No. You are wrong. The original flyer was clearly offering a perk of women delivering beer. The perk is first named "Women:" and then described "Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (female) staff get that for you." That first word "women:" is not aimed at a female audience. It's aimed at a male audience. It's clumsily using stereotypes of programmers as mostly single males. That's pretty offensive in itself.
Thank you. I had trouble finding the original advert and I thought that sentence was the entire ad. When I finally found it, I came back and deleted my posts. Sorry about that.
Sorry for replying three times but after talking about it with my wife for a couple of hours, we both agree...this is an absolute over-reaction and a projection of women's general frustration onto a non-issue.
I'll try to respond to some of your points in this one answer.
You're right, sex wasn't being offered. I was trying to show how specifically mentioning the sex of the servers, in a list of perks, was a shoddy move. It plays to traditional stereotypes of male programmers as lonely losers, and it puts women firmly in the role of subservient to men; not good enough to be there as participants. It's lazy and stupid. It's not as if "treat people with respect"; "don't discriminate against people based on their age, sex, sexual preference, race, or ability"[1] are new concepts.
You mention a mixer, where men and women can meet. (We'll assume "people can meet" because we're not being hetero-normative.) With your mixer it's going to be a social function. Men turn up, women turn up, people meet and talk. There'll be other people working there. People serving the drinks, for example. So, you have one group (the people meeting each other, who are different sexes but on an equal[2] footing) and the people serving (who are different sexes, and who are on an equal footing with their colleagues; subservient to the meeting group, but because they are employees and not because they are women.)
You can see that it's different for work or for professional situations. When you're working in an industry that's trying to attract a more diverse workforce you need to try harder not to exclude people.
You mention an event that excludes men. Ignoring the male children that will be helped by that function, you're right, it does seem aimed only at women. But no-one is saying that there are not enough men working in the fashion industry. And there are strong socio-economic factors that mean women with children are more likely to need help than men. (Although I do hope that group considers changing their mandate to include "men and children" too.)
You mention places like "Hooters". In my opinion these places are horrific. I'd feel very uncomfortable if I had a daughter and she worked somewhere like that. But, they are legal, and if people are able to make an informed choice to work there and people are happy to pay money to go there then who am I to judge them or stop them? These are specialised services; they are a niche. There's a big difference between Hooters (who aim at that market; they don't care if women are not customers) and a daily deal API firm who should be proud to be part of the modern inclusive world.
Finally, you say:
> this is an absolute over-reaction and a projection of women's general frustration onto a non-issue.
The over-reaction comes because some people just don't get it. It's the 21st century; suffragettes were campaigning for equality more than a hundred years ago. It's definitely an issue - the wording was clumsy and lazy and stupid. The fact that they got jumped on so hard is a good thing - it shows that people actually care about this stuff.
You mention women's general frustration. That's a really important point. Josie Long (she's an English comedian) says it well here. She talks about the general everyday grind of stuff that she has to put up with, just because she's a women, that her male colleagues don't.
[1] In theory you should have religion in there too.
[2] Dating sucks. It sucks for very different reasons for men and women. I understand men who are annoyed or angry or bitter or frustrated at their dating experiences, and I'd probably agree if they said that men and women are not on an equal footing when it comes to dating. I'm handwaving over it.
"... specifically mentioning the sex of the servers, in a list of perks, was a shoddy move."
I disagree. I don't see anything wrong with it for the same reason that there's nothing wrong with advertising that scantily clad women will be walking around at a comics convention.
" It plays to traditional stereotypes of male programmers as lonely losers, and it puts women firmly in the role of subservient to men..."
In your opinion... and you only have that opinion if you actively work to extrapolate that meaning from what was actually said.
"It's lazy and stupid. It's not as if "treat people with respect"; "don't discriminate against people based on their age, sex, sexual preference, race, or ability"[1] are new concepts."
The problem is that in reality, there are differences between men and women, races/cultures and people with differing levels of ability. That you can't accept those differences and are offended by anyone else that addresses them is where the problem comes in.
That you think women are not being treated with respect here is a fault in your own understanding. There's simply nothing wrong with targeted advertising.
"She talks about the general everyday grind of stuff that she has to put up with, just because she's a women, that her male colleagues don't."
Right, but projecting those frustrations onto something completely harmless is still wrong.
Also, as if to put an exclamation point on this conversation... my company is moving it's office this week and guess who didn't have to do any of the work of moving or disassembling our furniture or other hardware?
I don't hear men complaining about always being targeted for this kind of work. I'm not complaining either, I just happened to remember our conversation as I was lugging our office stuff around. I really don't mind it when a woman says "Oh, I need a big strong guy like you to do X", even when the woman in question could probably handle it herself if she really tried.
Complaining about something like that would just be a waste of time and emotional energy, besides the fact that there's really no need to complain at all if you acknowledge that "equality" is a fiction.
The women themselves were not being offered. Serving of beer by women was being offered. The chance to meet a woman was being offered. Nobody was offering sex with a woman or any kind of woman sex slave.
