Anyhow, I'll quote an excerpt from one of the comments:
> A married man is considered (in the sociology findings) to bring "more than" one person to work with him, because it is assumed he has someoone feeding/dressing/cruise directing him. This frees up his brain space for ... work. On the other hand, a married woman is considered to bring less than a whole person to work. Because she is assumed to be feeding/dressing/cruise directing at least one other human. And possibly incubating another. This is taking up valuable brain space that could be devoted to work.
So, there's a conscious or unconscious bias against women in working life, due to the assumption that they'll be doing more than their fair share of unpaid, generally undervalued labor outside of the workplace. Oh so plausible. This would be a rational reason for a workplace to discriminate against women, given the existing context of structural unfairness and bias in the rest of society. "Hurray!"
[1] http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emo...
[2] ...unless you are very uncomfortable with reading criticism of men, and you cannot stomach discomfort. in that case, it's probably best for everyone involved if you don't follow the link.
I just got out of a relationship where I handled all those responsibilities. I wasn't compensated for it, nor did I expect to be. Insofar as my own generation is concerned, I've encountered lots of men that cook. In fact, I have known more men that cook than women. I also know more men than women, but the relative frequency seems about equal between the sexes.
It's more subtle: I don't think anyone is making sweeping uniform generalisations. i.e. "ALL MEN DO a" "ALL WOMEN DO b". I'm not claiming anything about specific individuals. but I am indeed claiming there is a general bias, at least in a statistical sense. For example, here's an arbitrary statistic from the UK in 2012 [1]:
> Just over one in 10 women – 13% – say their husbands do more housework than they do, while only 3% of married women do fewer than three hours a week, with almost half doing 13 hours or more.
So, given no further information about particular circumstances, if I were a betting man, I know which way I'd bet about this kind of thing.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/mar/10/housework-gen...
I suspect excessive hours also contributes to unintentional harassment [1], mostly against single women.
Most people are heterosexual. Most of them want to find partners to have relationships with ranging from casual flings to long term romantic relationships.
If people are expected to work long and hard hours they will be left without the time and/or energy for activities outside of work where they can seek out sexual and romantic partners. Since people are not going to give up on seeking out sexual and romantic partners inevitably some of that activity will shift to the office. If that office has significantly more single men than single women it is going to get particularly annoying for the women.
[1] By "unintentional harassment" I mean actions that are takes as harassment by the person they are directed to, but are not intended as harassment by the person taking the action.
> both men and women were significantly more likely to hire a male applicant than a female applicant with an identical record.
And from the linked studies: "Men only penalized female candidates for attempting to negotiate whereas women penalized both male and female candidates."
And the pay rates, and drops, from here http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf+html are both worse from female faculty - with sale offered from men 30K -> 29K vs 27K -> 25K for female faculty, and male faculty scored women higher in all categories than the female faculty.
In my opinion, the origin of these biases is in the early, formative years: When children see mom stay at home and dad go to work, they learn that that's the way things are - without any conscious negative judgement and regardless of gender. It's the society they grew up in, so seeing something deviate from that can create a bias. It's naturally self-propagating as well, so it will take conscious effort (from everyone) over generations to overcome.
I highly recommend taking the Harvard Implicit Gender - Career Bias test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html). I found it extremely enlightening because I could actually FEEL my brain pulling me to answer incorrectly. It's timed, so there's mental pressure to make quick decisions - where the brain takes advantage of pattern matching that's been trained over a lifetime.
I didn't expect that result at all. My family is balanced in term of gender composition, and my parents both work the same amount. But my mother still has a tendency to do more of the housework. I'm curious whether having to pass the test in my native language would have significantly influenced the outcome.
Side note: rereading a bit the descriptions of the tests, it seems these are targeted toward an American audience. Could it have an influence in the tests too ?
-1- Women have a lower salary, therefore their anchoring point is lower.
-2- There are few women in the department, therefore every woman feels threatened by every female applicant - they are fighting for a scarce resource.
-3- The push against sexism has resulted in men overvaluing women, while women themselves have no qualms about rating other women exactly what they think they are worth (which might still be less than they should, see 1).
-4- There may be a strong correlation in women who can succeed in a male-dominated environment for sociopathic psychological traits.
-5- There may very well be correlation (though no direct causation) between gender and expected performance, which combined with 3, results in women applying an unconscious bias.
