Author: Bobbie

Pink and Blue

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I was at a child’s birthday party/dinner last night and we were discussing pedicures. One of the boys was running around with his nails done and I had stated that I had asked my son if he ever wanted to do that (for he was welcome to come with me) to which he assertively said “no”. When I retold the story I included my pointing out to him that they have “plenty of ‘boy’ colors” to which a friend of mine (appropriately) chided me with the question: “What is a ‘boy’ color?”

She and I both knew the actual text of the conversation was my attempt to clarify to my son that if he wanted to have his nails done a color other than pink or red that that was available these days, and that my use of “boy” was to appeal to a child who had already had societally-driven color choices drilled into him; and that her attempt to tease me was the sort of thing friends do. I am sexist in some ways but not that one. That said it did open the wider discussion of gender color stereotypes, which is one reason I like hanging out with the people I hang out with, because we didn’t have to devolve into a contrived political correctness or a stunted conversation about color choice equality.

To provide some background: one friend has a boy and girl each, another has the same, a third has two girls. I have one boy, and elect to dote on girls by proxy. But this conversation, plus a recent review of the Mindware catalog, got me thinking.

It’s no secret that the toy aisles of Target, or Toys R Us, or really any other mainstream store, are segregated into three types: “Gender Neutral” toys, “Boy” toys, and “Girl” toys. The “Girl” toys aisles are helpfully marked by pink signage and include things like dolls, baby dolls, Barbie dolls, domestic dress-up games, and (possibly) Pink Legos. The “Boy” toys aisles are manfully black and blue and red and include Nerf guns, trucks, traditional Legos, new movie-themed Legos, and Legos that look fairly militaristic. In the middle you have card games, balls, and Slip-and-Slides.

Why do my friends’ daughter’s Legos need to be pink? They are defaulted to build houses and ice cream shops, fine: you can build a perfectly serviceable house out of red and blue and yellow Legos, because we all did that when we were growing up. And if they are red or yellow or blue you don’t have to build a house or ice cream shop, you can build a rocket. Or a scale model of the Revolutionary War.

Why does her son’s Medieval Lego kit have only armed soldiers? Anyone who spent time in their History class knows that most of those soldiers were buffeted 10:1 by peasantry, either in terms of someone to go get the grain that fed them to someone who took care of the horses. There’s no queen, no princess, no baker-lady (for gender roles *were* explicit in those times and so Lego would be perfectly correct to have them in a set identifying as that part of history). But no females of any kind can be found in the kit. This very manful Lego kit is full of manly manliness and action. Girls need not apply.

The Star-Wars new Lego minifigures this year at Target have two (2) females out of what looks to be about 50 new minifigures. They are Leia in the gold bikini and Padme in the ripped-midriff shirt. Not Leia in her Cloud City costume, or Padme in her full regalia (Lego has found a way to make capes, they could’ve rocked this). (If you go to lego.wikia.com you can see the full minifigure line-up, and there are plenty of other female Star Wars minifigures. But they’re not on display at the Target.)

Why must Goldieblox, that bastion of gender correction in educational toys, be pink for girls? The whole point to Goldieblox was to get girls interested in engineering, to rail against the pink conformist aisles of toys for girls. Why, then, is it pink? Why are the cookware “play sets” for children almost always manned by a girl? My son loves to cook. But the photos on the box are clearly stating that this is a largely female domain.

While there are darned few pink toys in Mindware, there are far more boys in the pages of toys that are about engineering and far more girls shown next to the beading kits. If we can’t get our arched-brow, intelligent-snowflake-producing toy catalogs to play fair how do we ever hope to rescue our girls from the clutches of Barbie?

From the 20’s to WWII, the color “ownership” between boys and girls was inverted: boys wore pink and girls wore blue. Before that children wore white (which, if you think about it, is practical as long as you have a ton of bleach lying about). After WWII this reversed and we have the color “preferences” we see today. With all the challenges our kids have and will have (underfunded schools, bullying made easier via the internet — and this is not just kids, as adults have been doing that for years) can we please not heap upon them color “correctness”?

When you’re first pregnant the question you are asked is “do you know yet if it’s a boy or a girl?”  Some parents elect to make it a surprise and there’s that moment of “discomfort” for the families because now they “have” to shop for yellow or green baby gear. I honestly don’t think the baby will care if s/he is housed in blue or pink; the larger purpose is the social signaling device for this tiny creature to his/her audience as to what his/her gender is. I’m considering making onesies for babies that say things like “Manly enough to wear pink” and “Girly enough to wear blue” just to poke fun at this.

