deference error

I’m going to struggle to write this post, because I wish to remain generic enough to have some semblance of anonymity while also diving into the deeply personal, but I feel the topic if important enough and topical for me at the moment to warrant a few notes.

A long while ago, I had a conversation about my tech career with a line manager and one of the comments that I received was that I was to deferential to my team mates and colleagues (all men, as usual in this line of work). Although most of them were senior to me in title and surely senior in pay, I was still their peer, I was told and so should act that way. I assume this deduction came about because of late, I’ve stopped caring when I’m interrupted in meetings and when my ideas are co-opted and re-hashed as someone else’s. I simply don’t believe it’s worth my very limited time and energy to fight against someone who already believes that I am intrinsically less capable to do my job, because of some external and biological factors.

So these days, instead of vocally being labeled the bitch on the team, I simply let go and peacefully flow along. This act of distancing and letting go and in general accepting that no matter how much I want to be one of those “women-in-tech” eggs that gets thrown at the wall of techbro sexism and general bullshit and survives intact, my shell, after these five years, is wearing kind of thin and I still have the better part of the marathon to run. I can’t be taking many more hits or the pieces are going to start coming off.

And this peaceful coasting had been working well for me until this conversation.

It seemed, for a second, unfathomable to believe a few things. First, that I was apparently performing on the same level as my more senior colleagues, but an actual promotion was still far away in the future. Second, the presence of this ever thinning double-edge that I constantly walk on. Seem too assertive and aggressive and risk being labeled the difficult to work with bitch on the team. Don’t get into debates with people to keep the team spirit peaceful and be labeled too deferential? You just can’t win in this game.

In the past half a year my conviction to continue down this technical career path has become threadbare. I can barely remember why I got into this profession. Oh yes, I liked solving problems, and writing up the solution as small silicon thoughts that I could then run on an auxiliary silicon brain - I mean how cool is that?

But then I realised that being the other on every team would mean that my career would quickly become about bumping into various glass ceilings and navigating the various cracks to see if maybe at some remote point in time when finally I was done proving myself over and over again, I’d finally “make it” and just as these thoughts were crossing my mind, I realised that once I’d “made it”, so what? There would be yet another ceiling and the same thoughts and feelings would be present again.

I’ve written about stepping away from the traditional tech scene - you know, the massive vendor sponsored conferences, the tech t-shirts and endless bucketloads of swag, the conversations where people begin by namedropping the computer they learnt to program on (if it’s not Commodore64 apparently you are not 1337 enough to sit with us at the lunch table) and their first programming language (if it’s not C or Pascal, then what are you even doing in this industry, lol?) to gatekeep the people who they don’t deem “technical enough” - a favourite phrase that gets thrown around all the time - but until now, I’ve still been biding my time, waiting for the last straw on the camel’s back.

I’m stepping away and I’m going to try to remember the person I was five years ago and what were the things I valued and wanted to do. And then maybe, I’ll come back and I’ll create my own version of tech, because after all, the way tech - the industry - is now is not the way it has always been and not the only way for it to be.

a bold type of catnip

Binge-watching only became a thing when I was finishing high school and getting ready to enter college, so I never really got into it. I liked my TV old-school, one episode per week, with sweet and bitter cliffhangers tiding me over from one week to another. As I’ve grown older, the need to be completely enveloped in a fictional world has increased and, as it turns out, there is nothing better than binge-watching session on your favourite streaming service to procrastinate on dealing with the fact that my penchant for avocado toast and Starbucks lattes is tanking my generation’s economic prospects.

I don’t have a wide array of binge-watching material. Instead, I get obsessively fixated on a series and then go through all of the episodes and all the seasons several times. I have now watched all of the seven seasons of the Good Wife three or four times and am onto my 4th re-watch of the entire series of the Bold Type, which brings us to the subject of this post: my current obsession with, as New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino put it, woke fantasy, the Bold Type. The series depicts the lives of three young 20-somethings, Kat, Sutton and Jane, working in the New York office of Scarlet magazine, a forward thinking, Cosmopolitan-like publication. Jane is a junior writer, Kat heads the social media department and Sutton starts out working as an assistant to editor Lauren Park and then, as the show progresses, accepts a dream role as an assistant in the fashion department. Though the publishing company’s board is older and whiter than presidential portrait gallery, the writers headed by Jacqueline Carlyle, the magazine’s cult editor-in-chief, manage to push through to deliver progressive, politically-engaged content. The show follows Kat, Sutton and Jane as they navigate their careers and private lives.

