Weekend Reading: The Good Writing about Annoying Things Edition

I have gathered a lot of really good things to read this week. As I put this post together, I realized that they were all about annoying things that shouldn't happen. Maybe that describes a lot of my link posts, actually....

Anyway, to the links:

You know how you can know something at the level of acting on it, but not ever really think about it until someone else points it out? That describes me and the way women experience public transit, until I read this story by Ann Friedman.

But if you think you'll just take Uber instead... maybe think again.

Jenn Frank wrote a very thorough, good, and patient explanation of the problem with "we should hire based on merit not (gender, race, etc)" arguments, which includes the great line: "never take gender into account when choosing the best man for the job."

Perhaps you saw an article this week about how older white men are facing discrimination in tech. It was all over my Twitter feed, but I could never get through the one everyone was tweeting out. I don't mean to imply that ageism is OK. It isn't, and it should be stopped. But I kept thinking that the older guys who are experiencing age discrimination now helped build the supposedly meritocratic tech culture that has marginalized so many people for so long. Where was their interest in fairness and cultural issues then? I really liked Ann Friedman's take on this, in which she wonders if tech has "disrupted discrimination" and points out that unlike women and people of color, no one is telling the older guys they're just doing it all wrong. They're looking at the structural issues. So I guess if this actually leads more people to recognize the structural problems in the tech culture it is a good thing... but I am still sad it took discrimination happening to older white men to get it noticed. (Yes, that's two completely unrelated articles by Ann Friedman in one links post.)

Ashe Dryden (@ashedryden) wrote a great multi-tweet thread about the issues that tech has with recognizing the value of management and the like. I've seen similar problems in biotech. It seems every company has to discover for itself that management has value. In fact, just this week, I had cause to forward this old HBR article about how Google "proved management matters" to someone. (Unfortunately, you'll have to register with HBR to read the whole thing, but registration is free.)

Staying with tech for a minute... the unfolding wage cartel story is destroying any respect I had left for Steve Jobs. Also, I wonder if any of the techies who think government does nothing but get in their way will change their views now? (My guess is not. But I can dream.)

That's enough tech stuff. I really liked this interview with Stephanie Coontz. I usually find Coontz' thoughts on work and family matters to be interesting and good.

Speaking of people saying interesting, good things: Britney Cooper says really smart things about the #CancelColbert incident.

I also found this article by Noah Berlatsky about race in Sci-Fi very interesting. 

This picture will probably make you angry.


@DNLee5 has written many great things, but this might be my favorite tweet of hers ever:

Stereotype =/= phenotype.
— DNLee (@DNLee5) March 27, 2014

Let's end on a more hopeful note. Tragic Sandwich (@tragicsandwich) pointed me to this article from Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, about overcoming Imposter Syndrome.

And I love the picture in this:

Wonderful RT @BBCBreaking Law permitting same-sex marriage in England & Wales comes into force http://t.co/4aeVhENZ3w pic.twitter.com/mMVPRkt5tS
— Karen James (@kejames) March 29, 2014

Ask Cloud: Writing a Cover Letter

I've gotten several requests for advice on how to write a cover letter. I am too lazy to dig them up to fit the usual Ask Cloud format, but trust me. I have been asked about this! I touched on some "things NOT to do" in an old post, but I've never written up my advice on the things you SHOULD do, so here goes...

The cover letter is an intimidating thing to write. I freely admit that it is the hardest part about a job application- it is for me, too, and I've written dozens of cover letters and read hundreds of them. The basics of what you need to do aren't that hard to grasp, but it can be very hard to write something that covers those basics well and still feels authentic. However, it is worth taking the time to really get the cover letter right. As @SteveB mentioned in the comments of my post of writing a resume, a good cover letter can rescue an otherwise mediocre application.

A bad cover letter, on the other hand, can completely sink your chances for a the job. Don't freak out, though. When I say "bad cover letter," I am thinking about the ones that say they are interesting in a different field than mine, or the one memorable one I received that talked about how the candidate had a "God-given talent for (specific job function)" and how he would profoundly improve our company's chances for success if we could convince him to work for us. This was from someone who was just graduating from college. We all had a chuckle and set his application aside.