We live in a country of astounding wealth and opportunity and we have larger problems than the color or gender appropriateness of toys. The only way to shape and change the offerings is to vote with your dollars; it’s effective but it takes more patience than some of us have.

 

On the Naming of Me

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My name is pretty unusual, in and of that I’ve been challenged by telemarketers, customer service people, and baristas alike that “That can’t be your name” or “What’s your real name?” (As if the sort of person who gives out a fake name would abruptly turn around and provide a real one). My name is in fact Bobbie, although legally it is Roberta; the only people who call me Roberta are telemarketers, teachers, and attorneys.

Per Wolfram Alpha, fewer than 200 people each year are given the name Bobbie (as a given female name – and yes it does say it assumes Bobbie is female). Less than 1 in 3331 people have the name, and the most common age for a person with the name Bobbie is 76 years. (Roberta clocks in at much the same, with 1 in 1823 people having the name and the common age is 57 years).

So it’s safe to say “Bobbie” is an unusual name, and that is that.

Over the years my name has been mangled quite a bit, from the masculine “Bobby” to the alternative female “Bobbi”. I also oftentimes get the email typo of one more o, one less b; for the most part I choose to ignore these and hope the sender goes away. That said, I wasn’t really particularly particular about how people spelled my name (with the exception of that last) until I read Freakonomics.

Freakonomics has a pretty good chapter on Correlation vs. Causality, particularly around naming conventions. The main anecdote is about a man who named his sons Winner and Loser, and the indication that the son named Loser had an extremely successful life, whilst the son named Winner had an extremely unsuccessful one. There is no causality in naming. However it also had a second anecdote, and a study, around names given to female children. Specifically, names that one would associate with strippers.

The idea was thus: if I name my daughter, say, “Bambi” or “Sugar” or something like that, am I dooming her to life on the pole? The short answer is no, you are not. By virtue of naming your daughter anything like that (there is a third indication of a daughter named Temptress who indeed had a pretty name-similar life) you are not going to ensure she ends up with a job whose uniform consists of two ounces of elastic and slightly more than that of glitter. But there’s still a good chance it will happen. Why? Because the parent who names their kid something like that is also probably not going to make sure she gets home in time for a curfew, or is getting her homework done. It’s the correlation – the fact that a parent who names their kid something like that isn’t likely to be hammering on the grades – rather than the causality that drives the preponderance of “Crystals” and the like to the pasties.

As part of this chapter in Freakonomics, there is a list of the top 10 names found amongst strippers at time of publication. The name “Bobbi” – with an “I” – is on that list. The name “Bobbi” with an “I” has a common age of 39. That means those Bobbi’s were born in 1975 or thereabouts, and Freakonomics was published in 2005, with data from studies probably the year previous, and so I think it’s entirely reasonable that their stripper population was about 29 at the time.

Since reading that I’ve made it a point to educate people on the value of the “e”. I don’t look good in glitter.

State of Education

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I was born in California, and the first 12 years of my life lived there. The summer before my 13th birthday we emigrated to Washington, all six of us: my four parents, my brother, and I. Up until then we had gone to private school (in my case, religious private school) because my parents wanted to keep us out of the blackboard jungles of southern California.

When we arrived in Washington State the public school system was actually pretty darn good — the fellow students in my junior high were, for the most part, atrocious (as all junior high kids are) and my social register was somewhere beneath pond scum; but the educational offerings, while not as good as a private school, were pretty decent. My brother and I were as challenged as we wanted to be (which became “not much” and so between parent teacher conferences and report cards, the continual theme was “Bobbie could do so much better if she just applied herself”.)

As a twelve to seventeen year old student, I did not pay attention to educational funding or where public schools ranked within the state or the country; I wasn’t a taxpayer and I regarded school as a dismal use of my time (why couldn’t I just sit in a corner and read someplace?). When I finished college (the first time), left home to go create my own, and returned to the state with the intent to start a family, I still assumed Washington schools were “fine”, as they were when I was in school.

By the time my son was about 2 I was hearing, from the fellow mommy reports, that this was not so. Funding issues were brought to the forefront, and as someone who has voted in every election since 2000, I discovered a direct correlation with my vote and my taxes. I was paying for these schools now, so why was I hearing complaints from the field? Why were the local schools needing additional funding, seemingly each year, in the form of bonds and levies?

