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I love that you pointed out the need for political strength within organizations. I agree, and I think it directly conflicts with this line from the post: Yeah

I love that you pointed out the need for political strength within organizations. I agree, and I think it directly conflicts with this line from the post: Yeah, I’m gonna bring gender into it, because I’m a woman and when women take on roles like this they often get pigeonholed into “den mother” stereotypes. That means less prestige and less prestige usually means less pay. Having the admiration and respect of the next generation of developers at your company offers far more leverage than the nebulous prestige. If you mentor three engineers, that's three warm bodies at your company who will have good things to say when asked about you. If you do a good job, you now have a team of four capable engineers who can get things done. What could provide more organizational political power than building a hierarchy of capable engineers that consistently come to you when they need help?

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Don't see anything said that's incompatible with the 'Den mother' stigma. If its about pay and promotion, not about being friendly with Engineers, then you want to avoid the role that won't be respected. You can't imagine all the ways management can dismiss women's actions - "she's a great connector in that department. Let's leave her there, that's working great." or "sure she's got all the guys eating out of her hand. But lets talk leadership - Bob has got everybody afraid of him! Lets promote Bob"
- padobson 9y ago
  If its about pay and promotion Pay and promotion is about making yourself valuable. If you mentor engineers and gain a reputation for doing so, you're effectively shaping the culture of the organization, not to mention gives you a ton of leverage with the productive employees you taught to be productive. It makes you far less disposable. When mixed with even amateur negotiating skills, that leads to promotion and better pay.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    If you ignore the part about stigmatizing, which happens to women by default, then sure. An objective management team would act as described. But the 'den mother' comment comes out of a real issue, of womens roles being sidelined. One pragmatic response is to avoid roles that feed into the stereotype. In a better world, this would not be a thing. But here we are.
    - padobson 9y ago
      One pragmatic response is to avoid roles that feed into the stereotype. You make a good point, and I agree with the pragmatism of the choice, but I also believe mentorship can be a means of advancement. The point of my original comment was to advocate for another choice - one that will both advance the mentor and their proteges. Hopefully, this will give us that better world we're looking for.
  - Marazan 9y ago
    If you're mentoring jr devs ten it's going to be years before they rise up high enough to have any influence on you getting promotion.
MollyR 9y ago
Wait until you get old (past 35), I'm a woman (ex web deck "ninja/rockstar/etc") and I can safely say the ageist comments are far worse. No one believes you can keep up the development sprints, or new technologies.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  Molly, you are so right. And this is why internships are a bunch of hooey too. ("hooey" only in the supposedly merit-based on-ramp sense- of course they're valuable for teaching and learning and building a great team) The entire process toward getting tech job is ageist if all we have to offer "junior devs" is the internship role. (all the ads say that interns must be recent graduates or currently enrolled in an undergrad CS program) Nevermind if that's even legal. We know legality doesn't come into it until a whole movement and hashtag gets going. The ageism is sickening. It does seem that those who are the most ageist may suffer the consequences of their culture later. For example, it's interesting that Facebook is now officially the "old(er) person's social media" according to The Guardian and many other sources this week. Do note that "old" had to be changed in rewrite to "old(er)" in the paper, so as not to appear as fully insulting and ageist as the statement to address the data actually is.
- hgthompson 9y ago
  This is also one reason why senior people don't want to mentor -- they'll get stabbed in the back at the first opportunity. Ageism also goes both ways: I find the output of the current young generation pretty unimaginative and poor. Redecorating OCaml, Erlang and Javascript in order to have a "new" "technology" does not impress me.
- zappo2938 9y ago
  I'm a little older but I'm only 6 years in the industry. I worked at a job where they were using technologies from 10 years ago, i.e. tons of custom PHP5 and MySQL on top of Wordpress, while I took the time to learn Angular, Node.js, MongoDB, Postgres, React, and modern tooling like Grunt and Webpack -- this list can go on and on. Now I have a situation where I had to go back in time and learn how to do things 4 years before I started hacking and everyone in any position of power is treating me like I'm a threat. I open my mouth at a meeting and someone will immediately shut me down. At every corner, I'm being mansplained to and I'm a man.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Having the admiration and respect of the next generation of developers at your company offers far more leverage than the nebulous prestige “Prestige” and “respect” are essentially synonyms, and careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management. > What could provide more organizational political power than building a hierarchy of capable engineers that consistently come to you when they need help? Being perceived by management as delivering results rather than being the one behind the scenes enabling others to be perceived that way.
- padobson 9y ago
  > Being perceived by management as delivering results rather than being the one behind the scenes enabling others to be perceived that way. This is essentially a synonym of the sentence you quoted > careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management You're missing the point. By mentoring developers you become de facto management; it's willful, benevolent career advancement.
yetanotheruser 9y ago
Depends if the leaders even care what 3 junior devs think.
- padobson 9y ago
  The leaders will care a great deal if the three devs are well trained and capable.
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    The leaders should care a great deal.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago

