You seem to be focusing on a situation where there is a proposed solution with an obvious bad outcome, and somehow you are the only one smart enough to realize it will lead to a bad outcome.
In my experience this is very rarely the actual case. Usually there are multiple viewpoints, multiple solutions, and while some may be slightly better than others, the effort of having the debate is much more time and resource-intensive than just accepting one of the solutions.
> the effort of having the debate is much more time and resource-intensive than just accepting one of the solutions.
Man, have you ever seen bad code?
For an example, suppose someone comes up with the idea of making dozens of mini-modules with poorly defined interfaces, each one having no clue about what's going on globally, that should somehow contribute to solving a simple problem. Each interacts with each other through some sort of worm hole where you have only a vague idea what's on the other side.
Another possibility is to look at the requirements as a whole and write a single module that solves the problem in a straightforward way. Now, should one accept the first idea and write 3 or 4 times the amount of hard to code, the code being unmaintainable because the interactions between the many moving parts are very hard to understand? Just because everybody thinks that's how it should be done?
By definition the answer you think best is the answer that all of your skills and all of your experiences guide you to. I’m saying you have an obligation to fight for what you know is the right answer. There is nothing ethical about allowing people to make decisions that you believe will be catastrophic. You are being paid for your expertise — don’t accept money if you are not willing to do what you can to ensure a good outcome.
This has nothing to do with having a debate in a meeting, indeed, often the best strategy is to avoid the meeting altogether.
Yes, agreed but that is what I also wrote, you should prevent catastrophic outcomes. I did not wrote anything what you implied in previous comment. I only implied that there is many technical decisions which are nowhere near to catastrophic.
Like picking tabs vs spaces, I am not going to fight about it, it is not a decision that will make any difference for product.
I’m also wary of accepting controversial opinions at face value, and fully support your skepticism here. She’s not my favorite messenger, either. I don’t think ad-hominem attacks are fair, though.
The article is full of references to evidence outlining her position. Do you have any critique of her arguments you can share?
Not a 'good idea', but it's partly because the same password is used for telephone banking. And people seem to have trouble with typing long passwords on numerical keypads.
Julia Enthoven shared her experience as a Woman in tech, and this thread is filled with nitpicking, asking for sources, disagreement, alternate theories, debates, etc.
There is no empathy here. So I'll start:
Good for her for sharing her thoughts and experiences. It's a tough topic to talk about, and as we see here and elsewhere, people will immediately pick apart everything you say. Individual experiences like these are useful to read about for people like me who recognize that there is a problem but don't really know what to do about it. So thank you, Julia. I'm sorry it is such a difficult topic, but I hope you keep talking about this and that others are encouraged to do so as well.
That attitude doesn't help the cause of women in tech. It makes things worse.
Machines don't have empathy. They do not care about feelings. Code is harsh. So are professional code reviewers. Therefore if you're a programmer, you will in fact spend a lot of time dealing with nitpicking issues, finding sources for claims you make, debating alternative theories and so on.
If women can't even do that in debates they start then they should give up in being programmers. They won't make it and they won't get along with their colleagues.
I don't think they are incapable of such things, as I always get the impression posts like this one ("why can't you just respect her opinion") are actually written by men. But her compiler won't give her opinions automatic respect. Why should anyone else?
There are lots of posts of this nature, but there's also many, many posts that give the other side of the story -- explaining why young men in this field don't engage with women.
So, I think there is a good deal of empathy here. We understand that women feel excluded and have offered insight into why they may be excluded, which in turn can help society figure out how to help the next generation overcome this.
Another way to look at the comments is to look at the audience. HackerNews readers are typically hard problem solvers. They discuss theories and solutions, and can't be afraid of avoiding potential causes because they make people uncomfortable.
So while your post has empathy, it doesn't really push the solution-finding process forward in the way that other, more active (vs passive), posts do.
And passive empathy without action is pointless. How much data needs to be gathered before an action becomes clear? Should we all not take any action until then?
