Posts made by faraday

@Darinelle said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

Ribald jokes are the least of your worries. I can brush off a ridiculous joke or a smarmy attitude (that doesn't involve touching, don't fucking touch me at work). But being ignored and talked over in meetings and having to wait for a man to repeat my ideas will destroy my enjoyment of what should be a good job, and honestly it's doing a disservice to the team because you've now hired someone and then forced her to underperform because you won't let her. Don't do that thing.

I just wanted to echo this. Occasionally the jokes or topics go overboard ("Guys, can we not talk about picking up hookers in Vegas while out at lunch with our new summer intern?" -- true story), but the general dismissal is the most pervasive day-to-day problem I've seen in tech.

@BlondeBot said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

I have never heard of 'Sorry, I'm not coming in today because I'm volunteering.' being an acceptable excuse to miss work in any vocation, for any gender.

I have (from some more socially-focused companies), but that's completely beside the point here.

I think that there are two points being argued here, and that they're getting confused because they're related but distinct.

• A bias against people with outside of work commitments, which may impact their ability to do the extracurricular things that employers look for in the hiring process (my original point).
• A bias against people with obligations during work hours, which may necessitate them using more of their PTO days than someone else without said obligations. (Gany's point)

Neither of these is explicitly bound to gender. There was a single dad at my previous job who took just as much time off for kid obligations as me, a single mom.

However it is well-demonstrated that women, statistically, are frequently the target of these biases, and that it is a part of why women are underrepresented in the tech industry.

Also bear in mind, nobody's said that anyone of any gender should be given a pass for taking unexcused absences beyond the company's allowed amount, nor should they be given a pass for not being able to meet the requirements of their job.

@BlondeBot said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

The person who can show up more often, when asked, on short notice has the advantage.

There are certainly some jobs where that's the case, but there are tons of jobs where it isn't. Particularly the M-F 9-5 jobs that you tend to find in the tech industry. As long as the person is able to fulfill their assigned schedule, with time off within the company's allowed limits, who the heck cares what their schedule is outside of work? They could be working three jobs to support their ailing mother, they could have a kid, how is that any of the company's business?

@Ganymede said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

I can remember our new associate frustrated and in tears because she had to take yet another day off because of a sick child. She was worried (because I was not a partner at the time) that she might lose her job because she was taking too much time off too soon from her hire.

That's exactly the sort of thing I'm referring to, yes. Statistically, this falls more on women more than men, and especially on single parents.

Now an employer can look at that and say: "Wow, if I hire this lady she might have to take time away from work for her kids - I'll hire this other guy instead because all I care about is hours in seats" or an employer can look at that and say: "Hmm... maybe the fact that we don't allow all parents to take the time they need off for familial obligations is detrimental to their emotional well-being and places an undue burden on one gender and an implicit hiring bias. Maybe we should fix that, huh?"

You see the same thing when it comes to parental and family leave, which often is biased against men.

@Tempest said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

What in the world does being a minority have to do with how much time you have to devote to things? If you as a person have 20 different responsibilities outside of work, that are going to render you incapable of doing what your employer expects of you, that sounds like a personal problem that, again, has literally nothing to do with sex or race or any of that.

I said nothing about their ability to work. I was talking about things outside of work.

There are studies/articles on this very subject. You can go read them if you like. My point is that responsibilities outside of work should have nothing to do with your qualifications for work. If you can do your job, that's all that should matter. But in reality that's not all that matters. Employers bias towards people based on perceptions about their commitment or their ability to do things outside of work, and that causes a bias in hiring against certain demographics.

@Sparks said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

Now maybe it genuinely is just an idle philosophical exercise to some people to shift discussion of "how" to "if" instead. But to a lot of us in the STEM fields? It is part of our daily professional life in some way or another, not just some abstract thought exercise.

