Can I get a ++ from all the lady developers on this app or from anyone who supports women in STEM? Signed, a fellow female engineer

I'm 40 years old today. Feels strange.. and getting older as a developer is not an advantage at all. But I got a wonderful little baby, a wife and a job I (almost always) like! So happy birthday to me 😊

Truth be told

I stare through the blueish black backgrounds and blurry colorful syntax into a somewhat familiar office within a mirrored world. That damned reflective glass layer covering these meaningless pixels is certainly not on my side.

The rushing sound of transactions flowing through cables is silenced today. Some blood cloth in the invoicing system is zeroing out everything after the currency mark.

While sighing I spin a one-and-a-half pirouette on my desk chair — even when desperate, you shouldn't give up on style — I take three steps away from my screen and try to harmonize my thoughts.

So much noise, everywhere... Noise from within?

I have been stuck at the apogee of an inhale for a while now. Locked into some masochistic constriction, self-punishment for the blindness which stings my ego.

Just fucking take a deep breath you asshole...

I freeze in place, and fall backwards.

Patterns on the creamy drywall rapidly vibrate and synchronize on vivid rhythms of respiration and resonating basslines. Deep indigo rainbows ripple through tiny veins, in-between chalky grains, raining as fine magenta dust through the ceiling frames.

My bare feet slide over soft oscillating concrete, fine flows of unsievable sand surrounded by toes, toes surrounded by streaming variables veiled in obscure vile abstractions.

A jadegreen field of vectored compressions resiliently rumbles and bounces through the clearances and corners of the vibrant concrete office cave, whispering in tongues. I try to voice my woes in little blips and bleeps but I seem to be missing an asymmetric key to their shrouded sequenced speech.

Suddenly, a wild turbulence breaks up all signals.

Joanna floats by in her tipsy effervescent cloud of disordered black hair and alcohol perfume, one hand grasping grapes, her other waving at me.

With every finger she moves a thousand tensors propagating paradoxically flawed but perfect pieces of an intricate surreal picture, sketching whole constellations of possible paths throughout the leafs of the giant Ficus next to her desk.

She stops dead in her tracks, and asks somewhat hypocritically: "Are you high?"

I can not discern the meaning of her words, and respond stoically.

"Joanna! Check out those branches!".

"Pun intended?", she giggles.

I'm focused on her grapeless hand, her fingers stretching to reach the lush little tree.

On touch, the plant shivers, grappled in the tight net of the puppet master. She pulls her strings, applying measured weights, all nodes normalize, and Joanna speaks in an oddly soft tone:

"Isn't it beautiful, how so many models emulate nature"

Her cheek buried in foliage she babbles on about unbalanced search trees and machine learning models... but from the tips of her fingers tables and indexes flow into the plant. Users, payments, tariffs, invoices and taxes crawl over the bark, joining at thicker branches, joining at the stem....

Joining. JOINING. A JOIN.

"IF THERE'S NO FUCKING TAX MULTIPLIER IN THIS LEFT JOIN, EVERYTHING COALESCES TO ZERO" I shout at a perplexed Joanna who squeezes grape juice over her desk. I hop on the beat to my keyboard. She looks puzzled, hugs her Ficus tightly, and reaches for the whiskey bottle behind her monitor.

Attracted by my exclamation, Tom from finance swings open the door, while I push my branch.

I look at Joanna still half hiding between the leaves, and I laugh at her: "Branches! Oh, lame, I finally got it!"

Tom's heavy voice interrupts me: "Does this mean... does this mean that the invoicing bug is resolved?".

I smile at Tom with his tailored suit and waxed hair. "The money is flowing once more. All debts are being settled."

He releases his breath in relief, which he seems to have held since that morning as well.

Joanna adds: "Although I think he is forever indebted to my Ficus".

I nod.