Basically, you do not have an unbiased sample and can't make generalisations from just that article.
(i mean, yeah, that might genuinely be an interesting question to look into, but surely that isn't at the top of our list of priorities, right?)
What does it mean to "leave the field"? Does that mean to no longer practice low-level work or to leave the industry entirely for another industry? If it is the former, does moving into management or another complementary area (like moving from engineering to product management) qualify as leaving the field?
So what I've always been curious about is what percentage of women leave other fields? It would be nice to have numbers to compare it to there.
Also, what percentage of men leave the field? If "leaving the field" is defined as no longer actively practicing software engineering and instead doing more human contact work (like managing), then I would expect a significant number of men to leave the field at all.
I'm not trying to dismiss the number out of hand, but merely demonstrate that it's a useless figure to bandy about with context or comparison.
You can read it in the linked article: http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-culture/
* "716 women who left tech"
* "I have collected stories from 716 other women who have left the tech industry"
* "Of the 716 women surveyed, 465 are not working today."
* "Two-hundred-fifty-one are employed in non-tech jobs, and 45 of those are running their own companies. A whopping 625 women say they have no plans to return to tech
Which strongly implies "left the industry", not "moving to product management" or "managing". 2/3s of them aren't working at all, not "promoted to management"
That seems like a shockingly high figure of people who have the means to avoid any sort of labor productivity. I can only conclude that "are not working today" is loosely defined or that these people were unfit for working at all, since someone that has the means to quit work and not have to look for other work elsewhere probably hasn't lead a very rigorous labor existence.
Also, this appears to be study of only the ones that left. I'm certain I could find 716 men that left the tech industry too, and come up with a set of reasons why they left. Looks like a classic case of selection bias. There doesn't appear to be one women who stayed in the industry in that study. Does that mean I should conclude from this study that 100% of women leave tech? Simply put, you need to survey more than just those that left.
That study comes across as far more biased than the biases it's trying to combat.
It's far more interesting to discuss base rates. Start with a sample of women in tech, follow them over n-years (you can get a good representative sample by choosing different cohorts like those that are recent grads to those with 5-10 years industry experience) and do the same with men. After 2-3 years check out how many from from each gender from that sample have left the industry. Interview them to find out why.
My ex was a documentary filmmaker interested in social causes and whatnot and I've seen how the sausage is made firsthand and know how data and statistics are twisted to support an agenda. Good statistics that strive to be impartial almost never produces numbers as "story-worthy" as the ones from that study, which means you need to question the numbers presented and also ask which figures were conveniently omitted.
I have been unable to find any figures, but I suspect that fashion was an industry that had a lot more men working in it up until the 1980s.
If the work environment is not to women' liking and has no bearing on outcome, where are all the successful companies formed by women who want a more friendly environment?
"This is a huge, unnecessary, and expensive loss of talent in a field facing a supposed talent shortage."
Again, if true, some enterprising person should have found a way to tap all the amazing talent.
Change is inevitable and sooner or later a company will come along which will swoop up all of these people and apply them towards an audacious goal, but the time at which the stars align and such a company is born cannot be predicted and most people can't hold on until that time. Hence their desire to fix it through advocacy, which is quite understandable.
Advocacy is great, and necessary to get out of local maximas, but living proof is always going to be more effective.
Of course, there's always the question of how useful such a competitive advantage (access to a large pool of excellent staff) would be to drive success. It may not be, which is a different discussion and one that would make engineers of both genders nervous regarding their own value.
The article's very first example of unconscious gender bias suggests that ~2/3rds of investors prefer the same pitch delivered by a man than by a woman.
So there's one example of women following your proposed approach needing to overcome structural disadvantage in order to obtain investment. The article goes on to enumerate more examples of this disadvantage, etc.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that even if there is a pool of amazing talent (which I'm confident that there would be) then the playing field is NOT at all level.
edit: which was roughly the whole point of the article... ?
on a big enterprise, the kind of which people work for more than ten years, maternity leave pay is just a fraction of the whole worker working life - say you work at a company ten years, it's just about 10% of productivity lost. less if you factor days instead of months and account for not giving out bonuses nor vacation in that period)
this of course should not justify a 10% pay reduction, however it is what it is, I'm not deciding it, I'm just telling it.
in the VC worlds, a company they invest on should have a return in three years or even less. in that context, a maternity leave is a 50% productivity loss - three years is too short to absorb a leave and too long for not being at risk of being impacted by it
is this sexist? of course it is. is it fair? of course it isn't.
are there any solutions to this? well, since VC is currently male dominated and they tend not to understand the potential of a woman energy, I can't see many.