I'll start by saying that I don't believe that @Ghost's comment "if you take a female candidate who isn't as skilled..." was intended with any malice. That said, everything Sparks said is accurate. This is a daily grind. It sucks. It's exhausting. And "Just hire the best person for the job" is one of those arguments that is quite frequently trotted out to trivialize the very real struggles that women/POC/LGBTQ candidates face in tech.

Here's a concrete example that has nothing and everything to do with gender. It's quite trendy for software companies these days to expect candidates to do all kinds of extracurricular activities. Conferences. Open source projects. Community engagement. Or they'll make doing some kind of coding project--requiring hours of work--part of the interview process. Sounds great on paper, right? Anybody who's doing all that crap outside of work must be super devoted.

But you know who doesn't have time for that kind of stuff? People with families. Especially women. Also other minority candidates who may face additional social challenges that divert their attention outside of work.

Does that make them any worse at doing their job? Only if the core facet of the job is "your ability to work on your job outside of working hours", which is a pretty crappy reason to hire somebody.

There's plenty of research to support the idea that having a more diverse workforce is valuable, so this should be something we strive to change. But unless we challenge our preconceived notions about what constitutes a good candidate and recognize the inherent biases in the hiring processes and culture in tech, we're never going to make progress.

@Ghost said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

What you're in is a Catch-22 with your politics....I can tell you that not a one would be alright with having gotten a sort of socio-political bump over their skill set to support their gender/culture/religious tropes.

While I agree that nobody should be hired solely because of their gender/culture/etc. if they can't do the job, there are well-documented systemic biases and challenges that do require conscious thought and effort to combat. It's very easy for somebody to fall into the trap of thinking that "the best person for a job" is somebody exactly like them, who does the job in the same way they do. And that's the kind of BS thinking that leads to non-diverse workplaces.

ETA - There are a ton of articles about bias in hiring decisions. Here's a nice one: 7 Practical Ways to Reduce Bias in Your Hiring Process, and its lead paragraph is pretty spot-on:

A vast body of research shows that...unconscious racism, ageism, and sexism play a big role in who gets hired.

If something is unconscious, it takes conscious thought to overcome it, so it's good that @Arkandel is taking the time to think about these things.

@Sparks said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

Seriously, it is actually considered very bad practice at my workplace. Leaving commits in smaller chunks makes it /way/ easier to figure out which change exactly broke a build or introduced some kind of instability, and to roll just that change back. It's really important on firmware projects.

Totally derailing the subject, but we use squashed commits for PRs because when you've got dozens of devs all contributing to the same codebase, you don't need to be spammed with everyone's: "Doing X" "More X" "Fixing X" "Unit tests for X" "Typo in fix for X" iterations along the way. A single squashed PR commit for "X" is the way to go. This assumes that your PRs are reasonable and you aren't tackling 17 features or changing the world in a single PR.

@Sparks said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

In fairness, Ruby's actually a perfectly fine language and well worth learning. I'm personally just used to using Python on a daily basis to create CI build scripts at work, for machine learning stuff (which is primarily in Python these days, it feels like), and so on. After so much Python, doing Ruby always feels like I'm driving someone else's car for a bit; I know how to do everything, but the windshield wiper toggle is in the wrong place, the parking brake is a pedal versus a stick, etc. So I just have to force my mind into Ruby mode instead of thinking Pythonically, and that annoys me enough that I default to Python for things.

Side tangent. I think that's just a matter of being used to one vs the other. I think that Python is a perfectly fine language as well, but as someone who learned Ruby first, there's just a cognitive dissonance because things are similar enough to feel like: "Oh! I know this!" But different enough to be like: "Crap, that totally doesn't work."

Ares started out in Python, but there were roadblocks that proved easier to overcome in Ruby.

@Arkandel said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

For instance does a question such as "we're currently a team consisted only of men, how do you feel about that?" sound like we're preparing to listen for feedback and keep things professional, safe and constructive or signal we might be shedding too much of a spotlight on gender right out of the gate?

I think anyone who works in tech is already aware of and used to the imbalance. (I have frequently been the only woman on my team.) Calling attention to it like that seems like an uncomfortable spotlight that would probably be taken the wrong way.

