It's a real bummer how I introduced my old job to desktop notifications, serviceworkers, and offline experience development.
It's an even bigger bummer that they took that sickass tech and uses it to spam folks with offers to shitty fake adult dating websites.
But that's the line of work I entered.
On the same note: I remember a 3 week period where I'd throw ideas out in our dev Slack channel, like:
'hey we oughta look into Vue because jQuery aint the shit no more'
'hey we oughta take a weekend to chill together and crank out some documentation'
'hey we oughta have a shared dev library. like bring some books into the office so we can all share knowledge'.
Eventually I just went: 'or, fuck my ideas, I'll shut up'
And I did.
I'm not even exaggerating: these were all Slack messages that I sent to the dev channel with *NO* fucking responses over like a month.
No wonder I'm not the """""right fit""""" for every dev job ive applied to since. Because nobody gives a shit like I do
The problem is: i'm not the "white" fit.
If I were your typical "Josh Fluke"-style white boy techbro, I'd be working at fucking Google right now and pissing on the affiliate marketing industry.
But since I dont look and act like the rest of your bog-standard dev teams, I have to be poor.
But despite literally all of this: I fucking love programming. And I dont want to do anything else.
I spent two years being told I'm not the right fit for developer jobs that I was *obviously* the right fit for.
I was a fucking security guard for over a year while *still* looking for a dev gig.
And while the job I have doesn't pay much -- hell I still have to figure out how im going to make the rent come January -- I fucking love this profession. I fucking love software.
I know there are folks on the fediverse who work for companies like Google and Amazon (Ive seen your bio's, you cant hide from me).
I wanna know: how many Black devs do you work with? How many black devs -- or fuck, just Black folks in general -- have been hired on around your sphere?
I can definitely guess as to what these statistics are, but I wanna know forreal. Let me know.
Obviously, FAANG companies arent exempt from this impromptu call for numbers: if you work in tech, let me know how many Black people are in your department, or who work fairly close to your department.
We all talk this BDE about White folks dominating the tech work industry and how that's trash, but what do we do to illuminate this?
What do we do to *prevent* this?
My take on addressing gender and racial staffing inequities in tech (corpo levels)
@somarasu IMO, we prevent the "white dude company" phenomenon by capping the numbers of white dudes folks hire at all stages of company development.
If, when the company is young, they only hire white people then, ten years later, the employees with seniority will all be white.
(tiny soap box time)
Also, ignore cultural 'fit', use better metrics for developer performance, anonymise pull requests when possible, and prefer contract to hire models based on performance metrics. If metrics overall show patterns, address the systematic issue in your company rather than ignoring it and deciding that it's the employees fault. Promote/give bonuses to whole teams when they do well. Deliberately ensure that every reporting chain has at least someone of a similar gender or culture to folks, and ideally, that there isn't a clear dominant pattern in that reporting chain. Use anonymous surveys for diversity stuff (religion, sexuality, etc) and run training on how to be inclusive for folks in those categories. Set clear expectations that delaying your colleagues work or wasting their time will eventually impact your own performance reviews. Have users rate the actual work done by devs, rather than just the dev perspective on performance.
(end soap box)
