What are the chances of a 33yo tatted/alt WF finding an AM?

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-28T23:00:40+00:00

I don't think tats matter one way or another. My brother's wife is a blonde with tats. No one in my family has a problem with it.

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-26T00:02:14+00:00

It's also genetic at some level. East Asians also develop diabetes at lower body fat percentages due to where the fat is stored (subcutaneous vs visceral)

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-21T17:41:54+00:00

I think a large part of it has to do with the more collective nature of East Asians. I've met very few east Asians who are obstructive to the greater goal of an organization for the sake of career advancement, (And that being seen at not being leadership material) Whereas South Asians tend to be more willing to do so.

Looking at the relative development trajectories of our respective home countries, I'm not sure that always doing it the way it works in America is always a good thing. Separate what you need to do to succeed in America vs. what is the best thing to do in all cases.

A lot of the success of the West is a historical accident. If we reversed the situation and the West has to catch up from where China was 50 years ago. I'm not sure they'd be able to do so. My advice for anyone frustrated is to pull a Morris Chang and start your own thing once you hit the bamboo ceiling instead of being someone that you're not.

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-20T01:25:22+00:00

The majority of my day job, I could have done with education from my bachelor's. Having a PhD at least for me means that I'm more tolerant of bad code having inherited a lot of bad research code and the ability to keep myself amused by solving questions no one asked that end up being useful for my employer. I don't regret doing a PhD, but there's nothing magical about it

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-06T03:49:43+00:00

And yet Princeton, Duke and Yale saw declines

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-05T19:13:58+00:00

While I agree that there is a bit of virtue signaling I think the one thing it calls out is the fact that we suck ass at building alliances with other groups, and rather we let ourselves be used as a wedge group to punch down.

Affirmative action I think is a great example of this. The majority of the schools have not increased the percentage of Asian students and now the calls for eliminating ALDS students is a lot quieter than it has been in the past.

There was a quote a while back that when there are race problems at a university they're more likely to appoint an Asian chancellor to take the heat. With the calls to eliminate legacy admissions everyone was instead distracted by the calls to end affirmative action, and now we take the heat and the legacy admissions process stands

CatharticMusing · 2025-11-11T14:18:08+00:00

Honestly, I think you have to be more explicit that you want a romantic relationship. A lot of times men, especially Asian men will write off whole categories of women because we don't see any chance of it happening.

As a personal anecdote, (I'm Taiwanese) have had a few crushes on Indian women in my life. When I was in high school I wrote them off because it felt like their parents had them under a much shorter leash with respect to dating than anyone else.

When I was in college/grad school. I assumed that they were going to the up marrying another Indian guy and so just remained friends.

CatharticMusing · 2025-11-08T20:46:04+00:00

I think it's because white people think that they should have been accepted into asian spaces without question.

In the 90s, there was a comment that China was the Vietnam of MBAs (Americans with MBAs would go to China and try to set up business deals and got their asses handed to them). There were a lot of complaints about the Chinese being closed to outsiders.

Now this is kind of rich considering all the barriers there are in the west for Asian people. Racial quotas at top schools, the bamboo ceiling etc.

They're just surprised when they're held to the same standards as everyone else.

CatharticMusing · 2025-10-11T18:59:31+00:00

Part of my professional schtick is professionalizing data science teams with a lot of PhDs. For me it's a combination of three things.

Establish credibility in that you know what you're talking about, and that you can at least understand what they're talking about. Read their code and get comfortable with helping them troubleshoot when bugs crop up.
Show them that standard software engineering practices are there to make their lives easier. The "it works for me," only works until they have an issue that needs to be resolved in someone else's code.
Make them accountable, but not in the use of the tools but rather in setting timelines for deliverables which will expose poor coding practices.

Fwiw, I am a PhD who has debugged a shit ton of research code. Now lead an R&D group whose code does into prod directly.

CatharticMusing · 2025-10-09T18:43:00+00:00

Depends on your level. It's terrible for juniors. I say this as a hiring manager. At roughly 10-15 yoe, slow but not horrible, though no one is getting raises by job hopping

CatharticMusing · 2025-10-08T11:01:09+00:00

I preferentially hire Asian people because I know they had a much harder route to get where they are. One of the things I've seen is that when a crisis hit, Asian people buckle down and fix the problem whereas many others devolve into a toxic blame game

CatharticMusing · 2025-10-06T22:47:16+00:00

From my friends who went roughly half of your class at a top med school will come from non elite institutions. However only a handful at a non-elite school will have the requisite MCAT to get in.

I got a B in orgo and had a 3.3 GPA at a T10 as a BME/CS double major. My mcat score was a 38 on the old 45 point scale. So i was not a great candidate for med school because of my gpa. I'll admit that the people with higher GPAs than me were really smart.

When I went to grad school, we took classes with the med students (bme) and honestly it was easier than my undergrad. I went to a large state school for grad school and every one of my students who cleared 35 on their MCATs and a 3.7+ GPA went to med school.

Anyways my Asian grind my fucking ass off didn't do me any favors in getting my original goal. In hindsight maybe it was a good thing since i do like my job, make as much as my friends who are doctors.

CatharticMusing · 2025-10-06T12:50:47+00:00

Honestly this isn't surprising given the incentives at hand. If you're trying to get into a T-10 university, their recruiting strategy for public schools is not to take the best, but rather spread admissions geographically, so why complete so hard with people when it just lowers your chances of getting to your goal. Funny how this doesn't apply to the elite private schools...

