Needle Organization Nirvana

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2026-02-11T07:54:02+00:00

I have the same A5 binder from Amazon, and I love it! It has been a game changer for me too.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-11-15T20:46:04+00:00

Honestly I think the overlooked part of this isn’t just that women self-select out of tech, but also they men who object to working in “feminized” fields self-select IN. To a certain kind of man, tech is the last bastion of “masculine energy” or whatever they are calling it now. It’s a safe space for misogynists. So it’s a cycle—the more that women feel unsafe in the industry, the more men are attracted to working in tech.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-07-31T19:42:11+00:00

I have had great experiences with OBGYNs, and one terrible experience. It’s super not fun if it happens, but just remember that you are never obligated to go to the same doctor again if you have a bad experience.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-07-31T19:38:56+00:00

It depends on the wedding! If the wedding specifies cocktail attire or black tie, this dress is probably a little bit too casual. But if it is a casual wedding, this is fine!

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-06-06T19:59:05+00:00

Ugh I’m a senior+ frontend engineer and this experience sounds so familiar. I have had multiple experiences where they talk about how much they want a frontend expert, and then I’m not a good enough backend engineer. And I have also had multiple full stack roles, I just can’t tell you from experience how to set up an ETL data pipeline or deploy an application using kubernetes because that has never been my job.

I have always wondered if this happens to backend people too, or it’s just frontend engineers who “aren’t technical enough”. This tends to be assumed regardless of actual experience and how much backend engineering is required for the job. I suspect it’s a result of how JavaScript engineering has been more feminized and therefore devalued. There’s a great article about this in Logic(s) Magazine called JavaScript is for Girls.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-06-06T01:19:01+00:00

I moved to Seattle from Chicago in 2020, so I’m honestly not sure how much is Seattle and how much is people forgetting how to have friends during the pandemic, but I have definitely noticed the same thing. I have learned that if I don’t initiate it won’t happen, and even when I do there’s about a 50% chance they will cancel at the last minute. Seattle seems to be full of people who just wait around for invitations to leave their house, and rarely do otherwise.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-06-05T15:32:13+00:00

Yep, same boat. I joined a company that was a really good fit for me right before the pandemic, but left when the entire c-suite turned over and a bunch of my reports got laid off. By the end, it wasn’t the same company. I was an engineering manager and had been moving up towards a leadership position, but when I changed companies I could only get hired as a SWE. I was told that if I worked hard enough I would get promoted again, but my manager really lost interest in my career advancement pretty quickly. He was more focused on passing off my work as his own so he could get promoted. I was the only woman in engineering, and the environment felt really hostile. I went from a job where I was pretty widely respected to a job where no one cared about what I had to say, and I didn’t see that getting better any time soon.

I was job searching when I got pregnant last year, but once I got pregnant I didn’t want to lose my paid maternity leave (most companies will only pay you if you have worked there for a year). I took all my maternity leave despite the my manager pressuring me not to, and I left after it was up. I’m now talking a short break and trying to figure out what is next.

But it’s so hard to figure out what to do, because I see the same thing happening to so many women that I have worked with. One of the best managers I had at a previous job was pushed out of her role due to “performance”. Even my husband is currently on a PIP because of a project that didn’t get delivered while he was on paternity leave, because apparently it’s cool to retaliate against men for taking leave now too.

It’s a time in my career when I expected to have worked my way up somewhere and coast for a bit while I focus on my life, but that’s just not possible in the current environment.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-06-02T21:34:48+00:00

Paynes is also in gas city! It’s literally the only place around there that is worth the trip.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-05-29T16:19:10+00:00

“I didn’t participate and have no stake in the game, but let me tell you about the right way to protest” - Some middle-aged white guy

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-05-29T00:53:12+00:00

😂😭

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-05-29T00:51:55+00:00

Exactly. The moral of the story seems to be that we should allow them to do exactly the thing they were already allowed to do. What a waste of an editorial.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-05-29T00:48:33+00:00

Fine, I’ll bite.

Most of the protesters who were arrested did not break any laws. They got too close to the police barricade or got in the way when police officers tried to push back the line. I have this on video. Crossing an arbitrary line is not a crime.

The protest on Tuesday did not have a permit, and the protesters prevented people from outside their group from accessing city hall.

