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jononomoHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

The best software engineer I ever worked with, whom I'll call Steve, ended up working in Fortran …

The best software engineer I ever worked with, whom I'll call Steve, ended up working in Fortran after we parted ways. He had a Ph.D. from Harvard in Computer Science and we met at a research lab at Harvard Medical School. Interestingly, both of Steve's parents as well as his uncle were professors of Computer Science at top schools. By the time he was 18 years old Steve had a dozen years of programming experience under his belt On one occasion he was on a team that was collaborating with a team from MIT that had contributed some software to the project that Steve disapproved of. So, one weekend, Steve entirely re-wrote the software that the MIT team had contributed. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a firing offense because he had humiliated the collaborators. …

Original discussionWhy Fortran is a scientific powerhouse159 source comments · at import
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milliamsHN

> Of course, Steve transitioned a couple of years ago and he (she?) now goes by Jessica. It is generally considered polite to refer to people post-transition by their new pronoun. So, "she".

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UncleOxidantHN

> It turns out that Fortran is the best tool for modeling glaciers, Is it the best language for this, or is there just more existing code for modeling glaciers in Fortran than in any other language?

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lowbloodsugarHN

Why “Of course”? Do all autistic people have gender dysphoria in your experience? Also, this person’s name is Jessica and their gender is ‘she’. It would be appropriate to simply refer to her as Jessica, not referring to their old name at all. Also most trans people do not agree that they have changed gender, as your post suggests. Instead, they view themselves as have been misgendered at birth. Thus, to refer to their past by their old pronouns is to continue to misgender them in the present . So please don’t. Finally the persons gender here is no more important than their race, religion, or countless other unimportant things that you didn’t mention. Maybe leave the whole transgender thread out of any future conversations.

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