I will also second everything that @Sparks said. Particularly the issue about writing actual code under pressure. Sure it sounds good on paper as a live skills test, but for introverted people and/or women (and lucky me as an introverted woman) it can be particularly nerve-wracking.

@Ganymede said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

no conflict resolution system is free of staff adjudication, so it all falls to staff to figure this stuff out, make the rules, and stick them.

Yep. I will say though, echoing what @ZombieGenesis said earlier, as staff, I think stats can help reduce some headaches.

When players can't agree and call me in to sort out the mess, they generally react better when I tell them to roll some dice vs when I just say "Arsenal wins". Either way the loser grumbles (because if they didn't mind losing, they wouldn't have needed to call me in the first place!) but I'll take "your system sucks" grumbling over "clearly Arsenal is just your favorite because he's your buddy" grumbling.

But the presence of stats doesn't really help too much for players sorting things out amongst themselves. Sometimes, sure. But usually low-stakes things don't come to rolls at all, even on a stat-based game.

@Ghost said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

Altogether though, I think the class of musher who prefers diceless all-consent games may be a slightly different creature than the one who is comfortable with stats and dice resolution.

I know many people who are equally comfortable on both (including myself), so I really don't think the gulf you're describing exists. Certainly, though, there are folks who only like one or the other.

@ZombieGenesis said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

. You're saying: Why not just always be reasonable? And others are saying: Not all people are reasonable all the time and dice based/level based systems help compensate for that.

Dice-based systems don't force people to be reasonable. I've seen countless situations where players don't agree on what should be rolled, what modifiers should apply, what the outcome represents, etc. And that's just on games based on real-life physics. Throw in superpowers and I can only imagine the "But I should be able to X" arguments increasing.

Stats can be a tool to help people resolve conflicts, yes. But at the end of the day, unreasonable people are going to break any system and need to be dealt with by staff.

@mietze said in GMs: Typical Player/GM Bad Habits:

Unless you are the ONLY person running events and stuff though, I'm not sure you should worry about doing something to fit everyone's style.

Even if you are, you shouldn't worry about doing something to fit everyone's style. It's okay if a game is not for everyone. Nowhere did staff sign up to say "I must entertain everyone who logs into my game equally". Fairly, yes, according to whatever rules you set forth for your game. But as I remind my kids daily, "fair" is not a synonym for "equal".

@Ghost said in GMs: Typical Player/GM Bad Habits:

All too often, GMs railroad, envision specific methods that are the only solution to their riddle, or punish players for making decisions that the GM may think are stupid.

Yeah, I agree with what you and @Coin said. Like I said in my first post, I think it's a balance. The GM's job is to enable the players to progress in the story, not to stump them, beat them, or railroad them. If they come up with a viable angle that you didn't consider - run with it. If they're going down the completely wrong path - either run with that in a fun way, too, or redirect them, or just handwave it not working out.

At the same time, I think players need to be willing to do some modicum of research into the world and the characters they're playing, and not rely on the GM to give them all the answers because they rolled well. You don't pick up a James Patterson murder mystery expecting the investigation to be written like "And then Alex Cross found some clues!" We get that it's fiction and it's not going to be perfect. We get that not all players/writers are experts in their subject matter. Anyone who's read a book or watched a TV show or movie in their life is quite adept at dealing with this phenomenon. But the good writers at least put forth the effort to make it believable.

@Coin said in GMs: Typical Player/GM Bad Habits:

Let me roll to find the right avenue of investigation or interaction.

There has to be a balance though. Everyone realizes that players don't have the same skills as their PCs. But without players making decisions as to the approach, everything boils down to just dice with no actual storytelling.

I play a lot of Shadowrun, which is often built around heists. Rolls are used to give you tips as to the feasibility of various approaches, but ultimately planning the heist is the whole point of the game. If you just boiled it down to "I roll to figure out what's the best way into this building" and then "I roll to figure out if we succeeded" then it's no fun.

