Elena’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
To count how many emails from professors I got during my years in undergrad, I would have to go back to my old email and do some fairly sophisticated filtering. I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’ll just estimate that about three times per quarter – over the course of nine or so quarters taking primarily computer science classes – I got a mass email from some professor or another saying something like: “There is nothing wrong with the jar [Java file] I uploaded. You aren’t setting the path correctly. Follow the directions.”
On its own, this anecdote speaks to nothing more than students’ persistent arrogance and willingness to blame people other than themselves for their screw-ups. But here are a few more stories.
Twice in my academic career, I had to gently tell my male group member that he’d set up the server wrong, and maybe we should just use cloud hosting, since his home server was not capable of keeping the website up.
Three times in my first year of college, I had to tell would-be helpful male classmates that my netbook couldn’t connect to the wifi not because I was configuring it wrong, but because the signal wasn’t strong enough for my computer to hold onto it.
Twice my first year of professional work, I had to get my male coworker to roll back changes he’d made to the web application I was the primary developer for, because he’d broken the code.
Once I had to talk over the same coworker when speaking to a VP, because the VP asked how the code worked, and my male coworker couldn’t answer the question – because I’d written 100% of it.
Men speak over women in pretty much every arena of life. None of this is, on its own, unique. But I was reminded of these incidents, and many others, yesterday, when about 20 people that I follow on Twitter all attempted to talk to one another on Ello over the course of about 3 hours.
One by one, the reactions from my female friends rolled in: I can’t change my user icon. I can’t figure out how to reply to people. Why are the time stamps wrong? What’s up with the threading? So on, and so forth. Privately, I emailed my girlfriend to point out some problems with Ello. We’re both developers, we’ve both worked extensively on web applications, and we both came to the conclusion that it wasn’t ready for a public beta – there were too many prominent bugs and usability problems. But when I looked at the conclusion on Twitter, there was a theme that wasn’t present in my own high handed criticism: a bunch of highly educated, internet-savvy women were asking each other, “Am I stupid, or is Ello not working?”
I ended up yelling (in all caps, at 10 at night, with my girlfriend lying beside me) “NO, YOU’RE NOT STUPID. BLAME THE WEBSITE. BOYS DO.” And while this is a shallow analysis, it’s also true. Tech is often the yardstick by which we judge our own intelligence. My relatives always say “Oh, Elena’s a programmer, she’s really smart.” Computer literacy is seen as a fair metric by which to judge job applicants. Typos are seen in internet comments as a sign of stupidity. The list goes on. Somehow, as technology became more important and we started communicating online more and more, we conflated “intelligence” and “good at STEM”.
It’s worth digressing to note that there are many types of intelligence, a significant number of which are not suited to evaluation via tech use. But putting that point aside for the moment, let’s focus on the fact that we measure our intelligence via our ability to pick up tech and use it fluently. But when we fail, women almost invariably blame themselves, at least partially. Men almost invariably blame the technology, if they’re using it, and user error, if a woman is using it.
(Another digression: intersectionality of course still applies here. I am a white lady. My competence is assumed over a black woman with hundreds of times as many followers as me, and a stronger Internet presence besides.)
One of the last classes I took in my undergrad career was a class on user experience. It was required for all computer science majors. The class was overwhelmingly female; the professor was female; about 60% of our course materials were women-driven or -authored. And yet, in spite of all of that, I was the only female CS major in the class. The other CS majors were male. The other women were, by and large, communication majors.
That’s not to say I’m a special snowflake, because of course, I’m not. There are women in STEM and always have been. However, it’s important to note that my UX class was so gendered, because men – by and large – scorn the idea of user experience when it’s applied to other people.
“But,” you may be saying, “if men always blame the technology, how can that be?”
Easy. Men see themselves as smart. Worthy technology allows them to apply that intelligence, and prove that they’re smart by mastering it. Unworthy technology frustrates that intelligence, and thus has no right being popular. Most important is the implication that if you can’t figure out the technology men have collectively deemed worthy, then you’re not smart. Thus, user experience – the practice of making a website usable by the masses, and accessible to everyone – is unimportant.
If you’d like a case study, I’d suggest browsing Linux forums. Posts from 2006 or earlier are particularly instructive. Now, it’s more common to at least link someone to an article about how to use make and compile source code. Back then, asking that question of the community would be cause for derision.
Circling back to Ello. I don’t want to bag on them too hardcore, because I do think there’s some promise there. But the truth is that they’re a company with considerable venture capital and a user interface that is, at best, difficult to figure out, with some major bugs. I feel confident saying this because I know principles of web design. I know that their buttons should be larger and not so translucent as to be almost invisible. I know that basic functionality – such as updating your user picture – should not be left to guessing. I know that you should ensure your site renders properly on mobile devices. Ello fails at these requirements. I hope in the future they’ll correct their course, but right now, they are – to me – unusable. And they are unusable directly as a result of their design, not because I, or anyone I know, is stupid and/or bad at the internet.
So like I said last night, to a very limited audience: unless you or someone else can prove that the problem is you, assume it’s the technology. Demand accessibility, ease of use, and good FAQs. The internet has gone global, and every new website shouldn’t be a test of your intelligence. Blame the developers. I can assure you that the men who also can’t figure out threading or how to upload a user icon will be doing exactly that.
