faetal on 11/7/2017 at 18:15
Damn harvester, so sorry to hear that. :(
Azaran on 11/7/2017 at 19:19
My condolences Harvester :(
Nayru-chan00 on 11/7/2017 at 20:35
I feel like I shouldn't be bitching about life, but here goes.
Two weeks without a fast and stable (took me 4 minutes to get here) internet connection, so now I'm replaying Thief 2 and clearing out my backlog of FMs because I have nothing else to do. Also, I almost got into a position of a promo artist for a mod, pretty big one, not telling details, but I'm still awaiting response from a project lead and I'm pretty anxious about this. A voting for a contest I signed up for has been opened for 2 weeks - I'm probably not going to win.
Thanks for hearing out my rant and sorry for any grammar errors.
Kolya on 11/7/2017 at 23:40
My colleague's contract is officially being discontinued at the end of the year and I'm glad it is. She was one of two female apprentices when I started at this job. I taught both, because no one else seemed to care. One graduated as the best of the state and left the company, the other one barely passed and was hired.
Ever since she has required constant hand holding. There's a number of reasons for her eventual failure but the main points are that A) She is too old to learn and remember complex stuff. B) Being a coder to her is a male thing that she basically rejects. So she tried to become a designer, but her lack of basic computer skills (file organisation, consistency) got in the way.
montag on 12/7/2017 at 06:03
Harvester hang in there, and thanks so much for your vote for my neighbors' roof. That was a really nice gesture, with all you have been dealing with.
Kolya, hope your cat feels better soon!
Nayru-chan00, I feel your pain. Last friday evening I lost power due to a storm, no internet for me and no TV for my mom (aka the little monster) for over 6 hours. Then just tonight Win 10 demanded some priority updates, took 12 minutes! TWELVE!! MINUTES!!! Also my fi-optics provider upped my my bill from $90 a month to over $200 a month. Now I have to call them to get my deal back, I have to do this once every year and it takes about 5 minutes that I will never get back! First world problems are the worse! Also, I am dangerously low on pickled herring.
Nayru-chan00 on 12/7/2017 at 06:49
Heh, thanks Montag.
Kolya, I feel your pain with your colleague. I have some computer illiterate people in my family and it's a pain in the ass. I feel like me and my cousin are the only people who can actually go and repair computers (me mostly software-wise). And the worst thing is - no one even bothers to learn and I don't have patience for it.
One of my family members wanted me to burn something to a CD because I apparently "have the skill and equipment" to do it. Like, no, you have a computer, a disc tray and a burning software so do it yourself! It's that simple! But nooooo, because they were apparently too lazy to actually search for a suitable program to use and to simply DO IT! I just...:mad::mad::mad::mad:
Apparently they were too lazy to google instructions on how to burn stuff on CDs, but weren't TOO lazy to watch TV.
Sorry, it just makes me feel so mad. I just...I feel like I'm the only person in my family (including my cousin) intelligent enough to google what's wrong and actually fix it.
Damn, this went longer than I expected.
Harvester on 12/7/2017 at 08:28
Quote Posted by Kolya
My colleague's contract is officially being discontinued at the end of the year and I'm glad it is. She was one of two female apprentices when I started at this job. I taught both, because no one else seemed to care. One graduated as the best of the state and left the company, the other one barely passed and was hired.
Ever since she has required constant hand holding. There's a number of reasons for her eventual failure but the main points are that A) She is too old to learn and remember complex stuff. B) Being a coder to her is a male thing that she basically rejects. So she tried to become a designer, but her lack of basic computer skills (file organisation, consistency) got in the way.
Yeah I can understand this. I've had similar things at my work. I write texts for websites (SEO texts which rank highly in Google and inform the customers at the same time, also blogs and regular website texts (like "About us" pages and such)) and am also in charge of spelling/grammar checking of other people's texts. Multiple times it's happened that we got a new person who claims (s)he's very good at Dutch grammar and wants to spell/grammar check the texts that people have written. So my supervisor goes "great, welcome to the team, Hans
(my name) is going to check your work to be sure, but that's just a formality, I'm sure you're great at it." But just knowing the Dutch grammar rules isn't enough, you also have to have a really precise eye to catch all the mistakes.
So my supervisor built these people up and gave them confidence and then it turns out they aren't good enough at it. They didn't have the precision required and/or they weren't as good at Dutch grammar as they thought they were. And I had to tell them that, which I seriously didn't like.
Now I have a new supervisor, and I told him about this. Thankfully he said he wasn't going to operate this way.
side note: there's a great writer on our team that I get along with very well. But he's computer illiterate to a high degree. I've showed him how to do things multiple times, but now he's writing down the steps of the things I show him, because he doesn't want to ask every time. In that case I don't mind, and as I said, he's a great asset to our team. He's also one of the few other people on the team who actually
can do grammar checks well.
Kolya on 12/7/2017 at 08:37
@Nayru-chan00 : I know what it's like to be that guy in the family of course. But it can be warranted if your relatives have other skills and help you back. Continuously relying on others at the job is different.
But what I really wanted to get at is this: If you want your daughter to become a programmer (and you should because it's one of the most intellectually fulfilling jobs there are, that also gets paid) then teach them how much fun it is to solve logical problems. Every techie I know wants women in this job, but at Girls Day I hear those old cliches repeated by 14 year old girls, how they don't want to program because that's difficult and numbers and logic are basically appalling. There's a straight line going from Princess Lilly Fee's dreamworld to thinking you can live off (and should be valued for) your overwhelming emotions. Keep them for god's sake away from that crap unless you want them to become someone else's breeding chamber.
And yeah, advice from a childless guy of course. Don't listen to me, what do I know.
Sulphur on 12/7/2017 at 11:02
Hrm. So what you're saying is, if someone isn't good at logic and numbers or straight out doesn't like 'em, they should still do it because programming pays well? I don't see how that path is any less cynical than someone who chooses to feel that gifting the world their precious viewpoint is a worthy revenue stream.
Kolya on 12/7/2017 at 12:07
Whether you are good at some skill and like it is at least partly due to your upbringing. Women are underrepresented in programming jobs. Since I don't believe they have less natural ability for it, it follows that they are brought up to dislike it and hence don't get good at it.
