I read somewhere that women will typically only apply to a job posting if they feel they meet 100% of the requirements, while men will typically apply if they feel they meet just 60%.

In IT, this would not be a successful tactic even for men. Generally, I’d recommend applying for an IT job even if you meet only 20% of the “requirements.”

A lot of those are put in there either as “weeders,” that is plausible deniability if they don’t hire you for some other reason (illegal or legal) besides your skills or qualifications, or they are included because HR pulled them from some 10-year-old or otherwise irrelevant list.

So in IT, it pays to apply to jobs where at least according to the job listing if you have only 20% of the “requirements."

In IT, I have applied to and gotten jobs where I have met that few requirements, and no, I did not lie on my resume, etc. Just nailed the interview portion, and got the interview because no one closer to all the requirements applied.

I am sure that John Green is a fine writer. But I’ve also noticed the strange spate of articles that seem to imply that he invented the YA genre.

Now I’ve been reading YA for many years now, since my late 20s. (I didn’t read YA at all when I was a Y – I skipped straight from reading primers to National Geographic and Moby Dick.) And I know for a fact that YA existed well before John Green, even “realistic” YA, whatever the hell that means.

So the peculiar canonization of John Green and this string of bizarre articles that anoint him as the vanguard of a post-sparkly-vampire seriousness in YA isn’t simply about taking a white male more seriously than everyone else. It’s also about privileging a certain narrative structure—the dominant narrative’s dominant narrative. It’s not only that Green is a straight white man, it’s that he writes in the way that generations of straight white men have deemed important and Literary.

I also like how the piece explored how to a certain class of critic (also known as “bad, useless critic”) the only valid literature is the one tiny genre of “realism.” Though of course realism is a construct like any other, and just as fictional as anything else.

But thank you, time-traveling John Green, for rescuing us from all these women and their lady books! We all really appreciate it.