These are easy mistakes to avoid. Most cover letters are not bad, but they're not good. They don't really hurt your chances, but they don't help them.

So, what should you do to write a good cover letter? To me, there are three basic requirements for a good cover letter:

1. Convey the right information
2. Clear, concise writing
3. Proper grammar

Let's take them one at a time.

Convey the right information

The point of a cover letter is to summarize how your skills and experience match the key skills in the job posting. You need to do the work of mapping your skills to the skills the hiring manager has stated that he or she wants. Use the keywords from the job ad! Don't make the hiring manager do the work of making the mapping, and don't make her guess if your "aqueous container construction" is the same thing as the "underwater basketweaving experience" requested in her posting, even if you come from a lab that strongly prefers the "aqueous container construction" designation.

You should not laboriously map every single skill in the job posting to your background. Instead, pick the key skills. This is a chance to demonstrate that you truly understand the position and what they key skills for that position might be. If you read a job posting and can't figure out what the key skills are, you should try to do more research into that field. Yes, it is probably a very poorly written job posting. Deal with that, and work around it to submit a solid application, anyway.

If there is a significant hole in your background with respect to the posting, don't pretend it isn't there and think the hiring manager won't notice. The hiring manager is almost certainly scanning cover letters and resumes specifically looking for the key skills- if yours is missing too many, it will just be skipped. Instead, think hard about your background and experience, and try to identify something that indicates an aptitude for learning the missing skill. For instance, let's say the job description calls for experience in underwater basket weaving, coordinated diving techniques, and reed selection. You have underwater basket weaving and coordinated diving techniques nailed, but lack direct experience in reed selection. However, you collaborated on a project in which you worked with the reed selection group. You can say something like this:

"While I do not have direct experience in reed selection, I collaborated closely with the reed selection department on a basket diversification initiative at Baskets University, which gave me exposure to the fundamental properties that must be considered when selecting reeds for an underwater basketweaving project."

Bonus points if you can offer to put the hiring manager in touch with the person with whom you collaborated, and that person will say you are wonderful. (This is a heavily anonymized real life example, in which I hired someone who had absolutely no experience in one of the key areas of the job. The cover letter sold me on the candidate, and the hire worked out beautifully.)

Only do this if you actually find something that truly indicates an aptitude! Do not contort your experience into unnatural configurations to try to make a connection that just isn't there. If you do not have anything at all relevant in your background and the missing skill is one of the key aspects of the job, say something like this:

"While I have not yet gained direct experience in reed selection, I look forward to the chance to grow in this area."

If the missing skill is just one in a long list of desired technical skills, I would just not mention it.

Other things to include in a cover letter, if relevant are:

An explanation of any unusual gaps in your work experience, particularly if they are recent. This can be very brief. If you have a gap due to child rearing or elder care, simply state that. If this is your first job on your way back in and you can point to something you've done to stay current or refresh your skills, do so.  I would not necessarily explain a gap between college and grad school, unless it is unusually long (more than a year or so), but I can't think of any examples of this from my hiring experience, so I honestly don't know what the best advice is here. However, if you are doing a postdoc now and had a gap between grad school and postdoc, I'd explain that.

If you are changing fields, indicate that you are interested in the new field. You would not believe the number of cover letters I have received that not only don't do this, but actually mention a long interest in some other field. Don't do that. But also don't assume that your interest in my field is obvious. Maybe you've just fundamentally misunderstood my job posting. How am I to know if you don't tell me? This can be a single sentence, such as: "I am interested in the chance to apply my knowledge of basket types to applications in underwater basketweaving." This indicates that you have read and understood that my job is NOT in the history and classification of basket types, and that you are at least willing to claim an interest in my field beyond the potential to collect a paycheck. If your only interest in my field is to collect a paycheck, it is best to keep that to yourself.

