Category Archives: Nadyne

Q&A, women

Q&A: does the sexism in CS ever get better?

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I saw this question on Geek Feminism a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t feel like I’ve come up with an answer that is satisfactory yet.  The question is in parts, so I’ll tackle them one at a time.

If you’re a woman in CS, does it ever get better? If it got better for you, where and how did that happen?

Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller famously told gay kids who are being bullied that it gets better.  Their video inspired thousands of others to film their own videos, ranging from all sorts of individuals to the San Francisco Giants to President Obama.  If you’ve watched a lot of these videos, you can often boil their message down to a few points:

  • A lot of homophobia is rooted in ignorance and immaturity.
  • When you’re the only LGBT person that you know about, you feel completely alone.
  • When you’re in a situation where you’re surrounded by homophobia, sometimes the only solution is to get the hell out of there.
  • Once you get the hell out of there, you have to find someplace that is accepting of who you are.

I think that there are a lot of parallels to the sexism that exists today in computer science and software engineering.

A lot of sexism in CS is rooted in ignorance and immaturity.  As men start seeing more accomplished women in CS, it gets better.

When you’re the only woman around, you feel alone because you have experiences that aren’t shared by others.  It gets better when you find another woman who is in a similar situation who you can talk to — it lets you know that you’re not alone.

If you find yourself in a situation where you can’t handle the sexism that you’re dealing with, sometimes the only solution is to get the hell out of there.  I know that finding a job isn’t trivial and isn’t something that you do overnight, but then those LGBT kids have to wait until they’re 18 so that they can leave home too.  Polish up your resume and portfolio like they’ve never been polished before, start applying for jobs, and get the hell out.

As you’re looking for a new job, remember that the interview is a two-way street.  A couple of months ago, I wrote a long post about participating in an on-campus interview, and my last point was that you should ask questions about what’s important to you in your position.  If you’re getting the hell out of a job because of the sexism that you’re dealing with, you should have a lot of questions about the team and its culture.  Obviously you’re not going to ask, “so, how many sexist pigs do you work with?”, but there are plenty of questions that you can ask and observations that you can make that will help you understand what the situation there is like.

If you’ve learned to deal with it, how?

As ever, it depends on the sexism.  Frankly, it also depends on you, too.

Sometimes you simply call ’em on it.  How you do it depends on the situation and your relationship with those involved.

For example, one day, I was working in my office with the door open.  A bunch of male engineers who I know pretty well were standing in the hallway chatting.  One of the guys, who is single, commented that he always felt like he was behind on stuff: keeping his apartment clean, doing laundry, etc.  Somebody said, “oh, you need a wife!” and the rest of the guys agreed vociferously.  I got up, walked to my door, and simply stood there with an eyebrow raised.  The single guy laughed and said that it wasn’t his idea, and the others backpedaled, including a couple who said that they’re also married to women who work in tech and that it’s a lot easier to manage when you’ve got two people to handle everything.  I didn’t say anything, I certainly didn’t call them sexist, and it ended up being a funny anecdote for all of us.

Sometimes you work on it over time, and you build up your credibility so that the sexist behavior fades away.  Credibility goes a long way towards fixing sexism that’s rooted in ignorance.  I’ll admit that I’ve laid the smackdown on someone who tried to mansplain to me that the problem that we were discussing was NP-complete and what that meant.  As if the mansplaining wasn’t obnoxious enough, he was totally wrong about it being NP-complete — in fact, it was only O(n²), and I proved it.  He wouldn’t meet my eyes in the hallway for weeks afterwards, but a few months later, I heard through the grapevine that he had complimented my technical skills in a meeting.

One thing that you always always do when combating sexism is to be the change that you wish to see in the world.  Do not display any sexism yourself.  For example, don’t use your mom (or the more generic soccer mom) as an example of a non-technical user.  I don’t care if your mom really isn’t technical.  It goes without saying that you should avoid other stereotypes, -isms, and -phobias as well.  Don’t display racist behavior, don’t display homophobic behavior.  Your credibility in trying to address sexism is negated when you make a racist comment yourself.

If being ostracized and viewed as gross and weird for being feminist and female “never gets better,” why stay in CS?

I reject that it “never gets better”.  It might not get better in certain situations.  Buy me a cocktail sometime and I’ll tell you about the manager who wanted to know when I planned to get pregnant so that he could include it in his schedule for our next release.  I doubt that he’s ever going to get better.  But you can find situations where it is better, and you embrace them, and you try to make it better for other women too.