What struct me when I was reading Jia Tolentino’s review of the TV series was her chracterisation of the TV show as catnip for young women working in the media industry. A sort of wish fulfillment come true. The TV show has become catnip for me too, as a sort-of ‘what-if’, what my own career in tech could be like if only I didn’t need to spend half my time apologising for my gender.

This might turn dark, but I’ve now spent five years in the technology industry and I feel like the words ‘wasted’ and ‘exhaust’. Tired and worn thin, warily staring at the very long horizon of Same Shit, Diffeent Day. True to the tech-idustry ethos of changing workplaces as frequently as we change socks, I’ve worked across a wide variety of sectors and technologies. The work has been interesting and challenging, but the work environment, has, most of the time, been anything but. Most disappointing of all, has been the elephant-in-the-room of gender. From overt really unacceptable stuff that was routine at my first workplace to the more mundane ‘why are you wearing lipstick’ kind of comments, it has been anything but a joy to work in and I keep longing for a workplace, like the (fantasy) one depicted in the Bold Type.

Maybe one day.

a translation of edith södegran's poem - stars

The first flat I rented here in Sweden was tucked into a quiet corner of Stockholm’s hipster neighbourhood Soder. It was a 1930’s house with tall ceilings and windows that opened west towards the spire of Sofia kyrka (Sofia church).

Beside the windows was a tall bookshelf that stretched from floor to ceiling. My landlord had arranged the books according to the colours of the book jackets and I spent the first, lonely days of February, snowed in and still missing a previous home, lying on the sofa and tracing the colours from violet to blue to green, to yello and and orange and red, reading the author and title of each.

A small book with a lavender jacket had a familiar name that I hadn’t heard since my high school days in Helsinki: Edith Sodegran, a Finnish Swedish-speaking poet from the 1920s and one of the first to write lyrical poetry.

I remembered a poem of hers I had admired as a teenager: Stjärnorna - stars. Since I’ve always had an interest in translation - in particular translation of poetry, which is often an order more challenging than translation of other texts and I need to get back on track with my Swedish, I’ve decided to attempt a translation of my own (with a bit of help from the Finnish language translation by Uuno Kailas).

The original poem can be found here on the project Runeberg website. The numbers in the translation are my additions and refer to the corresponding sections in the notes on the translation.

Stars

At nightfall, 
I stand on the stair and listen,
the stars are swarming (1) in the garden
and I am out in the darkness (2)
Listen - a star fell with a tinkle! (3)

Don't step on the grass with bare feet,
my garden is full of shards. (4)

Notes on the translation

1. The word used in the original Swedish is svarma, which can mean any kind of syncrhonised motion like flocking or swarming. I chose to use swarming in this context, because the image Sodegrans text most often evokes in my mind is that of a garden at nightfall teeming with fireflies, expect they are not fireflies at all but stars!

2. The original Swedish text for this line read och jag står ute i mörkret, which literally translated would be something like And I stand out in the darkness. I debated for a long time whether or not I should keep the stand, because it seems to be a symmetric complement to the “I stand on the stair” in the second line.

3. The original Swedish text uses the word klang which describes a delicate sound reminiscent of two delicate glass figurines colliding, so to translate it as the more crude metallic like clang, would, in my opinion, not be faithful to the original, so I’ve chosen to use “tinkle” here in spite of it’s other connotations.

4. Something closer to the original might have been to say “my garden is full of shrapnel”, but the word “shrapnel” has a more metallic connotation and I thought it might detract from the overarching image of portraying the stars as delicate glass pieces.

the benefit of the technical doubt

Who gets the benefit of the technical doubt in the tech industry and who has to go out of their way to prove they belong?

Editor’s note: Finished an published on the 30th of May, 2019.

Even Sisyphus - the mythical man condemned to push a rock up a slope - gets to the top eventually. But just as he’s reached the top of the mountain, the rock rolls back down and he has to start all over again. Or something of that sort. The precise details of this story have left me.

The reason my neural circuits sometimes conjure this image if that it strongly correlates with the feeling one sometimes gets being an underindexed (to borrow a term from Cate Huston) person in the tech industry.

Not a long time ago, I sat in the office of a professor at my university and talked about the tech industry. You have to be good, really good to make it, she said. I knew she was good and yet she’d chosen not to enter the industry. I also knew I wasn’t good. And I knew she knew I wasn’t. In another context, this might have sounded like a peptalk and perhaps it was intended as such, but now with hindsight and with my history of success or lack of thereof in many of the subjects I attempted, she was perhaps trying to give me a fair warning to not raise my expectations of success in this field too high.

