Slashdot Mirror
The Ugly Underbelly of Coder Culture
snydeq writes "Today's developers are overwhelmingly young and male, and they're barring the door from a more diverse workforce, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'Software development isn't just failing to attract women. It's actively pushing them away. ... Put all the pieces together, and you're left with an impression of developers that's markedly different from the geeks and nerds they're made out to be in popular culture. On the contrary, developers harbor the same attitudes and engage in the same behaviors you see whenever a subculture is overwhelmingly dominated by young males. They've even coined a clever name for programmers who think and behave like fraternity pledges: brogrammers,' McAllister writes. 'Developers like to think of their culture as a meritocracy, where the very best developers naturally rise to the top. But as long as the industry tends to exclude more than half of the potential workforce, that's nothing but pure arrogance.'"
"Awwww... not this shit again..."
Acting like fratfucks? How is that pushing women out? Wouldn't it be more that women are repulsed by them? Haven't programmers always done that?
10 PRINT "PENIS!!! ";
20 GOTO 10
this is just some extra text to get rid of the lameness filter because it thinks I'm yelling because I used all caps in a BASIC program.
Why do we even bother with the garbage from ___Word. The entire network is uninformed trolls, with sensationalist news devoid of technical merit. It's no wonder the world looks like a frat house to them. They are looking in the mirror.
Of course you'll have young male stupidity in an industry dominated by young males. But I've seen plenty of women code of varying ages and none of them get any less respect if they do it well. When they do it badly they don't get respect but neither do men. I've even worked in a company that comprised half coders male and half female and the women in this company were known as the superior coders. Granted that's not the norm. Calling programmers brogrammers is about as sexist as insulting as it gets. Imagine the outrage if we were to lean on stereotypes and call young female programmers prog-bunnies. More insulting drivel from slashdot. Perhaps you should stick to the asinine slashvertorial crap that's come to dominate.
As a young male developer, I've never, ever seen or even heard of this behavior until this article. Obviously, there are men out there who dislike women and vice-versa. Where I work, we're all too busy working to worry about what race or gender the next dev is. I just want to be/hire the best person for the job.
I've been a Silicon Valley software engineer for 15 years. I see no disparity of gender that's a concern.
I work in a team of 6. We just hired a senior engineer, a woman. Of the 9 people I interviewed, I only recall 2 men in the interview. In our team, there are 2 men, me and another guy in another so called discriminated class - age. He's 53. Our entire dev team is about 50/50 and might even be tipped to the female side.
When we went to universities to screen for interns, no identifiable difference at one I went to at San Jose State.
Now, there is a disparity in American v. Indian (and some Chinese and Russian), but I don't think it's anyone's fault. Those are the people looking for the jobs.
Granted I have seen some companies that put their white male faces from a Portland company right up front, but my personal observations in Silicon Valley are quite different.
Whilst I guess I fit the Young and Male (29 so young ish!), my team of 5 has two great female developers. And my previous manager was a female developer promoted (best boss ever to be fair)
So its not all sexist around here...
There's been a lot over the past couple of months about the ratio of male to female in programming environments, and how a few of the women who are programmers are frustrated and leaving because of sexism in the workplace. I don't disagree that this is an issue that needs to be resolved.
But, the low ration itself isn't so much of the Brogrammer mentality as it is that we're failing to get more women interested and/or actively involved in development, programming, computer science, whatever, at the high school and or college levels (or earlier) in the first place. Solve this problem first, and there's more women entering the workforce as developers. Once that happens, the ratios will balance out, and attitudes and behaviors will change.
women didn't like them was that they were 'nice guys' - they would treat women with more respect than those fratboy/jock types. It turns out, they are more like those fratboy douches than they would like to admit, right down to believing that sexism doesn't exist and women are being too sensitive.
All of which is perfectly fine. But don't pretend that you are somehow more enlightened than other men simply because you obsess over geeky stuff rather than sports.
diversity is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves. hiring someone because they are female, or of a certain race doesn't improve anything.
The problem is that whether you're going to be a good coder is generally decided by the time you're like 18. For those of you keeping score this is _before_ you typically enter the workforce.
I think this is pablum is just a bunch of silly navel gazing. Most of us are too busy doing work to run around acting like 15 year olds.
More common in my personal experience as a developer in a large corporation is that there's a rush to hire women developers of any ability. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find good candidates when _half_ the applicants are pre-screened out due to having a Y chromosome?
To be honest, I have only seen or heard about _great_ female developers online working other places, I've never met one in my job and I've been there a looong time. I've worked with decent and even good ones, but a great one that is the "go to gal"? Never.
I attribute this largely to upbringing. I think we'll see more in the future, but my generation and the next few generations tended not to immerse girls in technology from a young age like they did boys. I think in the current generations this is more common.
LOL
What? The stereotype of the unwashed nerd living on high caffeine drinks and noodle-food who spends all night hacking code?
Or are you talking about the bullshit from InfoWorld where the "nerds" spend all night drinking and disparaging women?
From TFA:
"subtle sexism"? I can see subtle sexism being a problem. And not just in programming. But that doesn't mesh with "brogrammers".
...therefore I am a scumbag and should be ashamed of myself?
The demographic for coders are skewed male, for sure, but for almost as long as I've been a coder, I've been one of the youngest in my company. (Most of my colleagues are beyond 40 and have kids, including the women...) I've also recommended we hire both women I've interviewed over the years, and one of those we lost in a bidding war. There are a few women coders and software architects in our production team, and I've got a great amount of respect for them. For what it's worth, the CEO of my company is a woman, too.
Ah, there it is.
I've read this article twice, and the only supporting facts for the author's conclusions seem to be some stats about declining female enrollment in CS and the personal tale of one woman who had a slightly shitty experience at one place she worked.
WTF.. I could provide a lot more evidence to support a flat earth theory.
I don't doubt that there are places where women have a tougher time than males in the IT dept, but the conclusions this author is making seem shaky at best (not to mention flying in the face of everything I've seen in my own somewhat lengthy career in the field.. admittedly myopic but just a valid and apparently more diverse than the evidence used by the author).