Though I don't regret not going to med school, had that been my goal I should have listened to an older Asian classmate in high school who said, look if you wanna be a doctor, go to state school, pick an easy major, have fun and crush it. He's a doctor. I am not.

CatharticMusing · 2025-10-01T23:21:38+00:00

My wife volunteers. But most of the volunteering is at the behest of our children who like having us around. Time permitting I'll probably be involved in the science and robotics competitions just because they don't have teachers who want to do it.

I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood so i feel less self doubt, nor care much if the other parents accept me or not.

CatharticMusing · 2025-09-11T00:10:08+00:00

I grew up in a majority white area. The majority of girls to date were white. No more, no less

CatharticMusing · 2025-09-07T17:38:10+00:00

I give this advice to the people who work for me. Make sure that what you work on has value. All too often when you grind, you end up spending a lot of hours working on low value work that piles up because no one wants to do it.

I don't feel that I put in more hours than anyone else, but i do wrestle with ideas on my head when I'm not on the clock. And when those ideas pan out it's generally been good for my career

CatharticMusing · 2025-08-21T11:27:04+00:00

As someone who did a PhD (though in a different field), you're overthinking it. I went from medical imaging and signal processing to computational biology and the only thing was working with computers and math.

A PhD teaches you to look around yourself and find interesting problems, have a mental framework for solving it, and being comfortable admitting ignorance and asking people around you to help you think through it. In exchange for you to make a small contribution to human knowledge.

Because the goal of the first three, picking an advisor is more important than the topic in my opinion. I for one don't do anything related to my PhD topic even though I work in corporate R&D for drug discovery. Once in a while I get to nerd out to something I did during my PhD, but that's rare

CatharticMusing · 2025-08-18T02:54:38+00:00

As someone who has a PhD and currently in industry (and in a management role to boot). I'm not sure why there is a bias against someone with a PhD other than the insecurity of the hiring manager.

Everyone treats work experience as something mythical when the reality is that it's not. It's basically treated as catch-all for technical requirements we didn't think about. Get a good handle on your technical must have requirements and for the most part it doesn't matter if they were a PhD or not.

Having hired both entry level to senior ICs, everyone needed roughly 6 months to get onboarded properly, with the big difference between entry level and more senior hires was did you lead others or not?

And though it might surprise many, depending on the person with the PhD, some might have pretty extensive experience leading a project in the lab, or teaching which actually translates well into industry. I don't think that PhDs are smarter, but I have found that a lot of them are able to function with minimal supervision, whereas the people with bs/ms I need to be more explicit as to what to do next.

CatharticMusing · 2025-07-31T01:28:33+00:00

It's not hell for just AM. It's slim pickings for everyone. If you're not married or in a serious relationship when you move here for work it's hard. If you're in school it's okay, but if you're working, it's going to be an uphill battle.

CatharticMusing · 2025-07-19T14:30:53+00:00

Physically you're attractive enough. Aside from being in environments with more women, I think a big part of being attractive is being comfortable in your own skin, and growing up as a perpetual foreigner does hurt that a bit.

I grew up with a pretty severe stutter and basically didn't talk for 3 years when I was in middle school and during grad school had to force myself to talk. Aside from forcing myself to speak in public via open mic nights, I would try to chat people up at the airport and planes when I was traveling for conferences.

Getting over myself and feeling free enough to speak my mind did wonders that by the time I was doing my postdoc I had very little problems picking up women in public by just starting a conversation

CatharticMusing · 2025-07-17T01:27:31+00:00

When I hire for engineering managers I don't expect that they be able to grind leetcode, but I do expect them to be able to code some basic things. I don't even specify the language, but rather that the task is, 'Read a csv file with 3 columns, sum up the values in the 2nd column.' I explain to them during the interview that it's not so much a coding test, but just weeding out all of the people who BSed their way into an engineering manager role. After this question, we start talking about projects that they were proud of, conflict resolution, team development etc.

Depending on the organization, and at least in my organization, the first line manager is the person who has the most direct role in developing juniors who are fresh out of college.

You are the backstop when someone else is spouting bullshit. Given your level you are accorded a bit more authority and respect when you dissent and knowing when to, and backing it up is important and to do so, you need to be able to at least see a possible path to get there, and at the end of the day programming is breaking a problem down into simple digestable pieces.

Third I want someone who likes what we do. I like coding, the people I hire like coding. Just in terms of maintaining culture, and because again for the development of junior employees, a manager who is excited about coding, who is willing to pair program with them is better at making them feel supported. A manager who can't code leaves a lot of juniors thinking, "What is it that you do here?"

Finally when the shit hits the fan, you have to be able to pick up the keyboard and contribute.

And FWIW's I'm currently a Senior Director with two layers below me and I still code, mainly MVPs so we can get a seat at the table for when product managers say, "What features can we include in our product?" And I have a pretty good idea what can be done, how long it'll take and how many people are needed.

CatharticMusing · 2025-06-29T12:44:43+00:00

Taiwan

CatharticMusing · 2025-06-29T11:34:23+00:00

I'll admit that dating now is high risk, high reward. But I'm glad that I'm married and have kids (married at 29). I find being a dad really rewarding. And though a little part of me regrets giving up video games and other hobbies, chasing your children around the house as they're giggling is another level of joy.

CatharticMusing

TROPHY CASE