The worst thing about the gender gap in tech is that I can't find someone to borrow a hair tie from.

prof: were gonna program snake today
me: yay!
prof: but program the way i did it :)
me:

the effort to get girls, and children for that matter into programming has been terrible. I never thought I could find something worse than code.org, but here it is: SmartGurlz (because what could be smarter than spelling your own gender wrong, right?). this was on shark tank and this lady was making robots to try to get girls into programming. they pretty much control dolls on wheels by means of scratch. it's terrible. first of all, how the fuck is that profitable? when a little girl wants to play dolls, what kind of girl wants to *program* it first. jesus, no kid wants that.

second, this girls who code thing makes me barf. the thought process for many organizations trying to push girls to code is "hmm, if we isolate girls and give them lower standards, then maybe they'll decide to go into a male-dominated industry," because, fuck logic right? idiocy is dreadful. lastly, what I hate most about so many of the girls coding organizations, is the fact that they have to embrace the stereotypes. almost every single one cares about "feelings" or something similar. its bullshit.

and don't get me wrong, women should have equal opportunity, but pushing them into stem fields isn't good. bias in the workplace is what we should be talking about, or other topics like women being paid less. trying to make girls interested in programming is complete bullshit, let them do what they want.

back to "SmartGurlz," I looked them up and they confirmed what I expected. the first thing I see? not anything related to programming whatsoever, but different dolls wearing different outfits. girls deserve something better, and shouldn't have to deal with organizations trying to push them into something they don't want to do.

just got an email that they have a good opportunity for a -female- graduate of computer science where they don't require any programming or other skills. wtf
Do they want females just to up their fem statistics?

safe to say I did not reply, i am not unskilled and I don't want a job like that!

I’m a college senior now. The best CS class I ever took was in high school. Our teacher didn’t know how to write software, instead he went around on day one and has us submit proposals for year long projects.

With each project, we had to find mentors in the industry who could help us if we got blocked. Every other week we meet with the teacher (who was more a facilitator) and described how the project was coming.

The results? We had final products that were well beyond the expectations of a high school and more impressive than any project I’ve seen at my university.

Why can’t all STEM programs be like that? Students have incredible ability, but are blocked by traditional education. Let students set the bar.

You know you've been developing for a long time when you don't just write code but also wear it haha

Finally they arrived!!
My first sticker ever 😅
Seems a bit lonely though

Controversial tech rant begins here:

You know, I'm sure a lot of you guys know that it is pretty uncommon to encounter a woman who is who is into tech (and ranting about said tech). This has always made people question why. I personally feel like that is the case because those that do like tech, and those that don't just find a different interest. I thought that would suffice, but now Google and Microsoft are advertising their diversity programs. I was fine with all that until I was personally affected by it. I intended to apply for scholarships from Microsoft. They turned me away because according to them, they began giving them only to people who were "marginalized". That and their commercials trying to pressure young girls to join the STEM field. Again nothing wrong with women in the tech field, but now that this is turning into favoritism I have to fight harder battles to compete in the tech industry. Not only that, but now I read a study about their employment. Despite the number of people they turned away and the money they spent on these programs, thr companies STILL haven't become any more diverse, and from what it seems, their reaction lately has been to double-down and try harder. I just want an open, honest, and fair tech community. Has anyone else felt the affects of this situation?

I just realised that I've been experiencing a lot of stress and frustration over the last couple of months. I also realised that these feelings of dread and existential anxiety stem from my heavy use of Ubuntu. So I ended another agonizing 3 hours of trying-to-get-internet-access-again-so-I-can-get-some-fucking-work-done and managed to blow off some steam without causing too much property damage. Then I sat down and thought about it. And you know what? I hate Ubuntu.

With Window$ I can at least get some work done without having to write my own network drivers because the current ones do not function when the day of month is a prime number or some shit.

there's this club at my school, called STEM, and another called "science olympiad." both are pretty cringey, bad, or boring. science olympiad was just for the college credit. during the intro to the club, they said there was a coding section. "game on!" is what they dubbed it as, where basically you're timed to make a game in scratch. i'm fucking tired of it. why is scratch considered programming? don't get me wrong, i'll write an OS in PHP before i say code.org is better than scratch, but fuck it. its a fucking interpreted language that's interpreted by another interpreted language. i don't understand why this shit is still used. scratch isn't good. please codecademy or w3schools or just write in binary directly, but not scratch. my hand hurts from dragging and dropping, my eyes hurt from the light theme, my imaginary cat committed suicide after learning about scratch's mascot. fuck it. now onto stem club, fuck it too. not for being bad (well, kinda), but for not being more recognized. it should be above science olympiad, and other clubs because you actually have to think instead of just memorize. but alas, we still were offered the choice of scratch to program the robot. sigh. arduino much? i guess not. challenging much? nope. was i elected "leader"? with three of my friends out of the eight there, i could have been, but no. effort in this would be depressing.

