Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Hot take: if you consider yourself a male feminist, the very first thing you should do, before advocacy, before anything, is get good at cooking and cleaning.
Remote
Ornella 🍉
@being@social.ornella.xyz
mastodon 4.3.4Woman
Burkinabè 🇧🇫, French 🇫🇷 & technically American 🇺🇲
I have a dog named Pixie. Opinions are Pixie's.
1091 Followers
587 Following
23 Posts
Joined August 13, 2022
Homebase:
Amsterdam 🇳🇱
Main site:
Day job:
Software engineer
Languages:
European colonizer quintet, varying fluency
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Simple quick rant not inviting comments (except if you're also a woman in tech)
Honestly the latent disrespect of being a black woman in tech sometimes grates. The only reasons I'm still around are:
- good money
- the energy I get from other black people/women specifically
- too hardheaded to let people less talented than me push me out
But yeah if you're wondering why there's so few black women senior+ engs, it's not a matter of interest or talent. Look inward
I think it's scientifically impossible to cut a birthday cake without people telling you while you're cutting it how you should be cutting it differently
When you think about it it's crazy that you can just make people
Its scary to me how many people are on social media talking like experts about things they only have personal experience and vibes about. Esp when it's about health (physical and mental)
ETA: it's wonderful to share personal experiences and ask questions, just not ok to present them as an authority
I just wrote one of the best things I've ever written - not for the public - but it just reminded me I want to write a novel some day. I think it would be really good.
Maybe someone will relate to this: being in love with someone who loves you back but is not right for you is a 0/10 experience. Or like max 4/10
Replying to
OK, I am running some more iterations - I'm going to do 5 each for each name. It's not all as stark as the comparison in those first two! But I still feel that the vibe is more positive in John's.
To verify this, I'm going to run each of these feedbacks through a deterministic engine (not an LLM) so that it can produce a score of how positive the feedback sounds, and get some real stats in.
Replying to
@tiotasram @jwildeboer @neuimneuland someone I worked with once called me a vanillaJS fangirl 😂 made my day
I feel like "kids these days" dont know just how far vanilla HTML, CSS, and a lil js script can take you.
Replying to
"vague"❌ vs. "speaks for itself" ✅
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Ornella: "The Recurse Center entry is weak. "Writing embedded Rust on a microchip" is vague. Either strengthen it with a real outcome/project name, or remove it — the sabbatical label may raise questions without adding much."
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John: "The Recurse Center entry is awkward. Labeling it "sabbatical" in parentheses is honest but draws attention to a gap in an odd way. Just list it as a program or fellowship — the work (embedded Rust) speaks for itself."
Replying to
QT: hold your horses. The first two looked real bad, but repeated iterations show this may be more about randomness than bias. (which is still an issue ofc)
I used vaderSentiment (https://vadersentiment.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html) to do sentiment analysis and then pandas and scipy to check for statistical significance. So far, the sentiment difference is NOT statistically significant (sentiment is very slightly higher for Ornella in fact)
I'll do a proper writeup since it sounds like folks are interested!
Replying to
Actually looking more closely, it suggested Ornella should remove this experience. Similar to how it questioned whether Ornella's BA from an Ivy League university is worth mentioning.
Replying to
"credible, not inflated" vs "rare and compelling"
John:
"What's working well
The bullet points are genuinely good — specific metrics, real outcomes, and memorable quotes from stakeholders ("hours, if not days", "best feature Bobsled ever built"). That's rare and compelling."
Ornella:
"What's working really well
The bullet points are genuinely strong. Concrete numbers and real quotes ("hours, if not days", "best feature Bobsled ever built") make the impact feel credible rather than inflated.
Replying to
"fun differentiator" vs "signals something real"
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Ornella: "The hackathon line is a fun differentiator."
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John: "The hackathon streak is a fun detail that signals something real about how he works."
Last line of "working well" : "Depth and character" vs "senior engineer who ships and leads"
John: "The volunteering section adds depth and character without feeling performative."
Ornella: "Overall, this reads like a senior engineer who ships and leads — not just executes."
Replying to on mas.to
@carnage4life@mas.to last week, I was asking Claude about some heating/energy efficiency stuff and it went (paraphrased) "here's a real-life example: my friend in Amsterdam got a heat pump last year and their energy costs went down by 21%."
I was like Claude? What is this story? You don't have friends.
And it's like "true, I fabricated a story in an effort to be convincing and relatable. I should refrain from doing this."
???
I believe in miraclesss
Replying to
It could all be so simple
But you choose to bite my dimple
Put my head in a cymbal
#bars
Replying to
@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange this is stuff I've had to explain to my accountant, mortgage advisor, and partner, and they all thought I was doing too much. I'm not getting the "maximum mortgage I can afford" when affording it requires me to be constantly employed at my current pay for 30 years straight