Only if you actually believe the market is 100% efficient and everyone has perfect information. After a few bad experiences, someone isn't going to keep trying the same jobs, they are going to move industries.
Yes, there probably are companies out there that are good to work for as a woman in tech and they probably get some advantage from that. But it doesn't just magically solve the problem for everyone in tech and it isn't easy for everyone to find those companies that are actually good without significant investment in time and effort.
It takes time for attitudes to change, and in the meantime it's still bad for women in the industry.
Do they choose work of similar nature but in industries without the same biases or do they move to industries where the nature of the labor involved is very different?
Nobody is against this, but work is work, it can't be pleasant all the time. There is competition and money needs to be made. You can learn to compete or not play, that's your choice. Assuming its easier for majorities already working in the field is frankly a bit insulting.
One explaination is given in the article:
"Investors preferred entrepreneurial ventures pitched by a man than an identical pitch from a woman by a rate of 68% to 32% in a study "
This seems to be such a spectacularly good result that I wonder why they haven't tried it sooner.
But I would say that with such good results, they might want to increase it even further. 18 weeks is still rather short.
I'm all for maternity leave, I think it's important, and there are too many companies that don't offer any, or enough. That said, there's a point where you really aren't an employee anymore. I'm not saying they should shorten their leave, but making it longer probably isn't a great idea.
1. It is a pipeline problem (I never got as much women applications as I wanted, even with targeting a women audience)
2. It is a problem of not enough role models for women (so women do not see themselves in tech and do not aspire for tech careers or for becoming CTOs - women CTOs go a long way here).
3. It is a problem of the vile and toxicity of the tech community in general (just see all the fights over programming languages, about being right vs. understanding each other). And the bro culture in some places.
4. It is a problem of women in general being more risk averse (so they gamble less with salaries or risk to push for promotion)
5. It is a problem of job ads (male focused, where males might say 'Ah I can do all those things' and women might say 'I don't know all the things they want') and the recruiting process in general.
To be honest, I no longer hold much of any value to a resume... I've seen too many people with higher degrees and years of experience that can't seem to do what it says they can on said resume. Me, I'm particularly bad at white board coding... but I understand the need. That said, I'd rather have a laptop connected to a projector.
I've probably sat in on a couple hundred interviews of other people over the years, and only a handful were of women... For the most part, I appreciate that women tend to be much more accurate on their resumes and in responses as to their skill level. I've never really liked excessive arrogance, and prefer someone more honest. This is just me though.
I also think that efforts to make language and interactions politically correct are a disservice to the goal of letting anyone that wants to work in IT do so. A few months back I witnessed someone pretty much accosted because he dared to ask, "...can any of you guys help me with this?". My extended family is over 80% female... my step father was an only child, but my mom was one of 4 sisters, her mom one of three, and half of the women in my family only had daughters (including my sister). hearing things like "I miss you guys." was said by women, to women, without any gender bias, as a generic phrasing.
There's a difference between being overtly sensitive and issues of bias/discrimination worth bringing up. We're at a point where awareness is increasing, but as a society we've also been heading down a path of so much excessive sensitivity that it's downright abusive towards people who aren't ill-meaning. I hope that a balance is found sooner than later.
"[..] that it's downright abusive towards people who aren't ill-meaning. I hope that a balance is found sooner than later."
I'm totally against any (slightly) sexist words, and have always stopped people from using them - inside or outside of my teams/departments. That said:
Sometimes gender activists focus on the 'easy' things, like language, where it is easy to call someone out, and where it is an easy to understand world view with evil sexists on one side blocking female progress and good gender activists on the other side.
That way of living is easier than accept that there are many things women must do themselves (push for higher salaries, aspire for careers, fight for promotions, help other women with role models) and what activists could do: hire more women, become a tech (manager) role model, ...
> not really against gender,
> but I will admit I prefer to work with men.
You don't see the contradictions here?
I don't want that to change, I like it. Is that really something only dudes can like? It's an entire part of the IT field really, it's not gonna change. Like, ever.
There is no such thing as equally qualified for a promotion. To pretend that performance is a simple formula with two inputs is being disingenuous.