Clear, concise writing

Most corporate jobs involve a lot of writing. If nothing else, you are likely to be writing a lot of emails. No one willingly signs up for a future of reading someone else's tortured prose. You want your cover letter to convince the hiring manager that you can write well. This does not mean that your writing must be on par with that of a great novelist. It just means that you must be able to structure your paragraphs and sentences logically and convey your message concisely.

You don't want to write a long, rambling cover letter, but it also must be long enough to convey all of the necessary information. I aim for 3 paragraphs of 3-4 sentences each. That is not a rule- it is just a guideline. If you can cover all of the important information in less space, that's great.

I cannot emphasize enough the fact that your cover letter must be constructed logically. If I cannot follow your letter without serious effort, I am probably not going to hire you.

Since the cover letter functions a bit as a writing sample, I am not a huge fan of the advice I sometimes see to make a table mapping skills in the job description to specific items in your background. However, I don't think I'd rule out a candidate for doing this, so if you are a very weak writer, you can consider that method. I think it would be better to get some writing advice, instead, but perhaps if you are applying for a very technical job, the writing sample aspect is less important.

Proper Grammar

I am reasonably forgiving of a typo or two in the resume and cover letter, but a true grammar mistake is usually a large mark against the candidate. I am more forgiving in this regard if the candidate is not a native English speaker, but even then, I will not overlook a large number of mistakes. Find a native speaker to proofread your writing. If you do not have a friend who will do this, look for paid help. (Corollary: if you are a native English speaker, help your colleagues out when asked. It is good karma for when you travel to their country and attempt to communicate by shouting "DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH???" at people.)

The reason I so strongly dislike grammar mistakes in cover letters is simple: it shows a lack of attention to detail and precision, and those are usually things I need the person I am hiring to have. Writing a cover letter and resume is a good time to get in touch with your inner perfectionist.

Those are the basic points.

There is one additional consideration I'd like to mention: when you apply to multiple jobs at a single company, the hiring managers can almost certainly see this, even if the company is quite large. The resume tracking systems companies use makes this obvious.

I don't see anything inherently wrong in applying for a couple of closely related jobs. However, in this case, you will need to work extra hard on your cover letter to make sure that it is appropriate for all of the jobs to which you apply. In some cases, the resume management system will only store one. Even if you can submit more than one, they sometimes get mixed up. And even if they don't get mixed up, the hiring manager might read both. Therefore, I'd recommend writing a slightly more generic cover letter that can fit both jobs.

Better yet, though, would be to try to network your way to someone at the company who can help you figure out which job is the best fit for you, and apply to that one and only that one. If the people inside the company think a different job is more appropriate for you, they will probably consider you for it anyway. (Really! Hiring is hard. We don't care how we come across the resume for our dream candidate- we're just thankful we found it.)

Another thing to keep in mind is that preferences for cover letter styles and content might vary a bit between industries, so if you can find someone in the industry you are targeting to review your cover letter and resume, that is likely to be very helpful. However, I have received advice very similar to what I put in this post at the outplacement services I've gone to after being laid off (this is often part of the lay off package), and those services were not focused on  my industry- so I suspect that a large part of my advice here will be applicable to other industries.

That's all I can think of right now. Other hiring managers out there- what do you think? Job candidates- what questions do you have that I have missed?

Taster Flights

This week's Tungsten Hippo post is on how short ebooks can function like a taster flight of beer (or wine, if that's more your thing), allowing you to compare different samples of similar things, and thereby notice aspects that you might have missed without the comparison.

It was also going to be the first blog post on Tungsten Hippo to include an image, but I ran out of time. To make that happen, I need to install several new Drupal modules and a client side WYSIWYG editor. This makes me simultaneously appreciate blogging software and miss the simplicity of the hand-editing HTML days. However, learning the ins and outs of Drupal was part of the point of the Tungsten Hippo project, so I will eventually finish this off and enable pictures in my blog posts over there. The Tungsten Hippo project, though, is reinforcing something that I already knew about myself- I enjoy tech challenges, but I'm really all about the content. So I decided not to let this particular tech thing get in the way of my posting schedule and put the post up without a picture.

