HN user
No, mostly because I’m fairly conflict-averse :)
If my coworkers misgender me and aren’t amenable to correction, or otherwise overtly discriminate against me, I’m much more likely to quit and go elsewhere than to fight it.
I think you’re right that this is one of the biggest downsides. It’s possible to feel people out by how they react if I point out discrimination in the product, and if that goes badly I might consider leaving the company before discrimination against me becomes a problem. But I would also say that most of the discrimination I’ve experienced is not really overt enough to be a good early warning system. At some point it becomes irrelevant to wonder “am I not getting promoted because I have X marginalization, or is my work actually not great, or does this person just dislike me specifically for no reason”; better, in my experience, to consider it one of life’s mysteries and try to find a new job.
I think it’s hard to tell; people like me tend to not be heard a lot in these kinds of conversations. But I feel like there are enough of us that it’s better to exercise caution and specifically carve out opt-in spaces for political discussion if you really want them to exist — marginalized people often have a lot of trauma related to their marginalization and it’s easy to inadvertently hurt people with careless political discussion.
When I can, I try to point out “hey, we need to caption this” or “hey, I’m not sure this is accessible to visually impaired users” or “uh, these gender options suck”. Probably wouldn’t bring up my personal identity unless it was somehow relevant, which it rarely is in these kinds of discussions. I think it would be inappropriate to have a discussion about broader politics (“hey, what do you guys think of the bathroom bill?”) in this context — the thing that personally drives me up the wall is water-cooler conversation about politics like it’s a sport, when it’s unrelated to the product or the company.
I’m trans and disabled, and I’d rather work with someone who thinks people like me shouldn’t exist but keeps their mouth shut about it at work than someone who thinks work is a great place to debate hot-button trans issues. Of course, other marginalized people may feel differently.
I’m hard of hearing and need automatic meeting captions. At a company that uses Google Meet, these are free. If the company is on Zoom and needed to subscribe to a third-party transcription service, let’s say that’s maybe $25/month, which is a fraction of my hourly wage as an engineer. It’s possible for me to follow Zoom meetings without captions but presents a high enough cognitive load that 2-3 meetings in a day will exhaust my mental capacity to do engineering work for the rest of the day — so the cost of the month’s transcription service is at least an order of magnitude less than the cost to the company of forcing me to struggle through meetings.
I disagree that we should evaluate disability accommodations economically, but in this case the economic argument works out, too.
You need to believe that computers are understandable. There’s no magic involved. Eventually, every abstraction leaks — so if you have fear or learned helplessness blocking you from trying to understand the leaky abstraction layer, the only way you can debug it is by squeezing your eyes shut and trying random things, which is ineffective. You really need to internalize that even things that seem mysterious happen for reasons, and that those reasons are something you could in principle figure out.
Stars mostly look white to me (or very light yellow or blue) and I‘m fairly confident I have standard color vision — but I’m nearsighted and have mild strabismus, so they look pretty bad unless I’m using a telescope. :(
“Do people like me get to exist in public life” is often a hot topic of political discussion, but it’s not a discussion I’m interested in having or even hearing about at work. Not sure I’d consider this “privilege”.
As a member of several different marginalized groups, I want to be able to go to work and do my job without having to hear my coworkers argue about whether I get to exist. I’m well aware that politics doesn’t ignore me, but for my own sanity I don’t want to think about it any more than necessary, either.
I don’t have chat bubble “blindness” — I have configured my ad blocker to hide them, as well as any other clutter I find distracting. I wouldn’t be surprised if other users, rather than being blind to it, never even know the damn thing is there.
Learn to sew. And to repair and maintain your things more generally, but sewing seems much more overlooked than e.g. car maintenance in this thread, even though more people wear clothes than own cars. You can fix minor rips in your clothes quickly before they turn into major issues. You can do basic alterations by hand (e.g. hemming). I like to put loops in my towels so they hang better on hooks and to embroider my initials on cloth items I might lose. Recently, I repaired my roommate’s rocking chair — the seat is made of canvas, which had torn along a stress point, so I sewed it back together by hand using a thick piece of replacement canvas to add reinforcement. With a sewing machine, I was also able to make a weighted blanket (much cheaper than it would’ve been to buy) and a couple of cloth face masks. Learning a bit about garment construction and fabric properties will help you evaluate clothes, so you can tell if something won’t last just by looking at it in the store, so you can spend less time buying clothes. You can also learn enough about basic hand sewing to get started attaching fabric to other fabric in like 15 minutes.
Also, get some kind of physical hobby that doesn’t involve looking at a computer. It’s nice to spend some time on evenings and weekends not staring at a screen, and I find that doing things with my hands is grounding.
As is, this seems utterly useless for rinsing hair (particularly long hair), and it’s difficult to see how it can achieve broad adoption with this flaw. If there was a pushbutton that would turn on a “high flow” nozzle for 30 seconds at a time for hair-rinsing purposes, it would be much more functional.
How can I express a preference to have my managers discuss my mistakes over email, instead of by “gently pulling me aside” and talking in person? I am more comfortable expressing myself in non-real-time text format, especially with topics that feel hurtful. A paragraphs-long, detailed email explanation would be the best way for me to receive feedback!
Cosigned! Personally I’m a big fan of weightlifting, particularly in the evenings when I’m too tired to do anything but my heart is racing because of stress. It tends to tire me out pretty fast and the repetitive motion feels meditative.
As a kid I was fascinated by the garbage truck lifting arm, as well as any other cool mechanism I saw. I’m a robotics engineer now.
In the first example, isn’t it kind of a problem to have a bunch of different functions for calculating pay? Seems like it would be easy for the accounting department to end up with a different version than the HR department that actually disburses the money, which would cause all kinds of hell when trying to audit your accounts. If one team or department owns the function, you end up with more interdepartmental communication if another team needs to change it, but you won’t end up with Accounting and HR disagreeing on how much employees should be paid.
I find animations generally overused, but the point in this article that really irks me is the one about animating call-to-action buttons. I know the button is there, it’s the biggest button on the page, but I want to read the content on the page before I take action, and making the button wiggle or pulse just distracts me and pisses me off. I’m not going to blindly and immediately click a call-to-action button before I know what it does!