Glenn Vanderburg glv

I'm writing in response to events that have recently come to light involving a sexual assault at a tech conference. Background information can be found [here][1], [here][2], and [here][3] as well as on twitter and google.

I've been watching this from the sidelines, and I've been wrestling with several questions that I can't seem to shake and that I really don't have answers to.

I wear many hats, both in the tech community and others. I'm a coder, a speaker, a user group organizer, a conference organizer, and even a boss. Each of those roles colors how I see this, but there's one role that is overpowering in my reaction.

See, I'm a Dad. A dad of two beautiful and innocent girls who are 3 and 2. They have their whole lives in front of them and so the questions I'm struggling with are:

Reciprocal Needs in the Employment Relation

We can look at two sides of the management coin: What do the individuals get out of it? And what benefit does the whole system derive from it?

I will disregard any benefits that accrue to managers just by holding the position of managing. Those are just circular logic. Circular logic abounds in discussions of management and hierarchy. For example, consider status reports. It will be said that status reports are necessary so managers know what their employees are working on. It’s

	(global-set-key (kbd "M-s") 'save-buffer)
	(global-set-key (kbd "M-z") 'undo)
	(global-set-key (kbd "<escape>") 'hippie-expand)

	(set-face-font 'default "-apple-inconsolata-medium-r-normal--13-0-72-72-m-0-iso10646-1")

	(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(width . 100))
	(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(height . 45))

	(setq-default tab-width 2)

	Proc.module_eval { def method_missing(m,a); call(m.to_s,a); end }
	Array.module_eval { def rest; self[1..-1]; end }
	Object.module_eval { def let; yield self; end }

	Music = Module.new do
	def self.load(filename)
	depth = ->(l) { %r(^([\s-]*)\w).match(l)[1].length }
	ldepth = ->(l) { %r(^(\s*)\S).match(l)[1].length }
	nonzero = ->(n) { n > 0 }
	empty = ->(c) { c.empty? }

	-- PostgreSQL 9.2 beta (for the new JSON datatype)
	-- You can actually use an earlier version and a TEXT type too
	-- PL/V8 http://code.google.com/p/plv8js/wiki/PLV8

	-- Inspired by
	-- http://people.planetpostgresql.org/andrew/index.php?/archives/249-Using-PLV8-to-index-JSON.html
	-- http://ssql-pgaustin.herokuapp.com/#1

	-- JSON Types need to be mapped into corresponding PG types
	--

	Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
	----------------------------------
	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
	Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD

	;; Is it functional programming's immutability that makes it a bad match for
	;; object-oriented style, particularly inheritance?

	;; For /Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer/
	;; (http://leanpub.com/fp-oo), I've implemented something like the
	;; Ruby object system in Clojure. Objects are built out of maps
	;; (hashes) with stylized "metadata". Here's a `Point` object:

	{:y 6, :x 4, :__class_symbol__ 'Point}

	$stack, $draws = [], {}

	def method_missing *args
	return if args[0][/^to_/]
	$stack << args.map { \|a\| a or $stack.pop }
	$draws[$stack.pop(2)[0][0]] = args[1] if args[0] == :<
	end

	class Array
	def +@

	Nature's first green is gold,
	Her hardest hue to hold.
	Her early leaf's a flower;
	But only so an hour.

	Then leaf subsides to leaf.
	So Eden sank to grief,
	So dawn goes down to day.
	Timezones: they're here to stay.

	set -e

	# Looks clever, is short, but removes your working directory on Mac OS X
	# where `mktemp -d` fails.
	cd "$(mktemp -d)"
	trap "rm -rf \"$PWD\"" EXIT INT QUIT TERM

	# ...