Don't see anything said that's incompatible with the 'Den mother' stigma. If its about pay and promotion, not about being friendly with Engineers, then you want to avoid the role that won't be respected. You can't imagine all the ways management can dismiss women's actions - "she's a great connector in that department. Let's leave her there, that's working great." or "sure she's got all the guys eating out of her hand. But lets talk leadership - Bob has got everybody afraid of him! Lets promote Bob"

padobson 9y ago
If its about pay and promotion Pay and promotion is about making yourself valuable. If you mentor engineers and gain a reputation for doing so, you're effectively shaping the culture of the organization, not to mention gives you a ton of leverage with the productive employees you taught to be productive. It makes you far less disposable. When mixed with even amateur negotiating skills, that leads to promotion and better pay.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  If you ignore the part about stigmatizing, which happens to women by default, then sure. An objective management team would act as described. But the 'den mother' comment comes out of a real issue, of womens roles being sidelined. One pragmatic response is to avoid roles that feed into the stereotype. In a better world, this would not be a thing. But here we are.
  - padobson 9y ago
    One pragmatic response is to avoid roles that feed into the stereotype. You make a good point, and I agree with the pragmatism of the choice, but I also believe mentorship can be a means of advancement. The point of my original comment was to advocate for another choice - one that will both advance the mentor and their proteges. Hopefully, this will give us that better world we're looking for.
- Marazan 9y ago
  If you're mentoring jr devs ten it's going to be years before they rise up high enough to have any influence on you getting promotion.

MollyR 9y ago

Wait until you get old (past 35), I'm a woman (ex web deck "ninja/rockstar/etc") and I can safely say the ageist comments are far worse. No one believes you can keep up the development sprints, or new technologies.

brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
Molly, you are so right. And this is why internships are a bunch of hooey too. ("hooey" only in the supposedly merit-based on-ramp sense- of course they're valuable for teaching and learning and building a great team) The entire process toward getting tech job is ageist if all we have to offer "junior devs" is the internship role. (all the ads say that interns must be recent graduates or currently enrolled in an undergrad CS program) Nevermind if that's even legal. We know legality doesn't come into it until a whole movement and hashtag gets going. The ageism is sickening. It does seem that those who are the most ageist may suffer the consequences of their culture later. For example, it's interesting that Facebook is now officially the "old(er) person's social media" according to The Guardian and many other sources this week. Do note that "old" had to be changed in rewrite to "old(er)" in the paper, so as not to appear as fully insulting and ageist as the statement to address the data actually is.
hgthompson 9y ago
This is also one reason why senior people don't want to mentor -- they'll get stabbed in the back at the first opportunity. Ageism also goes both ways: I find the output of the current young generation pretty unimaginative and poor. Redecorating OCaml, Erlang and Javascript in order to have a "new" "technology" does not impress me.
zappo2938 9y ago
I'm a little older but I'm only 6 years in the industry. I worked at a job where they were using technologies from 10 years ago, i.e. tons of custom PHP5 and MySQL on top of Wordpress, while I took the time to learn Angular, Node.js, MongoDB, Postgres, React, and modern tooling like Grunt and Webpack -- this list can go on and on. Now I have a situation where I had to go back in time and learn how to do things 4 years before I started hacking and everyone in any position of power is treating me like I'm a threat. I open my mouth at a meeting and someone will immediately shut me down. At every corner, I'm being mansplained to and I'm a man.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Having the admiration and respect of the next generation of developers at your company offers far more leverage than the nebulous prestige “Prestige” and “respect” are essentially synonyms, and careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management. > What could provide more organizational political power than building a hierarchy of capable engineers that consistently come to you when they need help? Being perceived by management as delivering results rather than being the one behind the scenes enabling others to be perceived that way.

padobson 9y ago
> Being perceived by management as delivering results rather than being the one behind the scenes enabling others to be perceived that way. This is essentially a synonym of the sentence you quoted > careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management You're missing the point. By mentoring developers you become de facto management; it's willful, benevolent career advancement.

yetanotheruser 9y ago

Depends if the leaders even care what 3 junior devs think.

padobson 9y ago
The leaders will care a great deal if the three devs are well trained and capable.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  The leaders should care a great deal.