This seems like terrible advice to me. "Men with daughters are less sexist" and "Men whose wives work are more sympathetic to working mothers" are extremely vague, only loosely correlated to what you want to know, and pure anecdata. Someone could make up an equally plausible counter-argument (say, "men with young daughters are more likely to infantilize female coworkers"), but it would still just be story-telling.
If you want to know how your possible-future boss treats the women he works with, how about, "Have you had any women report to you? How'd that work out? Were there conflicts, and if so, how did you resolve them? Do you think they'd be happy to work for you again?" I'd be happy to answer those questions. Asking what my wife does for a living will get you a very awkward, "Er, let's get back to the interview."
I will happily acknowledge all of your criticisms, since I agree with them.
But I'll also point out a big problem with your suggested other questions: employers know that this is a hot-button issue for some prospective employees, and they will adjust their answers accordingly. There is a right answer when a female interviewee asks "Would your previous female reports be happy to work for you again?" - could you imagine anyone answering "No, actually they hate my guts"? And so the only way to get accurate information is to either ask indirect questions, or to ask them to indirect people (eg. finding other women who have worked for this person and asking them what they thought, which is suggested elsewhere in the thread).
Same reason that no sane employer gives interviews that consist of asking "Do you think you're a good employee?", and only slightly better is "Tell me why I should hire you" or "Tell me about your biggest weakness". Sure, you'll get an answer, but it's very likely to be a.) predictable and b.) not highly correlated with how you eventually evaluate their job performance.
Have you done many interviews? The solution to "people lie sometimes" is not to rely on correlation-to-a-correlation Ouija board bullshit, it's to delve and ask for more detail until you're satisfied the person isn't bullshitting. I want to know if candidates are smart and hard-working; I don't ask them "Are you smart and hard-working", and I don't ask them what their spouse does for a living based on some cockamamie theory about how that relates to anything. I ask them to describe a project they worked on and their role in it and how it went, and I keep asking supporting questions and follow-ups until I'm pretty sure I know whether I want to hire them or not.
Candidates need to do the same thing: delve, ask for details, and keep going until they're satisfied that they know whether this is a job they want. I think those questions I posted are a good way to do that. If OP asks those questions, and then asks follow-ups, until she's pretty well convinced that this is/isn't someone she wants to work for, my suspicion is she'll very likely be right.
Again, I don't disagree with you. I will never be in a situation like the OP is asking for, because I'm male and so "how will my manager treat women?" is not a question that is professionally relevant to me. When I do interview employers, my procedure is largely as you suggest, except focused on engineering practices, capital structure, runway, and the specific role I'll be fulfilling in the company.
But I'll point out that what you're actually building, with the procedure you suggest, is a mental model of how a candidate is likely to perform in a role, given the information that you can find out about them. It is still a model, and you make a number of assumptions in it (notably, that past performance may predict future results, and that a candidate's description of how they handled a project is actually how they handled it, and that information about how they handled it is more predictive than asking them to do a shortened project in front of you). Some of those assumptions I'd agree with, some of them I wouldn't. My point is that these two questions are ones that a couple different women I know have found predictive of how a manager will treat them, and that these women are fairly high-up in their careers and generally satisfied with them. They are not necessarily the questions I would use, but because I will never be in the situation that they or the OP is in, they are probably a lot more relevant to the OP's situation than any mental models I use.
I'm presuming you want a candid, honest response as opposed to a look-how-inclusive-I-am one, hence the throwaway, so here's what I think you should be asking:
1. How frequently and for what reasons do people there work unpaid overtime? Does management plan it formally (e.g. "crunch time") or is it limited to emergencies like hacking attempts or vendor outages? Does this company think that asking people to put in 'extra effort' is a failure of management, or a regrettable but necessary part of doing business?
2. What's the policy on conferences? If they say they support them and send people, ask if at least half the team has been to one (with travel and lodging paid) in the last year or two.
3. How do they support professional development? You're not looking for little stuff like "we pay for Pluralsight!", you're looking for things like hackathons, paid time for professional development, a formal mentorship program, a developer book club, or other evidence of a genuine culture of improvement within the dev teams.