Even in a bad situation, one of the reasons that you stay in CS is because you love it.  If you don’t love it, and if it’s a bad situation, you don’t have a good reason to stay.  This isn’t to say that sometimes the sexism just gets overwhelming and you can’t take it anymore, and so you do go off and do something else.  If that’s the decision that you make, that’s valid.  There have been some pretty nasty examples out there.  If I try to put myself in those shoes, I’m not sure if I wouldn’t’ve walked away myself.  But, thankfully, I haven’t been that unlucky with sexism in CS.

I think that it’s incumbent upon technical women to make ourselves available for mentorship.  It’s hard to find a technical woman for a mentor, especially ones who have been in tech for several years.  So for those of us who have, I think that we should help out the younger women who are experiencing a lot of the same things that we did, and hopefully helping to avoid having women drop out of the field because they just can’t take the sexism any longer.  I do this at VMware, mentoring some of the younger women on my team1 and reaching out to them when I think that they could use a hand.  It’s also one of the reasons why I write this Q&A series of blog posts, to exemplify the behavior that I think that a senior technical woman should have.

Ultimately, I think that the way that sexism in CS gets better for us as individual women in CS is to find your tribe.  Find the other women who have walked the same path that you want to walk.  Find the men who aren’t sexist.  Find the courage to get yourself out of a bad situation.  It gets better, and it requires you to help make it get better.

  1. Men aren’t left out. I’m currently mentoring the newest researcher on my team, who is male. ↩
software

unintended consequences

In software engineering, things that you think are a joke sometimes take on a life of their own.  To wit: the humble origins of the blink tag.  A bunch of Netscape engineers got together for beers in Mountain View one night, where one lamented that none of the HTML extensions would work with Lynx.

There were two unintended consequences to this beer-fueled conversation:

  1. The blink tag was coded up that very night
  2. The engineer who made the lamentation met the woman who ultimately became his wife.

You never know what will come out of happy hour conversations.  They often have unintended consequences.

Nadyne

oh, Sony, how can you get it so wrong?

A few months ago, I was deeply in love with PopMarket.  It’s a daily deal website for music, and I went through an intense phase of buying lots of music from them.  But then it became clear how bad this relationship was for me, in the form of a botched order.  Last September, I ordered a three-album set, one of which was a double-disc version of Janis Joplin’s seminal Pearl.  When I got the order, I discovered a manufacturing error: instead of Pearl, the discs inside the packaging were of Earth, Wind, & Fire.

I wrote to PopMarket, got an almost instantaneous response where they sent me a replacement, and thus entered the rabbit hole.  The replacement had the same error, and then the replacement for the replacement had the same error.  After a few weeks of trying to get them to either send me correct discs or refund the order, I gave up.  And I haven’t ordered from PopMarket again.

Last week, I got an email saying that my order of Johnny Cash’s The Legend had shipped.   This is one of the albums that I had ordered, back in those heady days, but I received it months ago.  I thought that their system must have hiccuped and sent a confirmation mail out again, so ignored it, but then the album showed up on my doorstep.  So I wrote to them again, asking (a) what to do with this album that they’ve entirely inexplicably sent me, and (b) whether they have any intent at all of sending the order that they still haven’t completed.  The response is rather opaque:

I’m sorry for any inconvenience that may have caused. I’ve forwarded your message to our warehouse department for review. As soon as I receive any further information I will let you know via email.

Err, yeah.  You’ll excuse me if I don’t hold my breath on that one.

I still get the daily PopMarket emails, and sometimes I want to click through to order, but I always hold myself back.  I’ve learned my lesson.

Nadyne

Weebly has an obvious security flaw

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A long long time ago, back when Gmail was still in invite-only beta and invites were actually difficult to come by, I snagged nadyne@gmail for myself.  This has provided years of unintentional entertainment.  I’ve amassed quite the collection of other Nadynes who forget their email address or make a typo when entering it.

Today, via a new Nadyne, I learned about a website called Weebly.  If you’re not familiar with it (I wasn’t before this), it’s a website and blog creator.  Since that other Nadyne got her email address wrong when she created her website, I got the confirmation email.  The confirmation email included a link called “auto-login to Weebly”.  I clicked it, and found myself logged in to Weebly.

Yes, that’s right: without entering a username or password, I was able to login to someone else’s Weebly account.  What fantastically bad security.  I can’t possibly be the only person who has received such an email erroneously.  Weebly should require the user to enter their password when they’re logging in from a browser that they’ve never used before, even when clicking on the link from their confirmation email.  This is such a basic security mistake that I couldn’t trust them with getting their security right elsewhere.

