mjb394's comments

Option 1. Honk your horn. Sounds like this is what you're doing, and it makes other people around you more stressed, more frustrated, and less willing to do extra work to help you. After a while, noise like that just gets tuned out.

Option 2. Recognize this is an inappropriate metaphor, and that you are part of an organization that has certain policies and procedures, and that anything being done for reasons other than legal compliance can be up for debate and change.

Do you know why the central IT branch is behind? Are they working with shitty software that makes their jobs harder instead of easier? Are the business processes in place to grant a simple request unnecessarily complex? Is a mistake very costly and difficult to fix, meaning that correctness is incentivized at the expense of throughput? How much is it costing the business while you sit and twiddle your thumbs waiting for approval? Who in your organization has these answers? Who has the power to make decisions about these things? What can you do to get those people together in a room to discuss these issues?

You can get a lot further by trying to fix a problem instead of just complaining about it.

No one is arguing that uninsured people would use more preventative care, right?

It really depends on the person, the culture and family they grew up in, their physiology, etc. For me, one of my primary reactions to anxiety and stress (or especially the feeling of release once a stressor event is over) is crying, so that's at least a couple of times a month. Some people just get overwhelmed with emotion (not necessarily sadness, any type will do) or have found crying to be a useful physical reaction because of the hormones that get released and the often cathartic feeling of being able to express your emotional state, even in private to yourself.

How does your agenda view differ from the default?

Dunno why people are surprised that (straight) women are interested in boyfriends as well. Plus or minus a percentage or two, there are as many single women as single men, and they face many similar family/societal pressures to be involved with someone (if not more due to the eventual biological timebomb). Partners are not commodities, and it's way better for women to be single than to have the wrong partner.

Anti-sexist reactions are very rare compared to instances of sexist behavior in my experience. If anti-sexist behavior was as rampant and casual as sexist behavior, those kind of blowups wouldn't happen.

Most people can't afford to take even a small loss on selling a house, let alone the kind that would ensue if everyone actually jumped ship. In small towns, people don't rent. Are there actually enough places for these people to go where their life would be meaningfully better?

Pharmacies might be cookie-cutter businesses in your experience, but in a place with the density of NY, why should they be? Why can't there be a compounding pharmacy that specializes in pre-natal care, so the pharmacists and technicians are exceptionally well versed in various remedies for things like morning sickness, swelling, any sort of ailment that pregnancy can bring, who know pregnancy better than any doctor in terms of what products work best and in what combinations, in addition to stocking an assortment of complementary non-prescription items, all chosen because they are uniquely suited for the kinds of issues pregnant women specifically have.

Ditto cancer. Ditto orthopedics. Ditto MS and musculoskeletal problems. Ditto pediatrics. Communities exist around all of these things because people need a place to find that information and get their questions answered. Why couldn't that place be the exact type of business that exists to address people's health needs?

It could be a business built around serving the needs of a minority (yet significant) population exceptionally well, instead of being a bland cookie-cutter store that serves everyone pretty much okay, unless something goes wrong and the 22 year old pharmacy tech who has never even had a conversation with someone with your particular health concern remarkably doesn't know how to help you.

I don't know anyone who works 60 hours a week and also participates in the kind of community that Oakland has. People actually know each other there! They talk to their neighbors and strangers on the street, and it brightens everyone's day to have that little touch of human connection. They go to parties and talk about things other than their jobs. They paint and draw and play music and plan events and fundraisers that are good for the community. I know techies who aspire to that kind of life, but thinking like you want to do something and actually doing it are very different things.

When it comes to gay relationships, find some friends first. You need an in to the community, someone to invite you to the happy hour with their LGBT volunteer group or the queer short film festival. All you need is one or two people who are socially connected and get you started with gay events. You meet their friends, you go to the gay parties with them, you get familiar with the scene, and one thing leads to another from there. The odds are too slim in the world outside of gay centric events. You need to actively cultivate a gay community around you, because the tech life doesn't automatically lead to one on its own. This is doubly true if your outward presentation doesn't come off as 'gay' to other people. Making yourself visible to other gay people, even in subtle ways, makes a big difference. Take it from a straight-as-hell looking bi woman. I live in the city with the highest number of lesbian couples per capita, and I met no gay women for six months. Then, I went to one gay happy hour and met someone who told me about this lesbian tech conference, where I met a few more people, and now I hang out with gay people multiple times a week, and I have my first date since moving last year lined up for this weekend.

