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Do Women Write Better Code?
JCWDenton writes "The senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres-and one of Silicon Valley's highest-ranking female programmers-insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They'll intersperse their code ... with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it. The code becomes a type of 'roadmap' for others who might want to alter it or add to it later, says McGrattan, a native of Ireland who has been with Ingres since 1992. Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, 'they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,' she tells the Business Technology Blog. 'They try to obfuscate things in the code,' and don't leave clear directions for people using it later. "
I've seen all genders write obfuscated code--but it worked. And every single time it was because we were under the gun for a deadline or there was simply no other way to do it. It's preposterous to even try to sound like you have empirical data supporting this blanket assessment. There's a big need to fix testosterone-fueled code at Ingres
I could combat her anecdotal subjective statements (probably describing herself) with my own anecdotes or go on a rant about how many of the great programmers are men (like Donald Knuth and his 'literate programming') but what's the point? Men can be just as meticulous as women can at providing good documentation and women can be just as sloppy.
It's good to have a healthy mix of diversity and I wish that programmers were 50/50 split on gender (trust me, I really really do) but it's not because women are better than men at coding. Prime example of American sexism in one of the few forms it exists today.
My work here is dung.
and see how harmonic they all work together
Men's code is sexist and demeaning whereas woman's code will marry you for the divorce settlement.
they freak out everytime they miss a period.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
"Men and women think differently."
This is such shocking news. Unbelievable.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
This article told me I code like a woman. I knew playing all those female characters in RPGs would come back to haunt me.
/cry
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
I know the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but in my experiences this is far from true. I have found female coders in my jobs to be downright malevolent in their coding. All women I have worked with that write any sort of code obfuscate the hell out of it, document absolutely nothing, and will barely explain how to even use their product. If everything is not run "their way", then it seems like armageddon.
Case in point. We have a coder who wrote an application for our office. Because of the fact that she refused to use any variable for the Program Files folder (hard coded as "c:\Program Files\") and she insisted that all workstations need a D: partition (to hold a 100kb support file), we had to rebuild 4 servers.
Say what you will about women coders being "touchy feely." I won't fall for it, any more than the NOW propoganda that all women are natural caring mothers, even the coked out alcoholics.
This sounds like a severe case of deciding on a problem, and then picking out observations to support it. Let's say you have 1000 coders, and 1/10 of your coders (100 of them) write poorly documented code. Now we'll also consider the gender-split - if 1/10 of the coder population is female, and the statistical 1/10 of the coders writing poorly documented code applies to them as well - this means you'll have 10 female coders writing poor documentation, and 90 male coders writing poor documentation. WOW! NINE TIMES as many male coders who can't document code properly, CLEARLY that means that men can't document code, right? Right?
The same sort of thing applied here at the University I teach at - a certain ethnic minority had a very bad reputation as producing cheaters in Comp.Sci. So for a few years, I carefully recorded every instance of cheating, and kept track of the ethnic background of the people getting caught. You know what? The only reason more people of that background were getting caught is because they represented 85% of the population in the department - the overall percentage of them that were cheating was actually LOWER than others.
Perhaps this McGrattan person should concentrate more on fixing the problems than on blaming them on some group she doesn't like.
Hey look, you can read Miss McGrattan's own blog entry about the interview and perhaps provide some intelligent, constructive comments. Remember not to obfuscate!
We all know that even if a woman *appears* to document her code well that what is written isn't what she really means!
Or women don't document at all and just expect the men to know what they are thinking.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
If women code anything like they act in real life, then you'd get a lot of helpful comments like this:
/*If you don't why this function isn't returning your expected result, then hell if I'm going to tell you.
Not only that, but even if the observation (that women write better documented code than men) is true, that would only be a correlation. The gender itself is not causation - if you want to learn something meaningful, find out why the gender is correlated (e.g. women at that company are given more reasonable deadlines, men feel less secure in their positions so they don't care about helping others untangle the 'spaghetti').
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
I haven't seen a woman (live one that is). Nor sunlight.
One of the better programmers I ever knew was a woman, and also one of the worst. The better one didn't even indent her 'if' statements, much less add comments until I shouted at her and made her review something she had written a few months earlier. The other one, wrote more comments than code... Like she thought she could justify the fact that it didn't work by explaining what it was supposed to do.
Pretty much kills that theory in my book. Men and women often think differently, and even different programmers of the same sex think differently. There are a lot of generalizations one can make about women and men in the world, and argue religiously about whether it is environment or instinct... Somehow I don't think programming style is one of them.
but i do know that wildly speculative sweeping generalizations provides lots of fodder for utterly useless watercooler chit chat
congrats slashdot for picking a topic everyone feels entitled to comment on and absolutely no one actually says anything useful on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Does this mean you need to spend half an hour telling the database how pretty it is and how much you love it no matter what it says before it will give you a straight answer?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Also: I hear that Asians write really efficient code because of their little fingers. And black guys? They could write great code, if only Whitey would stop keeping them down.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Actually, this article is almost completely fallacious... Let's look at the facts quoted:
McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman.
