[TRENCHES] Tuesday, July 10, 2012 - Altitude
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Altitude
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/altitude
A Name by any other Gender.
AnonymousI am a programmer by education, trade and passion. I enjoy math and logic and enjoy solving a good programming puzzle any day.
I was a frequent poster on a popular online board where people ask questions and discuss issues related to the language of programming I was relatively fluent in. On the forum, some of us had gotten relatively close, and many people knew each other outside of their “forum handle.”
A friend from the forum mentioned that there was an opening at his company for QA development, and he had suggested I apply. He was higher up in the company and provided the HR department and the department hiring some of my forum posts, showing my ability to program and also be helpful in a large, collaborative environment.
Many emails went back and forth with this company. My current day job did not allow for phone calls, and I worked the entire work day of this company, but this was a great opportunity and I suggested I make a day trip out for a roundtable meeting.
Now, I have a name that, by all extensive purposes, is supposed to be male. Not one of those “Leslie” or “Dana” type names, but a straight-up male first name, despite having no Y chromosome. It never was an issue for me, nor for my husband for that matter. Nor did I think it ever would matter. It usually was a great ice breaker at conferences or when meeting someone for the first time.
Arriving at the company for the meet and greet, I was ushered in to the meeting to stares of people at the table. They had no idea, apparently, that I was female… And a not too bad looking one if I do say so myself.
I was not even allowed to have the meeting. Apparently having a “female” in the “all male company” would be bad for policy and productivity. I was removed by security from the building. I left somewhat ashamed. And my friend on the forum who suggested me blocked me and never spoke to me again.
I’m at a great company now where my gender isn’t an issue, and the company that I tried to interview for has since been bought and merged. I still get a bad taste in my mouth when I see anything online about them, though.
Posts
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
Sounds legit.
Edit: Re: Tale.
WHAT? That can't be legal.
Steam: pazython
"All male companies" that have discriminatory hiring practices always make me think there's some sort of mutual peen tugging going on after-hours. Probably smells like an old gym sock in their office too.
I'm glad the submitter found a better place to work!
I've been gipped before on an interview for a tech company. First interview was great with the deputy director, he said I was a shoe-in for the job, but I did have to go thru a second interview with my direct line manager just to tick the boxes. Bugger was, my line manager would have been this rather abrupt, suspicious lady in her mid-40's. For some reason, ladies of that age, in that position really do not like me (and genuinely for no reason, i'm not late, not rude, work just as hard as they do). I didn't get the job as she didn't feel I would be a 'team-player', which I know from previous jobs and references it utter bollocks.
Basically, what i'm saying in a very long-winded way is that if the face (or other parts) don't fit, regardless of skill or experience, you don't get the job. Laws or no laws, it just happens.
Well gosh, I suppose I might as well settle in for a nice cuppa ...... this is gonna be good!
Bwa-ha-ha-HA HA HA.
Oh, my.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
and my murder list just grows longer.
Well I did say it was in my own experience. That is because in over ten years of being involved in the games industry that is what I have seen. YMMV. Maybe saying that they are treated a bit better than male employees would be a better way of putting it.
and the money.
Well, that and the discrimination.
The only plausible way I can see this going down is if it happened like 20 years ago, though, or happened in a country that has really really different laws/culture. Like, I'm Canadian, and the idea of an "all male company" would be ludicrous in our society.
This is what I've seen.
A) Women have to deal with stupid sexism in the industry
C) Attractive women (regardless of skill) are moved up the chain of command faster
C is the ridiculous side of so few women in the industry; tons of guys fall all over themselves to help the attractive women.
Either way, yeah, weird story. What kind of company would seriously turn down someone because of gender? Guessing it was a smaller/newer studio, because I'd think anything with any sort of experience would have enough sense/lawyers to know that's a dumb idea :P
The weird part is that friend is named Michael too. Makes his brother's facebook profile look really strange.
Crazy interview stories no longer surprise me after having read so many Daily WTFs. I can't say whether it's changed if I believe them or not, but I've read so many bizarre things, throwing another on the pile is no problem.
1. If you're a programmer (and a good one at that like the poster says she is), going into game QA is not a good step for you. You will go from making $100+k/year to about $20k/year if you're lucky. Now if you were going into QA at a software development company (not a game studio), you would be able to make excellent money if you have a background in programming.
