Trans woman (recently out), still learning the ropes. Not my real name nor initials, want to avoid harassment as best I can.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • Yes, you’re absolutely right. There’s a lot of hopelessness and apathy, and it’s only helping those who commit the atrocities.

    But before you judge, I’ll state that I’ve been a member of an activist group, progressivecoders dot org, for the last 5 years. I’ve worked on various projects, but overall watched the world situation get worse anyway. Even before that, I’ve done my best to be an activist and ally.

    I’ve also been in the software industry for 30 years. I’ve watched it go from a genuinely useful and interesting information processing and delivery system, to a completely shittified ad delivery and surveillance tool. I’ve had to participate in it myself, I was actually part of the team that delivered the first animated GIF that made advertising that much more annoying. I worked for several of the big internet monopolies, and realized that it wasn’t an accomplishment, they just crack the whip that much harder, and I have CPTSD in exchange for free lunches and massages.

    So yeah, I’m starting to give up. But it’s not for lack of trying.



  • There’s a science fiction story, I think by Cory Doctorow, in which one of the technologies was gender reassignment restrooms. Go in, spend (unspecified, but not too terribly long, since characters talked about going in preparation for activities that night) time, and emerge with the new gender as though born to it. And my first thought was, yes, I would pay any amount of money to have that available to me. Like genderdysphoria.fyi says, if you think about it at all, you’re already thinking about it 100% more than most cis people ever do.




  • I haven’t gotten a raise in 10 years (since I turned 50). In fact, switching jobs often resulted in a decrease in salary. From 2018 to today, counting inflation, my effective salary has dropped over 30%.

    And no, I’m not mediocre at my job. At one Major Internet Monopoly I wrote a script to refactor several million lines of code, to remove redundancy in some autogenerated structs, with only one major outage that I fixed in a few hours. I than proceeded to modify a data display and write a coefficient calculation engine for an inhouse experiment that ended up saving them tens of thousands of dollars. After the experiment I leveraged the ML platform to generate reports for the data scientists in hours, where they were prepared to take weeks. My evaluation for that period? One step below Meets Expectations.

    At another Major Internet Monopoly I basically implemented a major feature to the mobile app, while still in my 90 day onboarding period. Under extreme schedule pressure. And while the other engineers “helpfully” redesigned my code in code review. Once I missed a release cycle because a reviewer blocked my submission because I forgot to add a period at the end of a comment. I’m still burned out from that one.

    I’m at a much better company now, at $10k below the Major Internet Monopoly above. In 2 years I got one 5k bonus, but still no raise. And we’re a startup struggling with the current economy fuckery, so no real point asking for a raise.

    Sorry, that was 3 things.



  • This precisely. Maybe “us vs them” was useful when we lived in caves and resources were limited, but now, we should theoretically have enough food and housing that everyone could be comfortable.

    But, Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” has bogarted all the resources, and emphasized tribalism by saying it’s really “their” fault, where “they” are anyone not like “us”. When we’re all struggling together.