I like to avoid being an early adopter for anything business or work related because it is so much easier to use things when there is an already established user community who has found and fixed/worked around most the major bugs.
He probably got fed that idea day in and day out while there.
I have worked for a few different large organizations and have often faced the size excuse for being unorganized and ineffective. I personally feel it is a cop out, and self fulfilling prophesy once it becomes an accepted perspective, because then people stop trying to be better.
I have also worked in big organizations on kick-ass teams who are willing to fight uphill battles against "we are too big to change" attitude. Thats what made them awesome teams.
Its more about what was communicated/interpreted than the actual words.
Take for instance: "I'm not going to let some bitch tell me what to do" vs. "Hey bitches, whats up?"
the first statement could communicate that the speaker has issues with females telling him what to do. The second statement is playful and affectionate.
However, because the word bitch is so generic and well used, the first speaker could easily only have issues with unpleasant people, not females. Its not clear.
That's why it is better to talk about a person's pattern of behavior, rather than labeling an isolated incident as sexism.
Sexism can manifest itself in many ways, and the subtle ways arent less legitimate concerns just because it could be worse. "At least youre not getting beaten, be thankful for that".
Sexism can totally be if you are a "nag" and get called a "bitch"!
Talking about an isolated relatively minor situation with the lens of sexism becomes difficult, because without establishing a pattern of behavior, its hard to determine if the situation is sexism or not.
What happens when many females encounter similar attitudes in many CS work spaces. Will we still deny that society isnt perfect?
That's just an unbacked assertion; come back with something better.
"nag" and get called a "bitch"!
If you are a nag you probably deserve to get called a bitch. I'm fairly certain if I nag like the OP, I'll get called a bitch, and I'm not a girl. If that's sexism, I supposed it's misandry if I get called a dick. Lame.
What happens when many females encounter similar attitudes in many CS work spaces
What happens is that it will be demonstrable with a valid statistical test, instead of being stretched from one anecdote to a complaint about CS DepartmentS in general, which the idiotic OP did. I'm waiting for you to produce the stats.
"Come back with something better", "I am waiting on you to produce the stats", "<crickets/>"
...um, why would I want to engage in a discussion with someone who communicates like this?
Also before you insult people's arguments by attempting to devalue them as assertions lacking proof, make sure you are also not guilty of the same. You use a lot of absolute language for someone concerned with evidence.
Lots of things in life cant be proved, does that mean we cant talk about them like mature and curious adults?
This kind of sexism isnt really isolated to CS unfortunately.
If that guy had called the author the n word, which I'm not sure I can even type without offending someone, the situation would have been handled differently. Interestingly, society will still tolerate derogatory behavior towards certain groups of people, but not others.
Also if that guy were a woman, and the author was a man and the interaction were something like "...I dont like some dick/asshole/jerk* telling me what to do", then the issue wouldn't be about sexism, it would be about one person being inappropriately hostile toward another.
For the sake of discussion, I wonder if it is more useful to boil some feminist issues down into people issues so that more people can relate and respond.
Instead of addressing it as sexism, I wonder if the author brought it up as generic hostile behavior, would the situation have been handled differently... maybe not?
No one of any stripe or colour should have to deal with that kind of attitude in the workplace, whether or not it is sexist, racist, homophobic, or just generically mean, but managers/supervisors can be conflict adverse, and try to avoid reprimanding people in general. Having to deal with the situation is just more work on their plate.
I wonder these things, because I have my own very likely sexism influenced "situation" at work with my boss. Everyone agrees that he is being a jerk, there is no argument there. I also happen to LOVE to explore and discuss gender issues, but when I bring up this situation or others with that lens, peoples' eyes cloud over.
I am developing a similar application with a map and live data generated dynamically by my server. The difference with my app, is that the data will be global, not for one city.
The Citi Bike Map appears to load all of the data available regardless of map extent, which can be practical with a small dataset.
How do you deal with caching when the extent of the user's map is constantly changing? My server currently returns data relevant to the map extent only. If I were to get Cron to regularly crunch out one big global cache to send to the browser, I would kill my site.
I am assuming the best option would be to figure out some sort of tiling scheme.
If anyone out there has any ideas about that, I am all ears!
You should look into vector map tiles! Basically, you create a little JSON snippet for every image that the map server returns, and then overlay it in the client. There's support for JSON tiles in Polymaps (<http://polymaps.org/>).
Cool! I've not heard of Polymaps before, and will look into it. For the time being, I am using Google Maps.
Do you have any recommendations on how to create the tiles?
The most important thing, is that when a user clicks the markers in my map(whether or not they are real vector markers or rasters passing themselves off as markers), the marker's associated attribute values need to be available to be fed into a popup.
I wouldn't worry about the caching, as your app is unlikely to get the same news coverage as the citi bikes program. I think the author misdiagnosed the citi bikes problem. My guess is they just had too few apache processes. If there was just one database table, the database's query cache should have been able to handle this load. His suggestions of cron based caching are likely redundant and overkill. Even if that wasn't enough, PHP's APC would be a better solution.
You need a way to do geospatial queries and likely clustering of the results. PostGIS will work well, and there are kmeans clustering plugins, or you can just do grid based clustering.
Same boat here as a contractor. If I could take my own advice, it would be great.
My goal with new workplaces is to be reserved and act introverted until I have figured my colleagues out a bit. A few of my work places have been political minefields, and looking back, if I had only waited a month or so to get familiar with things, it would have been obvious where the landlines were laid, and I could have avoided them.
In the past I assumed, naively, that my colleagues MUST be reasonable people, so I acted as if they were. Most people are completely enjoyable to work with, however there are enough bad eggs out there, that if you are contracting or job hopping you are bound to run into them.
Working with a bad egg who you have rubbed up the wrong way can be a total nightmare since, IMO it is relationships that make or break a job. Its a shame, but I now assume people are volatile, unreasonable, and egomaniacs, and so I walk on eggshells around them until they prove me otherwise.
Yes, it shouldn't be that way, but I just want to work in peace!
My boss's ego is VERY easily damaged by confident females who behave as men do in the workplace. Ya, he is sexist and having cultural integration problems, but I probably could have toned it down a bit if I knew he interpreted my professional opinions as emasculating. Now he is a monster boss from hell constantly trying to put me in my "place". It would have been better for me if I just sucked it up and acted a little more cutesy and insecure at the beginning, so he wouldn't have felt so threatened(?) by me when I began.
The other posters are right. For me its gotten so bad at my current job, that I will probably never experience worse. Dealing with my boss for so long now, I have gone through all of the stages in reacting to the situation: denial, disbelief, mourning(it was supposed to be my dream job), thinking I must be crazy, being masochistically amused by it, reveling in the conflict, etc. Now that I have used all of my energy up and gotten used to the torment, it has become so obvious how meaningless and insignificant it is.
If you can manage to see that from the outset without having to learn it experientially, consider yourself lucky! The only reason I am able to view my situation as ridiculous and insignificant, is because I am so worn out, that that is my only remaining option!
"Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. [...]
I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely." - Bertrand Russel
Ahhh, this old chestnut. It does not take "faith" to believe that something does not exist. There are literally an infinite number of things that you believe do not exist, simply because there is no evidence that they do. For example, if I told you that there is an invisible elephant in the boot of your car right now, would you consider yourself on the fence as to whether I was telling the truth? Or would you simply reject the idea as absurd, until shown evidence to the contrary?
Agnosticism is fine, but for people who place the burden of proof on those who make extraordinary claims, atheism is not a faith-based decision.