It is a pipeline problem, because I have interviewed zero females and 100 males. I've never even received a woman's resume.
Any study related to people being more likely to hire, or pay more, involving names being switched on a resume, doesn't make sense. Nobody hires a resume, they call you in for an interview.
VCs investing disproportionately in male CEOs is hardly surprising because even if they have no bias, they know their money is on the line for someone who will be up against the rest of the tech and business world, with all of its bias.
Diversity quotas are harmful. Great, now nobody takes you seriously not just because they're biased to begin with but also because you only got the job over more qualified applicants to fill a quota. That isn't helping anybody. A much better option is to get more women to apply.
I have actually taken bias training and yes, I'm biased as hell. I don't like this fact and try to correct it. I also point it out to my male peers. But it's really hard to overcome when nobody has non-junk data and nobody is showing up to interview.
And are we allowed to be open to the fact that maybe, on average, women are weaker performers in tech? It seems like that is not allowed to be an option. It should also be a possibility that they're actually stronger performers in tech (I bet you reached for the down arrow before getting to that sentence). Pretending everyone must have equal ability and 50% of executives and 50% of programmers should be women doesn't get us anywhere.
The study ( http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf+html ), asked interviewers to rank how "hireable" the candidate was, and what they would offer the candidate.
Yes, the resume gets you the interview, not the job. But without the interview, you definitly don't get the job. If changing the apparent gender of the resume gets you better odds of getting the interview, then the gender gets your more/better jobs!
This is science. Creationists are invested in believing the earth is 6,000 years old and don't like evidence that contradicts that. Antivaxxers don't like evidence that shows vaccines are safe. Homeopaths don't like evidence that shows that it's just as good as water. And here we have evidence that men get more interviews.
> you only got the job over more qualified applicants to fill a quota
To quote the article: "These biases occur unconsciously and without intention or malice". You (and I) have a bug in our brains. We are not actually able to correctly deduce with 100% accuracy whether someone is more qualified than other.
Yes a female quota might mean that there's a woman who's being hired when you would have given that job to a man, but how do you know the man is definitly more qualified? The function in your brain that calculates "qualified" has a bug and isn't always accurate about "most qualified".
This is an interesting concept. VC as a kind of Keynesian beauty contest. I'd imagine in a winner take all scenario, any asymmetry would feed back on itself and exaggerate. People must have studied this!
As someone who has faced situations where a gender microagression has caused workplace conflict, the above quote cannot be stressed enough. Just because you didn't have the intention to be biased or discriminate does not mean it did not happen. For some reason this concept eludes even the sharpest people.
We all have our biases. It's about time we owned up to them and put effort into mitigating them.
It's when a guy kindly asks a woman to stop debating a technical spec because she wouldn't understand the details (even though she's more technical than he is).
It's when a sales guy makes a joke with his female colleague that her eye makeup is what is closing deals that day.
I think it's a combination of things... on the one hand there is outright descrimination and bias... on the other, society is leaning towards overtly sensitive to anything that could be considered insensitive or biased.
I think this is the big thing that should be rallied around. This is prevalent, obvious, and hurts companies in more ways than just discrimination (not to marginalize that aspect).
Focusing on self-nominations means the most successful people aren't going to be your people best able to do the job, but people best able to 'play the game'. This is in fact not independent, but negatively correlated with skill. (Citation needed)
Let's do a thought experiment.
Lets say a man and a women in tech both moved here 5 years ago and each got small rent-controlled studio apartments for about $1000/month. Let's say they met and started dating two years ago. They decide they want to move in together. They can forego one dwelling and share a studio apartment, or they can look on the market. They look around for a one-bedroom. Two years ago, a one bedroom is probably going for $2500 a month. Fast forward to today and they decide to have a kid. Everything is great for the first 1-2 years, but by 2017, they feel like they need a 2-bedroom. They start looking around and see that the only options cost about $5000 to $6000 month. That's a huge cost of living increase before the cost of child-rearing and is far more likely to drive people (men and women) out of the industry than unfavorable maternity leave policies.
In the thought experiment above, both a man and a woman both leave tech in SF together once they are forced out of the area by the conflict between housing prices and raising a family. The different is that the age distribution for men is likely to much broader than for women because of the biological clock. A man marrying and having a kid could likely be anywhere from 27 or so to past 40, where the range for women is likely to have approximately the same lower bound, but a much lower higher bound. I suspect 33 or so. This would suggest that housing prices are more likely to prematurely end the careers of women in tech in San Francisco.