When my son entered Kindergarten, I resolved to be as involved in the school system as I could — PTA, volunteering, etc. Doing this as a single mother working full-time was difficult but necessary; there’s an unspoken “us vs. them” for the parents who contribute (in any form or fashion) vs. the parents who do not. This is not fair but it is true. With every PTA meeting and email from the school and school district, it became clear that as well-funded as our schools seem and ought to be, they are not. As we live in an area where the median house costs about $350k and nearly every high schooler drives his/her car to school, this is not what one would expect.

My son’s school — the one he is leaving — was built the year my brother was born. There are five or six portables that have been there at least twenty years, housing not only “electives” like music and computers, but also at least two grade-level classrooms. In my six-year tenure here, the PTA has paid for cement stairs and a ramp for easier access to the kindergarten area, fencing to protect the schooling area from bears and predators that walk on two legs (for we have had cases of child enticement), new landscaping, chairs for all of the classrooms, new sports equipment, stipends for the teachers annually to spend on school supplies, scholarships for children whose parents cannot afford the roughly $350/year in expected purchase of school supplies, materials, school party contributions, and field trip costs. That the direct community who benefits from this (parents of the local students) is the direct community who provides it, is a pleasant thing. The realization that we are fortunate and there are other schools in this district and throughout this state where they cannot hope to raise equivalent cash is not.

Washington state is unique in that it has a state constitutional mandate to *amply* fund education. Unfortunately it hasn’t and got sued (see the McCleary case) and lost in its own Supreme Court. Lawmakers are scrambling to figure out how, with the number of tax-reducing propositions on the ballot, they can achieve the now court-mandated requirement to fully fund education by 2018. This is not eased by Common Core State Standards (whether you’re for or against them — and my opinion is that at least there’s a standard now, even if it’s a low one — they do cost money in the form of teacher training, new materials, etc.). This is not eased by teachers unions (who fight legitimately for better benefits for people who are treated as babysitters and, for the most part, have the shittiest job around; on the flip side they protect those teachers who are not deserving of the pseudo-tenure said unions provide). I have participated in three ballot/levy votes here in our little area of Sammamish, including this last round. For this last round I knocked on 375 doors, I called 85 strangers, I emailed hundreds more. I wrote each week to the local newspaper to get them to print my letter urging constituents to vote, explaining the benefits of a properly funded and educated community to even those who do not, or no longer, have children in schools here. (I succeeded twice.) In this most recent effort, the operational expenditures the district needed to survive were approved. Our kids will have heat in their classrooms, they will have virus-free computers, they will have secure locks on doors.

But they will have this at 40 kids to a classroom, with some children being bussed in from 10-15 miles away, because the local bond initiative (to account for expansion) failed. We have a total of 300 brand new houses going up in the immediate area this year alone; the average house here has 4 bedrooms. The amenities keep expanding and City of Sammamish is spending a record amount of money on a local swimming pool and community center. If you want to go to a chiropractor, an orthodontist, a podiatrist, a personal tutoring service, a nail shop, a grocery store, a sports equipment store, or a gas station in Sammamish you have a choice of three of those (each) within a 3-mile-square area. What I do not understand is we fund all of these things through the local economy, and the demand is there for additional housing for families ostensibly with children– where are those kids going to go to school?

Already poorly-paid teachers, who will not be getting raises in exchange for some preservation of their retirement funds, will need to stretch their attention to an additional 10 or so students. The level of personalized attention is already small in a 30-student classroom (in elementary school, where that attention is needed as they build the foundations of study and learning practice). It will diminish that much more as the schooling populace swells. Sammamish, and the local school district, will not have the ability to put forth another bond measure for four years, meaning that the short-term decision-making of the paltry 34% of the populace that voted (yep, that’s right, only about a third of the voting populace voted, and while more than half voted for the bond, bonds require a supermajority (60%) which was not had) will have some long-term effects on the community as a whole.

I had been Legislative Advocate at my son’s Elementary school for five years. This last year, after the second failure of the bond (there was proposal A, and then when that failed a special election for proposal B), I gave up. It may be temporary, and I may just be suffering from fatigue of the situation; I increasingly feel that this society values an “every man for himself” view of education.

Well, if that’s how it’s going to be, that’s how it’s going to be. It’s just a sad state of affairs.

 

Hot Yoga: Confessions of a Reluctant Convert

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I had spent probably six years wanting to look down my nose at hot yoga, with all of its purported smelliness, its special gear, its special words (Namaste, indeed), and the trendiness of yoga pants that you could or couldn’t see through. How could it be real exercise when it’s just extrapolated stretching? How can anyone take it seriously in that gear? Then I took up cycling and the gear argument went out the door. After you shamelessly go to the Safeway in clippie shoes and chamois-padded bike shorts, any sense of dignity in costume is gone.