Combat is often done this way too in most games. The GM doesn't make you roll to figure out what the best attack is. You choose the attack, and the dice tell you whether it worked. I don't see why investigation/bluffing/etc. should work fundamentally differently.

Double post since I just stumbled across this on EW tonight and it seemed relevant to the discussion:

The Wachowskis were offered a bigger budget to make Bound a heterosexual love story

Tilly recalled that there was an offer on the table to make the film with a bigger budget — with the stipulation that the Wachowskis rewrite the script and make Gershon’s character a man.

@Ghost said in Fandom and entitlement:

I wanna read up on this stuff, because there's rarely a smoking gun, but I'd like to hear better accounts.

I don't think the problem in Hollywood is as overt as "We hate <POC/women/LGBTQ/etc.>", so there's probably not a "smoking gun" in that sense. The problem is always masked in excuses like: "But that story won't appeal to as wide of an audience" or "But we need a 'bankable star' to lead this" or "But girls don't buy as many toys" or whatever. There are tons of examples in interviews/articles/etc. of that kind of thing happening, though, so in a sense there actually are a lot of smoking guns lying around.

@Ghost said in Fandom and entitlement:

anyone actually seen, read, or heard (interviews/articles) where it's explained by the people who make the decisions that they're not "taking chances" on women or POC?

It’s pretty well documented, yes. There are numerous examples of Hollywood people being asked to change a role from a woman to a man or from a POC to white. Then there are the basic stats on representation (or lack thereof). You can either conclude from this that Hollywood is flat-out racist/sexist or that they have a pervasive belief that such casting is “risky”. Neither is good.

Here’s a nice article on representation: https://paris7masterculture.wordpress.com/2018/12/10/the-representation-of-poc-people-of-color-in-hollywood-a-case-study/

I particularly like the quote from Viola Davis: “The only thing that separates women of color from everyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.”

Also relevant

@Sparks said in X-Cards:

not wanting to be the one who ruined the game

The thing is - that's a valid concern. (Generic) you might be the one that derails the game for everyone else. I once noped out of a plot that a good friend of mine was running (and in fact, had put together in large part for me). They were a good sport about it, but they were understandably bummed.

That's why communication is key. Sometimes players need to bend. Sometimes the GM/game/story needs to bend. Sometimes both can bend a little to meet in the middle.

Maybe tools can help communication, but I'm leery of trying to use code to solve social problems. I think GMs/storytellers/game policies being more up-front that this kind of communication is not only acceptable but encouraged would go a long way.

@surreality said in X-Cards:

I know I was looking at a general RP-prefs setup on-wiki. It wasn't meant just for 'I hate this, don't go there', but with general categories where people could write whatever was relevant to them on any given subject. (Subjects were fairly broad and would have been customizable for any given setting -- ex: 'law enforcement', 'crime', 'romance', 'horror', etc.)

Ares has an optional RP Preferences plugin that lets staff define areas relevant to their game so players can register their preferences and view each others'. I think folks can mention those in their scene/plot/event descriptions if they were so inclined. I personally would have to see that catching on broadly before I would find it worth the effort to codify prefs/tags in a dedicated field in a scene/plot/event description, but that's just mean. Other games could certainly do that with custom code.

@Ghost said in X-Cards:

Because they don't want to be told what their character believes, wants, or has to do based on the game system...The x-card isn't entirely the same as people's aversion to social dice, but I believe it's in the same "spirit family", if you will.

I've stated my dislike of X-Cards as written, but I don't think the other "nope-out" mechanisms are the same category at all.

If I nope-out of a murder scene, that doesn't prevent everyone else from still doing the murder scene without me. If @surreality nopes-out of being strangled, that doesn't prevent the PC from getting clonked on the head (same end result, non-triggering mechanism). There are some gray areas ("I'm triggered by fire so I don't want you to burn down my PC's business" vs "But you pissed off an arsonist!") which I think need to be resolved by discussion, compromises and perhaps off-camera scenes.