The gift and curse of youth is the boundless naivete, which makes us so completely utterly convinced that ‘we know better’. The rules apply to everyone else, but not to me. I will definitely be the exception to the rule. It only takes a few good, hard disappointments to realise that while exceptions do happen, most of us probably won’t be in circumstances exceptional enough to be exceptional.

So I took my professor’s advice as a rallying cry. As long as I tried hard enough to excel in tech, I too could succeed. The zeal with which I immersed myself in everything from late night coding to meetups and giving conference talks quickly dissipated when I realised that just as I thought I’d accumulated enough of tech street cred to not have my basic technical work questioned, I’d have to start all over again. Just like that guy rolling the rock up a hill.

A few memorable moments have remained. Sitting in a meeting with the QA engineering team and talking about mocking, I get interrupted by another member of the team so that we can all make sure “I am absolutely sure I know the difference between mocks and stubs”. While geeking out about tech with the people in my graduate engineering program, one of them stops talking mid-sentence, turns to look my way and, with a concerned look on his face, says “You do know what XOR means, right?” What he means: I mean, you don’t look like you would know what XOR means.

It’s ok when it’s small things like this. They’re paper cuts, but in the big picture one can probably live with it. When it becomes real, is when my peers are promoted to managers and tech leads and retain the inkling of the same biases that made them ask those questions in the first place. It means that they will be customers of the tech company I work at and they won’t want me on site, leading the project, because I might not be technical enough. They will be the manager who sits in the meetings of the promotions committee, looking over my profile, and they will say to themselves, ‘yes, but is she really technical?’. They will be the tech lead who will choose to give the challenging engineering project to the early career engineer just because he looks like ‘he knows what he’s doing’, he has the benefit of the technical doubt.

While working at Big Co, an internal user was asking for help in my team’s technical chat. I offerred a solution and the user came back asking the exact same question, but directing it specifically to male colleague, who gave the user the exact same answer I had posted. At the same Big Co, I went downstairs to talk to an engineer from an upstream team who had introduced a bug into our codebase and thus caused a production outage. He refused to listen until my male colleague came with me.

You can have thick skin and learn not to take these things personally, even though they clearly are about nothing else than what’s in my underwear and yet you can acknowledge that pushing this rock of “technical chops” up the damn hill is a Sisyphean task. Everytime you think you’ve finally proved yourself, along comes yet another hill, the rock rolls back down and the process starts all over again.

I’m not good at tech, so it’s no surprise I’m still pushing the damn rock up the hill and will continue doing it until the end, but there are underindexed folks who are really good and they are still stuck doing the same damn routine just because they never get the “benefit of the technical doubt”. They never get assigned on the stretch assignments or the important customer meetings, because it’s important that “they prove they have the technial skills” before they can be given these challenges.

the tableflip club

We are told to lean in to get a seat at the table. But who built the table? Who decided how many seats there are around it? Who designed the structures that support it?

A few days ago, the AI Now institute published its report on the diversity crisis in AI - opens a PDF file. Among a wealth of material, it contained an interesting passage about the work of Sarah Banet-Weiser,

As she [Banet-Weiser] describes it, “the inclusion of women becomes the solution for all gender problems, not just those of exclusion or absence. It is, of course, important to have bodies at the table, but their mere presence doesn’t necessarily challenge the structure that supports, and builds, the table in the first place”

The phrasing - the extended metaphor of the seat at the table, which the gospel of Lean In tells us to desire - remained with me. It echoed back to 2015, when someone started a tumblr called table flip dot club. “Women are leaving your tech company because you don’t deserve to keep us around.”, the manifesto begins. It goes on to describe what is essentially a big fuck-you to the politics of the Lean In movement- it’s a table flip movement. We’re done with bargaining for the smallest corner seat at the table, we’re flipping over the table and starting over.

It was a co-incidence that this same turn of phrase found its way into the AI Now Institute’s report in the form of Sarah Banet-Weiser’s words. In all of this discussion about getting more diverse voices at the table to build large data hoovering systems, we’re not stopping to ask who built the table and why? Who is keeping it propped up and for what purpose?

When we make an argument for diversity at that table, we should also be talking about the table, who built and why should we seek their approval to join the table.

This is what I am hoping the next generation of movements for inclusion in the technology industry will achieve: not just helping diverse folks get seats at the table, but rebuilding the table completely from scratch.