The kicker for me was about a six months ago when my dad told me he had taken up yoga and it did wonders for his back.

I have inherited many things from my father, good and bad. I am stubborn, I can be very black and white, I am very plain-spoken. I dislike mayonnaise, I can be extremely pragmatic, and my knees and back are increasingly problematic. I didn’t get the piano playing skills, but I got the good hair and straight teeth. When I got to my mid thirties we started comparing knee injuries, back injuries, and what color of therapy bands we were using.

So when my dad said yoga really helped him with his back, I listened. I didn’t march right down to the gym to go try a class, because that would take actual effort, but I did listen. And then I did attend a class at the gym and it was pretty much everything you think of when you think of “hot yoga”: a 15×15 room filled with various bodies in yoga-esque clothing, a calming instructor, seventeen or twenty painful poses, everyone dripping sweat, and I could tell who was a fan of garlic and/or cheese. It wasn’t awful but it wasn’t great.

I left yoga to its own devices; I didn’t look down my nose at it but I assured myself it was not for me.

My best friend and I were chatting a couple of months ago and, as I pointed out the new Hot Yoga place just down the hill from me, she pointed out she had been going and she found it better than meditation to calm her mind. As someone who also suffers from chronic insomnia, this sounded like a good idea. The new place had a deal: 6 classes for $10 in two weeks. For the price of three lattes I could scientifically test the benefits of yoga! That this coincided with the last week of my old job, and a week off, made for an excellent test bed. And so I signed up.

It’s been a month now. I haven’t had back pain in that time. I have had only two (2) nights of insomnia. I am inelegant in class, I am not the lean-and-limber yoga Barbie; then again there are many in my class who are not. I have seen progress in my flexibility and balance, but frankly, the fact that my back doesn’t routinely go out, and that I can run again without pain in my knees, is selling point enough.

Then there are the personalities: I try to go every Thursday night (for a variety of reasons) but it seems I’m of a minority with a regular schedule. In six weeks of attendance I have seen maybe one or two people in any two classes, the rest of the cast members change out regularly. There are a couple of yoga Barbies — and they know it — but hats off to them because not only do they look it, but they can do that one pose where you balance on the ball of one foot while in lotus with your hands up. Or the other one where you fold yourself in half, and bend over (I think it’s called “sleeping eagle” but for me it’s called “impossible”). Then there was Tatooed Yoga Jesus: a man who looked like the Oxford-Christian Jesus picture but in yoga pants, no shirt, and tattoos all over his arms, back, and chest. Again, the inclination is to mentally tease him, but Yoga Jesus knew his stuff too. Even the inflated, gym-rat-football-player-looking-dude could get some of the more difficult versions.  And then there’s plenty of people like me: not quite with-it, but improving; dripping sweat and forcing muscles to do things they aren’t used to, secure in the knowledge of a pain-free back and a good night’s sleep.

That is worth any amount of self-imposed awkwardness.

Ramp

Bobbie3 Comments

As I have just recently changed jobs, which entailed leaving one job (and all of the transitory madness that is associated with that), having a purported week off (more about that later), and then starting the new job (I’m almost two weeks in), I’ve been a bit busy.

A prudent me would have curbed social engagements, extracurricular activities, and given myself some slack at the gym. But prudence is not one of the words that comes to mind when I think of me (although someone called me quirky the other day so now my quirky meter has gone up a bit and I need to see what *that* is all about), and I didn’t. One of the organizations I help with staged an intervention and dropped me from 2 of the 4 committees I was on, not because they doubted my abilities, but they feared for my sanity.

I spent my week off with a healthy checklist and a desire to make my son’s last Elementary School science fair something to behold. I think I marginally succeeded, given that the rules were simple: no fire, no liquids, no electrics. Naturally, we had all 3, including one experiment demonstration involving fire (that I had to forcibly shut down), one exhibit requiring not one but two extension cords, and a couple of suspicious watery areas on the floor of the gym (where the student exhibits were at). By the end of my week off, I was ready for a week off.

And then I started working at the new job.

Starting a new job is both exciting and sucks at the same time: exciting because everything is New And Different And Thrilling And Did I Mention New, and sucks because Guess What, I Don’t Know Everything — Or Possibly Anything– Anymore. It’s that awkward phase of not knowing a company, or any of your coworkers, or (in my case) your platform. My days are spent in Outlook, PowerPoint, and meetings; my evenings are spent learning a new language (when I so choose). There is more work to be done than can ever be done, and so the challenge of work-life balance rests solely in my court.