-Lod
not really any statistics in this article to back the authors point. the one statistic about university enrollment for comp science being up 10% while enrollment of women in CS is "down" (with no figure given) says more that women are less interested in the field than males, than it does imply that the industry is dominated by males who are "actively pushing females away". university is not exactly the same as industry - its a much more level playing field in terms of entry, so if less women are going into computer science in school, it's because less women are making the choice to, not that they are being shoved out.
in my personal experience, most male coders gladly welcome the presence of females. perhaps some of the sterotypical socially awkward, insecure nerd types are intimidated by females, but i think most guys are thrilled when there is a woman to counter all the testosterone. i've worked in industry and in research with female programmers and i've never seen them really treated differently than their male counterparts.
i know gender bias exists in the workforce in general, but i've not experienced it being noticibly greater in the comp sci field. i think this article lacks any foundation to skew it with such a slant.
the fact is, women and men in general aren't the same. blame it on hormones, society, whatever.. women just typically don't seem interested in being coders.
as for sexist jokes, whether subtle or overt, that happens in every field. women do it too. coders in general are commonly witty and sarcastic, and in my experience men programmers make as many or more vulgar and offensive jabs at each other as they do toward women.
I do not know why, but the truth of the matter is that women *seem* to be less likely to have an interest in software development. Woman are just as smart, just as able, but software development is not something that you can do very well unless you have some sort of inherent interest. Perhaps the tendency to have such an inherent interest is simply one of the things that is different between men and women.
When I started college maybe 10% of the class in the first introductory computer science class was female. That is long before any "brogrammer" effect can get started. As a matter of fact I don't remember the women in the computer science program being treated poorly. The "brogrammer" frat-house-like environment suggested was not evident at the two somewhat well known state universities that I attended for undergraduate and graduate computer science.
I could write a few sentences to refute it, but that would just add to the bullshittyness of it. I'm not sure if i spelled bullshittyness right.
In the 10 years I've been with my company I've never heard of a female developer applying for a programming job. It's hardly fair to say they are being pushed away if they're not applying in the first place.
I agree that there is little to no overt exclusion of any race or gender. Yet, I've observed young male groups of developers use language that is not polite in mixed company. Males and females are inherently different, and technology is a boys club. The women I've seen in the field are generally more tolerant of the normal behavior of a pack of young males. I think the solution is age and maturity, and if you want a diverse workforce, it has to be age diverse as well. Regardless of how silly the article is (probably written by academics that have never seen the real world), there is a lack of black, Hispanic and female representation in IT in general. The typical classroom/workplace where engineers and IT workers are groomed is male white/Asian. You have to question why black and Hispanic males and females of all genders avoid the technology field? Maybe they haven't embraced the Geek culture, because it isn't the companies. As a consultant, I've walked through hundreds of companies, large and small, and seen highly diverse workforces, until I get to the IT department.
Back in the day of home-computers (8bit/16bit, 1980s&'90s), computers were very much marketed to a boy/male demographic. Almost all games made for these computers were pretty "guy oriented". So while the boys were learning some BASIC programming and blasting away at jump-and-run & action games all day, the girls were playing with dolls, reading romantic YA books and teen magazines, and swooning over rock singers, or doing whatever it is that girls aged 5 - 16 do growing up. It is only in the last 10 - 15 years or so, with everyone, regardless of gender, starting to use things like email & IM & FaceBook & the internet, that women have started to become regular computer users. Is it really so surprising, given that a lot of women discovered the joys of computing only in the 2000s, while guys were using/playing computers massively back in the 80s and 90s, that there are more male coders and IT specialists than women coders and IT specialists today? The computers and software apps of the 1980s & 1990s were very much "guy oriented". Anyone who's over '30 and comes from that home-computing background is more likely to be male than female.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I've had enough of your sensationalist BS stories /.
Bookmark deleted, and goodbye.
You expect bro's who can't get dates to be nice to women??? Which came first is another question.
As someone who has worked in the field for over 20 years I have never noticed this either. Now maybe it is always because I have been "just a developer". As a matter of fact I would much rather work with female programmers since us nerds kind of live somewhat solitary lives at times. Who exactly is supposedly pushing women out? We have a ton of women working here also. We have more men but I think that is more a factor of who is available for jobs than any discrimination.
How can they not be attracted by this?
http://youtu.be/8To-6VIJZRE
http://youtu.be/wvsboPUjrGc
I've never seen this in any of the teams I worked in. Hell, we welcome women. If I told the team we were hiring a woman, they'd be like "f*ck yea! is she hot?? bring it
!" And I'd be all like, "dudes, you can't bang a coworker, man!" But then I'd be like thinking, "actually she's hot braah I'm all over that yo." But other programmers might make the move first, so I be like, "yo why you be playin?".
And then we'd drag race to settle it. In my mind.
Actually, we all sit in our respective corners and rarely talk.
Stats? Apparently those are not available to the folks at "Infoworld", just selected anecdotal stories from activist and the like-minded.
It seems Neil McAllister and his editors missed the all the news stories from the past few years where women outnumber men in US colleges and recently in earning degrees. Since that's where the majority of programmers come from, or at least get their degrees to qualify for the best jobs. We may soon be talking about how all these young male programmers work for better paid and educated women.
Instead of creating a faux crisis to support the stereo type of a sexist workplace, maybe InfoWorld writers should look elsewhere in their quest for relevance. Okay Bro?
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-20057608.html
Brogrammers. . . are you serious? who the hell calls themselves or anyone a brogrammer? I have never herd this and have been a professional programmer for over 10 years. I don't see any of the behavior talked about in the article.
I'm a male, and I've been involved with programming and software development in one way or another for over 30 years now. My wife has been involved with software product management for over 25 years. Together, we've been to probably 80 to 90 programming language or software dev conferences together, in addition to working with thousands upon thousands of developers, programmers, designers, architects, IT staffers, managers, and executives of all types.
This isn't a problem with the majority of communities. It's actually quite isolated. We've been to Fortran and Java conferences, for example, where everybody is extremely professional, friendly, and tolerant. Those conferences, even 30 years ago when I first attended a Fortran one back in my college days, were quite diverse in terms of gender. There were and are many female scientists and mathematicians who are experts at Fortran, for example.
This is almost solely an issue with the communities related to web development. We're basically talking about the Ruby, JavaScript and NoSQL movements. These communities are among the worst there are. Ignorance, both of social norms and technology, are serious factors in why this is the case. When ignorance is embraced as a core value of a community, the results are never good. Ruby is basically Perl, but 20 years late and with a much inferior foundation. JavaScript is, well, horrible in every way. NoSQL is widely taken to be a joke by professionals, who can easily achieve the same scalability using relational databases, without giving up their many useful and even necessary features.
These failed communities do generate a lot of hype, and that's probably why people think this is a much bigger problem than it really is. As long as they steer away from these rotten communities that are centered around being oblivious to reality, then females involved with the software development field in some way can easily have successful and productive careers, and expected to be treated as equals by their fellow professional male and female colleagues.
I'm an old Commodore 64 guy, a coder that has been around since the ZX80 jupiter ace days, yes...I've been around and been into every computer and every language you can think of - never mind that...it's besides the point I am about to make... ...Nowadays I work as a 3D artist at a smaller ad-company, we live in a rather huge building containing various companies, some working with programming...that of course work with us...since we're like a big family in this house we rent...if you like.