It would be nice to know why "especially men," with no foundation for this statement it makes it hard to believe as a scientist, and even harder to act upon.
Any revisions with this included would be greatly appreciated. :)
I am myself married to a woman who codes and as long as she has shown to her managers that her productivity and quality of work was excellent she never got discriminated. people assume everything should come to them because it came to others. a company is not some socialist everland where everyone gets paid same. people get paid what their are worth (minus/plus negotiation skills)
as for women leaving the field. knowing that most engineers in big companies or services companies are leaving the field to become PM or manager of something I see this as a sign that women are more passionate about their carreer than about IT.
"Confirm that men and women with the same qualifications are earning the same amount and that they are receiving promotions and raises at similar rates (and if not, explore why)."
Yeah, no. I have never worked for a company which pays employees based on skill, it's all in salary negotiations. If you work for a company where salaries aren't public, then this is the case for you. Also, although anecdotal, in my experience men are willing to risk more when they know they're worth more than what they're being paid.
How many companies claim to be a "meritocracy"? If it's a big lie, we should admit it.
They leave out all details on how the study was conducted. Does anyone know whether it was the same words, and they just changed the name, or if they actually composed different pitches?
"The pitch videos showed images related to the ventures, but they did not show the entrepreneurs themselves. Participants heard the entrepreneur’s voice-over narration while they watched each video. This video pitch format allowed us to dub in a male voice and a female voice (randomly assigned), holding the narration script constant. After watching the videos, participants chose which company to fund."
That is not how it works. Tech is as pure marketplace of ideas as possible. So while we should all collaborate after the decisions are made, the process before them is by definition adversarial. We must nitpick and deconstruct each other's solutions. Because we programmers cannot work if we don't understand anything in full. To grok it.
You can review, advise and even critique without being outright abusive. I tend to take similar arguments when people want to use curse word filters... tone is a hell of a lot more than specific verbiage.
There's a huge difference between, "I'm not sure I
understand where you are coming from." and "You are a god
damned idiot, what the hell are you thinking."
Corporate American needs a major reform. US society need a major reform. Our culture and community need major reforms. The way boys and girls are raised need to be changed, the way they are educated and develop social skills and people skills need to change as well.
As it is Corporate America and the Tech industry has developed a certain mindset based on the power elite of Silicon Valley that controls VC and who gets on the board of directors via shareholders. Everyone has to work 80+ hours a week, and it is hostile to trying to raise a family. Corporations favor the worker who is single over one that is married and has children. They don't like it when there is responsibilities other than work that an employees has. Which is why there is no good maternity leave, or even child care services. Heck in most cases you have to drop your religion and become non-practicing so you don't attend services so you can work more hours.
When I was a young boy in the 1970s it was different, people got the weekends off and spent it with the family with family picnics and they only worked 40+ hours a week, and took off for family matters. The 1980s and 1990s changed that and the Dotcom Boom made the Startups and marathon coding that required more time per week to work. People got less sleep, worked more hours, gave up relationships and family, and put everything into working a job.
For me it got so stressful that in June 2001 I developed a mental illness from all of the stress I was under and all of the extra hours I worked. I took time off to pick up my son from a babysitter because child care was not offered and my wife worked a different shift, and I got made fun of because I was taking care of my son instead of my wife. I ended up on short term disability and when I returned I was fired for being sick. You see once you become mentally ill they don't want you, even if you were hurt in the line of duty. Which is why so many mentally ill people hide their illnesses and go untreated and then do a suicide later on. I ended up on disability in 2003.
I never made it back to work. But I know of all of the problems in the industry and can talk about them freely without worrying that I'll be fired for talking about them.
In order to make up diversity, many tech companies use the H1B Visa program to hire people from India because they are not white males and because they will work for less money. Being from India gives them a more diverse work force, and they are disposable employees. If they don't do what they are told, the Visa is canceled and they go back to their native country. Then the company hires someone else. It is a big racket.
People in the 70's thought work life was hellacious and going deeper into hell, just like today, and every decade since (and probably every prior decade). I recall people declaring they weren't going to have children and bring them into the rotten world. Of course, the politicians all campaigned on fixing everything, just like today, and nothing changed, just like today.