This sort of disciplinary requirement, plus the uncomfortable position of Not Knowing Everything, makes for an unsettling period. Throw in the end of the school year (6 weeks to go!), a couple of trips, a pending wedding (erm… mine), and a neglected garden, and you’ve got the recipe for an OCD breakdown. I may have required myself to wash the sink twice and empty out the dishwasher completely before I allowed myself to eat dinner tonight at 8:30 when I got home.

Which is all a very long and rambly way to say: I’m a bit swamped at the moment, and sorry I haven’t written. Fresh content is on the way, it’s just stewing in the back of my brain. Specific blurbs will include: The Sadness That is Washington State Education and Funding, Hot Yoga (the Opinion of a Reluctant Convert), and Woodinville Wine Country: You Aren’t as Witty as You Think You Are.

Stay tuned…

That Sinking Feeling

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Today’s economic topic will be the Sunk Cost Fallacy. A sunk cost is something you’ve spent money (or other investiture) on and you cannot recover said money (or investiture). The $4.50 you spent on a latte this morning is a sunk cost.  So is the $90 you spent on shoes last month. And, oddly enough, so is the “free” doughnut you ate this morning, because even though it was monetarily free, it wasn’t calorically free – you “paid” in terms of calories for the day and, assuming you weren’t near-bulimic afterwards, you cannot retrieve those calories.  (And even if you did attempt to purge, you are still dealing with a sunk cost).

Generally speaking, it doesn’t make sense to take into account sunk costs when making a decision for future investiture – e.g., whether or not you spent $4.50 on a latte should not impact your decision as to if you will be buying a latte later today. You’ve already spent the money and can’t recoup it, so factoring in the presence it *would have* made in your budget is specious, you need to look at where your budget stands now. But humans don’t tend to work this way due to loss aversion.  They tend to frame an overall project to include what has been spent as well as what will be spent (time, effort, etc.) and look at it on the whole rather than what is left. One of the oddest presentations of this I am most guilty of, as are, I suspect, many of my friends: the Sunk Cost Doughnut.

I seem to be focusing on doughnuts, and this is because I had one today.  I am supposed to be watching my weight (I’m currently watching it nudge up) and today someone (Ms. Krieant, to be exact) brought in Top Pot Doughnuts, which may in fact be my favorites.  I have a workout buddy who insists that you can eat whatever you want as long as you work out enough and he is right, but he is also 25 and has been through OCS and it’s not enough for him to do pull-ups, he has to do them with a 50lb-weight strapped to his stomach. His and my mileages tend to vary.

sprinkles
mmmm doughnuts

At any rate, today I ate one (1) Chocolate with Rainbow Sprinkles doughnut, at a caloric cost of 510 calories. That would be 1/3 of my supposed day’s calories, and so it is really, really hard not to take into account my sunk cost (doughnut/510 calories) and say “well, I’ve screwed up the diet today, so I will just start again tomorrow”. On the whole this is NOT logical because in theory I can pay attention to my caloric budget and be “good” for the remainder of the day, and only come  in a “little” over budget.  If I frame my caloric choices in light of the Sunk Cost Doughnut, though, and eat whatever I want,  I would come in drastically over budget.

A suggested method by economists is to evaluate future costs and avoidable future costs to establish the true prospective cost for the day (E.g., I must have some form of dinner (future cost), it probably shouldn’t include bread or fat (avoidable future cost)).  And so, as I use my “MyFitnessPal” app and truthfully admit to my 510 calorie digression, I sit here re-evaluating my planned caloric expenditures for the day.

They’re serving birthday cake down the hall.

This is Going to Hurt You More than Me

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Greetings from the ending of a self-imposed blogging silence: I got the aforementioned email and am happy to state that I will shortly be joining Microsoft.  Sur La Table was very diverting and offered many challenges with respect to data, but it’s hard to pass up an opportunity to work in, and with, big data.

As a result of that interview loop, plus some interviews I did for an open position we have at Sur La Table, I’m here to write something Very Important: Don’t Lie on Your Resume.

Typically when I am called in to conduct a technical interview, I read the candidate’s resume, and then ask the hiring manager how technical they want me to get. If it’s me, and I’m hiring for a developer, I’m going to get very technical, and you’re going to spend 100% of your time with me at the whiteboard. If it’s for someone else, and I’m hiring for say, a PM, or a QC, or technically-minded-but-not-otherwise-a-developer role, I’m still going to test you on skills you state in your resume.