Oh, and a coda: once, one of my homework assignments did have a bad jar. We were told to use JDK 6 and when you got everything loaded into Eclipse, the jar’s configs didn’t match up with Eclipse’s, because the jar was using JDK 7. I figured out the problem and fixed it; 3 hours later, I got an email telling us to download a new jar with the correct settings. I hadn’t bothered e-mailing the professor, because I’d assumed the problem was me.
Tags: elena palmer, ello, feminism, it’s not your fault, sexism, tech
A wonderful tweet crossed my timeline the other day – “you can tell that Ello was designed by men because they implemented a messaging feature before a block feature.”
Ello touts itself as simplistic, but I had the hardest time figuring out how to update my profile, which remains bare bones. Much like Google Plus, I don’t think that this is going to be as revolutionary as it wants to be.
From what I’ve seen, there are also other privacy holes – being able to see if someone is on Ello by querying the API directly through the browser, for example.
I honestly wonder if they did any user testing, and if so, what their user base was. My user experience prof told us a story about an electronic reporting system for truckers – they were given devices and they’d key in info relating to their travel. At first their info was full of typos, and the people who’d designed the tool had a good laugh about how stupid truckers were. But when they actually did field testing with said truckers, it turned out that the truckers’ hands were too large for the tool, especially if they were wearing gloves. They were perfectly capable of spelling, but the tool simply wasn’t designed to meet their needs.
Preconceptions are just often not taken into account by developers, especially when they’re as homogeneous as the Ello group.
At first their info was full of typos, and the people who’d designed the tool had a good laugh about how stupid truckers were.
Raaaaaaage.
They were perfectly capable of spelling, but the tool simply wasn’t designed to meet their needs.
<3 <3 <3 Saving this anecdote for the next usability argument I end up having with the rest of my dev team. Female dev solidarity! Thanks for writing this piece.
<3 I wish I had a better source – at some point I probably did and just forgot it, as many seniors with senioritis are prone to do. But it’s such a beautiful example for why, if you’re going to be designing a product for someone, you need to take their needs into account – and sometimes privilege them over your own experiences/sense of aesthetic/etc.
And accessibility! Can someone who’s blind easily use this? Someone with motor difficulties? If not, how can it be made better for them. (Tip: If something will improve use for disabled people, it’ll probably be helpful to able-bodied as well.)
Aaaah DIRECT API QUERIES ARE SO IMPORTANT *implements blocks in app*
Ello struck me as kind of dumb because it wasn’t able to maintain state from page to page and also thanks for this article.
thank YOU!
yeah I had a bizarre experience where the link/smiley thing on the mobile landing page wasn’t loading my timeline, or any kind of progress bar, and I felt like all my fingers were sausages and also it was 2003.
Also the only way to report abuse is to EMAIL THEM.
Just once, I would like to see a social network designed that is actually aware of how social media harassment works. It is almost NEVER just one or two people, it’s usually a barrage (somtimes of the same people with dummy accounts, sometimes not).
Some friends are working on CollectQT, a social network run by and for queer and trans people (the person in charge is a trans woman of color).They are putting a lot of attention on harassment and how to mitigate it.
My tiny bit of UX exposure in library school has been so empowering this arena. It’s not just me! The podcast app (why the fuck do I need a separate podcast app again?) really is bafflingly badly designed!
I honestly think UX is hugely important and wish we, as internet-using people, were more exposed to at least the basic methodologies – because tons of people use the internet every day, to the point where it’s an honest barrier to upward mobility if you don’t have regular computer access, but so few people outside of certain disciplines know much about what kind of thinking goes into a certain design, much less what best practices are. And that leads to, among other things, the decidedly gendered assumption that the problem with Website X is user error, rather than bad design.
I didn’t even hear about Ello until the inevitable Ello backlash started… am I already starting to be behind the times?
I mean, it got all explodingly popular (for sign-ups, at least) because of the latest Facebook backlash (the one over the ‘real names policy’). So you’re at most only one backlash behind.
I mean, the person I follow who got me an invite knew about it way before I did and is A Youth at the ripe old age of 19. So you’re only slightly more behind the times than I was!
There’s no such thing anymore. The first post on Ello by several writers was a link to a long-form on how Ello’s time has passed.
Learning to ask for help was probably the hardest lesson of my early career. I was always convinced that I was doing something wrong and would be viewed as lazy or incompetent if I asked a question. It took me a long time to realize that sometimes technology really is that terrible and it’s no reflection on my if I can’t figure it out by myself.
Same, same. It probably doesn’t help that my first internship was at a place where there was a very strong culture of not asking for help. But at my current job I pretty much have to suck it up, deal, and ask for help, because the system I’m working on is older than I am and information about both the system specifically and the platform it’s built on generally quite simply does not exist on the internet. StackOverflow, I miss you.
I’ve been a graphic designer for 35 years, and a Web developer since the early 90’s, and my reaction to Ello was “WTF?” I’ve been afraid to criticize it publicly because of it’s ultra hip and exclusive milieu, so thanks for calling a spade a spade. Personally, I don’t get the attraction other than you can look down on people who don’t have an account yet.
No prob, i’m a total nobody so hopefully I can cheerfully criticize the site and it won’t actually negatively affect me (personal responsibility is fun).
It’s definitely trading in on some of the cachet of its exclusivity, not that that’s unique to Ello – but there are some things that I find very strange about it. Mostly the fact that I would never consider it public beta ready, and also the fact that it honestly looks/feels/responds like it was build 2-3 years ago and never updated. Sigh. I honestly kind of like the idea of the site – longer-form twitter that kind of acts like tumblr, huzzah! – but the execution is incredibly subpar so far.
oh is THAT what it’s trying to be? I got as far as uploading a picture they then rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise and wandered off.
also how can it expect to be longer form twitter with a shitty mobile interface?