The company next door has a woman employed, she is rather new into the business, but she really kicks ass. When it came to programming, I could literally ask her anything, she was modest, not implying that she actually knows anything, but she kicked ass every time...every time she found the answer to any of the programming issues that we had at hand, any problems we had...she solved. In other words...Women can KICK ASS when it comes to coding, and trust me...I am as old SKOOL as it comes, I've been coding everything from C64s to microcontrollers at any bit..but she?...She understood everything...and fixed it all...you know what that means? This is a woman! She kicks ass at coding...she is a natural...and I don't believe for a second that women can't kick it at this stuff, it's just a matter of attention, women can do this stuff as well as we can. Seriously...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
At work, we're all probably too busy with work to bother with this shit, but I remember in college, whenever there were a bunch of us in the computer lab working together on something (more specifically the Linux lab that was separated off from the regular computers), guys would be looking out into the window to the regular computer lab, and make some of the most misogynistic comments I've ever heard, and talk about how "nasty that bitch is" or what a slut this other one is, or how they'd tap that one, and they even did this when there were women in there with us (who didn't say anything). I didn't really know what to say, but just sat there in shock.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
While I'm not exactly surprised, as the article states much of the obvious, I wonder.
Is this true for FOSS projects? Where you jump on Github and contribute a patch? Where nobody will even know that you're a woman or elderly, or whatever, for at least the first few years?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Failing to attract women, are we, eh?
If women want to program, they can and do. Many excellent programmers work solo and have very little contact with other programmers.. For many, there is no coder brotherhood... If a woman wants a job as a programmer, all she needs to do is have a demonstrable talent for coding and the ability to stand with her peers. If they want to go solo, they can, as nobody knows or cares about the gender of the coder when buying software. If they want to work in a group of other programmers, they can do that too.. If a candidate has the skills, they get the job.. but what I do see is women with much less desire to spend the huge number hours required to be an excellent programmer. Which is not a slight against women, since by definition it means becoming a hermit in front of a keyboard for countless hours..
If there are lots of female programmers that aren't getting any jobs, isn't that a great profit opportunity to anyone who are willing to hire them? You get programmers of supposedly equal skill as others for a lower price.
I really wish everyone would get off of the whole equal outcome bandwagon and care about equal opportunity. If a woman applies to a job and gets denied because she is a woman, I care about that. If a woman applies to a comp sci school and should get in based on merits but doesn't because she is a woman, I care. If there are less women than men (or vise versa) in any field I don't care. I don't care about ratios of men, women, blacks, whites, gays, lesbians, liberals, conservatives, or any other group. I care about competent people getting jobs they deserve.
http://arstechnica.com/staff/forcequit/2012/04/sandwich-makers-finally-described-as-female-under-facebooks-leet-speak-option.ars
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
But as long as the industry tends to exclude more than half of the potential workforce, that's nothing but pure arrogance.
Sorry, potential developer workforce is not split 50-50 between the sexes. I haven't seen anything that would point to that, not in the CS/SE departments, not in the engineering departments, not in the figures available from various departments of labor in N.A. and Europe, etc. Who the heck came up with the myth of half of developer job entrants are women I don't know, but they must be out of their fucking mind.
I work for a very small business. The boss once told me, more or less, that he avoids female employees because his wife doesn't want him to be around them.
Posting as AC for obvious reasons.
I've been a software developer, I've been a hiring manager, I've been a co-founder of a startup, and worked in this industry for decades. Every time I've had an open job req, I see maybe one female applicant out of 200 resumes. 90% of success is showing up.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I was in the Army for seven years. Women get raped by the men they're working with. I think that's a bit different than a gender imbalance in the civilian programming field.
And whether the gender imbalance is due to overt sexism ("brogrammers") or something else.
The problem is they only hire "senior level" developers.
And basically ALL those hiring have adopted this attitude. (Also -most will not even interview you once you are >45 years old.
Therefore there are no (or exceedingly few) entry-level jobs for programmers, young or old.
Women tend to be much smarter than men in choosing and planning their careers.
So women with tech/science/math aptitude become doctors, patent (or other) lawyers, math and science teachers (easily earn 100K+ after a few years in my area), etc.
I would NEVER purse CS/SD/Programming again if I was starting out. It's a dead-end career, unless you are a stone-cold genius and/or married to your career.
See Greenspun for more info/perspective on this.
In my experience, the only people showing any negative bias at all toward women programmers were women managers or the male programmers they beat out of a position. My Kung Fu has always been superior, so I've never felt threatened.
...and I did not see what you describe. Niether did my female partner.
There were female presenters; they weren't treated any differently than the males.
Why isn't there a big media-driven push to get more women driving trucks for the cleansing department? Isn't this sexism too?
Go to the fscking hell with your Underwater Basket Waving Social Science Crap "degree".
That looks more like an overbelly.
self-haters... you're all pathetic
As an older coder, I tried to finish my bachelor's several years ago, until I flashed on the fact that I would be competing with a bunch of 20-somethings for the available positions. An older adult, even a male, has a snowball's chance of getting a cutting-edge IT job in the current atmosphere.
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
Already angry enough for today.
Ruby is *not* basically Perl, I've used both for quite a while now. Ruby's concepts are much easier to comprehend and use in everyday coding. Classes are not some weird afterthought that feels like it's falling apart every second now, they are first class members. The Perl interpreter is way quicker, which is nice, and Perl can do just about everything, but there's sooo much unnecessary syntactic explicitness compared to Ruby. Don't get me wrong, I like both, but Ruby is a very welcome change and brushing it off as just another Perl doesn't do it justice at all. Most of its fame is due to Ruby on Rails, though, and you see how well Ruby is done by all the attempts to copy Rails' API to languages like PHP. It just doesn't work, they are not flexible enough and everything just becomes more cumbersome, though you definitely have a better shot with the features added in PHP 5.3 and 5.4.
Repeating the same old cliche about JavaScript also shows more ignorance on your part than anything else. Yeah, I've been there, been a JavaScript basher myself, but that's a) due to not understanding its most fundamental features (anonymous functions and closures) and b) due to the horrors of cross-browser development (start using Node.js und you know how much of the pain is simply not due to the language itself). Yes, JavaScript has some fundamental issues, but is also so powerful that you can fix many of them yourself (take that, Java). And for the rest, just use CoffeeScript, which compiles to JavaScript but feels more like Ruby, but starts so much quicker than the standard Ruby interpreter even though it has to translate the code first.
And NoSQL *does* offer some advantages for some cases, and of course some disadvantages. There's no clear winner here, it depends on your data structures, how often they change and how you want to query them.