So when you tell me that you have a lot of experience with SQL, or that you’ve been using SQL for five or six years, I’m going to run you through the basics. Either of those statements will tell me that you know the four major joins, you know the simplest way to avoid a Cartesian product, you know how to create data filtration in a join or in a where statement, and you know how to subquery. I’m not even getting to more advanced parts like transactions with rollbacks, while loops, or indexing — the aforementioned list are what I would characterize as basic, everyday SQL use.

Imagine my dismay, then, as an interviewer, when after declaring (either verbally or on your resume) that you are a SQL expert, you can’t name the joins. Or describe them. Or (worse) describe them incorrectly. When you say you know SQL, and then prove that you don’t, it makes me wonder what else is on your resume that you “know”, that is less hard to prove (in the interview) that you don’t. The default assumption, for the protection of the company, is that your entire resume is a raft of lies. It’s the surest way to earn a “no hire”.

It would have been far better to state the truth: someone else wrote SQL scripts for you, told you what they did, and you were adept enough to figure out when there was a disparity in the output. That does not mean you “know” SQL, it means you know how to run a SQL script. This gives the interviewer an honest window and the ability to tailor your time together (remember, they’re getting paid by the company to spend time with you, if it’s productive it is not a waste of money) to figure out your strengths and weaknesses. Having just been hired into a position that works with big data, where I was honest that the largest db I have worked in and with was about 3TB, I can attest that it’s really hard to have to look a hiring manager smack in the eye and say: “I have 90% of what you have asked for but I’m missing that last 10%”. It gives them the opportunity, however, to decide if they’re going to take the chance that you can learn.

If they’ve already learned you’re honest, then that chance-taking looks better in comparison.

I hate waiting.

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For reasons that I can’t (and therefore won’t) get in to right now, I’m obsessively waiting on an email. One. Specific. Email.

This sort of obsession is hindered by the very reality that on any given day, I get about 200 work-related emails (if you include the junk mail from vendors who seem to think I’m hiring scads of people or want to outsource scads of work) and probably 50-70 personal emails (not including the invitations to enlarge my manhood or acquire millions from a long-lost eccentric cousin in Nigeria). The fact that this one particular email will come within a 5 to 10 day period, which means it represents 0.04-0.6% of my LEV (Legitimate Email Volume) does not help.

When waiting for that one email, a couple of behavioral shifts occur, including, but not limited to:

  1. Obsessively checking the iPhone to see if it arrived there
  2. Re-checking the desktop browser to see if it arrived there
  3. Keeping a browser tab open to email to see when the tab status changes to indicate a new mail has happened, and when you notice it does your stomach gets all giddy, and then you change tabs to open this one and discover that your Amazon order has shipped, and the giddy excitement crashes away into a wave of “meh”. Inbox(1) does not necessarily equal joy.
  4. Questioning whether or not you really expected the mail to come between 3:20am and 5:20am, which was this morning’s particular brand of insomnia (no, that wasn’t reasonable). Neither was it reasonable to expect it before 8am yesterday, or after 8pm, either.
  5. Trying to convince yourself that when they said 5-10 days they really meant “don’t expect it before 5 days, and from then on expect it within five days of that”, and not believing that *at all*
  6. Repeat steps 1-5.

There are two possible outcomes to this email: one is Tigger-esque mind-blinding joy and excitement. The other is a sense of doubt, self-questioning, and (eventually) redoubled efforts. There does not appear to be a contingency I can plan for beside these two results.

I am on day 2 of 10.

Free Premium

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I recently posted about LinkedIn and how I use it; I recently was the recipient of a FREE month’s worth of LinkedIn Job Seeker Premium, and this post is about my experience with that. (NB: I am not paid by, or influenced by, anyone at LinkedIn, save possibly Daniel Tunkelang, who is their Head of Query Understanding and a wicked brilliant person. And no, he didn’t pay me to say that. It’s just that he’s an “influencer” of mine on LinkedIn).

The short of it is my free Premium Membership ends in four days and when it does I will let it end (or more accurately, I will proactively kill it). Much like other “free introductions” the feedback loop is a negative one: the assumption is if you don’t actively end it then it continues on, and bills your card appropriately.  I am letting it end not because I do not feel it is a good program, but because it is not particularly useful for me.

