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10 posts total
Cat Hicks

Sometimes people are like "you act like someone who is having a conversation with you online is supposed to exert cognitive effort to learn something about who you are" and I'm like????? Yes??????

Cat Hicks

I don't know what you are all here sharing thoughts online FOR, but my assumption is that we are in general trying to use some of the same social mechanisms that we rely on for like.......social life in general

Denny

@grimalkina I like it when people tell me about themselves, but I'm really bad at requesting/inviting/encouraging it.

modulux

@grimalkina I follow your posts with interests. I just find it hard to understand your perspective sometimes, such us in this case. I wonder if it's an expectation mismatch on how social media works (I wrote something before about IRC versus more Twitter-style netiquette). I get though that it's unpleasant to be on the wrong side of this, and for what it's worth I am sorry if this reply is adding to it.

Cat Hicks

just gonna say it, if developer tool companies actually galaxy brained they could be learning a lot from places they will absolutely never learn from, like sewing communities

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Kevin Karhan :verified:

@grimalkina but that would require said #devs to be humble and not #TechBros who see themselves as apex #engineers since they make the tools that "#10X coders" use...

Tindra

@grimalkina I mean, I’ve given multiple talks at hacker cons about textiles, so, yeah, agree?

Cat Hicks

Today I'm launching something near and dear to my heart...VERY near and dear 😂 -- a podcast project with my phenomenal favorite neuroscientist (& wife), @analog_ashley !

On "Change, Technically" we're coming to your ears to share tales of who gets to be technical. We dig into STEM pathways & how leaders can learn from psych and neuroscience to think about cultivating innovation. We share our stories from classrooms to software teams. Plus new Cat & Ashley lore!

changetechnically.fyi/

Today I'm launching something near and dear to my heart...VERY near and dear 😂 -- a podcast project with my phenomenal favorite neuroscientist (& wife), @analog_ashley !

On "Change, Technically" we're coming to your ears to share tales of who gets to be technical. We dig into STEM pathways & how leaders can learn from psych and neuroscience to think about cultivating innovation. We share our stories from classrooms to software teams. Plus new Cat & Ashley lore!

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Greg

@grimalkina @analog_ashley I listened and it was great. Will share such an accessible format with people in teams who might benefit from topics discussed.

Cat Hicks

I guess "burnout" is the new "imposter syndrome" because apparently it explains absolutely everything (and nothing at the same time)

Danilo, from the Gerentate

@grimalkina “the social safety net was replaced with a bed of spikes so you’d better work even if you can’t” was my first introduction to burnout, conceptually

so it’s yet another one of those reflections of the system turned into a conveniently individualizable condition

Cat Hicks

I've spent the week reading like 50+ papers on learning to remember what I know about how people learn and this is what I know:

-people are bad at deciding what to learn
-people are bad at studying. We choose the worst ways to study and we hate the most efficient ways
-people give up on learning so much. Like more than anyone believes
-people aren't clear about what their goals really are for learning and if you try to get people to set goals they don't want to
-teachers truly work miracles

Cat Hicks

Had brunch with a scientist friend who's an expert in one of the more exciting emerging areas of applied biology. She said:

"People are like why are you so tired. People don't understand that our brains are on FIRE for at least eight hours a day. This is biology's heyday and yet the worst time to be a scientist because we're expected to know a million new things a day and discarded if we don't. All the tools none of the humanity."

I felt the software developers I work with can relate

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Sevoris

@grimalkina I want to be poetic and say something along the lines of how we‘re exchanging understanding the world to tell better stories for better understanding the world as a mechanical endeavor without A Point but that also feels like missing the margin by a mile.

But even so: when did become understanding and knowledge such a… dehumanized process, when arguably understanding and improvement and self-reflection is so very human?

David Nash

@grimalkina It was starting to head that way in scientific reasearch many years ago (late 90s) after getting a Ph. D. in chemistry.

There were many reasons I left that career, but one of the big ones was simply that in the first year of my first post-Ph. D. job, I felt that I had to learn twice as much that year as I did in any one prior, including one of the toughest STEM undergrad curricula in the country and the traditional "really rough first fscking year" of a Ph. D. program.

And had absolutely no time to stop, think, and rest.

I bailed out into software development, where that trend (amazingly enough) was fairly muted by comparison.

@grimalkina It was starting to head that way in scientific reasearch many years ago (late 90s) after getting a Ph. D. in chemistry.