Because the actions that would be obvious outcomes of the identified problems are pointless to suggest, they will never happen.
For example, a key issue identified in this discussion is the perceived career risk of being friends with women at work. Stories have been shared about harmless comments that came back to bite innocent men years later, or being described as creepy, and of course, we've all seen the string of high profile men losing their jobs based on mere tweets.
An obvious action that could address this is for women to stop collectively insisting that they never lie and that they should be able to shoot down the career of any man based on nothing more than a complaint to HR. But there is no sign this will happen, why would people give up such power.
Better weather, definitely. But is anyone claiming San Franciso or Seattle are more 'world city' than Toronto or Montreal? By almost any definition of world city, they would be very wrong.
I'm from Toronto and San Francisco is a world class city. Last time I visited it felt like a city from the future. It felt alive even the homeless have evolved trying to get you to buy poetry instead of just begging.
Me and most of my engineering friends faced this decision 5 years ago. We all had to decide between offers from one of the big 5, or remaining in the Toronto-Waterloo region. I'm the only one who stayed. And that's only because I was presented with a really interesting opportunity not available to most.
I can only speak to the University of Waterloo, but there was this idea that the only goal worth perusing was a cali job. 'Cali or Bust' was one of those sayings that was said jokingly, but you know, people were also kind of serious about it. Even really great paying jobs in Toronto or Waterloo are not as desirable as the exact same position out west.
It's not so much that people are paid better in the bay area, but the jobs are plentiful, more interesting, more opportunities. Endless opportunities in fact.
Bay area best case scenario is top of the world. Founder of a world-wide renowned company.
Best case scenario for being in waterloo: Founder of a huge telcom handset manufacturer until shifting markets cause massive failure written about in economics textbooks as "what not to do"
>
Best case scenario for being in waterloo: Founder of a huge telcom handset manufacturer until shifting markets cause massive failure written about in economics textbooks as "what not to do"
I'm sorry, but this is absolutely not true. Not only did the company you're talking about pay out incredibly well for its founders, but Waterloo is dramatically different today.
Are you talking about Nortel, Blackberry, QNX, or some other failed lake Ontario company? I'm afraid the original poster was spot-on, you just need to realize the long history of Canadian tech self-destructing ...
Honestly, best case for being in Waterloo is come work for Google Waterloo. If you can get through the interview you won't find a better opportunity anywhere. Working for the FANG in the Valley sucks compared to working for the FANG while having Kitchener-Waterloo living costs.
Or go work for Google in SV and then transfer back here after a few years.
How many non-upvoted life-changing posts have you come across? I've been visiting hn and reddit almost every day for maybe 8 years now, and the answer for me is zero.
I find the time and effort needed (as well as the mental stress) to make sure I am not missing out on anything is not worth the end result.
A quick scan of the front page gives me more than enough interesting material.
Malaria nets have been shown by many organizations as being one of the most effective use of funds possible. There are very few ways to more easily and effectively reduce pain and suffering in this world. Your comparison is ridiculous.
My SO teaches elementary math, and we've had a few discussions about this.
When teaching a new concept, say the area of a parallelogram, she will present the concept in multiple different ways:
- Give printouts of parallelograms on graph paper, so the students can count the number of squares in a parallelogram. Also give them scissors and see what happens.
- Give students two triangles and a square (which they know how to get the areas of already), as well as some tape.
- Simply give students the length of the base, height, and the area of multiple parallelograms.
The interesting thing is that there will be a somewhat equal split among which way makes the concept click for the students. Some will instantly start counting squares on graph paper and figure it out. Some will tape the different shapes together and go from there. Others will play with the base and height numbers and arrive at a formula.
So while "learning styles" may be a misnomer, I do believe that presenting one topic in a variety of ways is beneficial.
I strongly agree in presenting a topic in a variety of ways since being able to relate new information to information already known is a major key to learning new concepts. The more ways a topic is presented, the better chance a person's brain can relate it to something already known.