I can do anything that I like with her website.  Since I don’t actually know this other Nadyne’s email address, I posted something to her new site saying that I’ve changed her password and that she needs to update her account information with a new password and with her accurate email address.

This collection of other Nadynes has given me a long list of websites that I won’t do business with as a result of their bad security.  One particular website actually emailed me, in plaintext, another Nadyne’s complete information: her real name, address, phone number, SSN (yes, really!), and credit card number.  Usually I just email the Nadyne in question to let her know that she needs to (a) update her account to reflect her real email address, and (b) be careful about doing business with a company that will send out so much personally-identifying information via email.  Perhaps it’s time to mine this for a new series of blog posts.

user experience, VMware

Q&A: why should I work for VMware?

During interviews, I often get asked by candidates why they should work for VMware.  There are lots of reasons to do so, but here’s one of my favorite ones: VMware CEO Paul Maritz was just ranked in the top ten CEOs by Glassdoor.com.  Their ranking is based on employee reviews.  Having trust in your CEO is a great thing, and is definitely a great reason to work here.

The user experience team at VMware is still growing.  Here’s a job description for a senior interaction designer; we’ve got other positions in interaction design and research, for both new college hires and experienced hires.  Ping me if you’d like to learn more or would like to apply.

user experience

Q&A: what applications should I know for a career in user experience?

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This week, I got asked a couple of questions about applications for user experience people.  One was from a researcher asking which applications they should know how to use, another was from a designer worried that they don’t know how to use Flash.

Three minutes on the internet will reveal plenty of UX people who have very strong opinions about the applications that you should know.  Sometimes they’re advancing the idea that you don’t need to use a heavy-duty application, but rather that a (relatively) lightweight application can do the job.  For an example of that, check out the power of Keynote by Paul Woods.  Sometimes they’re putting a stake in the ground and advancing that there is only one true way, such as this reference to someone who won’t hire designers who can’t code.

I generally don’t care about specific applications.  Job ads often list a  bunch of applications, and I know that I’ve written job ads myself with a list of apps, but I don’t think that anyone needs to know every single app on that list.  A candidate should probably know at least a couple (and I’ll get to why in a minute), but knowing the whole list isn’t necessary (or even necessarily useful).

What matters for user experience is communicating with your team. Using the right application is a method of communication.  If you’re working closely with a development team that tracks everything in Bugzilla, you need to use Bugzilla too.  If you’re working with a design team that loves OmniGraffle, you should learn how to use OmniGraffle.  If you’re working with a PM who never seems to have any application other than PowerPoint open, you’d better make sure that everything you send to them is a .ppt file.  If you don’t use their application of choice, then you’re decreasing the chances that they’ll open your file or pay attention to your work.  You’re negatively impacting your communication.

For researchers, I rarely care about specific applications.  They’re nice-to-have, but they’re not need-to-have.  Email, a word processor, and a presentation app are absolute requirements.

For designers, I think that you should be a wizard in at least one design application, and you should be proficient in another couple.  Knowing more than just one application shows me that you’re flexible and adaptable.  I especially like it when you can tell me that one application is great in this case, but another application is great in this case.  And I want to know how you’ll get up-to-speed doing designs in a new application too, since it’s all but guaranteed that you’re going to have to learn a new one.

For researchers, I don’t think that you need to be a wizard in a design application, but you should have at least a reasonable knowledge of a couple.  You’re going to be communicating with designers, so just as you need to be able to communicate with that PowerPoint-lovin’ PM, you’re also going to have to be able to communicate with your team who loves OmniGraffle.  When you get a mockup from a designer that doesn’t quite work for your usability study that starts in 10 minutes, you can tweak it yourself.  It makes your life as a researcher that much better to be able to use the design app(s) that your team prefers.

Leaving aside the basics of email, word processing, and presenting, I don’t think that there is any application that I think that every single UX person should know.  The application is the tool.  I care about what the outcome of using that tool is, but — so long as you’re willing to use other tools when necessary or appropriate — I don’t care what tools you use to do the job.

Nadyne

casual sexism in software engineering

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Casual sexism happens all the time in software engineering.  If I hear one more person say that they want to make their app easy enough for their mother or grandmother to use, I’m going to scream.  Let’s stop assuming that women aren’t technical or aren’t willing to understand something.  And for the love of all that is good in this world, don’t try to justify this one to me.  I don’t care if your mom isn’t actually technical, you can still come up with other examples of people who aren’t technical.  Don’t be lazy

Women in software engineering have to deal with this casual sexism every day, and mostly we let it go.  When you hear it so often, it’s hard to identify it for what it is, and you get tired of being told that it wasn’t actually intended to be sexism.  But then you get hit between the eyes with yet another example of casual sexism, such as this displayed in Sqoot’s invitation to an “API jam” in Boston:

That’s right, ladies, you’re just a perk at a hackathon, like the massages and booze.