To people who have done tech support:

Shoot me. Do you know what it is like to teach kids to use a mouse? Or even type in a keyboard? They don’t even know how to double click. Gotta call google chrome the circle of colors for them to understand. Some think the video that is giving the instructions is actually them doing it. So when it ends they are like alright done.

FYI: working in an internship currently where we teach kindergarten up until 5th graders from scratch to Minecraft modding. Btw it is an unpaid internship.

My fucking work challenges:
1. "Talk to this thing over the internet" what language does it speak? Fuck knows
2. "Make sure all the files are correct in the server" Our server plan only allows 3 requests per second, and someone is pinging it. Can't do shit.
3. "Shit broke!" You broke it. It was working fine. In fact, all our problems stem from that 1 thing you broke!
4. "Stay here all night" The hallway to the bathroom's door is locked. I can go to my workstation but have to go outside to get to the bathroom!

Fuck, its like you don't want me to succeed

Debugging a request that got lost in a myriad of containers of a scaled application....

It wouldn't be worth a rant if there wasn't some kinky SM stuff in it, wouldn't it?

Regexes. The fucker who wrote a lot of the NGINX (🤢) configuration decided to use the Perl Regexes with named group matching. A lot.

So now I have to fight wild variables supposedly coming from nowhere (as they stem from the named groups)… fucking single location redirects instead of maps.... A d have to write an explanatory documentation while going down the rabbit hole of trying to find out where the fuck that shitty frigging bastard redirected wrong.

I really wish I could eradicate the person who wrote this shit....

!Rant

I hope that my daughter takes an interest in STEM stuff. I’m going to introduce it early on for her. (She’s only 9 months old right now) but I’m admittedly nervous that she won’t have a hyper curious nature as she grows up. I was always super curious about learning about how things work, even though my parents never gave two thoughts about it. I don’t think that being curious and wanting to explore the inter-workings of stuff is learned so I’m just hoping she is a curious little-shit like I was as a kid hahaha.

Michelin star Chefs, Chefs, sous chef, pastry chefs, cooks, burger flippers; they all prepare food.

I think that development is heading becoming a service industry. Millions of developers at the low end making next to nothing with less at the top making more; sometimes much more.

Then there will be shows like "Master Coder" where something is white boarded out and the contestants have a limited time to write the function.

I don't understand working in FAANG. As an engineer, who inherently has an ultimate say in how the computer worlds you construct work, how do you live with acceptance that you have no say whatsoever in how your company is run? how do you accept doing work that you don't always see the product benefit of?

Yes, FAANG pays a lot to ordinary engineers, but when you were dreaming back when you were a STEM student with fiery eyes, did you really want to be an ordinary engineer, no matter the bankroll? After all, it's not the total company's revenue, it's at least the revenue divided by staff count. In Nintendo, salaries are way higher than in EA, because there are way less people working at Nintendo.

Take any unicorn startup that survived. If you work there, you will have a say, you have an impact, you see the results of your work, and you will earn much more.

I wanted to work at Google as a student, but now I feel like it's just a plastic dream pitched to those inexperienced who don't know any better.

Note that above I don't even touch ethics, like anti-suicide nets in Foxconn factories that make Apple devices, let alone Facebook's and Google's surveillance.

Maybe, if you're somehow an engineer who has proficiency but not care, or if you cared, but was broken, with fire in your eyes extinguished, and now you see your work as "just work", FAANG might be a good choice.

But I can't relate.

I am doing very well in a STEM PhD on a topic I don't like. I wish someone could hire me as a junior software developer instead. :(

STEM consultant as a service

So I became a panel for a students' oral defense for their apps in the IT dep, I'm a lowly plebian STEM but oh well I guess they did spot me making apps on the library on my lunch time.

Anyways here's what happened:

I reviewed two groups and here's my input on them:

- Group one did a app that uses the gyroscope to control a character in the screen, and avoid obstacles. At first I don't know how to play it but I figured it out nonetheless, since I'm reviewing in the customer perspective, I shunned them because of poor UX, and poor performance. Idea was there but execution is fucked - and the fact its a one man stand when there's 6 persons in front of me.

- Group 2 did an app that behaves similarly to our shitty eLMS, I liked the UX and the UI but I gave them a few pointers to improve it more and recommended it to replace the current application (yes because it was really exceeding my low bar for their department).

It's kinda obvious which one I picked to get to the stage on their graduation. They deserved it but I felt bad for the girl in the last group since she did everything so I gave them a passing grade. But if I were to individually grade them: I'd pass her and fail the rest.