Therefore, the 20 or so people who read Tungsten Hippo and not Wandering Scientist will miss out on this picture:

Anyhow, I've used the same image of a beer taster flight before, in a blog post here. That post was about careers and interests, and being a "scanner." One of the insights I'd gained from reading a couple of books about people who have a lot of different, diverse interests is that we can benefit from viewing our interests as a taster flight. I continue to apply this idea in my life, and it has stood the test of time.

As useful as the idea of the taster flight is, I'm still struggling to get the balance right in my life. I can spiral into unhelpful self-doubt about how I feel like my career is floundering- which made it  nice to read this article from Brian Featherstonhaugh about "career rocket fuel" and the stages of a career. Although I feel like I'm too old for all of this soul-searching nonsense, in his formulation I'm hitting that phase right on time: I'm 15 years post-PhD, which is when my career really started. Even the three possible paths he listed as an example for his imaginary second phase person sort of fit.

Of course, I still have to do the work of figuring out where I want my career to go, but maybe I can stop beating myself up for not already knowing!

I was also really struck by this excerpt from the book "Happy City," by Charles Montgomery. There are a lot of really good, thought-provoking ideas in that excerpt, but the section that really made me sit up and take notice was the section on the effects of a long commute, and particularly this quote:

"Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office."

So maybe I should stop beating myself up for hating my new commute, too. People try to convince me it is not that bad, but the new routine effectively doubles my commute time, and I spend an hour every day just commuting. That is not good.

There are two bright spots to my new routine: the fact that it made me start walking Pumpkin to and from school, and the fact that it made me try out podcasts. I'm still collecting a good list of reliable podcasts. I'd like to branch out from the usual NPR ones (although those are good, and I listen to some and love them). One of the less well-known podcasts that I've stumbled across and enjoy is Launch Yourself. I am enjoying hearing all of the interviewee's different stories about what they decided to launch and how they did it. If you are at all tempted to try to launch something- even just as a side project, I recommend checking it out, particularly if your inner PR person is as stunted as mine is!

That's like a taster flight of things to make you think about how you've organized your career and life. There's lots we could discuss in the comments- whether you have a taster flight of interests, where you are at in your career path, what you think about long commutes, whether you've ever launched anything and what you thought about the experience... so have at it!

Weekend Reading: The Fine Blend of Good Things Edition

My big software release is done (and went well), but I've still got an IT outage to get through this weekend (my team has to come smoke test all the apps after the outage is over. Yes, I know about automated regression testing. There are reasons we still need to smoke test.)

So, while I've got a nice mix of things for you this week, I don't think I have the brain power to write much analysis around them. I'll just get straight to the links.

There is a lot of hate about the new Common Core standards out there. I haven't had enough experience with them to have a strong opinion. I can say that I've liked the math that Pumpkin (a first grader) is bringing home. I like how it is not about memorizing facts, but is instead giving her a chance to recognize the "magic" in math that makes it so powerful. I got an inkling of that with proofs in geometry (10th grade)  but didn't really get how powerful math is until college. I'm all for letting more kids see that earlier.
 
Anyway, @mylifeasprose, one of the people I follow on Twitter, is in some sort of math ed role, and is a huge advocate of the Common Core math standards. She did a series of tweets about how the new standards work in practice, and it is storified. It might be worth checking out if you're wondering "WTF" about the math homework your kid is bringing home.

Like I said- I haven't really seen enough of the Common Core standards to have an opinion, but I think there is some merit in this tweet:

. @kportermagee so, in other words, math instruction that brought about generation of Americans who say "I'm bad at math" is totally better.
— Jenn Borgioli (@DataDiva) March 21, 2014

And I think that "the Common Core" is being used to explain a lot of changes that may or may not actually be about the new standards, and a lot depends on how the standards are implemented. I personally would like to see less focus on testing and more on having a curriculum standard and trusting/empowering educators to teach that curriculum to kids. But we love our tests here in the USA....

OK. Moving on.

Reading this interview Kiese Laymon conducted with his mother makes it obvious that he is not the only awesome person in his family. (Also, if you have not yet read How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, you should fix that. I've got his novel, Long Divisionon my Kindle, waiting for me to have time to read a novel.)