2. I'm not entirely sure how having a background in programming is good for QA. There are a lot of relevant skills in game QA, but I'd be surprised if programming was one of them. At least she did mention collaboration which is of course important. Also, an HR person would never look at forum posts and say well golly, I can see from that they are an excellent programmer. Hired! Most HR people wouldn't even know what they're looking at and would have no idea if it's good or bad code.
3. The whole thing about the company being freaked out about a girl and being escorted out by security reeks of BS. I can get past the above points and say she was just someone who really wanted to follow their passion and willing to make a major life change but this whole part really just put the story over-the-top. There are companies out there that are pretty stupid about things like that, but I *really* doubt a place you would call earlier in your post a really good company, especially one with an HR department, would go to those extremes.
A background in programming is good because you'll be more familiar with how the game is coded. You can probably better anticipate edge cases that a programmer might not think about, or if you find a bug, you might be able to write up a better bug report since you may actually have a real idea of what's broken. Things like that are probably an asset.
Also, HR would not look at that. They would hand it to a programmer and say "is this good?" and go off that.
Calling security is a show of power so that that uppity woman knows they won't stand for her name games that tricked them into giving her an interview.
Remember, we're talking about a culture that's enormously threatened by a woman simply planning to discuss female stereotypes in video games.
You see a person's real character when you see how they act when there's no repercussions - and if the (predominantly) straight white guy tech community has proven anything time and time again, it's that they love to trumpet their misogyny, racism and homophobia, frequently all at once. (And anyone who defends it by just saying they're "just trolling" is really saying "Why yes, I am an enormous douchebag who should be avoided at any cost.") That seeps into real life interactions and you end up with situations where women have to stand to side because it's their own fault for being so distracting.
Then you have the (comparatively) non-asshole portion of the community enabling this behavior because they find it SOOOOOO unbelievable that their bros would ever act that way and that those women are making it up because they're attention whores. After all, they've never encountered sexism so it must never happen to anyone else. And besides, they know about this one girl that slept her way "to the top" so it really all balances out if you think about it.
Between the douchebags and their enablers, these types of stories happen *all the time* in the tech world.
Unrelated, R[M]arely is obviously the mole. He was leaking whenever he got high enough to not give a damn for his job security. He had it coming, twice now.
Perhaps. But this raises the bothersome question of what Cora's deal is.
I guess there's nothing that precludes them both being moles, is there?
Maybe Isaac is the only member of the entire team not leaking.
Your not being hired for not being a team player is not the same as her not getting the job for being female. It's open discrimination. You weren't born a non-team player. How does she prove it? I'm not sure exactly, I would imagine the same way anyone else proves discrimination with one word vs. the other. They certainly didn't hire her, and she had a male name. She was told of an opening, she applied, multiple emails were exchanged, that is a formal interview. Would you still be saying this if she had been black and not hired for that reason? I would think you would be thinking "Wow, what an easy discrimination lawsuit."
I can't really speak to game QA, but having a programming background is critical for QA in general, especially any kind of scenario involving test automation. QA work puts you in a lot of edge cases, and a lot of over-the-edge cases, where the designer of the tools, the framework, or the language thought long and hard and couldn't come up with a single scenario where someone would ever possibly need to do exactly the one thing you need to do.
As for the forum posts, her friend "provided [them to] the HR department and the department hiring [to show her] ability to program and also be helpful in a large, collaborative environment." HR sees the helpfulness and collaboration, the department hiring sees the programming ability.
This is probably the only part that strikes me as at all improbable, and not really even that much so. The company sees she's a girl, they kinda freak out and overreact. They've convinced her to take a day off from her job, so they think she might be upset. Maybe they're wondering if she used a fake name or something, or if something else weird or untoward is going on. They've got a security guy; might as well call him, just to be on the safe side. I could see it.
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
Stopped reading here.
It's just not always worth it.
PSN ID: fearsomepirate
It's a slam dunk discrimination lawsuit. If she sued for enough, working would be the least of her concerns because of the huge payday.
See, I called that he was the mole 3 weeks ago and while I would LOVE to be vindicated, i personally think today's comic actually proves im wrong. It sounds like hes actually innocent of being the mole, just a stoner idiot. Not that im judging him of course.
The only cure is waterballoons.