Search for gay events on facebook. Go gay hiking with a group from Meetup. Is there a StartOut chapter in your area? There is very probably a gay tech happy hour somewhere. Go to gay events until you feel like you're going to start barfing rainbows. Force yourself to do it. Look for gay networking on LinkedIn. Add a few people on Facebook (and check out their event feed, often there is gold in there). Make plans with two new potential friends. Once it starts going, it's easy to keep going.

There are a lot of different medications you can take, and they have different side effect profiles. Prozac is different from Wellbutrin is different from Lexapro, etc. Sometimes doctors don't have a good reason to choose one over another in any particular case. If you sit down and have a serious talk with your doctor about which side effects often come with each medication, and which side effects you can live with, you're more likely to get off on the right foot.

People telling you to exercise are right, but that is pretty hard advice in that format. The real answer is to find the kind of exercise that works for you, and don't give up until you do. I've never been a morning person, and I always hated running and other cardio, so for years I didn't really exercise at all outside of walking places. Turns out I really like biking and rock climbing. If you can switch to biking as part of your commute (biking to the train maybe) then you don't have a way out, and you have to exercise. Use the days when you do have energy to make plans for later days when you may not. Try to do things for other people.

The best thing for me in the end was 1. Getting out of the life situation where I had been depressed for a long time. 2. Getting into something totally new and overwhelming, and doing it totally by myself. I spent all of college and grad school dealing with some pretty severe depression, and when I finally graduated I took out extra loans to travel for a few months over the summer before my job started. I bought a one way ticket, planned almost nothing except listing a few places I wanted to see, and went alone. When you are traveling alone in a foreign country, it really hits home that you are entirely responsible for your own experience. There are beautiful sights, incredible food, life changing encounters to be had, and you have to make the choice every day between getting up and out and interacting with the world and crying on your hostel bed. You'll still spend some time crying on your hostel bed, but you might also smoke a joint with a Brazilian and some French women in a park in Prague and start a travel romance with a former professional trail runner in Barcelona.

Education is where the least disparity occurs. Everyone, regardless of demographics, goes to the same lectures, turns in the same projects, takes the same exams, gets graded on the same rubric.

Bias and discrimination creeps in once humans start to make judgments on things that aren't so clear cut. There is no objective scale for a resume, or a conference proposal. People use their intuition and judgment to make decisions about hiring, and speaker selection, and salary offers, and everything else- and that intuition has been shown to be unconsciously biased in many studies, including the ones you referenced.

It's probably very frustrating, as a white male (according to the picture on the article at least), to feel like the deck might be stacked against you in some way, in some situations, at some companies. It's also very frustrating as a minority in a field to know that it is, for it to have been shown to be true both in your own experience and in decades of research.

Solutions are up for debate. No one has the best answer. What is happening is an iterative process towards something that is better, that works for more people, more of the time.

Trivia is a great activity. I like it when you have a ton of mini-rounds of 2-3 questions under some category- you can leave plenty of time in-between questions so people can come up with an answer and then still have time to chat and get to know each other. For your goal specifically, I would just try to avoid topics that are kinda gendered and stick to stuff that isn't. Biology, history, music, pop culture, literature are all great topics. Throw in some oddball questions, and keep a really broad scope so you can learn which of your new teammates is really into Bill Murray and knows what language he learned, what instrument he learned to play and what art form he practiced in Groundhog Day, or what is the common name for Amorphophallus titanum, the Sumatran flower that is the largest flower in the world and arguably the smelliest.

Trivia is cool because it gets your brain going in a lot of different directions in a short period of time, it can spur some ideas for the rest of your hacking. It is also competitive while still being fun, and unlike a tournament, you get to play the whole time whether you're in first place or last. If you have a Final Jeopardy style final question, you can totally come up from behind and win if you're the only team that knows it, so it's never pointless to keep going. Giving out prizes for various special rounds is great for that too, like a round where you have to identify songs based on a 15 second clip, or brands or celebrities based on a picture. Think about how you want teams to form, and what size works best for your group.

Rock on with being mindful about the culture you're creating. Lots of devs love competition and violence like that, and lots of devs don't.