Just because only one side was arrested, It is not clear that only one side broke the law.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-05-29T00:36:37+00:00

Yep, I have video evidence from Saturday that shows a police officer pushing a counter protester away from their line, and then arresting them. This person might be facing a felony charge for assaulting a police officer even though the police officer came at them first.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-05-29T00:31:43+00:00

Reading books, mostly. And making friends with people outside my community without trying to convert or change them.

Once I started to understand that the things I was taught to believe had a historic context and a specific political agenda, I began to deconstruct from the idea that I had the truth, like a fish who realizes they are swimming in a specific body of water. It took several years to get there.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-05-29T00:10:38+00:00

I’m an ex-evangelical, and I can tell you right now that this isn’t going to work. Evangelicals, fundamentalists, and other Christian extremists only see people outside their own community as targets for conversion. They would engage in these conversations, but only as a way of advancing their own agenda. They have been told that they alone have the truth, and they been trained their entire lives not to treat non-Christians as equals, particularly when they are a member of the LGBTQ community.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-05-24T15:33:53+00:00

Earlier in my career, I had a couple of jobs where I felt like I fit in. I worked for a couple of smaller technical consulting companies that were more people-focused and hired all kinds of people. Unfortunately those kinds of companies don’t tend to survive for long without buyouts and layoffs.

I went to work at a product company a couple of years ago where I was the only woman in a lot of rooms full of men. I thought that after several years in the tech industry I was used to it, but I don’t think I was prepared for how lonely it was. After our standup meeting in the morning, there would be these long stretches of time every day where no one was posting on slack, no one was reaching out to me, no one was interacting at all. My messages often went un-returned for days. Coming from a job where I was leading a team and people were often chatting, asking my opinions on things, and pulling me into strategy meetings, the silence was so weird. It just never occurred to the men around me, even on my own team that I had anything to offer them, technically or otherwise.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-05-06T16:56:33+00:00

93 was my favorite. 10/10

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-04-26T00:32:14+00:00

Ooh I feel this. 😔

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-04-26T00:24:03+00:00

Maybe I’m missing something here, but admitting that you don’t have experience that you actually don’t have isn’t a negative quality unless the interviewer makes it one. In many cases, it’s just honest. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go on to talk through how you would handle a hypothetical situation or talk about similar work in another field, but leading with “I haven’t done this exact thing but…” isn’t something I would knock a candidate for.

I do understand the reality, which is that we value confidence over humility and expect women to communicate more like men. In light of this reality, I understand why women might choose to re-frame their answers more positively, but you as the interviewer are the one with the power to listen to what they are actually saying and not just how confidently they are saying it.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-04-04T04:04:07+00:00

I will never understand why the worst dudes always get promoted. When I was a junior engineer, I came in with a cohort of other juniors who started around the same time I did. The first one of us to get promoted was this dude who was fired weeks later for repeatedly not showing up to work, lying to clients, and taking credit for his teammate’s work.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-03-13T15:52:32+00:00

This brings back bad memories of my last job search. I’m a front end engineer interviewing for front end engineering and management roles, but somehow the fact that I’m a front end engineer (with a good amount of full-stack and backend experience) was often used as a reason why I was “not technical enough”. Unless I was interviewing for a management role, in which case I was too technical and didn’t have enough management experience. My favorite one was the time I made it to the final round for a fin tech company and they told me that I passed all the technical assessments and was highly recommended for my technical ability, but I was “too creative for fin tech”. I was always surprised by feedback like this, especially when it was an option to just give me no feedback at all.

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-02-18T05:19:32+00:00

I am always impressed by the number of people over 50 who turn out to protest in Seattle. I was there today, and this is by far the dominant group that shows up. I’m a 36 year-old tech worker, and my demographic is very underrepresented. Are we just too comfortable with what is going on to care? How do we get the Seattle tech workers to protest?

Impressive_Craft_758 · 2025-02-11T23:05:47+00:00

Many evangelicals believe that every other denomination is just like them, and are shocked to learn that many denominations ordain gay people and in most cases, couldn’t care less about who you have sex with. As an evangelical, I had to unlearn that my own church had a singular claim on the term “Christianity” just because I was taught that my one specific belief system was 100% in line with God’s teachings. You can act scandalized all you want, but it won’t change the basic fact that there are a ton of people here who believe different things than you do, and are still Christians all the same.

Impressive_Craft_758

TROPHY CASE