First, the basics: LinkedIn Job Seeker Premium has a check sheet of the advantages of paid membership here. At $25/month (billed annually, so $300/year) it provides you with the ability to see who’s looked at your profile (the regular free membership shows you a subset), you can see full profiles of people up to 3rd degree, you can leverage LinkedIn’s “In Mail” and receive a bump of introductions, and a few assorted other UI niceties (up to 250 results per search, etc.).

whodatFor me the attraction was the ability to see everyone who has looked at my profile, and here’s the rub: it does show you everyone, but only if they want to be seen. For example, if someone has not logged in and/or is surfing anonymously, with Job Seeker Premium you will see an individual, faceless avatar saying “someone” looked at you; you will have no idea who they are. So if 12 total people looked at you and 3 were not logged in and/or were surfing anonymously, you see 9 photos/bios and 3 blank avatars. This is frustrating for someone who wants to inspect the inspectors, but totally understandable from an execution perspective: LI has no idea who you are until you are logged in, so there is no way to let someone else know who you are, either.

Then there’s the fact that I now know that “12” people looked at me, instead of “5”. I also get handy “last 90-day” graphs with informational snippets like “7 viewers had the title of Technology Manager” or “16 viewers work at Microsoft”.  I can also parse out how they found me: search, 2nd or 3rd link, etc.

icon_gold_inbug_74x74As part of Job Seeker Premium you get a little yellow and white icon in your search results (when people search for you, that is) that indicates you’re on Job Seeker. This should be a very large flag to any potential recruiters that you’re open to inquiry, and the inquiries just come flooding in, don’t they?

In my case, not.  I did get one offer of a contract for Salesforce Development (something that is not anywhere on my profile; I have worked with SF developers on getting two Salesforces (Salesforceii?) to talk according to a set of business rules, but haven’t done it myself, thanks) in another state. For someone who has been Manager and above titled, etc. it was an odd request and reaffirms my belief that people don’t actually read.

The other thing that messed with the experience is that I used this opportunity to update my profile and add on consulting work that I have been doing on the side (for about a year) and the recent appointment to a non-profit Board. This generated a bunch of “Congratulate Bobbie on her New Job” notices to those I was linked in to, and when your own best friend emails you to ask about your “new job” it’s time to add a control to the announcement features, methinks.

The rest of the features offered by Job Seeker Premium were unused and I’m not entirely clear how someone looking for a job would actually use them. To wit: as a free member, I can send in-mail to anyone I’m linked to, and can “hack” that by attempting to link to someone I don’t know (e.g., recruiter) and putting my introductory email in that “link to me” email.   If I’m looking to get a job, rather than find someone for a job, I don’t know how useful it is for me to see the full profiles of 3rd-level linked people; I’m more interested in the recruiters seeing me.  I’m not sure how the ability to see up to 250 people per search is useful, unless the proposition is that I will try to boost my 1st-linked numbers while job searching; even then, if you can’t find someone you worked with or know in the first 100 records then you have to question if they’ll even link to you.

Now, counterpoint and contrariwise: if I were not already gainfully employed (“Congratulate Bobbie on her new old job!”) and were actively networking and really trying to get employed, I would probably pay the $300 and then pay another $200 or so for a professional headshot, and possibly another $150 for a resume analyst. I would probably have a resume for every position type I was qualified for and interested in, and would make sure my LinkedIn profile was carefully agnostic (If you are angling for a Dev Manager job you probably don’t want to over-emphasize your writing skills vs. your coding skills).

This assumes that somehow I had the cash for that (remember it’s good to have a cushion for just-in-case) and have not been unemployed for some time.  To that end, if money’s tight, I’d stick with regular LinkedIn at the free level: if someone thinks you’re what they’re looking for, the presence of the little yellow and white “in” icon is not going to further attract, or dissuade, them.

Sporting

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NB: I may have previously mentioned that I’m not “into sports”, by which I mean I have not followed football or baseball or basketball teams. It’s only just recently that I’ve figured out when those seasons start and end, and that I have learned the rules of football (thanks to a SuperBowl party and the fact that my region’s team was in the SuperBowl this year. As the kids say, “Go Hawks!”) This post will therefore be unusual that it deals with sports. It will not be unusual in that it deals with gender perception and economics.

This past Wednesday some 700 thousand plus people descended on downtown Seattle to celebrate the Seahawk’s winning of the SuperBowl. Busses were jammed all morning, many folks did not go to work, kids skipped school; this was all for the privilege of standing along 4th Avenue, in the cold, hours on end, for a parade that ironically started late because those in the parade couldn’t get to their starting point because of all the people.

