nevertheless, she coded

@medz The complete version:

@fastharry Nice job reading.

@sammydog01 it was midnight, lol…

@Thumperchick

I am like most women. Most women have varied talents and tastes and don’t fit into a preconceived package of lace and demure deference. Most women have goals, dreams, drive, and achievements.

I like the way you put that. I wish I’d said it like that in my post.

@katylava @Thumperchick

Certain persons (loving relatives, sigh) attempting to tell me that I was somehow not sufficiently “feminine” (by some cultural standard or other) used to fill me with quiet, unexpressed, slow-and-long-boiling rage.

I argued softly, or not at all, because it was so clearly pointless. I quickly learned that none of these:
[reasonability, rationality, or real measures of social appropriateness and productivity]
were germane to the discussions. It was all about unacknowledged guilt trips and attempts to control or something.

So I came to resist, and stopped being, terribly cooperative with conversations about all that and just made my own choices.

Not sure my senses of social self-presentation and self-preservation are that great: but it’s hardly the thing I’m worse at. So …

My attitude about what are appropriate interests and conduct for females is this:
What do females do or wish to do that is responsible, productive, and/or reasonable (as life, intellectual, personal, social, career, hobbyist, recreational choices) for any human to do?

If someone (anyone) wishes to engage the world in some degree of “traditionally feminine” ways, that’s fine with me.

And if anyone does not, that’s fine with me also.

Women do not owe the world endless services in areas traditionally left to females, aside their/our own individual choices.

Congrats, @katalava, on your choices and perseverance.

And congrats to everyone else who ever pushed back against unwarranted and unjustifiable expectations about limited choices or similar.

And congrats to everyone who stood up to protest abusive practices or cultural straightjackets.

@LordSalem I think it’s not as bad as it used to be when that happens, since frontend is way harder these days. In my current job I got moved from backend to frontend because I was the only full stack engineer on my squad, and we were light on frontend people.

I quickly found that my story point estimates needed to be higher for frontend work than what I had been doing for backend work. The backend’s db and request/response cycle are less complicated than the frontend’s user interaction and state management.

@brhfl

So much if it (non-inclusiveness in tech and other fields) is about “fitting the expected human formula” and about playing a “status and ranking and behavior and power game” that many people just don’t know how to play and that many people are discouraged from playing, as tho they are “not supposed to play” and where some people at times are actively or subtly blocked or waylaid or sabotaged over.

Much if it seems to be about undiscussed and unexamined interpersonal behavior dynamics.

I think most of the issues that cause non-dominant-group people to be dissatisfied within tech are pretty subtle to all but those who struggle with them daily, unless one really looks.

Sometimes it’s hard to see stuff there is no common public vocabulary for. Even tho most people i encounter are pretty decent, we can all be partially blind.

Part of it is learning (and learning to feel comfortable with) “altered standard-role behavioral codes” (both as prescribed and in the perception of others.

I think you prob experience all that as much as anyone.

I hope your current life situation and employment don’t stress you out horribly every day.
Or I hope they are at least “pretty decent”.

@f00l to be fair I had a lot of support from my husband in that he was the only one working while I taught myself to program. I could never hold down a job for more than a few months until I got my first web dev job.

@katylava

I leaned late how to do this effectively for myself:

That individuals of our species can (with some learning and work) totally learn to hack own moods and personal outlooks in completely customized ways.

I suspect most people (esp mature adults) do this routinely and unconsciously a billion times a day. But it can easily become a conscious practice, and thereby a far more powerful one. And people can keep getting way better at it for ongoing decades.

When one is younger it can be harder to get one’s mind between the very strong mood or emotional experience or habitual outlook and the rest of the mental experience. Takes tools and deliberate practice.

Re depression, anxiety, poor social integration, lack of practice with conceptual skills, and similar: this can really narrow down one’s perception of the field of life possibilities.

People who grow up “emotionally healthy” have a naturally far broader sense of potential opportunities (interior experience and IRL). The rest of us get it learn this stuff the hard and slow way, if at all.

Totally sucks to learn this late in life. Sux worse to not learn this at all tho.