I have a strong assumption that when many people hear "learning styles", they assume it to this instead of auditory vs visual.
> I have a strong assumption that when many people hear "learning styles", they assume it to this instead of auditory vs visual.
Or the assume each individual only benefits from one in all situations (being half awake, interested in the subject, etc, etc). Which is a ridiculous assumption once you really think about it.
And yet I've have teachers growing up who gave classes workshops to help them identify their learning style, as if it was as inherent as a pokemon type.
> The more ways a topic is presented, the better chance a person's brain can relate it to something already known.
Well there’s that, but it also goes further. The more ways a topic is presented, the more context there is for the learner to see how those things relate to each other. Give me both a formula and a graph and I will be able to use them together to better understand the concept. They reinforce each other.
> So while "learning styles" may be a misnomer, I do believe that presenting one topic in a variety of ways is beneficial.
Absolutely. I think "learning styles" is a reductionist view of Universal Design for Learning [1], which is essentially what you described how your SO teaches.
It's quite possible that at a given time, someone may be inclined to visual learning, but may be more kinesthetically inclined in another setting/moment.
I love it, and I think most people here will as well.
And it highlights how important it is to not force one method of learning on children. So even if one thinks that we shouldn't teach multiple learning styles, it's important to keep the lessons in Lockhart's Lament in mind:
Discovery is important. Variety is important. Rote memorization is not.
What you're describing is usually called teaching methods, rather than learning styles. Teaching methods are real, figuring out which ones work best is a field of its own, like mathematics education research. But the article is specifically about learning styles, which is a specific term in psychology and a different idea. I think it's unnecessarily confusing to mix up the two, learning styles aren't real and definitely not a "misnomer".
The way we define area is in terms of little squares. (We could use little equilateral triangles or little right-angled isosceles triangles or some other unit instead, but we don't, conventionally preferring squares.)
So the way to learn about areas in general is to start with the area of a unit square = 1, and then clarify the properties of area in general, notably that we can cut and paste shapes without changing the total area, as long as we don't overlap them, which means we can count up the number of unit squares and that tells us the area of a figure. Most of the rest can be figured out by students if guided by a well organized set of problems which build on each-other.
We can proceed to first finding areas of shapes made using axis-aligned sides of natural number lengths on a square grid. For these the area can be found by directly counting squares, and e.g. by natural number multiplication in the case of rectangles. Then we can look at the areas of other shapes with vertices on a square grid. Then we can look at the areas of rectangles with rational side lengths (no longer nicely on the original unit grid; instead we need to make a finer grid to count, resulting in rational-number areas, since we must relate the grid units). Then we can next proceed to parallelograms – in a square-area-unit conventional world these are arguably more fundamental than triangles, but we could deal with right-angled triangles at about the same time. Triangles where we can find base and height can come next; these can be split into a pair of right-angled triangles or duplicated and glued into a parallelogram. After that finding areas of other shapes (e.g. with irrational side lengths) takes more machinery from Euclidean geometry (starting from the Pythagorean theorem), and can be delayed a while.
While talking about parallelograms it would be nice to take some squares and other rectangles outside and look at the shadows they cast on the ground. This is a nice chance to introduce the concept of affine transformations, which preserve parallel lines and area ratios, as we can see by observing the shadow cast by a square grid (e.g. made of wire or drawn on a transparency sheet), especially if we have some translucent shapes lying on the grid. Basic transformation geometry (especially discussions of reflection/rotation/translation [isometries] and snowflakes, wallpaper tilings, etc., and affine transformations) is accessible at quite a young age and some hugely valuable topics to introduce early so that kids will be prepared to extend them later. More general projective transformations can wait a while.
In my experience this is very rarely the actual case. Usually there are multiple viewpoints, multiple solutions, and while some may be slightly better than others, the effort of having the debate is much more time and resource-intensive than just accepting one of the solutions.