Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

In any case, I feel that I have succeeded in constructively disrupting an aspect of my work culture that made me uncomfortable. This is the first personal project I’ve ever thought of, coded, and made public, and I am pretty excited about it! It makes me so happy every time the other bot says “that’s what she said,” and my bot responds with something like:

Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel. ~ Bella Abzug

-- Jessamyn Smith

There's a lot of code in glibc that I think could be very validly worked on by "random" people, and I suspect that glibc is a project that would really do rather well by itself with "drive-by contributions" from developers who really have no interest in glibc itself, but that were bitten by bugs or just performance issues while they were working on whatever project that they are really associated with.

That's certainly how I personally sent in a patch or two to glibc.

-- Linus Torvalds (in the comments)

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Hostile Work Environment

Posted Mar 29, 2012 19:50 UTC (Thu) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [Link]

I hope that Jessamyn will have a talk with her HR department. It certainly sounds like her male counterparts have created a hostile work environment and under U.S. law her employer can be sued for letting it continue.

Hostile Work Environment

Posted Mar 29, 2012 23:36 UTC (Thu) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]

>>It certainly sounds like her male counterparts have created a hostile work environment and under U.S. law her employer can be sued for letting it continue.

(probably) true.

I found her post documenting a far more effective attack on the problem than reaching for a lawyer. She has potentially fixed, or at least alleviated, _many_ people's problems rather than just her own through skilful use of irony(*) and her own talent.

Her approach compared to your proffered solution appeals to me and certainly seems more fitting on a site dedicated to "libre" software related nerdiness.

Mind you - I'm English and probably don't understand some of the finer points of the TWSS thing. It sounds awfully clever. I'm probably overreacting in some way.

Cheers
Jon

(*) similar to steely but with less carbon.

Hostile Work Environment

Posted Mar 30, 2012 19:37 UTC (Fri) by blitzkrieg3 (subscriber, #57873) [Link]

If by awfully clever you mean awfully tired, you're right. It was funny when I was in high school 10 years ago, it is rarely funny now when you have the luxury of a human screening. I couldn't imagine it being funny as a response to a list of suggested keywords from a bot.

And my friends now are just as childish, or maybe more childish than my high school friends. It's just that there are a lot better responses, such as repeating what they said for effect, or "so that's what you did last night?", or "Yeah I like it hard too."