I mean, I don’t know how they expect to be anything-twitter without a mobile app proper. So who knows.
Maybe you could also insert a PS into this article about how women should stop prefacing their questions in class with “Sorry.”
Every single class I took in library school was rife with this, and at some point it stopped sounding self-deprecating (as in “sorry this is a dumb question and I’m not smart enough to be here”) and started to sound sarcastic, even though I know it wasn’t.
Ah, yeah. I had a very different experience in school – in the earlier 200-level classes, women would preface with “sorry”, the professor would be decent, but then their question would be roundly mocked later, as we all exited class, by the dudes who were so proud of themselves for already knowing what a for loop is. Fast forward a year, and most of those women were no longer in the program. Those of us that stuck around generally kept our mouths shut. It wasn’t the worst environment in the world, but it definitely wasn’t terribly welcoming to women.
On a similar linguistic note, some other female CS major friends and I were comparing experiences of pair programming back in undergrad and realized that we all ran into the problem that we had a completely different language when talking about ideas with male programming partners. We had all been socialized to present an idea in the form of Hey, if you don’t mind, I think it might be a good idea to … when what we really meant was I think this is a good idea and I want to go ahead with it unless you have a strong objection. Most of our male peers would just say We’re doing this and expect us to stop them and argue them out of it if we saw a problem. I’ve spent my career trying very hard to make myself stick with polite-but-assertive I think this is a good idea and this is what I want to do, do you have any objections or suggestions? but it’s still something I struggle with on days when I’m tired or nervous.
AHHH YES THIS IS SO TRUE. Body language and tone of voice comes into it too, in my experience – even if you have a fairly adamant way of phrasing things, if you don’t sound more or less ready to throw down over your preferred direction (especially in school, where professionalism goes to die), you’re very likely to get overruled.
One of the great frustrations to me when hearing this problem discussed in the field is the assumption that the best way for women to cope with this is to start imitating the men who jump into their own approach without discussing it with their teammates first. It is possible to be both assertive and polite. It is possible to both have a good idea of your own and also want to hear feedback from your teammates. And it would be better for all of us if we expected everyone to try to achieve this. By all means, let’s encourage people (regardless of gender!) who have trouble expressing ideas assertively to have more confidence in their own designs. Let’s also encourage people who come across as dismissive of other people’s opinions to be more active about soliciting feedback and showing that they care about their teammates’ ideas. Shouting down everyone else is not a sign of leadership.
(I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but, well, I have FEELINGS on this issue, clearly.)
Agreed 1000000%. I honestly haven’t worked with people my age since graduating (luck of the draw, I guess?) so I can’t speak to how fresh grads are, but in school there was such an overwhelming lack of respect for people’s ideas. Not always, obviously, but often, there was a pecking order, and whoever made himself sound flashiest and most knowledgeable won the day. I know a lot of CS majors are real into the idea of lack of professionalism – you know, the whole hoodies/flip-flops/Mark Zuckerberg aesthetic – but there’s something to be said for enforcing a certain standard of behavior among your peers. And that includes listening to other people, regardless of gender or how many at-home servers they have.
FSM, I need to sort that shot out in my home life.
I fucking hated it at the time, but now I wonder if I was actually better served by being paired with a guy so incompetent that I was forced to take complete control over the project if I wanted to pass the class. I got fed up enough with fixing his code that I assigned him to basically spell checking. There was no “I’m sorry…” or “If you don’t mind…” because I was too ticked off.
Or maybe that was his plan all along and I got played like a sucker. Joke’s on him though, prof noticed he wasn’t doing any work and graded accordingly.
I would like to thumbs-up this a million times.
I don’t like the implications of saying that women should stop speaking a certain way: the way I talk is blunt, I am not good at hedging or softening what I say, and oh man, I am not popular, and I do not get promoted.
Choosing to speak the way that society encourages your gender to speak is not a weakness, it’s not a fault to be overcome. Sometimes it’s more effective to behave the way your culture expects: then you don’t have to be 2x better at your job than everyone else to get ahead.
I think giving people data on how saying “Sorry” in certain contexts sounds is helpful, but telling them to stop is not.
YES.
I’m in public services/instruction at an undergrad library. A huge part of reference and teaching librarianship is being 100% okay, breezy even, about your own ignorance, while trying to guide others toward embracing their own ignorance in the same way.
I hope that your professors/instructors caught that teachable moment by the short hairs and talked the proto-librarians through it.
I remember a university tutor once saying never to start an essay with an apology, as it would just give people negative expectations from the beginning.
Reading Chapter 1 of “The Elements of User Experience” changed my life. I am now much more likely to blame bad design instead of my own intelligence/skill!
HECK YEAH. Honestly, most of the people I was talking to use the internet for the majority of the day and have prematurely aged their laptops’ batteries because they put them through so many power cycles – and yet there they were, assuming Ello’s lack of usability was their fault! UGH.
I had a similar life changing experience reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. I read it in the mid 90s for an intro to Industrial Design class. It covers architecture and product design more than computer interface design (iirc) but the principles are the same – if you can’t use something that someone designed, it’s probably not you, it’s probably the design. So freeing to know that if I can’t figure out if I need to push or pull on a door to open it, or whatever, it’s bad design, not me being dumb.