So. I fully reject the technological aspect of your comment. I'm not well connected to the community, so I have no idea what the gender issues there are (other than hearing about some issues at a Rails conference due to sexual imagery in a presentation). But since I don't see the ignorance that is the basis for your argument, I don't feel comfortable trusting your conclusion.
These languages are not popular because there are obviously better alternatives, they are popular because they better match the mental concepts of many programmers and answer a whole lot of the "why the fuck...?" questions I had about your beloved classics. They make me rejoice. "Finally!"
There is an inherent assumption in the article and in most of the posts here in response: a disparity in the number of male and female coders is bad. To which I reply, "Why?" The answer, as I see it, is to accommodate radical feminist ideology.
The desire to see absolute parity between men and women in every field is a bedrock tenet of feminist ideology and is born of the assertion by professional feminists that there is no inherent difference between men and women. In the feminist worldview, every difference which is observed is a result of differences in the way men and women are raised or a result of differences in the way that society treats men and women. Since professional feminists will never admit that there might be inherent differences between the sexes, they insist that society is unfair and unjust and must be radically changed in order to accommodate feminist beliefs. And since society won't willingly change itself, feminists demand that the cudgel of government be used to make society change. Generally this means that companies must be legally vulnerable to lawsuits claiming "discrimination" and men must be made to feel guilty and walk on eggshells for fear of damaging the sensibilities of their female co-workers.
Seriously, if some women don't like the subculture in a particular field, instead of complaining and demanding legal remedies, why don't those women start their own software companies, use their powers of personal persuasion to change the subculture from within or simply work in another field? Why must everything be turned into a political issue? All that does is generate resentment and move the industry away from being a meritocracy. Why must society be changed to accommodate a small number of malcontents or, in the case of professional feminists, to accommodate a small number of political freaks with very little support from the general population?
I would prefer to just let people pursue their own interests with their own talents and ambitions. All the efforts to try to force a particular vision of how society "ought to be" just creates problems. If the natural ratio of male/female coders happens to be 3/1, 10/1, or 1000/1, then who cares? Why does it matter? Living in a free society means accepting the choices of others even if you may not approve.
...but I play one on the intertubes.
I am really shocked that this is something someone cared enough to write about. I know plenty of female coders (vagrammers?) and a lot of them far surpass the younger male programmers. Sometimes, while observing them in their natural habitat, I've even seen mate with one another. Night vision has done wonders for observing the local wildlife in it's most comfortable setting.
Sounds like another complaint about there being too many white males in computing without being so overtly racist/sexist about it. What I want to know is why this is such a bad thing? It's not like women or minorities are being discriminated against on anything but merit. There are plenty of Asian/Indian developers. What more do you want?
And why should the coding culture be neutered for the sake of diversity? Why should the minority dictate the emergent culture? This is just more anti-white diversity-sanitizing nonsense. You're in a white male dominated field. Computing has always appealed to white males in general. Perhaps it's biological, perhaps it's cultural, but there is no reason to suggest that this is a problem. Adapt, become part of the culture, and guide it. Nobody should be expected to adapt to you just because your the one black, Islamic, homosexual, mentally/physically handicapped, transgendered computer scientist. If you are uncomfortable about being surrounded by white males then I suggest you pick a different career that caters to your white-male phobia.
of the do gooders trying to force women into roles they don't want. And also for making excuses and wild rationalizations about areas they are not as successful in. More women than men go to college now, do you really think they couldn't be coders if they want to?
The article is describing a problem very specific to our culture. Indian and Chinese STEM fields do not seem to have a problem attracting females. So if we are having a problem, then that is an indictment on our culture in general, not on the field.... Besides, in my team, I'm the only guy (I work with three ladies, one CS major and two EE majors.) Not that I've not worked in places that are completely man-poplated, but c'mon to infer the whole field is a bros-in-arms, that's just speculation for speculation's sake. YMMV
First off, who thinks that having an Asian-sounding name would cause any problems in a programming interview? Isn't the OPPOSITE the case? Look at the computer science classes. There are a lot of Asians in them. And they're getting good grades.
Those "findings" are generalized and do not seem to apply to this discussion ("brogrammers" and sexism).
So you thought that a woman who spoke THREE languages was "less educated" because she spoke your language with a heavy accent? Why was that?
I just recently encountered this when developing a minecraft plugin.... One of the developers on my team asked to make a youtube video on how to use the plugin. And, in the description of the video he said "i decided to make a video for you guys out there. i'd say girls but come on what girl runs a minecraft server. if anyone knows of one let me know, but i don't think they exist"..... He wanted me to put his video up as a tutorial for the plugin. But, I refused until he removed that comment.
I'm a guy and a programmer btw, but I have respect for everyone regardless of their race or gender. It's called common decency. And, I refuse to be associated with this sort of stuff.
Nobody seems to really care that much about the lack of females in the plumbing profession, contracting, bricklaying, landscaping, etc... only the lack of females in high profile fields. Where are the campaigns to recruit more women into plumbing? I really don't care whether my coworkers are male or female, but my wife certainly prefers that I only work with males. She gets jealous and resentful when I work with a good female programmer.
"NoSQL is widely taken to be a joke by professionals, who can easily achieve the same scalability using relational databases, without giving up their many useful and even necessary features."
What an astonishingly ignorant statement. Clearly, companies like Google and Facebook must lack "professionalism" given their investment and success with systems like BigTable, Cassandra, HBase, etc. I'm sure you could teach them a thing or two.
The issue you'll have with the asian candidates once you've been a hiring manager and had to deal with enough of them is that a painfully high percentage cannot effectively communicate in English. (And in spite of what you might think, this is typically a functional prerequisite for most coding jobs: you must be able to tell them what you want done, and the most commonly agreed upon language for that communication in the US is English). For whatever reason, the percentage of white candidates who can at least speak passable English seems to be much higher. I guess while US schools are a failure in general, those who make it out unscathed enough to go to college and get a CS degree are at least building some basic skills.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You forgot to mention that they're a monoculture of EUROPEAN AMERICAN males!
We'd better send in a troop of racially diverse amazon women to occupy those cubicles and disrupt the brogrammer terrorist networks so that the first nerdy female computer science major that gets a cubicle isn't the office's first sexual her-ass-ment lawsuit! Die, you insensitive white men! DIE!!!!!
This is just sensationalistic nonsense! There are plenty of women coders at the company I work for, and I've worked with a lot at other companies. They aren't treated any different than the men. Hell, many of them can code circles around their male peers.
From what I have seen, the majority of female programmers tend to be Indian (as a percentage of population). I would venture to guess that the second largest female group are Chinese.