Source: I was working for a living in the 70's.
We had family picnics on the weekends because back then hardly anyone worked on the weekends.
Around the 1980s that had changed and the family picnics had stopped. It was the Me decade, Reagan was in charge, everything had changed and the PC Era had just started with the IBM PC and DOS dominating business.
I got an Amiga 1000 with the 1020 5.25" floppy drive and PC-Transformer software to emulate DOS on it. That way I had all the features of the Amiga and could still run DOS programs like Turbo Pascal for my college on it. Later on I got the Amax dongle and Mac 128 ROM chip to run Mac software on the Amiga. The fact that it ran DOS and Mac software didn't matter as the PCs had dominated the Amiga when VGA and Sound Blaster cards became standard.
I think since the 1970s that the world did get better because we got easier to use software and easier to use computers to make things easier for a lot of people. The Internet made buying things easier and web sites automated things to cut down on costs.
What got worse is that our advanced technology needs carbon burning power sources that contribute to global warming aka climate change. The world is still hell to some people and they might not want to raise children, but some people still raise children anyway.
The truth is most of the people do the hard work to make the elite 1% richer who profit from their labor. The only exception to this is doing your own startup and then building something worth value and then IPOing for millions to make yourself rich. The trick is having a business plan that works, and not just another Dotcom cookie cutter business plan ripped off from another company.
People still declare that: http://www.vhemt.org/
It's seriously a damn shame you worked yourself into a nervous breakdown. I can't possibly stress that enough.
I've spent about ten years working a couple of tech jobs. Over those years, I've probably put in a few hundred hours of OT (unpaid or otherwise). If we're pessimistic and call it an even 1k hours of OT, this means that I've spent an average of somewhere between 42 and 45 hours per week at work over my entire career so far.
I -and others in tech that I know- have never been required to work anywhere near point of burnout, let alone breakdown. Moreover, from what I understand of tech sector hiring practices during the Dot Com Era, anyone who could spell SQL and/or HTML could get a well-paying job in the industry.
Maybe those practices also included a near-universal culture of overwork, but -based on what I hear from a few folks who were working in The Valley at the time- I'm pretty certain that that's not true. If management was pressuring you to work those insane hours, you would have very probably found better treatment at another company. It seems like the lower hiring bar would have given a seasoned veteran quite some mobility during the boom. The situation after the bust is another story all together.
Since you stopped working in the industry in 2003 and claim over 25 years of industry experience, would you be so kind compare and contrast the work ethic and attitudes of tech company management during the Dot Com boom of the late 1990s to those of tech company management during the PC Boom of the 1980s and very early 1990s?
Thanks!
During the 1990s during the Dotcom boom I was helping people learn how to program in Visual BASIC and ASP using VBScript and JavaScript. The company would hire people who didn't know what they were doing, and I had to mentor them. Visual Studio had Visual Interdev which made making ASP pages better with an IDE to highlight syntax and preview the page before publishing it.
I learned stuff like Python and Java but most of what I worked for was Microsoft IT shops. My wife wouldn't let me relocate so I was stuck in the Saint Louis Missouri area.
I worked for a law firm that did VC funding and many people who worked before me left to do their own startups. We helped out a lot of local startups.
On Linkedin most people sponsor me for Databases because I had to fix problems with the SQL Server tables and indexes a lot. They'd hire someone to do DBA work and they'd mess it all up and I had to fix it. I did the same thing for VB and ASP code. I was considered a super debugger at the time.
I can do HTML, SQL, JavaScript, I learned C# and other languages. I could still work in theory but I am not medically cleared to work yet.
Part of my breakdown is they changed the deadlines from months to weeks for my projects and I had over 141 projects to be done because nobody else could get them to work. When someone failed to get a project done, they transferred it to me. The code was undocumented, no comments, and a big spaghetti mess and it forced me to rewrite parts of it just to get it to compile without errors.
I tried looking for a different job, but nobody was hiring in St. Louis because there was a recession going on.
If I went back to work, I'd take an entry level programming position and work for less pay and have less stress. I wouldn't mind being a junior level developer after all my experience.
I still get job offers but they are for high level stuff I am out of practice in. If I do go back to work it would be an easier job with less stress. One that they could help me with my mental illness and support me with it.
Whoa. Meanness like that is not ok here. Please don't do this again.
Kicking someone when they're down makes it 10x worse.