THANK YOU. I was complaining to a friend, saying that Ello definitely wasn’t ready for this kind of exposure and he retorted, “Yeah but it’s in beta, what do you expect?” I expect better, even if it is beta! It’s not like they’re reinventing the wheel, after all. ETA: I’m a graphic/web designer, so I don’t know why I didn’t feel like my opinions were backed up. :
Ah yes, the old “it’s in beta” excuse. How a company defines “beta” obviously varies from place to place, but when a site flagrantly violates basic usability expectations (seriously, I couldn’t see Ello’s buttons on my phone on the train, that is a problem), I think it’s safe to say it shouldn’t have been let loose on the public – even if it’s still invite-only.
And yeah, I hear you re: “wait, I know what I’m talking about, though”. Sigh.
omg the “it’s in beta” excuse ><
I wrote a piece about ello’s privacy holes that went viral. The main response I got from people was “it’s in beta, give them some slack”. The WHOLE POINT of Beta is to nitpick and find holes! yeesh.
If it’s in beta, and obviously not ready to ship yet, DON’T SHIP IT.
I’m an Elder Scrolls fan. Ask me about bugs in first-release product. Go on.
Super relate to that last line, probably because I was teaching myself Linux back pre-2006, and I “learned” very well that “if you have a problem, it’s probably something you did wrong, so you should figure out what you did wrong and fix it yourself or else you will never learn.” It’s been a lot harder to learn myself that it was in fact just dudes saying “our time is more important than yours.”
Pretty much. I think I installed Ubuntu for the first time right in 2006, when I got my first laptop. It was an Adventure that involved boot time modifications to make the display work, and it was accomplished 100% without talking to anyone, because 16-year-old me had lurked tech forums for long enough to recognize the bootstrapping mentality, particularly as it applied to women. Looking back, ugh, that was a toxic thing to internalize as a teenager.
Woot! That is AWESOME.
Not the toxicity. The toxicity is not awesome. The installation is.
This endless dude-blaming is making me squeamish. Why is (US) feminism so incredibly us vs. them? Yes, it’s good to be aware of certain patterns, but stuff goes wrong when we start assigning intention to these patterns. If I were to base my impression of US men only on what I read here and on similar sites, I would never dare to even visit the States, because the men are apparently loud, shouty, overbearing ogres. (hmmm, ok, some of the ones I met were.) Are Western European men thát radically different? 99% of the men I’ve met in my life were totally ok with listening to women, or with doubting their own performance. Also, if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be respected, but (publicly) mocked.
/exasperation.
Well, part of it here is the ironic misandry thing, but (speaking as a western european) it’s not that all men are overbearing, it’s just tendencies. I know and like a great many men, good men, thoughtful, humble men some of whom identify as feminists themselves, and they still have little behaviours and assumptions and ideas that are fairly innocuous individually but add up to a pattern of most men over time having been socialised in certain ways that women aren’t, and it’s these habits that are being called out. It’s societal expectations for the most part.
Thank you for your reply. I’ve been thinking/riffing about my comment some more today. I read this dumbfunny thing on fb that said something like: everyone has an asshole in their circle of friends. If you don’t, then you might be the asshole.
This got me thinking about mansplaining etc. And I realised that I, woman-person, am actually one. Ladysplaining? Is there a word? I’m always explaining shit to people which it turns out they already knew, I always think I know best/better, and talking over people is my middle name. The only reason I still have friends is that I’m superduper adorable to compensate for the stuff described above 😉
Only thing I don’t do is (completely) blaming the program/coding/machine/other.
Very generalizing, you can say that whenever stuff goes wrong, women blame themselves, and men blame the thing/other. I think that both have merit: blaming yourself is an exponent of believing that you can change, that if you study harder/do better/verb -er, you CAN succeed. I.e. you give yourself some agency, it’s the opposite of defeatism.
Always blaming other/thing/outside…Well, a vision of a bitter MRA comes to mind 😉
So ideally all of us would use both approaches, at a constantly changing ratio.
This article makes me deliriously happy, partly because I am extremely lonely as a software developer lady, and partly because Ello is so, so, so buggy and frustrating, and… yeah. I always assume it’s me, and that maybe the cooler kids have worked out that the thing works way x or way y because… you know… I like books.
Anyway no it turns out it’s because the documentation for Framework (X) is notoriously garbage, even by the standards of garbage documentation, etc.
Someone over beers told me that the problem with code is that it’s properly understood as a trade-school job, taught in an apprenticeship system, like cabinetry or plumbing, and that that this is overlooked in the massively competitive performative world of Tech, Generally. I like this analogy enough to blabber in this comment.
Yay! I know a few ladies in tech but not as many as I’d like, largely because of my own reticence. I am glad this struck a chord, though. 🙂
Huh, that’s an interesting perspective. It’s definitely a trade you have to practice etc. good point.
This reminds me a LOT of the statistical program R, which is an open source and extremely powerful statistical program. It’s getting a bit better, but when I started using it it had the steepest learning curve of any program I’ve ever used. Everything, from the error messages to the help files, was almost completely opaque and not helpful to an almost comical extent. There was a help mailing list, but the prof who taught me the program warned the class that posting there would bring on a barrage of ridicule from the mathematicians and profs who hung out there and we would need a thick skin. Even after weathering that, the answers would almost always be at a level that was obviously far above that of the person asking the question, to the point where I wondered if the goal was to technically answer the question but to do so in a way that wouldn’t help the questioner at all.