4. How much freedom do the dev teams have to choose their own stack and tools? If they currently use React, did a Director choose it or did the devs who had to build the UI choose it? If a dev team wanted to experiment with something (e.g. TDD, or pairing/mobbing, or switching from sprints to scrumban), could they just do it and see how it goes? Or would they need their boss's boss's signature first?
You may notice there's nothing on that list about gender, race, diversity, etc. I put it to you that:
a) Diversity is no indicator that you will not be underpaid, mistreated, lied to, etc
b) Few teams will be able to give satisfactory answers to all of those questions
c) Of those teams that can give good answers to all four questions, the proportion that suffer from a miasma of gender/race/etc toxicity will be approximately zero
That said, "good team culture" is extremely subjective, and people here can't tell you how to find a company you'll like any more than we can tell you how to find a bar you'll like. You should figure out what you value (e.g. interuption-free focus time vs. frequent informal collaboration, remote distributed team vs. everyone-is-in-the-same-room, "bust ass to get rich" startup vs "eveyone leaves at 5pm" established company, etc) and treat those as just as important as the four questions I listed.
Only tangentially related, but some of you may be amused to learn that one legal standard for whether something infringes a trademark is the "Moron in a hurry" test: meaning, would a moron in a hurry confuse the thing at question with the thing claiming infringement?
Dopamine seems to be an API that automates and optimizes the display of "rewards" (positive messages or images) in an app to increase usage, right? And there's ML to optimize timing of the rewards, but it's basically exploiting the same effect seen with randomized rewards, i.e. the thing that makes gambling addictive, right? Is that a fair summary? That doesn't seem like it's giving "an individual autonomy over attention". It seems like the exact opposite.
I don't understand what the other thing, Space, does. Does it just interrupt social media apps periodically? It seems more like an attempt at viral marketing for Dopamine than something that's intended for real people to use, but I can't tell what it does and I'm not on iOS.
Just installed it. It generates a link on your homescreen from the app you need space from (ie twitter, in my case). Link looks like the twitter app icon.
When I tap it it loads the browser on a page saying "breath with me" for a second or two, and then loads the twitter app.
I can imagine 1) needing the breath and that working out, 2) ditching the process of loading twitter if i'm asked to breath
There's a third benefit too. Putting a lag between the action and the reward rewires the brains wanting system. That itch at the back of your brain or the impulse to reach for your phone at the briefest hint of boredom doesn't have to be there. Using space will kill that wanting impulse.
It won't take off until there are useful apps to run on it, and once there are, people will get it for those apps, not for it itself. Only to CS majors is it interesting in itself - to everyone else, it will (or won't) be interesting purely on the strength of what you can do there that you can't do elsewhere.
It was sale.urbit.org but you needed a ticket. Submit your email address to get on the list for future notifications, including tickets to future sales, although they say the next one will be a public auction. What you get when you buy is a number which can be submitted to urbit in exchange for the key that proves ownership of a certain star, meaning you would be able to sign messages that other planets/stars would trust as having come from the owner of that star. Stars are identical to planets except that they are also able to issue tickets for planets. So the point of owning a star is that you can give away or (in some future scenario where anyone wants to buy them) sell planets. For now, you can get a planet just by emailing the devs and asking for one.
People have complained about the documentation forever, but I think it's just hard to explain what it is, because it is pretty novel. If you chew through some of the available stuff and have further questions, reply to me, I'm as likely to give a useful answer as anyone.
Urbit is the most brazenly audacious computer science project on Earth, it's entirely open source, and yet, every time it gets mentioned on the world's most popular forum for programmers, virtually all of the discussion is non-technical.
Who cares about the ideology behind it? Does anyone pick their linux distro based on the maintainer's political blog? "Oh, one of the devs said something in 2007 about immigrants I didn't like, and..." uh huh. What about the insanely ambitious attempt to replace unix, any comments on that?