I really liked this HBR article from Avivah Wittenberg-Cox about how sexism in the workplace self-perpetuates. Sad and thought-provoking, especially as a manager. A couple of favorite quotes:

"The only hope of overcoming anything unconscious is to make it conscious."

and

"Companies that continue to use biased talent management systems — unwittingly or not — will continue to get exactly the same results. Equally competent women will learn from the system that others are considered better – and believe it.  “People don’t even learn that they are equally capable,” as one of the study’s coauthors, Luigi Zingales of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, told the New York Times. Research pointing to women’s supposed “lack of self-confidence” overlooks this point: Men and women are born with similar ambitions, talents and ideas. Then we teach them bias."

Sarah Kendzior has a really good piece out about not just the gender gap in foreign policy, but how the system excludes people who do not come from wealthy backgrounds. You should also read the backstory on this piece, which should be unbelievable but sadly is all too believable.

To finish off the sexism and racism portion of the links, I give you... white guys sorting things out.

I  found this story about the homicide report at the LA Times to be really interesting and moving.

This is a really good post about alternative histories. (Hat tip: Bad Mom, Good Mom, who emailed it to me.) Definitely watch the short film that is embedded in it. I had seen it before but not posted it because I was uncomfortable with how the hijab is portrayed as necessarily demeaning. I do not agree with that. But other than that, it is a really well done film. And maybe I'm not reading the hijab portion as the filmmaker intended. I don't know.

I had never even heard of Portolan Charts before reading this post from Strange Maps, but it is a fascinating story. I love that site for teaching me random things I didn't even know I wanted to know.

Finally, Tragic Sandwich has a post about an interaction between her kid and some other kids at day care that really got me thinking. To understand the post, you need to know that Baguette (Tragic Sandwich's kid) has Autism Spectrum Disorder and a speech delay.I won't say more, because I think you should just go read the post.

It got me thinking about how I need to push myself to talk to my kids about all sorts of differences, not just race. Pumpkin and I have been talking about physical disabilities a bit on our walks to and from school, because she just got a long-coveted roller backpack, and she likes to pull it over the yellow bumpy section of the sidewalk ramps. She asked me why some ramps have those and others don't, and that led to a conversation about what they were for, etc., etc. I have to say, I am loving how we talk about things on the way too and from school. The change to walking has been the one bright spot in my new commute routine, which I otherwise continue to hate.

Anyway, inspired by Tragic Sandwich's post, today we talked a bit about how we shouldn't infer too much from differences we notice between ourselves and others, and I told her about Carly Fleischmann, a young woman who has autism and is unable to speak. At the age of 10, she figured out how to type, though, and she is telling the world what her world is like. I wanted Pumpkin to see that being unable to do one thing (or slower to learn it) does not say anything about a person's intelligence and other capabilities.

And I showed her this trailer for a book Carly has co-written with her father, which tells the whole story:



That's not my usual funny ending, but it is uplifting, so I'll leave it there and wish you all a happy weekend!

Lazy Isn't Accidental

I wasn’t planning to blog about the recent events involving Julie Ann Horvath and GitHub, partially because my little corner of the tech world is pretty far removed from that corner, so I didn’t feel like I had anything to add, and what I would say, I’ve said before. I am also working very hard to deal with the fallout from my very bad day a week and a half ago and put all of this messy “woman in STEM” stuff back in the mental box in which I usually contain it. From a purely selfish standpoint, I just want to lock that box back up and move on with my own life plan.

But then someone I know made an offhand comment about how maybe the reason tech has these periodic high profile “diversity fails” is because there are so many guys- and I am quoting here- “on the spectrum” in tech.

And that got my ranty juices going, because I think it does a huge disservice to people with autism spectrum disorders as well as to women and other marginalized groups in tech. I have managed someone with an autism spectrum disorder and while that presented some different challenges, a prevalence of misogynistic asshole-ish behavior was not among them, because guess what? He wasn’t a misogynistic asshole. In fact, he was one of the least likely people I have ever worked with to say something that was even borderline sexist. So can we please, please, please stop with the lazy stereotypes about people with ASD and just acknowledge that being sexist and having ASD are two distinct things, which may overlap in individuals much like having brown hair and being sexist may?