At the time, I put it down to “mathematicians have no social skills” but this is somehow the first time I’ve seen it as a gender thing. It’d be hard to design a system less encouraging to women if you tried, and many of my female friends spent a lot of time and energy trying to avoid using R as a result. Luckily, since knowledge of R is rapidly becoming necessary in a lot of STEM fields, there are decent FAQs and help and tutorials written by non-assholes, so it seems to have gotten better.
R has *such* a steep curve, it’s insane. I learned to use Matlab first, and moving to R after that was like trying to swim through jello. I might find it easier if I wasn’t trying to learn the statistics I’m doing at the same time, I guess, but right now learning LMERs and R go hand in hand. Which just totally sucks. (On the bright side, I really do love that R has a ‘rainbow’ command for graphs. Using that always makes my day better.)
Oh geez, that sounds awful. I will admit to being somewhat sympathetic to people who want to be smug about having learned difficult technologies, in the sense that you do feel a real sense of accomplishment when you’ve ferreted out a bunch of errors from years-old message board postings and Google groups nonsense and whatnot. But at the end of the day, it’s a pretty hollow achievement. Those are barriers that often exist because no one has bothered to collect a useful repository of info – because, you know, “I bootstrapped myself, so should you!” As ridiculous as that attitude was 10 or 20 years ago, it’s even more ridiculous now, when the Internet/computers/various software tools adapted to all kinds of disciplines are ubiquitous. There is nothing shameful about needing help, nor is there anything particularly glorious about figuring something out without help! And the awful gendered aspect a lot of those attitudes have contributes, a lot, to the lack of women in STEM.
I don’t know R (though I really should be learning it, heh), but that all sounds very similar to my experience using ROOT, the programming framework used by pretty much all of High Energy Physics (i.e., CERN and CERN-like projects). It’s a double whammy of male arrogance and Physics arrogance. “We don’t NEED to pay for a license for Matlab or other analysis tools…we can make our OWN version of C++, and add data analysis tools, and make it better!” (The fact that they called a Linux program “root” should tell you everything.) It’s extremely hard for new students to learn, with minimal documentation, and often contradictory rules. And, like R, it has the world’s least helpful mailing list, the kind of place where if you report a problem they tell you to stop using the framework wrong and say it’s a feature not a bug.
Coming at this as an undergraduate, I used to think I was just naturally terrible at programming. Why did I not understand how to properly manage memory, for instance? And then I read a thorough breakdown (written by a male physicist, of course) of why ROOT actually *was* so terrible, both from a User Experience *and* programming point of view. It was really an eye-opener in seeing how many of my own person struggles were actually real, structural problems. And that physicists were often arrogant assholes.
OMG YES. The “oh just code it from scratch!” when all you want to do is take a damn Fourier transform! Ludicrous.
And don’t even get me fucking started on the documentation for ocean/climate models. >:(
Oh god. I know that feel, bro. So so so much sympathy.
Yes. This. The documentation is the worst – I just want to plot a function, why does it tell me about pointers?! I want to slap the person who named it ROOT. Way to make it ungooglable.
Also, what is with the default colour scheme? It’s like they want you to hate them.
I feel like I should be able to get away from using ROOT, as I’m *not* in HEP, but it’s pretty common in nuclear physics these days.
Thanks for the link, it makes me feel so much better about it all.
P.S: Awesome username!
Thanks! 😀 It used to the be The Bourne Approximation back on the Hairpin, but I shortened it for whatever reason. Also, I am so so so sorry that ROOT has infected nuclear physics. It’s the wooooorst. I recommend reading the wikipedia edit wars he links to on the page – they’re totally hilarious.
Have you tried PyROOT at all? It takes a little finesse to get working, since you have to force ROOT’s awfulness to work as a Python module. But it means you get to mostly write in Python, which is so much more intuitive and well-documented (especially string handling) with access to so many other graphical and math packages, while using ROOT stuff when you need it. It’s honestly a life changer, if it’s compatible with your coding needs (it tends to be less efficient for running over large-scale data sets).
This is a current problem in Angular and Javascript development generally! It’s there because when you only have performative smrtz to display, you don’t want to share, and it suuuuuucks.
Coming to R after learning another programming language wasn’t a bad experience IMO, but I think if it’s the first language you see it would probably be pretty daunting. I use R for only very limited purposes though – I am NOT a statistician.
The information available online is abundant and mostly high quality in my experience.
I’m sure it’s not bad as far as programming languages go, but for non-programmers it’s pretty tough! I got started with it 7 years ago before there was anything but the mailing list and a few books, so when I was putting together a guidebook for my coworkers last year I was glad to see that there is way more help available from someone other than the angry internet dudes.
Thanks for writing this, Elena! I definitely have that experience as a woman that when I’m talking to my CS/STEM female friends, I’m very self-deprecating about my technological savvy and think about how intrinsically smarter than me they are–but I could probably do that work and get good at it if I tried. There’s a certain amount of talent that helps, but it’s also a skill to be developed like anything else. My friends are still mega-smart! But I don’t need to put myself down in comparison to them.
Also, tangentially–speaking of sites rendering properly on mobile devices, don’t some folks have trouble with The Toast on tablets and/or phones? I know I’ve been navigated away from the site to ads when trying to go to the second page of posts on my phone, and I’ve talked to other people who read the site very little because it doesn’t jibe with their devices.
Self-deprecating tendencies aside, I think you must be more competent than you realize at technology in general, and problem-solving in particular. Problem-solving, gathering information, figuring out how to interpret what you’re gathering – that’s what you do for your job, right? So you’re practicing it every day, and people are paying you to do it. If a thing is ostensibly meant to be used by all kinds of people but someone who uses something similar for a living can’t figure it out, maybe the problem is not that person.