At first, they tried the “it was just a joke” defense.  It took more outcry for them to issue an apology, first by saying that they were “really sorry” (a Google Doc that now no longer exists), and then by saying that “we can do better“.

Yes, you can do better.  You can realize that women aren’t a perk.  You can realize that you can’t blow it off as “just a little humor”.  You can realize that your first non-apology apology isn’t acceptable, and that your second attempt saying that you were just trying to “call attention to the male-dominated tech world” can’t possibly be accurate.  Beer wenches call attention to beer and breasts, they’re not an attempt to address gender inequality.  Would you try to make call attention to the lack of diversity by pointing out that you’ve got Latinos cleaning the bathrooms?

There’s only one acceptable apology here: “I’m sorry.  I was wrong.”  No explanations, no posturing, just an admission that you got it wrong.  After that admission, the next step is to figure out how you got it so wrong and what you’re going to do about it.  Maybe, for example, you need to reach out to local women’s developer groups to try to do something about the “male-dominated” nature of hackathons.  Do something, don’t just say that “we can do better”.  Tell us what that better thing is that you’re going to do, and make sure that it actually is something better.  If your solution is just making sure that there are hot boys to bring pink frilly drinks, you’re still missing the point.

user experience, VMware

research contractor needed

My team has a very large research project coming up, and we’re looking for a contractor to come in and help us for at least three months.  In this research project, we’ll be doing a lot of studies in the usability lab.

For this position, we need someone who will own the complete research project.  Working with my team, they’ll define the scope of the project and how we will go about answering the questions that we have.  They will create the research plan and all usability test materials, including (but certainly not limited to) creating a screener to find participants for the study, setting up the environment for testing, and creating the task list and script.  They will conduct the research and analyze the results (which we anticipate will be a mix of qualitative and quantitative).

Candidates should have at least an undergraduate degree in HCI or a related field and 2-3 years of experience in conducting UX research.  A stellar candidate will have experience in conducting research on highly-technical enterprise software.

Interested?  Have questions?  Email me.

user experience

communication is how I get stuff done

Earlier today, I read an interview with Karina van Schaardenburg, a user experience researcher at Twitter, in which she discusses what she uses to get her job done.  In essence, she’s got a laptop for her own use, and she’s got some tools that she uses for data collection and analysis, and she’s got some hardware and software that she uses when she’s conducting her research.  As I read it, it was all familiar to me.  Specifics aside, Karina’s setup is pretty similar to my own.  But I felt like something was missing.

The interview focuses on applications and hardware, and all of the interviews on the usesthis.com site focus on that.  Which is fine, in term of the mechanics of what I do as a researcher.  But the question that the site is trying to answer is “What do people use to get stuff done?”  The tools that I use aren’t what I do to get stuff done.

As a researcher, what I actually do to get stuff done is communicate.  I communicate with the design team, the program management team, the development team, and anyone else who I can get to talk tome.  That communication is about deciding our goals and priorities.  Then I communicate with our users to learn about what they do.  Sometimes that communication is conducted via survey, sometimes by interview, sometimes by contextual inquiry, sometimes by usability study.  After I’ve completed my research and conducted my analysis of the data, I then circle back with everyone at my company and communicate with them again: what I learned, what steps we should take next.  I keep up this communication to ensure that actions are taken, based on my recommendations.

In my opinion, the tools themselves don’t matter that much.  Yes, I’m a Mac user, and I use Morae to record my studies, and I use SlideRocket to give presentations to my team, and I use Apple Mail to communicate with everyone involved throughout the process.  But those tools isn’t what makes me a good user experience researcher.  If you took my Mac and my SlideRocket account away from me, I would still produce good research.  The tools are all but orthogonal to the discussion of how I get stuff done.  The thing that I actually use to get stuff done is communication.

This isn’t a complaint about the idea behind usesthis.com, and it’s certainly not a commentary on Karina.  I think that we understand intrinsically that copying someone else’s setup won’t magically imbue you with their traits and talents.  It’s pretty clear that using BBEdit and jailbreaking my iPhone won’t make me a novelist like Charlie Strouss.  The tool is only the tool.  Answering “what tools do you use to get stuff done” is very different from answering “what do you use to get stuff done”.  Communication is what I use to get stuff done.  Everything else is just a tool that supports that communication.