The Fake Tech Influencer Drama

Why is tech like this? Don’t pretend you don’t know. California centered businesses are left leaning? Who would have guessed. Stop caring what people look like and pay attention to their work. Politics don’t belong in the workplace. It’s just another political trick meant to divide.

Theo lead the web tech industry

100k followers… I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that most of those were purchased for money

Apart from these conferences, i hate pyramid scheme sellers and people selling vercel/nextjs, and scam callers. All come in the same category.

Hahahahaha

Can’t believe Uncle Bob is still at it. I left the tech world many years ago (death/rape threats eventually got to me 🤷🏼‍♀️), but long before that, I was a founding member of the Java Champions and resigned because of Uncle Bob’s behavior around women and tech conferences. I still keep an eye on the field (and occasionally write programming books) but after seeing the comments here, I guess I’m glad I quit speaking at tech conferences. I thought things were getting better. If these comments are any indicator, not much has changed…

why would you be looking specifically for women in tech to invite to conferences? like just look for people in general that are talented and interesting

Open source women catalog? Sounds kinda creepy

another stupid look and opinion in the name of diversity we don't need woman in tech or black or white or latino or arab or indian we need good people in tech it should not matter who they are or what race or gender they have

This is what happens when you're looking for people based, not on what they've done, but rather based on inherent characteristics.

A bunch of drama queens.

"just another white dude on stage" wow. Maybe we should all just wear masks and use a voice changer so that people don't focus on such irrelevant characteristics

Theo is a fake profile. He's AI genereated don't be fooled!

it's just sad

"Uncle Bob is a scourge to software". Why? I thought his books and stuff were popular.

Theo you are not just a white man. You are Theo! A very smart white man with lots of opinions, but very valuable ones! Dont sell yourself short man

Nahui Boba

Thanks Theo for making this video!

I've been a software engineer for about 35 years. There are very few women in this business compared to men. I don't think anybody is keeping them out. Managers would love to hire women in these roles. But women are mostly just not interested. I even encouraged my own daughter to go in this field. She is a straight A student. But she wasn't interested.

Men and women tend to have different interests. You are not going to get equal representation at tech conferences. That is an unrealistic expectation.

i wish we could have this sort of coversations on a different platform than shitter

So what's the back story with Uncle Bob and why does Theo not like his take? This needs a whole video to explain!!

Invite developers/contributors for skills & insights not for gender. It's a great disservice to all attendees to do otherwise. No one wants to waste their time on those who are not qualified.

maybe he identifies as a woman when online (Digi Gender)

Attractive women that only exist on the poster is a common trope in tech.

I have seen so many agencies that promently feature attractive white women on the team page, but all the developers are not.

As much as I hate the grift of abusing the female gender to leverage engagement, I also am not a fan of people trying way too hard to push females into tech or blaming mysogynism on the lack of females in tech. It's not a field that women, by and large, seem overly interested in, in the same that men aren't generally as interested in nursing or teaching, fields dominated by women. Video feels a little pandering.

Can we stop focusing so much on immutable characteristics and more on merit? You have plenty of merit that goes well beyond your skin tone, Theo.

Stop pretending you're not a part of the problem. This is because of your culture and desperation.

I agreed with you up to the other white dude on stage comment. White people are not some monolith and we are all individuals. I think this mentality of associating yourself with a group is toxic.

If a conference is willing to lie about their speakers, then they don't have anything poaitive at all to offer. Talent and success doesn't need to cheat. If a conference had real things to offer, they would have no problem attracting a diverse set of speakers.

What I'm saying, in short, is that the scam is much much bigger than their attempts to conceal their diversity issues.

These conferences are massive scams to get money out of small businesses who send their employees to them. They need to end.

The problem is the horde of simps that follow these accounts because "wow it a gurl" rather than following the smartest folks in the industry

yes. we deserve better.

I get so tired of hearing about this idea that diversity in race and gender is an important aspect of the people conveying any sort of idea. I get that having multiple perspectives very valuable, but even twins who grew up in the same environment can have completely different perspectives on the same problems we face. While the people who impersonate are fraudulent assholes, I've never once looked at a speaker roster and thought, "oh good, a woman is bringing her womanly perspective". Instead I go, "oh her topic seems interesting. Let's check it out". I'm willing to bet the majority of people are like this as well.

You need computer science drag queens over there.

Something strikes me as weird about going to a github repo of women so that you fill a virtue signalling diversity requirement (this person filled it by making up people). Is that really fair to women?
But the alternative is not fair either

New set? Looking slick!

Don't force diversity for the sake of diversity. A male speaker isn't less valuable or interesting than a female speaker just because of their gender.

There is a scurge of fake techs and people who talk tech in large companies with no real dev knowledge. It's like scamming with enough surface level knowledge to sound intelligent. I had 2 conversations with cloudflare where this happened. So I imagine this same thing happens in the influencer space.

In an ideal world the most talented people will be the ones that get the oportunity no matter the gender.

Having weird rules to force diversity makes no sense for me, but if most of the people are men just for probability you will end with just men if you don't add those rules, taking in account that all the men are women are really skilled people.

Now do tech recruiters pretending to be women on linked in. 😂

I'm trying to work out now if theo is actually an AI imposter :/

George xD

Lmao at some of these comments. Swing and a miss.

People still go to conferences? Why?

Sorry but this is hilarious. This wouldn’t happen if people were valued for the value they bring, not the colour of their skin or what’s in their pants. You select people as speakers just because they’re women, and this is what happens. I say kudos to the person who did this for exposing this virtue signalling foolishness. The ones who did this are not the problem with tech, the problem with tech are the “oh another white guy” and “oh we need more women” types.

Pinterest has hundreds of incredibly talented women engineers.

Why Theo detests Uncle Bob? 🤔

theo’s coverage of this was 10/10

makes perfect sense that he's probably making up fake people to defend him on twitter too.

Dude, I want to RenderATL this past year and I was disappointed you didn't show up

I have binders full of women if you need any.