Thanks for reading! Programming is, like anything else, a learned skill – and it’s not one that everyone is naturally good at, but neither is pretty much any other skill on the planet. CS being a yardstick of intelligence is pretty ridiculous.
The Toast renders fine on my iPhone, usually. Sometimes the ads are a little difficult to navigate, and I can’t speak to how good the comments are, but I find it fairly usable in the sense that posts align with my screen width and whatnot. I will admit, though, I go days or even weeks without going to The Toast on mobile.
The Toast renders pretty well on my gallaxy, though I have to make sure the page is fully loaded or I will accidentally click on ads. I’ve been having problems for weeks with getting the site to load properly in my browser though. I frequently go on my phone to ‘read’ the image based articles because they won’t load in Chrome or Firefox. And on Friday an audible ad was blocking the comment box and it complicated my ability to participate in the open thread. Again, I had to go to the phone. Weird.
YES, it jumps around as the page renders, and all of a sudden I’m clicking ads instead of [2]. Mucho annoying.
Taking a UX class made me a million times more confident when it comes to learning new technology. Anyone who has a chance to take one should; it’ll make you a more competent user and a more effective communicator. I haven’t taken a look at Ello yet, but from what you’ve said here, it sounds like it would be immediately recognizable as having an underdeveloped interface to anyone familiar with UX.
Yesss, I really wish it was more mainstream – not just the knowledge that UX is a thing but also the basic principles of web design. It would save a lot of grief.
Ugh, the cockiness of male programmers drives me crazy, too. Dude, at a minimum, you learned a language. That legitimately takes skill and training, but it doesn’t make you a genius; it makes you educated in a particular skill. Now, being really good at it, and coming up with clever ways to use that language as efficiently as possible to solve really difficult problems: that takes both training and smarts. But just knowing the basics of how to code doesn’t make you god’s gift to humanity. So I say, don’t believe them when they try to convince you they are smarter than you just because they know how to code. They could be truly brilliant, of course, but just learning a language is not in and of itself evidence of that.
Programming is hard, for sure! Buuuut it’s also a highly valued skill, for which there are many resources available, both online and offline. If you have the ability (time, money, internet connection, computer) to learn it, then sure, gaining expertise is something to be proud of. But not prouder than you would be if you were an expert in anything else. The mystique of the rockstar programmer is just so, so dated and wrong, for so many reasons. Ranging from the very real racist & misogynistic atmosphere such attitudes can create, to the simple fact that people who think they know everything are annoying as all get-out.
Reminds me of the prevalent attitude of the (male) scholar to women through much of Western Civilization: “I know Latin and you don’t. Nyah.”
(And if she DID know Latin, then she was a mouthy bluestocking, and there was no need to respect her either..)
Thanks for sharing, this was a great article! I got into programming last year through a grad school class, and really liked it – not enough to keep studying after that semester, beyond using it for my own research, but it was incredibly interesting. And then I found out that the computational linguistics class has 10 students and only 1 woman, and I really had to think about changing my minor just to take that class and even out the numbers a little bit…
Thanks for reading! Yeah, the gender gap is very real, and sadly not getting better.
I couldn’t believe it when I saw they didn’t have a block feature. Like, here in 2014, even if you’re a dude, isn’t the first thing you do when building a Glorious New Social Medium sitting down and making a list of THE MOST BASIC COMPONENTS of every other such medium in existence?
They just introduced it a few days ago! But yeah, it took some rabblerousing for the block feature to even be on their priority list.
I RELATE TO THIS SO MUCH. As one of two female engineers at my (relatively small) company I vacillate between enjoying working with dudes I get along with really well and hating the times when the above explored UX things come up (which is honestly rare, but there are still culprits).
I try to loudly hold design accountable at all times in my life, because I think this self-blaming thing can happen to everyone (not to get all #notallmen about this, but I can see this happening to anyone who is not An Established Member of a group – whether because of their gender, or race, or newness to the group). We have a conference room at work that has the stupidest doors (they both slide, and it’s possible to slide both of them too far, and takes a huge amount of finesse to actually close them completely). Inevitably when I have a meeting in there at least one person has some trouble, and other people have had a tendency to be like “open doors much?” To which I respond with something like, that door is poorly designed, of course a normal human with a normal human experience of doors is having trouble with it.
All of this to say, thank you for writing this. I am a Woman in Tech and definitely see these issues in software, but I think they are more sinister and extend to all types of design – the book in particular that opened my eyes to this was The Design of Everyday Things. It’s a little bit slow reading, but the particular examples and overall message are very much worth it.
This is something I’ve been trying to teach my mom — she does, at this point, know enough about what she wants to do with technology that when something doesn’t work, it’s probably NOT her doing something wrong!
I work in a lab and you hear “it didn’t work – what did I do wrong?” or else you hear “it didn’t work – my reagents must be off!!” (The difference being, it is never your reagents, it is always, always you.)
i’ve been using computers like, my entire life?? and this is still a line (UX or me??) i have to negotiate every single fucking day so THANK YOU FOR WRITING THIS.
This is so excellent. Thank you!
I am a software tester with some human factors background. Everyone, EVERYONE, thinks they can design a UI: if you’re smart enough to write good code, you must be able to do UI design too. Note the ratio of software development jobs to UI design jobs next time you’re on Monster or Dice.