Also, there is a HUGE difference between having an autism spectrum disorder and just being socially awkward, and people should not self-diagnose ASD to avoid owning up to their social challenges. And they certainly shouldn't use an ASD diagnosis, whether from a doctor or from their own analysis, to justify being an asshole, because that just makes them an even bigger asshole. (For the record, I have never seen anyone with an actual ASD diagnosis do this, but since they are a large and diverse group, I'm sure there are some assholes among them, just like there are in any large group.)

Furthermore, I cannot think of a single person in a marginalized group with whom I have EVER worked who was not capable of distinguishing between social awkwardness and sexism, racism, and other discriminatory speech and behavior. It is, in my experience, extremely rare to come across someone from a marginalized group who will NOT give people a giant benefit of the doubt with respect to this. I am sure a few people with a hairline trigger on reporting harassment are out there, but your chances of running into them are quite small. (Particularly when compared to my chances of running into someone who makes sexist statements, but let’s not go there…)

I think there is a misconception that there are no negative impacts to reporting abusive or discriminatory behavior. This is laughable. There are huge impacts. I've witnessed people put up with unbelievable behavior because to report it is to risk destroying their career. I have personally put up with wildly inappropriate behavior because reporting it would (1) make it worse and (2) have negative impacts on my career. It is almost never a good thing for your career to raise these issues. It just isn't.

I think a lot of the angst around this topic amongst more privileged groups is related to the fear of “accidentally” saying or doing something wrong. I get that. It certainly gets a lot of hype. But I think it is entirely unfounded. First, as I discussed above, most people in marginalized groups are likely to give you a lot of chances and the benefit of the doubt. Second, I’ve come to think that most “accidentally” racist and sexist speech isn’t really accidental. It comes from a place of ignorance, and what is your excuse for being ignorant? It is easier now than ever to learn about these issues. Diversify your Twitter stream and read some of the links that your new tweeps post and you’re already off to a great start. If you won’t do that, it isn’t an accident. It is lazy.

The trick to not being viewed as a racist or a sexist is pretty simple, really. Just don’t be a racist or a sexist. I mean REALLY don’t be one of those things. Don’t just say “hey, I think everyone is equal so it is all fine.” Learn about your privilege and implicit bias. Learn to give other people the benefit of the doubt that you hope they will give you. I.e., don’t make people earn your respect . Assume people- even women and Black people!- who are in technical roles know a decent amount of tech, and if they ask a question, answer it with respect not condescension. In short, treat people- even people who are not straight white men just like you!- in the manner in which you would like to be treated.

(And hey, fellow cis straight white women- we don’t get to skip this step! We need to examine our implicit biases and learn how to really not perpetuate a discriminatory system, too. Extrapolating from our anger at how we are treated is only the start, and sadly a lot of us seem to fail to do even that.)

You’ll still make some mistakes, but they will be less common and most people will overlook them, or perhaps, if you’ve really earned some trust, gently correct them. Apologize sincerely (this is so rare, that it is likely to render the person to whom you are apologizing speechless), learn from the mistake, and move on, with your career trajectory completely unharmed. In fact, if you really, honestly do this- apologize for your mistakes, learn from them, and improve- your stature is likely to increase.

Or, you could be lazy and continue to do nothing and to tell yourself that you believe in equality so everything is fine. You’ll continue to make “accidental” mistakes. But that’s OK. 99% of the time, the person on the receiving end will decide that she isn’t in the mood to blow up her career today and will let it pass. She’ll pack your mistake into her mental box of stupid, discriminatory things she’s dealt with and you’ll both move on. Maybe you’ll notice that something wasn’t quite right, but hey, you believe in equality, so it can’t have been anything you did. If your career is long enough, you might eventually hit that 1% case where someone is just so sick of this shit that your “accidental” mistake blows up in your face and does you some damage. In that case, I think you got exactly what was coming to you.