This story infuriates me.
[1]no ducks in a row by :
a long farewell to the tech industry
I suppose one could say that I'm losing hope. In fact, I've always
been losing hope, one small papercut at a time. Yet, after the
publication of the black hole image, the rate of loss of hope has
accelerated dramatically. After news broke out of another 'diversity
manifesto' incident - this time at Microsoft, it accelerated a bit
more. Sometimes, I have to wonder, why I keep coming back to a place
that clearly believes I can never be as good as my colleagues
because of the way my body looks. In an industry that always makes a
point to talk about "the future", "progress" and that dreadful word
that in practice means the complete opposite than what says in the
dictionary, "meritocracy", we get quite hungup on someone's external
characteristics that have no bearing on how they will do their job.
I thought I could help us fix that, but it looks like no one truly
wants to fix the problem unless it's a quick brushup for an upcoming
photo-op.
…
The point when those kindlings blew up into a fullblown fire was the
day the image of the black hole was published. News outlets had
stories of Dr Katie Bouman, the MIT researcher, who had written the
algorithm to generate the image of the black hole from observations
made by a global team. Within hours, internet message boards were
full of messages discrediting her contribution. The supporting
evidence was found when someone dug up the Github repo with the code
and calculated the percentage of her contributions (in terms of
lines of code written). Every person in software engineering knows
that lines of code is a shit metric to measure someone's
contribution, but alas, the internet bros were at it again.
Shortly after this debate flared up, Mekka Okereke, engineering
director at Google who I follow on twitter, [2]wrote a thread about
it. Dr Katie Bouman "survived" this challenge, to quote Mekka,
because she had all of her ducks in a row - enough ducks and good
enough ducks to satisfy the nasty commetators looking to discredit
her - a PhD from MIT and a professorship at CalTech. That is how
good, how amazingly excellent you have to be, to survive in this
industry.
Do read the entirety of the article.
Some people, a minority, suck. They use social network services (SNS)
to broadcast their suck. On SNS, their suck gets amplified.
Don't contribute to their amplification. Pity them instead. They may
not know better. If they do, pity them anyway. Let them know.
__________________________________________________________________
My original entry is here: [3]no ducks in a row. It posted Tue, 23 Apr
2019 11:00:58 +0000.
Filed under: culture,
References
1.
https://winterflower.github.io/2019/04/22/no-ducks-in-a-row/
2.
https://twitter.com/mekkaokereke/status/1116870900517785600
3.
https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=2731