Fact is, few people actually can do UI design well. There are actually concrete human factors principles out there to help guide UI design, but you have to hire people who know those principles exist – or who make it their business to learn about them.
Also helps to beta test your application with some actual users, or, better yet, have them “use” the UI with mockups and see what comes up.
whispers come back to livejournal
Realtalk: I am astonished nobody has wholesale lifted LJ’s privacy/filtering systems down to different user icons to indicate different topics. Google+ is kind of close and Facebook has some of that available now, but by default everything is set up like “well, they’re following you so they must be interested in everything that you post, and you’re not blocking them so you must want them to see everything you post” which is baffling. Like, this shit was almost solved 10+ years ago and none of the social network wunderkind know anything about it because they all think of LJ as where teen girls went to have feelings, not an actual social network.
(God, this is what all the old Unix nerds must feel like. “Twitter’s just a clunkier more non-standard ad-laden version of a .plan file!”)
This flabbergasts me too. I mean, DW did it, but as far as I know it remains fandom-centric and never took off as a general interest site. Facebook is so…ugh. The way they constantly change their privacy shit destroys any trust a person might have that a post they marked limited or private will always STAY that way. (not on FB, ftr). And the G+ real name thing (although they allow pseuds now) means I never got one in the first place.
I totally still participate on livejournal! lol I think I made my account when you still needed some kind of invite token or whatever (it was 2003 oh god)? You’re not doing anything new, Ello!
2004 for me.
I’m there and I love it.
*thumbs up*
F’reals, though: an awful lot of the web is shitty to use, but I get the sideeye when I want to complain about it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m a man, and a designer, and absolutely done with ello. IT supports GIFs, and that’s it. I uploaded an animated header ,and then was just done with it.
Why is it that monochrome brutalism is seen as sophisticated?!? is it because so many male technologists are nihilist misanthropes? I’ve been trying to beat the same drum to less tech-y friends, regardless of gender: it’s not you, it’s the stupid technology. You’re a human being, you’re wonderful, the tool is supposed to serve you properly, not the other way around.
Thank you! I work in UX, and Ello doesn’t look like they tested anything nonstandard to see if it would work. Seems like sacrificed a lot of usability for dubious aesthetics, and honestly I’m not interested in being their beta tester that much. I gave at the office.
Thank you so much for writing this!
Put another way: (generally) men are trained from a very young age that The World (in no way is this limited to technology) is there to serve them, so any problem they encounter is not their own fault but the fault of Something Else … and (generally) women are trained in exactly the opposite way: to cater to others’ whims and to examine themselves if they have a problem. This is toxic and breeds all kinds of problems, as we can readily see.
I wasn’t a CS major but, I was able to pick up that the most misogynist specializations are probably: 4. The sciences; 3. Math; 2. CS; and 1. Philosophy (I minored in Phil.).
Finally, I wanted to say something specifically about Ello. I haven’t used it, so I can’t say anything about the network itself. However, one of its creators is Paul Budnitz, who is also the man behind Budnitz Bicycles. The 30-second version: Paul Budnitz commissioned two custom bicycles (ostensibly for himself) from a custom builder called Black Sheep Bicycles (Fort Collins, CO). He then asked BSB if they would be willing to do the design work for him to manufacture bikes branded with his name. They said no, and Budnitz then had their designs reverse-engineered (basically) and began production overseas.
So, while what he did wasn’t in violation of copyright or any other law, it was still pretty crappy and underhanded. He essentially stole the hard work and the thought that went into producing those bikes, and is now making money by passing off someone else’s idea as his own.
For that reason, if heinous UI and other issues strangle Ello in its cradle, I wouldn’t be the least bit sad about it.
Maybe we do need a Facebook killer, but as garbage as Facebook is, Ello appears to be worse.
(Also, Budnitz is kind of a James Franco/Buster Bluth trust fund dilettante, who can do whatever he wants business-wise because he’s got a cushion of money a mile deep. Looking at it from that angle, it isn’t surprising that Ello is as half-baked as it is.)
Some friends are working on CollectQT, a social network run by and for queer and trans people (the person in charge is a trans woman of color).They are putting a lot of attention on harassment and how to mitigate it.
omg the "it's in beta" excuse ><
I wrote a piece about ello's privacy holes that went viral. The main response I got from people was "it's in beta, give them some slack". The WHOLE POINT of Beta is to nitpick and find holes! yeesh.
They just introduced it a few days ago! But yeah, it took some rabblerousing for the block feature to even be on their priority list.
I think you are by far too kind to ello. It’s not just badly designed; it borders on the imbecilic. One example: it does not heed the camera rotation from iPhone photos. Most of my ello friends were sideways. Another example: on posts, it shows the user’s photo, but not their name; most of the new users have no photo, so “smiley the icon” is the poster for almost all posts. It’s as if the developers had never seen a web site before.