How'd I do as a panel judge my angery dudes?

In the Netherlands they have a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" culture around wages, how is this in other countries?

You ask for what you think you're worth (and are happy to work for) and if the company agrees they pay you.

There's no guarantee you'll be paid the same as your colleagues working the same job because they might just have the confidence to ask for more money.

I have no idea how my wages compare with my colleagues but as I am happy with what I earn it doesn't matter. Seems to solve a lot of the dick waving issues that stem from everyone comparing salaries.

So IBM finally jettisoned the cancer that was Virginia Rometty a few weeks back. They had an opportunity to move fresh blood and solid managerial background into the top slot with Jim Whitehurst (Redhat) and try and recover their flagging market share and do some sane business strategy. They passed on that opportunity and instead appointed the old guard bootlicker who overpaid for Redhat to the tune of 20x what it was worth, and signalled their intent to continue staying the course of the Titanic and it's slow inevitable trek towards the bottom of the ocean. The board wants a yes man, and they got one.

This is basically what I assumed would happen, but I have some other predications as well:

- Whitehurst will leave to a better company
- the redhatters that haven't already left will be replaced with commodity labor
- Redhat will be the least stable Linux offering 2 years after the last hatter leaves
- they will sell off most of their existing software assets to HCL/ similar consulting partners like they did with domino and websphere to stem the bleed
- the displaced in that move will either quit or be replaced
- their cloud initiative will collapse under the weight of its own stagnation and glacial pace of development
- they will attempt to salve these wounds by moving focus to global services, reducing profit loss by cutting salary costs, further diluting their eroding ability to innovate
- they'll buy at least one other trendy software company at ridiculous valuation, and sell it off within 2 years at a massive loss
- the CEO slot will start to resemble the late Roman empire with a new CEO every other week
- Redhat assets will be sold to Google inside of 5 years

Last prediction: I will be overjoyed being able to witness the death of IBM in my lifetime. Fuck them 🍻

If you want a self stem boost talk to some non programmers sometime. They seems to see us as gods with some mystical magical powers!!

Talked with a broker today and he told me about a damaged computer that he had with some important files. I told him that I'm not that kind of computer guy and proceeded to explain him briefly what I do (I build stuff) and he was like "oh, so you a the the REAL computer guy!" (no offense to any technicians here!)
I loved it!

So, get out and talk to the muggles and stop complaining that you are not good enough to work for Google (or Google is not good enough for you anymore anyways...)

*laughing maniacally*

Okidoky you lil fucker where you've been hiding...

*streaming tcpdump via SSH to other box, feeding tshark with input filters*

Finally finding a request with an ominous dissector warning about headers...

Not finding anything with silversearcher / ag in the project...

*getting even more pissed causr I've been looking for lil fucker since 2 days*

*generating possible splits of the header name, piping to silversearcher*

*I/O looks like clusterfuck*

Common, it are just dozen gigabytes of text, don't choke just because you have to suck on all the sucking projects this company owns... Don't drown now, lil bukkake princess.

*half an hour later*

Oh... Interesting. Bukkake princess survived and even spilled the tea.

Someone was trying to be overly "eager" to avoid magic numbers...

They concatenated a header name out of several const vars which stem from a static class with like... 300? 400? vars of which I can make no fucking sense at all.

Class literally looks like the most braindamaged thing one could imagine.

And yes... Coming back to the network error I'm debugging since 2 days as it is occuring at erratic intervals and noone knew of course why...

One of the devs changed the const value of one of the variables to have UTF 8 characters. For "cleaner meaning".

Sometimes I just want to electrocute people ...

The reason this didn't pop up all the time was because the test system triggered one call with the header - whenever said dev pushed changes...

And yeah. Test failures can be ignored.
Why bother? Just continue meddling in shit.

I'm glad for the dev that I'm in home office... :@

TLDR: Dev changed const value without thinking, ignoring test failures and I had the fun of debunking for 2 days a mysterious HAProxy failure due to HTTP header validation...

So, my son is in the STEM program at school. They are suppose to use engineering methodologies in their learning process, according to the school. Apparently there is a new engineering process of step 1 try to write code for robot, step 2 build robot, step 3 make CAD design of how you will build the robot, step 4 write requirements for how the robot needs to function, step 5 robot doesn't work right, and step 6 lose robotics competition.