The parade seems to have made many people happy; my Facebook was replete with happy family photos of smiling, green-and-blue-dressed people, plus blurry photos of those in the parade. Everyone seems to have had a good time.

Nestled in that timeline, though, was a comment (actually two, from two different people), that the Seattle Storm (our local female basketball team) won National Championships twice, and no parade was had for them. (It should also be noted that the Seahawks paid for their own parade. )

In reviewing those comments the implication is, I think, that because it was a women’s team that won previously they were not “good enough” (not my words, just what I’m inferring from the context of the statement) because they were female. It doesn’t help that articles like this announced that the last time Seattle had earned a national title was when the Sonics won in 1979 (considerably before the Seattle Storm’s victories of  2004 and 2010 ). Forbes went so far as to acknowledge them and indicate they weren’t “counting” them. And yes, when the Sonics won in 1979 a parade was had.

There are two culprits here: sexism and economics.

Let’s take the simpler one: economics, specifically the concept of Supply And Demand. More specifically, there are demand differences between Women’s Basketball and Men’s Football. (It would have been nicer to have a Men’s Basketball team to weed out the gender variable, or a Women’s Football team, but alas we lost the former and the latter doesn’t really appear to exist except for the Lingere Bowl).

The Seattle Storm plays in Key Arena which holds  slightly over 17,400 seats; they play 34 games per season. 16 of those games are played “home”.  Ticket prices range from $16 to $155 with a mode of $28.  Let’s further say that 20% of anyone at an “Away” game is there for the Storm, and 80% of anyone at a “Home” game is. However, the Storm doesn’t actually sell all of the seats in Key Arena (they block off a portion, and they don’t often sell all the seats that are unblocked). 9,600 seats are actually available to sell and at times The Storm sells about 50% of those. Let’s assume similar seating volumes at away games, and or the purpose of this hack math, let’s say half of the time they’re at half, and the other half of the time they’re sold out, for a blended average of 75% capacity. So a back-of the-envelope dollar value for interest in The Seattle Storm would be about (9600*.75*.8*28*16)+(9600*.75*.2*28*18)= 2580480+725760=$3,306,240. (This obviously doesn’t include sponsorships, swag sales, etc.)

The Seattle Seahawks play in Century Link Field (the Clink) which holds about 68,000 seats and the Seahawks had sold out every one by July. The average ticket price was $220, they had 17 games in their regular season, and had 62,000 season ticket holders. Let’s just stick with the season ticket holders, as that is cash up front. (17*62000*220)=$231,880,000. (This also doesn’t include sponsorships, swag sales, etc.)

In short, there is a purchase-behavior disparity of 7000%.

That disparity is driven by not only volume (the Clink seating is 7x the amount in Key Arena used by The Storm), but also by price (average ticket price for the Seahawks is larger than the HIGHEST ticket price for The Storm).  Even if The Storm were to sell 100% of the available seats in Key Arena, they’d fall very short of economic comparability to the Seahawks in terms of fan fiscal investment.

But this isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know: the demand for entertainment via male football is much greater than the demand for female basketball. The Sonics left in 2008 and their ticket demand is 44,000 season ticket holders, meaning that even if they sold at the same price as The Storm they would still outsell on overall ticket volumes. And so we can infer that demand for entertainment via male basketball is greater than the demand for female basketball.

And so we segue into sexism: essentially that people are making economic demand decisions based on gender preference in sports.  As a society we tend to like our sports hyper-competitive, confrontational, metricized and self-aggrandizing. Nowhere is this more evident than how we idolize the players, how we purchase team jerseys and say “us” vs “them” when talking about upcoming games. “We won”, “they lost” is how games are summed up; followed by an earnest delve into strategic review of plays, the metrics and statistics behind those plays, and player strength.

These are not things we encourage in our girls. Much has been made of now-pink Legos and Goldie Blox, of Sheryl Sandberg Leaning In and the overall interest in getting More Girls into STEM. We enroll our daughters in soccer just as readily as Girl Scouts, we tell them they can be anything when they grow up. A girl who is hyper-competitive though is deemed less attractive, a girl who is confrontational is deemed a bitch. (Let’s not even touch self-aggrandizing). Women’s basketball is not televised nearly as much, or touted as often, as men’s.

We make these choices, and display our preferences, by our societal expenditure. The Seattle Storm will have a parade when the larger group decides that the athletic achievements of women is as representative and worthy as that of men, and that will have to come from increased ticket sales, which will in turn have to come from increased demand.