First, the person above you didn't say anything about caring about the underlying ideology; they said that they cared that the project seemed to them to be an art project designed for ideological purposes and unlikely to succeed as a result.
Second, people definitely do choose their linux distributions based on ideology. The Debian project, in particular, has a very well established ideology. They also choose which distributions they spend money on or donate money to (the relevant comparison to purchasing stars as discussed here) based on ideology.
Third, Urbit is a different category of thing from a Linux distribution. Urbit is a network. A network designed and organized based on a particular principle can impose that principle on the way that people on the network act, interact, and relate on the network in ways that a Linux distribution cannot. I am not certain whether this accurately describes Urbit. Statements from the project and its developers have suggested to me that this has been a goal, but they may have retreated from that since.
>A network designed and organized based on a particular principle can impose that principle on the way that people on the network act, interact, and relate on the network in ways that a Linux distribution cannot. I am not certain whether this accurately describes Urbit. Statements from the project and its developers have suggested to me that this has been a goal, but they may have retreated from that since.
this is certainly the case -- the scarcity of resources (about 4b cryptographic identities called 'planets', along with an associated reputation system) is meant to introduce something like proof-of-stake, where incentives are created that make it more expensive to act in bad faith (trolling[1], spamming) than the bad faith behavior is worth.
[1] 'trolling' in this case would be determined by local 'communities' on the network, and not a central authority a la the current internet (fb, twitter, etc)
> people definitely do choose their linux distributions based on ideology
Sure, sorry, I meant that it's not the norm, not that it never happens ever. My post was unnecessarily argumentative in tone, due to frustration with some past urbit discussions here.
> A network designed and organized based on a particular principle can impose that principle on the way that people on the network act
This is a very abstract point, which may be true in the general sense, but I was talking about Urbit in particular. Consider two assertions:
1. Urbit is so amazing and useful and wonderful that it's reasonable to imagine people all over the world using it every day for decades to come
2. The guy who wrote Urbit is racist/authoritarian/something else, as proven from a close textual analysis of his old blog posts
The point I was ranting about is that it seems like the truth or falsity of those two statements is completely separate, and that the former ought to be a lot more interesting than the latter. I don't think that's proven to be the case.
Could you please make a throwaway account for this shit? How can you be smart enough to write your own OS and yet dumb enough to not realize that the #1 impediment to Urbit's adoption is your political blogging?
I say this as a supporter, a star owner, someone who wants urbit to succeed: please stop giving ammunition to those whose job it is to farm pageviews by identifying right-wing bogeymen for the internet to hate. Honestly, I have nothing against you or your politics. (Nothing for them, either.) We've emailed, I think you're perfectly decent and that the slanders against you are slanderous. In a just world, people (especially HN commenters) would judge you by the product, not your blog. But in this world, shit like this post makes me think Urbit's best chance for widespread adoption is for some rando with a decent CS pedigree and blandly-inoffensive politics to hard-fork it.
Interesting thoughts. I'll just weigh in on the ones I feel confident answering:
> I have absolutely no idea why they've invented a custom p2p network/addressing system.
Part of what Urbit does is make it easy to identify people and exchange messages with them, so it has to have a built-in idea of what identity means and how to tell who someone is. If it didn't have its own identities, each application would have to do that itself, which is where we are today.
> I have absolutely no idea how this has anything to do with social media.
It's just a use case that everyone's familiar with which illustrates something that urbit makes easy to do. But I think the hope is that "Hosting continuously available cryptographically identified server apps is easy now, what shall we do with that?" would spawn genuinely new niches, in the same way that mobile phones have.
> Even if we assume that all of Urbit's ideas pan out: interacting with Twitter seems to completely undermine all of it!
I think the idea is that you'd have some app on urbit that sits between you and your social media. So, when you take a picture of your kid and want to share it, you'd use an app within urbit that would (say) post it to twitter, put it on facebook but only for "family", and store a copy in the "backed up monthly by the hosting provider" folder. As social media apps come and go, you could use them while they're useful and abandon them when you tire of them, without having to export or import things.