I bet that the majority of smart women end up going into health sciences. If she is smart enough, I would think she would favor to become a doctor, knowing full well that the career outlook is far more lucrative and the positions far more stable. Even amongst programmers and engineers, there is a mid career migration towards the health sciences fields (from nursing to massage therapist or home health aide). I have not heard of anyone making a mid career change to become a programmer.
I don't get this - I would think most guys would love to see more women coming into software development. I went to an all-male grammar school for my secondary school education, and I can assure you I don't really want to go into an all-male workplace.
As far as I can tell, it's not men keeping women out of programming, it's that they don't want to do it. The only time I've ever seen anyone try to disuade a girl from programming, it's been other girls calling it geeky.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
There are posts by men saying that they don't have a problem in their work place, or the women that they know don't have a problem. I expect that this is accurate, for the most part. However, there is self censorship in play. If there is a problem, there would be a tendency for it to be under-reported. If there is a hostile culture, one way to fit in is to deny that the problem exists. Pushing back is a sure fire way to be labeled a "bitch" or worse.
I know women who left the field because they got fed up with the macho culture. They could do it and be successful, but they didn't want to. They were always having to prove themselves, and they just got tired of the bullshit.
If you go back and read the denials that make up most of the comments, you will see a direct example of the problem that does exist. The comments exhibit lots of hostile language. The default position is that there is no problem, and anyone who says otherwise is a whiner and/or a self serving idiot.
Slashdot itself is an example of current software culture, and it exhibits a lot of hostility. When this post gets modded down to -11 and/or I get a lot of comments that attack me, it will prove my point.
Why is Snark Required?
"But as long as the industry tends to exclude more than half of the potential workforce,"
Men are expendable, why don't we keep it that way, and waste them on irrelevant stuff.
Je me souviens.
the only workplace that actually accepts us for who we are.
I can't say how many women actually send in resumes, because HR filters resumes. However I doubt there's any real bias going on in that because:
1) HR is heavily staffed with women.
2) The HR people know little to nothing about the job, they just filter based off of a list of requirements (things like "must have experience with Microsoft Windows" and so on).
3) They deal with jobs of all types, technical, clerical, administrative, teaching, custodial, maintenance, etc, etc.
4) I work at a university. Diversity is big. We have a diversity director. They push it perhaps more than they should.
Last time we hired we had 5 resumes make it past screening (meaning 5 people were able to articulate that they had the required experience on their resume, people get filtered because they don't do that properly, just how it goes in a large institution). None were women. The time before, for the same job, no women. The time before that, one woman, who got hired. She did well too, but her husband took a job elsewhere so she left.
We can't hire the people that don't apply or make it through the process. If there are legions of excluded women out there then to them I say: Read the job description carefully, and make sure your resume covers those points, using the terms we use. It is an HR drone sorting through them, they are matching buzzwords. We usually have very few resumes make it through and always interview at least the top 3 so you've got a real good shot at an interview if you get your resume through the process.
Obviously I don't speak for all IT departments in terms of hiring practices, but I bet we are pretty accurate in terms of applicants. When no women apply, no women get hired.
Sure, there are more men than woman in IT. But this article make it seem like men are actively working together to keep woman out. I have never seen anything like that.
I figure that woman stay out of IT because woman are smarter than men, at least in terms of common sense.
Maybe it has something to do with woman doing more to take care of the children, so the long, unpaid, hours of many IT jobs don't appeal to woman?
Maybe woman tend to be more social, and don't care for work that often lacks social interaction?
Maybe it's a self perpetuating problem where woman don't want to be a field where there are hardly any woman?
Maybe it's because IT is being taken over by visa workers who are mostly men?
Maybe it's because other fields, like health care, are far more stable, and professional?
No reason to jump to the conclusion that men are actively conspiring against women.
I have only seen sexism one place in 15 years as a developer; and that was when I was contracting for the Army. And mostly retired in-fun-try at that.
And guess what, they didn't like geeks of either gender. Only being a type A personality and an asshole commanded any respect.
On the other hand, they didn't discriminate against just women geeks, they just discriminated against pretty anybody was wasn't an experienced marcher and ex-ranger's got extra respect; no matter how dumb they were.
We have a bunch of them and I am currently on their shit project, having avoided it for the last five years. Its got to the point where they are being made to take people who refuse to play poker and golf with them but the leadership of the project is still a boys club.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
As a Black woman who has been a programmer for over 17 years, I believe I can add a new perspective to this discussion. After being laid off during the dotcom bust, I almost completely gave up my career. It's not that I minded working with my predominantly all male, white and Asian colleagues, it's that they minded working with me. Being unwelcome to participate in the after work drinking sessions and unwilling to participate in bawdy banter is just one factor of a multifaceted, career impairing complex. I could care less about social acceptance that is not forthcoming. Of real consequence is the egregious disparity in pay for equal or superior experience and skill set, denial of professional growth opportunities and malicious attempts and undermining work and productivity. Lack of skilled non white, non male programmers is non sequitur and self aggrandizing.
As a male, salaried coder, I have had a lot of anger during the times I have had to pick up slack for a coworker who went on maternity leave. I have worked with a lot of female coders, no matter what the trend is. No other real drama to speak of, outside of the times they are sleeping with the married manager... but the maternity-leave-thing really ticks me off.
Do you think that after 37 years in the US Army, I didn't hear, 'You won't let me do it because I am a girl or female)" argument? Say OK, do it and then have have to listen to them complain about getting sand in their vagina!
Fair point, but I have to say that hearing guys complain about the chafing their wedding tackle is getting after a week in the desert wears a little thin after a while.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Is that RMS?
Koalas. They're telepathic. Plus, they control the weather. -Margaret
That's what she said.
And want job security, respect, and lasting careers.
As I said, see Greenspun, and others. If my view is warped, I am in good company.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
I have plenty of friends who are older programmers who have, out of necessity, left the industry, or become management. Others travel the country looking for another 3 or 6 month gig. What a great life at age 55+!
(Yes, I am sure you think that I and all my friends are below average, or outright lousy programmers. Not surprised - that is the default position of everyone I have ever dealt with in a hiring situation, even those I could code rings around, or those asking questions full of contradictory and incorrect assumptions, poor practices, etc.)
If I wanted to be a manager, I would have pursued that career. What I am saying is that if you want a career using math/science - CS/SD/Programming is one of the last ones to choose.
Programming for a living is just not worth it. It is already hard enough - without all the political and manager bullshit you have to put up with.
Those who honestly look at the overall situation - including use of H1-B indentured servants, offshoring(both reasonable and ridiculous), extensive unpaid overtime expectations, clueless management, agressive culture and backstabbing, ridiculous hiring requirements and practices, etc., etc., etc. understand that it is the coding/SD culture itself that is warped.
