  Another very curvy one liked jeans (which looked great on her).  And who cared?  No one!  And from the purely selfish, comfort standpoint of a guy who is sick of being overheated in the summer, if a woman can wear pants, why can’t a guy wear a cotton skirt? (Or silk? Or hell, organdy for all of me?)

Besides, from the aesthetic standpoint, there are plenty of guys who would probably look much better in a skirt.  I mean, there are loads of guys out there with nice legs; why not give the folks who want to gawp at male gams the chance, huh?  And I have to think that all those flat-butted middle-aged guys would look a lot better in a nicely-tailored skirt than in those relaxed-fit Gap-for-man khakis, don’t you think?  Add some pockets to a skirt, some belt loops, and why not?

thom-browne-skirt
Okay, ditch the white shoes, but at least it’s an attempt
(Photo courtesy of Goddamit I’m Mad)

So without making too fine a point of it the question is:  Why shouldn’t anyone wear jeans and T-shirts who wants to but, even more, why can’t men wear skirts on hot days?  Not kilts; I have a kilt, and while I quite like it the damn things are amazingly heavy and make you sweat like a demon around the waist on a hot day.  No, I’m talking light cotton skirts here.  If Harry Potter can wear Dress Robes, and Cornelius fudge pin-striped robes to work, why can’t we design a lighter kilt-like garment, or a skirt that “looks masculine” so that it’s okay for guys to wear it?  The skirt equivalent of a pin-striped, double-breasted jacket?  Why not?  The Romans and Greeks wore dresses, for pete’s sake!

So I say to you, fashion gods:  Make it so!

* Special thanks to Dominique for providing me with the idea for the post. Thanks, Dominique! (God I love my Twitter feed.)