If I advertise a mixer where men and women can meet each other, does anyone have a problem with that? I don't think so.
Should we all get mad at Hooters or Chipendales next?
(EDIT: Seriously, do you really think that men should be offended that Chipendales exists? Why?)
Also, I'd like to know... what's wrong with appealing to sexual desire?
The women were not being offered as chattel. There's nothing wrong with sex.
You really have to work to be offended by this one. Well, maybe you don't, but it certainly defies logic unless you read into it, which you are most certainly doing because the words themselves don't really back you up.
They wrote two apologies. Their first one was pretty terrible and did not show that they had actually processed why what they did was so offensive.
Their second apology was a bit better. But they claimed that their comment was "aimed to call attention to the male-dominated tech world through humor and intended to be inclusive."
Do they honestly expect us to believe that their comment was designed to be inclusive, so that's why they offered women serving male coders as a perk? (And this isn't just me reading into it. That's very literally what they said.)
I would have much more respect if they just came out and said that, in an attempt humor, they had made immature and sexist remarks and that they understand that their comment was harmful not only to women, but to non-straight men, and to hacker culture as a whole.
They're embarrassed, and rightfully so, but trying to BS around what they were doing doesn't help. Admit your faults directly and people will be much more forgiving.
If I were to theorize that this were a real interview question (which, again, it's not), then I think the first step is to ask a bunch of questions. Almost any solution to this problem will be making a bunch of assumptions, and you probably need to know what those are.
* Okay, your density is the same as it was before being shrunk. What else has changed about your body? Muscular strength? Brain capacity?
* Can you assume that this is an ideal world? For example, if the blades were perfectly balanced and there was no wind / air movement, you could stand in the middle.
* What are the dimensions?
* Is there anything in the blender?
... etc ...
The best solution would depend on which assumptions you make. Any of these could be reasonable answers with different assumptions:
* Jump (an ant or spider could... I think)
* Climb out / above the blades (it's possible the walls have grooves where you can fit your tiny little hands)
* Stand on top of the blades, at the immediate center
And as an ex-hiring committee member myself, I agree with everything Collin there said too. And it pains me that people write blogs / books promoting this brain teaser stuff. Such a disservice to candidates...
If you're finishing your junior year, then yes, that's true. But if you've only done one year of college, then you might have trouble finding a paid internship. Your best bet might be an unpaid internship at a start-up.
As a (female) software engineer at Google, I once staffed a booth at CES. CES doesn't, to my knowledge, have many booth babes, and there certainly weren't any at the Google booth. Despite this, I had a number of people DIRECTLY ask if I was a booth babe. And who knows how many more people just assumed I was and avoided talking to me entirely...
It wasn't a big deal. I mean, I'd seen this my whole life. And that's just the thing. It's every job, every conference, every meetup, every event, and every single conversation. It's constantly having to prove that you're technical.
And even once you've offered up a bunch of credentials, you still aren't perceived as being as technical as a man with the same credentials.
It's exhausting. And I'm so, so tired of it.
Changing how people think is hard; changing company policy is much easier. Ending "booth babes" is one of many steps to ending sexism, but every step counts.
@strlen Again, some of the questions are absolutely 100% FAKE.
So if some questions (like the "why are manhole covers round") are definitely fake, and others seem very weird (like the dead beef one), isn't is more likely that that question is fake too?
> So if some questions (like the "why are manhole covers round") are definitely fake, and others seem very weird (like the dead beef one), isn't is more likely that that question is fake too?
It may sound fake to you, for a specific team you interviewed people for. But, it's an entirely reasonable question to ask for someone who claims low-level experience for a team that actually does low-level work. Use a product your ex-employer has built to search for '0xdeadbeef' and you'll see this technique is not just a piece of esoterica.
There are many kinds of software engineers: a low-level hacker may just be as puzzled by "support vector machines" (why do they need our support?!) as you are by 0xdeadbeef.
[Edit: last point is why lists like this are meaningless. This question likely gets asked by teams who do low-level work, other questions get asked by teams who do machine learning, etc...]
@andylei Yes, some do happen to be real. The point is that if several are definitely fake, why believe the rest?
For example, take this one: "A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?"
Come on, no one was asked that. If even if they were, the hiring committee would take one look and that and throw out the feedback.
As for some of the other questions, like "How much would you charge to wash all the windows in the Seattle?"
(1) This question seems fishy, just because it's about Seattle. Yes, Google has a Seattle office (where I worked), but it has very few PMs. It's far more likely that this question was asked at Microsoft.
(2) This question is actually very standard for consulting question. It's really a totally fair problem solving question, as the accuracy of your final answer doesn't matter.
The Business Insider article is designed to be link bait - reprinting fake questions and building off the "OMG IT'S GOOGLE" stuff. The legitimate questions on this list are actually totally normal for tech and consulting companies.
As a female coder, I'd rather not be offered as a perk to male coders. So, yeah, this is belittling.