A thread about Eastshade's bike mechanic!

When I originally thought of putting a bicycling in Eastshade, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work, for the simple fact that if it was easy, we'd see a lot more rideable bikes in games. Well, I was wrong. It took a mere week.

So, I want to talk about how sexual harassment and fair pay are linked at Google (and beyond), because I think that's an angle that isn't being highlighted enough in the coverage of these walk-outs. I'm going to frame it largely around my personal experience there. Thread.

When I was sexually harassed by the director of the area I was working in, I was afraid to report it because I was worried that "getting him in trouble" would result in the subtle retaliation of missed leadership opportunities.

I wanted to continue working on the team I was on, because I'd gained a lot of very deep knowledge and expertise in that area, as well as reputation and camaraderie with the other folks working in that area. I didn't want to make the situation more "difficult."

To get promoted at Google, several need to happen: 1. you need opportunities for ownership and leadership above your current level (basically, opportunities to show you're working at the next level you're trying to get promoted to). The work you're "assigned" has a big impact.

2. You need glowing reviews from peers, *at or particularly above the level you're hoping to get promoted to.* Basically, you need people a lot more senior than you to say you're doing awesome work.

🕵️‍♂️ How Google's PageRank algorithm works

The PageRank algorithm gives each page a rating of its
importance, which is a recursively defined measure of importance, based on if important pages link to it.
It's recursive because the importance of a page refers back to the importance of other pages that link to it

Here's how it works in practice:
1⃣ We start with some pages and crawl them for links

2⃣ Each page has 1/N points (where N as the total number of pages)

3⃣ Add points to each page for the amount of links to it, divided by the number
of links emanating from the sources of these links

When you complain about an open source project's management you'll get the reply, "Use something else if you don't like it!" That'd be true except for the tiny problem that *many* projects also strive for complete monopolistic dominance.

Let me tell you about Java in early 2k:

I was programming in Java since it's release, and all through the late 90s into the early 2000s. At first Java was very determined to unseat C++ and it used various propaganda tactics to turn C++ and malloc into a weird enemy for all of us to hate. This worked great!

Everything was fine though because there were plenty of jobs in tech because of the dot-com boom, and then suddenly there were not jobs because of the dot-com bomb.

Overnight it seemed as if the *only* way to get a job was at giant companies, and they *loved* Enterprise Java.

Now, this is the golden ticket for many open source projects and corporations. They all want to be the top dog #1 in the industry for their particular use, and once they gain that position they become abusive by ignoring user needs and extracting wealth from them.

With Java the dominance was so insane that *every* language had to copy Java's weirdness to survive. If you wonder why a language has some odd CamelCase things it's because early Python, Ruby, and others had to copy Java's semantics and style to even be considered "serious".