Thank you for this. I have tried to like Ello, for months, I have embraced the idea of befriending people I do not know to broaden my perspectives. I am open to it, but it seems that the too hip to be hipster crowd that makes up the beating heartbeat of Ello does not reciprocate my friendliness. Today after commenting on something I read (though maybe not directed at me) “I wish I could pick my followers”- and I thought, well then, why don’t you just create FB account? CNN said “Facebook is a bustling scrum, its virtual boulevards crowded with content and conversation.” Ello on the other hand is like a trendy, overpriced and underpopulated street, full of lumberjack beards and nerd glasses and women in retro prints, resting *itch face and sagging winter caps that look suspiciously like a used condom, all sipping home brewed kumbacha and noshing on organic granola cookies….in front of a miror. *YAWN* I tried to love it, I tried to embrace it, the problem was that the other people using it were so busy proving to the world how hipster they were they forgot other people even existed. The whole format of not controlling who your followers are is is greatest asset- it makes it exiting, kind of like 1998 LYCOS chat, before the internet went into full on firewall against the world mode, back when we would chat with perfect strangers just for the fun of it. Another artificial described ELLO as “A place where people try to “Out hipster each other.” That was a perfect description, it is a virtual wasteland of amazing talent and no conversation. No conversation. Even on postings that had 1000+ views, there may have been a grand total of 5 replies. Seriously the place takes on the vibe of “ooh I am different and eccentric! Look at me, look at me! I am so cool that I wont answer anyone because that’s what cool and I am so before cool cool….” Yawn and boring. Well yes, that is why they call it a social network. But I think ELLO missed the whole point and the chilliness or self absorbedness (yes, made that up- have to make up at least one word everyday to fit my vocabulary needs) of the artistic cliques on ELLO are going to be it’s downfall. – Could have been a running contender even with formatting issues, but the general assembly is vapid and kind of snooty- yes that is a nice black and white portrait of the some girl with too short bangs in a retro dress standing next to a kiddie pool, but you are trying to hard and the next 25 similar photos are not going to convince me that you are an arteest. If I give you a compliment on one of them, and so do 3 other people your absence of notice will not be interpreted as “coolness” it will be interpreted as – arrogant little twit and arrogant twits are short lived and boring. Ello is just too cool for it’s own little self, everyone is trying to look bored all of the time, and that leaves me…well…bored.
You pretty much nailed my perception of Ello. I wanted to like it–hell, anything is better than being part of some huge social network that uses “all the things” for a massive data-mining operation, and uses members as targets for advertising, all while trying to cover it up innocently. (Look at how many times the FTC alone has smacked down fb and that conceited asshat zuckerberg.)
So I do have my account on Ello, but as I wrote in my first post…”Now what?” I see the same hipster fools that you do, and that alone turns me away, knowing their attitude towards anyone outside their little hipster and hipsteress cliques is pretty much cold and condescending. I don’t need that in my life. And I’ve never really even seen a genuine discussion–most of it is posting abstract pictures and images that the self-important hipsters post because they like their “pretty (hipster) things.”
G+ isn’t perfect either, but any conversation I’ve been a part of has been thoughtful and intelligent, with like-minded individuals. When I was on fb, it was the same old shyt: reading about some friends’ or relatives’ dyspeptic, overprivileged kids, or having religious bullshit shoved at me, or political opinions that none of us want to hear, or music videos for whatever rot is playing on the radio these days. I do miss being in touch with classmates and other friends, but I cannot abide by having my privacy raped and resold.
But aside from the content, Ello’s layout just plain sucks. And I don’t say that lightly. I do like clean, uncluttered design that is easy to use, but the UI of Ello is TOO sparse and plain–consciously so, in fact. While I can relate to Ello being new and in beta, I agree with others that (even today) it is still lacking a few essentials that it should have launched with. If it even looked a little more friendly, it might gain more attention, and maybe get them away from that negative hipster stigma I see them associated with.
There is room for an unencumbered social network, but Ello so far has attracted the wrong types, needs a major facelift (it can still be uncluttered yet a lot more attractive), and needs those few essential features that any social network should have, including usability.
You pretty much nailed my perception of Ello. I wanted to like it–hell, anything is better than being part of some huge social network that uses "all the things" for a massive data-mining operation, and uses members as targets for advertising, all while trying to cover it up innocently. (Look at how many times the FTC alone has smacked down fb and that conceited asshat zuckerberg.)
So I do have my account on Ello, but as I wrote in my first post…"Now what?" I see the same hipster fools that you do, and that alone turns me away, knowing their attitude towards anyone outside their little hipster and hipsteress cliques is pretty much cold and condescending. I don't need that in my life. And I've never really even seen a genuine discussion–most of it is posting abstract pictures and images that the self-important hipsters post because they like their "pretty (hipster) things."
G+ isn't perfect either, but any conversation I've been a part of has been thoughtful and intelligent, with like-minded individuals. When I was on fb, it was the same old shyt: reading about some friends' or relatives' dyspeptic, overprivileged kids, or having religious bullshit shoved at me, or political opinions that none of us want to hear, or music videos for whatever rot is playing on the radio these days. I do miss being in touch with classmates and other friends, but I cannot abide by having my privacy raped and resold.
But aside from the content, Ello's layout just plain sucks. And I don't say that lightly. I do like clean, uncluttered design that is easy to use, but the UI of Ello is TOO sparse and plain–consciously so, in fact. While I can relate to Ello being new and in beta, I agree with others that (even today) it is still lacking a few essentials that it should have launched with. If it even looked a little more friendly, it might gain more attention, and maybe get them away from that negative hipster stigma I see them associated with.
There is room for an unencumbered social network, but Ello so far has attracted the wrong types, needs a major facelift (it can still be uncluttered yet a lot more attractive), and needs those few essential features that any social network should have, including usability.
I have been a web designer in Minneapolis, MN for nearly 5 years. My firm provides full web design services there. In my point of view, Ello really got bad design…It’s better to have new version.
The reasons behind Ello being horribly designed have absolutely zero to do with penises and vaginas.
I’m 100% sure the reason behind this comment being posted is one of the two.