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My wife suffers from this - she does DB administration. Successful strategies: * Dress nicely - like a force to be reckoned with. * Stop holding back and seek
by benjohnson 14y ago
My wife suffers from this - she does DB administration. Successful strategies:
* Dress nicely - like a force to be reckoned with.
* Stop holding back and seek a bit of glory.
* Let others know the importance of what you do - "Oracle DB Admin for company's product line" vs "I just fix the database"
* Don't help jerks - if a jerk asks for a problem to be solved, solve it but report the solution to the jerk's boss so that they don't get the glory.
* Don't train jerks - keep your domain knowledge close to the vest.
* Wear heals - there's an odd correlation with hight and perceived stature.
- famousactress 14y agoWhat exactly does a force to be reckoned with wear? I'm being serious. The more posturing with clothing, the more I assume someone isn't good enough at what they do not to bother.
- shardling 14y agoPresumably this is only true when you notice that they're posturing. Someone adept at it will do so in a way that conveys the message they're aiming for on a more subtle level.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- MartinCron 14y agoA force to be reckoned with might be just one notch above the average of the environment. Not so overdressed as to be distracting, but polished enough to create a "don't dismiss me" unconscious message.
- famousactress 14y agoI hold my own opinion here at least a little bit suspect. I certainly wouldn't pass it off as truth or even good advice... but my tendency is to think that by the time you're considering dress, you've already lost the battle you're fighting. Once you've gotten past doing whatever it is that you deserve respect for in the first place, playing these kinds of games for it establishes weakness and enters into a social negotiation of sorts that I haven't seen won from this position very often. The spoils here tend go to the person who's earned them, and doesn't give a fuck about whether any particular other person thinks that's true.
- MartinCron 14y agoI'm going to go out on a limb and state that there's a bit of a double standard with how clothes are interpreted with men and women. I'm only barely wrapping my head around men's fashions, I don't pretend to understand what it's like for women.
- michaelt 14y agoWhat exactly does a force to be reckoned with wear? Ascend the corporate hierarchy; how does your boss's boss's boss (or their opposite-gendered counterpart in another department) dress?
- famousactress 14y agoI'd rather be naked and unemployed than even have a boss's boss's boss.
- michaelt 14y agoYes, I suspected when I wrote that it would seem unwieldy to someone from a startup. It comes about naturally enough when you have multiple thousands of employees though.
- Pxtl 14y agoHonestly? Based on my own personal past experiences, I'm more likely to assume worse of somebody who dresses nicely, at least in a technical field. Consistently all the most intelligent techies I've worked with have dressed completely unprofessionally. Obviously assumptions will get you in trouble, but my instinct when seeing a well-dressed person in a high-tech business is that they're not the one who does the real work.
- craigyk 14y agoActually dressing too well probably adds to people's cognitive dissonance. If her intention is to exploit this to her advantage, then that's one way to go about it... probably better then the OP's. The OP didn't say anything about how she was dressed for these interviews. I'd put down good money that she was dressed better than the average SE. Just because some schmucks are tactless enough to blurt their confusion doesn't necessarily make them "sexist".