Coder culture has an extensive ugly underbelly, and the hostility and condescension in your post only underline the point of my post, and the story itself.
ironic captcha: degrade
There are crude, obnoxious shops in every industry. From what I've heard, telecom is much worse than programming in this respect. I am a female programmer, and my workplace has a reasonable mix of people (yes, it's slanted toward male and young -- but that is the biology that's best at visual thinking, working too many hours, and dealing with silly deadlines). If you make sure there are policies that reduce the on-call load and overall unpredictability of work hours, you'll get women and married guys. So you have code reviews; have a real process for moving code out the door; have a process for discovering process failures and fixing them; try to split work into chunks that aren't two full-time jobs per person, etc. And look at that! You've reduced your turnover (even in the young guys), reduced software failures, and increased creativity (partly because your people are awake, partly because of the variety of people). Maybe you're spending more, but it's probably actually worth it for the reduction in risk.
You do some culture-fit checking in the interviews. You don't hire the ones who come close to committing HR violations in the interviews. You have women and less-young men around, and this subtly reminds the young guys to not get bad habits (c'mon, they're reasonably bright, they're trainable, they grew up in an enlightened world, they _do_ know better).
It is difficult to understand how the male dominated programming culture is caused by the programmers when they aren't the ones making hiring decisions. In addition, one would have to look at the admissions department at universities to figure out why they are supposedly discriminating against female students, if most of the IT students are male.
If those two decision making groups turn out not to be the cause, then something else is probably at work at instead of searching for the real cause, it is easier just to blame the males. Put a different way, is the male dominated subculture mentioned in the article a cause or an effect of something bigger going on?
Yes, I've been doing this for 35 years. /sometimes/ women are bullied by nerds which encourages them to take a less head-down-programmer role. They /may/ also be a lot better at all the things that go round programming anyway.
Real programming, and applying it and dealing with changing requirements etc. is a full-body(including mind) exercise. Once you recognise that boys are not girls are nor droids then you can move on. I could write a book on the subject, but for now let's say that
For me the biggest problem hasn't been with other coders. I do front end dev under a bullshit title. My boss is a male graphic designer. We work for a rather feminist organization. nobody understands what we do and there is a perception that he is running things and I have to come to him when there is a problem even though it tends to be the other way around. My brogrammers have stood up for me but alas they don't set the salaries so I continue to make about 60% what they do.
If you or any of your friends who are having trouble finding work are really as good as you say, I have a job for you. Guaranteed interview regardless of age, provided you meet the technical bar.
The fact that you read condescension and hostility in my earlier post is confusing me, though. I was only trying to give you an honest opinion based on my experience interviewing candidates over the past 4 years. There are a lot of mediocre coders in the field regardless of age, and our company probably turns away a higher percentage of young candidates than old, purely for competency reasons (admittedly an educated guess based on personal experience, not a hard number).
I'm not saying some places don't have a bad culture. I worked at Microsoft for several years, and would never advise anyone to work there exactly for the politics and culture reasons you outline. But that's not the entire industry.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
That is the most idiotic thing I've heard. Is this CIA and Ms. Magazine again? LMFAO Get a life you jerks.
Take that 'have only seen or heard about great female developers'.
Remember Stereotypes tend to be self fulfiling.
Just as in any other profession or trade.
If everyone will only hire the top 1%, and no one will train/mentor anyone, why do you think it is so hard to find good coders, or encourage others to join the so-called "profession"?
This is the kind of hostility/arrogance I am talking about - this is why companies keep moaning about the dearth of talent (while doing nothing to attract more talent, like increasing pay levels, or having defined, supportive career paths.)
This is why I try to discourage anyone from going into this field - it is pure poison, you are on your own and only likely to find grief.
You reap what you sow.
I happen to be married with a Java enterprise developer - and she really hates women.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
If everyone will only hire the top 1%, and no one will train/mentor anyone, why do you think it is so hard to find good coders, or encourage others to join the so-called "profession"?
As matter of fact, we don't want the top 1%. Those are geniuses, but they are also unmanageable loose cannons who do whatever they damn please and you can't stop them short of firing them.
We want reasonable people - those who we can work with. This excludes the topmost strata (we don't need a LKML-style flamefest every day) and the bottom strata (we don't need drooling idiots who never saw a computer in their lives.)
We don't even need people with encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms. Truth is that most coding jobs don't require any algorithms at all, and maybe a few percent need a standard Sort() method. The coder doesn't even need to know what algorithm is used there, as long as it works. There are very few pieces of software that require complex algorithms or specific sort methods. Most of labor these days goes into the I/O, into the data structures, into networking protocols, into interaction with external data stores.
All you need to get hired is to be able to code GUIs (XAML and its C# equivalent methods,) and protocols, and worker threads, and data binding (many GUI objects insist on that,) and other *typical* WPF fare. (I'm leaving Java aside, since we aren't very interested in Java anyway.) I don't think this is too much to ask - you'd be unable to do your job otherwise. You don't even need to memorize most of it; but you need to know that certain stuff exists and where to learn the details. This practically means that you have to have at least one WPF application under your belt, and that application better use ListView and Canvas and such, not just be a single button to exit. Lots of C# coding is cut and paste because not everything in WPF is entirely logical, you must know of coding patterns and be able to quickly access them. Looking for a delegate syntax every time you need one is not helpful. Having a skeleton code in a scratchpad is.
... but rather, the lack of women
Blaming the men, no matter for what reasons, just doesn't cut it
When the female kind do not want to learn programming, - and I am saying this based on pure simple fact that over 90% of comp students are male - how are you going to blame the male for "not allowing them from entering" ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Giant elephant in the room is the H-1B visa, and out of control guest worker infestation of US tech workforces. Most H-1B's are Indian nationals who are hired only because they are cheap. Hiring rates out of some of the top US schools, such as Cornell and UC Berkeley, of US best and brightest graduates, are less than 40%. Even class valedictorians often find it takes years to find a job after graduation. Most tech workforces are devoid of domestic tech hires made after the 2001 crash.
The industry was making great strides in the 1990s to become more representative, and to employ greater numbers of black people, women, and other individuals. Engineers were provided with proper assistants and secretarial help, typically intelligent young women. H-1B set this back, not only ruining job prospects for American engineers (including sidelining some of the top quality talent because firms don't want to ante up the premium bucks), but also setting back the prospect of representative workplaces.
And don't even get me started on how intimidated a typical WASP American female will feel in a typical Silicon Valley or NYC curry den of software development, where Indian H-1B guest workers definitely do not treat women as their equals. Also, benefits, often of significant value to women, such as work-life balance, maternity, flex time, etc., have been slashed dramatically as the result of the H-1B invasion and a job market that is unilaterally unbalanced in favour of employers.