There were many reasons I left that career, but one of the big ones was simply that in the first year of my first post-Ph. D. job, I felt that I had to learn twice as much that year as I did in any one prior, including one of the toughest STEM undergrad curricula in the country and the traditional "really rough first fscking year" of a Ph. D. program.

Jimmy Havok

@grimalkina It was a lot easier to be a Renaissance person when the sum total of knowledge was much smaller.

Cat Hicks

A real challenge for me in this life is that for years and years because of my areas of research I have it firmly in my brain that "performance orientation" is generally speaking a pretty maladaptive thing and I am used to thinking of "performance cultures" quite negatively in terms of, this is a place where you don't feel you can be authentic or show your effort (only outcomes) and that's a known bad thing but in business, uhhhh.....the word performance is MUCH more positive 😂

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Ana Hevesi

@grimalkina I was having a conversation some years back with someone with a neuroscience PhD and a psych background. I acknowledged that I was feeling real insecurity about having recently joined “a really high performing team”.

She says to me “You know who else is high performing? Dogs in dog shows.”

I will never stop thinking about that.

Sean

@grimalkina between how short-term metrics are BS and easily gamed to the detriment of actual progress and the fact that an essential part of being effective in engineering jobs is accurately predicting and preparing for the future…

Cat Hicks

Oh this is good.

Much of my life's work has been around how we can work towards people being able to define themselves, their work and how they are measured. We have the right to tell our own stories.

This taps into the exhaustion too of how the restorative and growth-oriented vision of knowledge work can paradoxically be warped into The Grind. "Learn forever" is glorious when it's sustainable, human-centered. "Learn forever" is exploitation when it's not.

ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/the-ne

Oh this is good.

Much of my life's work has been around how we can work towards people being able to define themselves, their work and how they are measured. We have the right to tell our own stories.

This taps into the exhaustion too of how the restorative and growth-oriented vision of knowledge work can paradoxically be warped into The Grind. "Learn forever" is glorious when it's sustainable, human-centered. "Learn forever" is exploitation when it's not.

Ethan Marcotte

@grimalkina Oh my goodness, Cat: thank you so much for reading, and for the kind words.

And that’s just *beautifully* put. Thanks for that, too 💜

arosien

@grimalkina oh, the quote in the post about planned vs. situational sounds like lucy suchman, will have to read deeper

Cat Hicks

When I watched my neuroscientist wife teach herself hardware engineering to adapt a piece of tooling to physically fit the rest of the tools used by her research area, it became real in a new way for me that huge areas of our insight and data about the world depend on small numbers of people innovating in their own quiet ways, often unrecognized.

Scientific insight is not mass produced.

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jonny (good kind)

@grimalkina
Watching this happen in neuro is the whole thing that started me doing what i do now, and I write a section on this in basically everything I write. Its literally how the whole discipline works and ofc is a huge source of labor inequity and tech access inequity. Who has to, who has the resources for, and who gets the credit for hacking together the busted ass tooling landscape? The answers wont surprise u, obvi, since u study this stuff, but just to say we share this origin story ♥

Johan Nyström-Persson

@grimalkina This is so true and, I think, a strong argument for reinventing the wheel in science and diving into the tools you use at a minute level. They’re likely to be the result of a largely accidental process.

Cat Hicks

Across about ten things this week, I'll say this: mastodon has a real toxic reply guy culture going on and it is exhausting to receive this EVERY SINGLE TIME you dare say something that gets attention, as a marginalized female scientist. Worse to me tbh than typical trolling because it is so deeply rooted in credibility deficit "know your place" patterns. You all are worse than birdsite for me, where I have nearly five times more followers. Definitely thinking about leaving.

Fix your hearts.

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Eric the Cerise

@grimalkina

( ... sigh ... )

I just found you.

Edit: I've nothing to compare to. People keep telling me this place is much better than Twitter, Threads, etc ... but that Bluesky is also much better than here.

I saw a wonderful analysis by @kissane a week ago, on why people leave here for Bluesky ... and my biggest takeaway was that all the top problems here, have been problems here since before I joined, 5+ years ago.

In 5+ years, we've fixed nothing here.

CubeOfCheese

@grimalkina sorry you're experiencing this. Good luck out there.

Steve Lord

@grimalkina it's almost certainly related to being on mastodon.social. I was on there for years and moderation got worse as it grew bigger. It federates with some of the worst instances. Finding a home that works for you is a chore and only you can decide if that's worthwhile on fedi or jumping to something else. Whatever happens I hope you find your fit.

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