...at Ingres because only about 20% of the engineers are women, McGrattan says. (Most of them are in jobs involving quality assurance or adapting the product to a new locale, she says, and not the "heavy lifting" of writing code.)So, basically, she'd get a higher score if she guessed "man" every time than if she tries to be clever. Clearly, then, she does think some men's code looks like it's been written by a woman, which invalidates to point of the article.
That kinda scared me a little.....
Women and Men DO think different. The men are evil and women rock tone of this article however is pathetic as are her conclusions.
However you could leverage the fact that men and women think different to gain fault tolerance. If you have two independent programmers do the same work, with the same requirements they will frequently arrive at different solutions. As most know this can be leveraged by comparing the output of both solutions to verify the solution is proper. If one solution was done by a male and the other by a female the probability of difference should go up due to the difference in thought patterns, I would think.
That is a real chance of benefit versus the male hating nonsense she spewed.
I've seen 1, ever, a DB programmer, she was supposedly good. Heard of a few others through the grapevine, but only heard of them because how utterly useless and cruddy their code was. Just like I've heard of a few male programmers that I've never met. The phrase "complete rewrite" kept coming up from my associates after they (females and males) were canned.
Oh, wait, I have met a few others. They were no longer coding, they somehow had left the field and had a change of careers (working minimum wage jobs through a contract agency...) Actually, no different than after the big dotcom bubble pop and I met several (male) "network admins" who were (and still are, 7? years later) driving delivery truck. Seems they can't find a job in their field of choice again. I think the companies were looking for any excuse to let them go as these guys were from some very large manufacturing companies that really weren't effected by the dotpop.
Seriously, how many women, percentage wise compared to men, are in the field? How can they come up with some stat that says women are better programmers if you've got (pulling number out of air) 1 woman to every 1000 men in the field? How about a statement like "a percentage of women who become programmers and are successful at it (as in my experience a lot are not, but that's no different than men), tend to be better programmers than men"
ORLY now. I'm still officially a man (much to my chagrin), and I've always used landmarks to give directions.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
I particularly liked the "There's a big need to fix testosterone-fueled code at Ingres because only about 20% of the engineers are women"
Cos we all know that testosterone is bad, and women engineers are all better because, well, they're not mad things driven by their hormones, like silly men.
Basically the woman is a fool with an agenda (women into computing) so is constructing a theory to fit the purpose using crass gender stereotypes. There are good coders who document and comment clearly. There are good coders who don't, but should. There are rotten coders who both do and don't document and comment clearly. But any attempt to assign any of the former attributes to gender specifics is pathetic, and more than a little worrying for someone who, I presume, is responsible for employing people under present gender discrimination laws. If I worked for her I would more than a little annoyed at being patronised and my coding style & skills being categorized by gender.
I've seen 1, ever, a DB programmer, she was supposedly good.
Inept male programmers have an easier time hiding in the crowd. Inept women programmers can't.
Because of this culling effect, the women that are still around are, on average, more capable.
Industries dominated by women have a similar effect. The males end up being better because they need to overcome the inherent prejudice to get the same performance review.
I know your post is a joke, but on a serious note ...anybody with a computer science background knows at least one female programmer. Matter of fact, she's the first programmer ever -- Lady Lovelace.
The biggest problem with "brains work differently" is that "differently" is too easily interpreted as "better". People simplify this down to a one dimensional score of IQ. No matter how you rig the scores, one group is going to come out looking "better". Then you get things like how former Harvard President Summers' speech was interpreted. And you get denial for purely political reasons, insistence that everyone is equal because otherwise it would be unfair.
Which is the better chess piece, the knight or the bishop? That's not a good question. It presumes that there's a clear advantage to one or the other when actually it's situational. The knight is regarded as better for closed positions, while the bishop is better for open positions. Nonetheless, chess experts couldn't resist concluding that perhaps the bishop is overall slightly better, and have gone as far as giving computers a blanket preference in that direction. Perhaps the bishop is the better piece for the computer's typical style of massive tactical computation paired with ever more sophisticated but insufficient heuristic rules to compensate for zero understanding of the overall strategic considerations of a chess position. (For instance, computers have been known to continue to grind out move after move in positions where the outcome is already known, positions such as king and knight vs king which is a draw no matter what the players do, because unless specifically programmed to do so, computers do not assess positions from a view of what is possible.) What I wonder is if programming is a situation in which men's or women's style of intelligence seems to work better, or is programming a more varied situation than that?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
That kinda scared me a little.....
Apparently Hans Reiser is now posting as AC.You've clearly never used COBOL.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.