"This is almost solely an issue with the communities related to web development. We're basically talking about the Ruby, JavaScript and NoSQL movements. These communities are among the worst there are. Ignorance, both of social norms and technology, are serious factors in why this is the case", AC
I don't program and don't have a wife who's involved in software production, so I cannot speak from authority, but I can't believe there is a causal relationship between a programming language and male sexism, come on, you cannot be serious, this is a very clever and well written troll - right.
--
Dynamic Link Library (DLL): this is the method Microsoft programmers employ to enable computers to exchange data. (page 286)
from: "WORM" `the first digital war' by Mark Bowden
AccountKiller
Women just don't like coding, programming, the physical sciences, electrical engineering, and the like. Those fields are as repulsive to them as fashion designing, interior decorating, and Broadway musicals are to most straight White men. Sure a few will like it but most won't. Meanwhile, fully half of admissions to US Medical Schools are women. Women even form a majority in many bioscience fields, including molecular biology, and so on. Gee, women like a whole lot, bioscience. Who would have thunk it.
Newsflash, men and women are different. They like different things. This is just more tedious anti-White guy stuff. Most rap will be created by Black guys, Eminem notwithstanding. Most fashion will be created by gay guys and women. Most bioscience by women, and most computer technology by White men. No one gets upset because the NBA is 80% Black men, or the NFL 70% Black men. Nobody runs around thinking, "boy we better get more White guys on the field." That's just the way it is. Different groups of people are more interested, and better at, different things.
Different is just different. Not a master race. Jeez.
To be fair, it isn't that we push women away (who doesn't want a pair of tits on legs to stare at during the breaks?), it's that women kind of suck at programming. I know that's generalizing, there are some okay female programmers out there (probably - I've never met any myself), but I really only want people with ability (demonstrated or potential) in my teams.
I don't know if it's a hormonal thing that leads to different brain chemistry between men and women, but women as a whole just aren't as strong intellectually as men are (in the same way they aren't as strong physically). I'm certain that all the readers who have fallen prey to the mind-fail that is political correctness will take offence at what I'm saying, but I am simply speaking the truth - a truth we all know.
Women don't stay out of programming because they don't enjoy it; they stay out of it because they're simply incapable of doing it well.
It's OK that the new generation of male programmers are gay. We are enlightened now, and the females will start their own 'hogrammers' society any day now. Really, the bros- and hos- can -gramming co-exist!
(every English teacher I ever had is now currently loading up a sniper rifle for that lame ass joke)
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I took a Python class not too long ago. As a woman, I must say it was pretty bad. Many of the male students were filled with presumption about what I could and could not understand. The default assumption was that I needed help. When my code worked, they were 100% surprised. Every time. There was no merit-based reason for this treatment. My work was solid. It was as if the students were mimicking what they thought programmers did. I'm sure these guys would believe themselves to be enlightened beings who were beyond any kind of gender bias, much like many of the comments I see here. You have to look for your default attitudes. I got an A in the class but am pretty reluctant to pursue a career around scripting (although knowing some Python never hurts). It's a quality of life thing. I've also worked doing non-code computer stuff at several web development companies in the past. The dev guys were kind of a mixed bag in terms of attitudes towards women. Some were great, modest, friendly people. About half were tolerable but occasionally made creepy remarks to me. A few were unbelievably arrogant and regarded me (and anyone else who didn't code) as subhuman. The reasons many women are turned off by programming run deeper than merit. It's very much a cultural issue that begins with the way women and men get educated.
First, women are socialized from an early age that engineering, tinkering, technical things are not girly and to avoid them.
Second, I saw more than one woman get tired of the creepy stalkers, the sperglords, and awkward anti-social guys in the CS classes and decide to switch majors. Who knows if they would have been good developers but it can be hard to concentrate on coding when you get hit on constantly by creepazoids.
Lastly I agree with some people's comments... The discrimination isn't happening at the hiring level and in many cases isn't even overt. Women are just encouraged to go away and leave the programming to the boys and then we act surprised when they do just that.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
In my opinion TFA is a sensational and damaging piece of crap. The professionals who make up the vast bulk of us are owed an apology.
In 30 years, I've had the opportunity to interview 3 women. I recommended hiring 2 of the three. All three got hired. Circumstances beyond my control (facility closure) resulted in two of them finding other jobs. The loss to our team was considerable. They are missed. The other woman is still with us and I'm not yet clear whether this is a GoodThing, ... or not. I've also interviewed a number of men. Not all got hired, not all that did were worth the trouble. I did once interview a 'tool' that I might describe as a brogrammer. He did not get hired.
I am aware of the studies which show subtle, cultural, discrimination. Can I say with authority that I haven't a bit of this in me? No. I'd be foolish to make that claim. All I can say is that I do my best, as does the rest of my team.
Twice, I've been involved with firing someone (both men, if that matters). Both need to be fired.
Yes I have seen discriminatory behavior during the hiring process. Mostly it is subtle and gets squashed pretty quickly. Once, I was a spectator to a backchannel communication between two companies in the same industry. The party in question was described as a "raving psychopath"
While I know absolutely that discrimination exists. I have yet to see anything like what was described in TFA. Maybe I've just been lucky. Maybe I'm just careful about who I work for/with.
I'm from New Zealand, not Australia. I wouldn't suggesting using 'cunt' here at any time, and probably not in Oz either. Just about any other curse is funny though, in the right company.
JavaScript was meant as a language to implement event handling for various light and scattered UI uses. It was not meant to be a systems language in which raw GUI engines and virtual OS's are implemented from scratch.
Use the right tool for the job and the weaknesses of a language doesn't bite you. The problem is that browser standards haven't kept up with web UI demand such that JS libraries end up implementing a lot of GUI functionality from scratch. It's not JS that's broken, it's browsers. Managers and users want a desktop-like feel to web apps.
Come up with a better browser model and markup language, then most GUI activity will be implemented declaratively instead of needing explicit loops and IF statements and big client-side programming libraries.
Table-ized A.I.
"Practically every single event, and a huge percentage of the online discussion about these events, revolves around binge drinking," Funduk writes. "The simple truth is all you can do is just opt out of going to these parties ... or put another way, you can opt to exclude yourself."
I have not seen this. I've been in Silicon Valley for many years. I've been to parties in bars after major conferences from SIGGRAPH to GDC to RSA. I went to parties during the dot-com boom. I've seen very few drunks. Lots of exchanging business cards. Some flirting.
The frat-boy crowd is usually in sales.