The other thing that is irritating me is they don't require kids to meet deadlines, just whenever you get it done is fine or if you need 10 tries to get it right. This is the second time the whole class has been disqualified from a competition because the teachers can't keep them on task.

I'm starting to really think public schools suck.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal

It’s astounding how when a school gives me 100 dollars to make something to teach high schoolers with stem that I immediately build a lightsaber.

i'm just going to let myself rant here !!!! arghhhhhh why do i have to be one of those people that is pretty smart and good programmer but not under interview pressure when theres other stuck up lazy devs that do amazing in interviews and end up with higher salary while doing a worse job than u(slower)!!! arghhhhhhgggg

entering world as name in live chat so it returns hello world

"Is the stem on the Apple logo the eaten part of the Apple?" - shower thoughts

ughh here i am with an opportunity for a job (in london) and got given 3 programming tasks and my mum is surely praying so i wont get it ,i hear screamingin my head 'Nooooo!' when trying to even think about this third task , ive already done 2 ,

i really need to stop telling her about these london jobs she's witching them away , but what can ya do when i applied to more jobs here and some in manc yet i get through in londan 🤷🏼‍♀️

Warn: long rant is long

So for the past couple of weeks I've been frustrated/confused over my thesis course with the kids gloves the professor gave us. This week I found out that in actuality this class isn't just for the IT majors, but a mix of Software Engineering majors, IT majors with minors in the SE department (me), and Information System majors who do product management but don't know much about coding anything.

As a result, we have this really strange set of discussions going on where on one hand we have the professor giving the okay to students making a website in !!Wix because they don't know much about HTML and CSS, to students like me busting ass to get a Java/MongoDB/Bootstrap web application off the ground from scratch.

I'm not as nearly upset as a I was, but it's still a really bizarre thing to lump these two departments together and getting it all coherent. The SE and IT majors is a much easier fit as there's so much overlap between the two that it's next to impossible to see any difference, it's the IS majors who are off in their own little world.

One thing is relieving to me from all this. I've realized I didn't need to major in Software Engineering to become a competent software engineer. It's amazing what one can self teach in 2 years to get the equivalent knowledge and skill sets. In the end this makes it all up for when I dropped out Computer Science in my mid 20's.

It's jaw dropping to me how much my perception of the education system for STEM has changed from when I was freshman to being a senior.

How many women work with you in Tech at your current job (with a STEM field)?

I've decided to set up an old laptop for my granddaughter. Top two contenders for OS are Doudou and Qimo. I thought about Edubuntu, but that one isn't really kid friendly, and it's designed by "educationists" sic.

Volunteer to rep company at STEM day fair. Have to build robot. Volunteer activity now reflects on me professionally. Robot doesn't work.

Remove it completly. There is no point in forcing it on children, governments are too slow to deliver a proper education plan that is not horrible outdated and proper coding teachers are non-existant.

Instead they shoul focus on STEM and provide computer clubs that are not based around grades and education plans.

Hey guys, can you do me a big favor by voting on a project of my classmates and I.
If you go to icapresents.nl (yes the website is Dutch but Google translate can translate the page for you) then scroll down you'd have to click Selecteer profiel (select profile) and then select HBO-ICT propedeuse. There will be one project called EenmaalAndermaal. To view the project click Bekijk Project (view project) and here is the button Stem op dit project (vote for this project).

Warning, you might get a prompt asking you to log in to Facebook (nothing will be shared on your profile!) but when you do this you might get redirected back to the main page without the vote being registered. Bad design.

Thanks in advance

When you're doing someone a favor by looking at their PC and you diagnose what causes the issues and you try to explain them & then they tell you its not the problem cause they googled what it was.....

Count.. To.. Ten..

We get our degree from a high-end higher education institution and with it we have proven that we studied Computer Science and a number of important programming languages in-depth.

Now why is it that when we get a job as a Software Developer, that people only seem to value you if you get industry certificates in those programming languages?

I understand a degree forms the basis with which to tackle modern-day software problems, but for your entire education to be practically invisible to stakeholders? That's what seems strange to me. We are valued by the number of certificates we have? Something doesn't add up. The only reason for this I can see is that the Business department hasn't had the thorough STEM education we had and thus thinks we are still novices who need to get 'trained'.

STEM by Mercury Learning : are they good ?
The Humble Bundle seems cool, but I've never read any of those.

One professor told me Golang is the Future, the head of STEM at the College had never heard of Go. What do you guys think?