I don't know if TFA is correct, but my experience with several defense contractors is that it is not the case in that sector. The Federal government encourages workplace diversity, and the big contractors I'm familiar with make a point of making it happen. It probably doesn't hurt that these firms usually work 8 to 5, and offer benefits and a degree of schedule flexibility. In 30 years, I've yet to work in a lab that didn't include more than a token number of women (and ethnic minorities of either sex).
Luke, help me take this mask off
You use C#. That already leaves you with only the bottom of the barrel developers. On top of that, you only have a kind of development that consists of stringing libraries together and drawing GUI.
Your ideas and policies are irrelevant for anyhing that involves real work.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
> (Yes, I am sure you think that I and all my friends are below average, or outright lousy programmers. Not surprised - that is the default position of everyone I have ever dealt with in a hiring situation, even those I could code rings around, or those asking questions full of contradictory and incorrect assumptions, poor practices, etc.)
A peer comment already said this, but I have the exact same offer. If you can meet the technical requirements (ObjC, Java, modern tooling), we have a job opening for you. Today. Right now. Market rate salary.
We can't find enough solid engineers no matter how hard we try. The vast majority of applicants can barely code.
Bingo. I have managed teams of developers as well as being a developer myself. The longer I do this the more convinced I am that effective communication is CRITICAL. I can't tell you how many times I have sent technical design documents over to India only to get code back that either doesn't work or, more commonly, works but doesn't do what is required. So the lesson I learned was that whenever we send anything over the pond the technical design has to be rock solid with every single requirement spelled out in painful detail. What I have also found out is that when dealing with people from cultures where "saving face" is very important (India, Philippines to name two) nobody will ever tell me they don't understand something. When they don't understand they say "no questions" when I ask if there are any questions. They don't want to look dumb. So you have to phrase the question in a way that gives them an out, a way to say they don't understand while still saving face. Ah the joys of international relations :-)
OP didn't yet know that the Arab woman spoke a third language when OP originally formed that opinion.
OP revised said opinion upon learning this fact.
It's called "admitting that you were wrong" and "learning from experience". You should give it a try sometime.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It's pretty rare I encounter a coder that cares what gender, race, or age a team member is. As long as they get the task their assigned done in a timely manner, that's all that really seems to matter.
Most of my experience however is with indie and open source communities, so it's not often face to face stuff. One thing I've ran into there more often than I can understand is female coders that claim they are male. It's usually the one person on the team that feels it necessary to mention what gender they are without being asked. This has lead me to believe that the surveys about female coders are flawed in that they aren't using picture/video confirmation on gender and just relying on a written/typed form.
I don't know what the hell the article is talking about, but if I ever heard anyone use the term "brogrammer" it would be the event that immediately preceded my forced resignation for kicking the speaker square in the balls.
I did have a female development partner once, and mock her to this day. It has nothing to do with the assembly of her reproductive organs, though.
An actual function I found in the repo.
function unmilitaryTime($time)
{
$xy = split(":", $time);
$hour = $xy[0];
if ($hour == 1)
$hour = "01";
if ($hour == 2)
$hour = "02";
if ($hour == 3)
$hour = "03";
if ($hour == 13)
$hour = "01";
if ($hour == 14)
$hour = "02";
if ($hour == 24)
$hour = "12";
return $hour . $xy[1];
}
Male or female, the person who wrote that should be forbidden from approaching within 50 feet of any computer as or more complex as a Lego Mindstorms set...
Years later, still finding messes like that to clean up...
No, the problem is 'programmers' who are hostile to the very idea that they be able to program. The stuff he is asking for is really, really basic stuff. As in, a teenager who picked up a basic introduction to C# book and spent a few weeks playing with it would know enough to pass the interview. If you're applying for a C# job (rather you than me...) and you don't know this stuff, there's something wrong with you - why would you even think you were qualified? No one applies for a job as a car mechanic and doesn't know which way to turn a nut - if they're that ignorant and want to be in the field then they'd either do an apprenticeship or some other form of training - yet people like you seem to think it's quite appropriate to apply for an entry-level job without even entry-level skills.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When women are just as smart, knowledgeable, and skilled as any man...AND can additionally leverage their sex appeal, the combination in many fields can surpass what a typical man can offer. They can be far more effective (then men) by bringing both intellect and superficial advantages.
When it comes to engineering however, especially software engineering, they can't leverage their sex appeal for much of anything. Communication is mostly over email and IM, they don't even get much chance to use their voice much less leverage their looks. Compared to most any other field it ties one arm behind their back.
---
Men, even very attractive men, aren't accustom to being able to leverage sex appeal to their advantage. This especially is true for the introverts commonly attracted to engineering. So it doesn't feel like they're losing anything, much the opposite as it feels like the playing field is more even as the advantage of sex appeal is taken away from everyone else.
---
The feminist movement likes to go on about how they are fighting for women to be compared to men by intellect alone, but the truth of the matter is that wish comes true when it comes to software engineering. The results don't show either sex as intellectually superior...but they do show that women aren't really interested in a fair comparison. They want to leverage both their intellect and their feminine wiles, because they know it gives them an advantage over men who largely must rely only on their intellect.
Women aren't found in engineering because men keep them out. The vast majority of male engineers are dieing to get more eye candy around the office. No, women aren't found in engineering because women don't want to go into engineering. They know as women they are much, much more powerful in virtually any other field.
My
which is perhaps better said as "systemic bias".
There is ZERO systematic basis against females in engineering degrees.
There is in fact a nonzero bias towards supporting females in engineering roles.
So what happens when after decades you do not get many female engineers, in any discipline?
You have to realize it's not the system that is the problem, or at least changing the system will not create the balance you seek.
The desire to be an engineer has to come from the female population at large, you can't lure them as though engineering were a kind of trap for them.
How that happens, I'm not sure. But it's far more broadly cultural than any system or set of systems in place.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ms. Ada Lovelace wants a word with you.
There is nothing clever about the term "brogrammer"
Coding Blog
I call bullshit. Gender barriers are either low or non-existant in our field. Racisim? Maybe in related fields. Probably there'd be a bias towards an indian entreperneur vs. a afro-american one, but that's just historically grown sillyness that can easily be exposed. Techcrunch had an interview a week or two ago, where some guy said that there's this sort of racisim is measurable in high-level VC funding. Dunno. Can't say. Could be.
But measurable gender discrimination in coding? I call bullshit. If anything, there's a bias *towards* women. Especially in FOSS or the modding/gamedev community, anybody can gain a rock-solid reputation as a developer, before anybody even will know what gender that person is. I've said it before, just a few weeks ago.
There may be a tad of mostly unintentional sexism in the first phases of normal interaction, simply because awkward technerds aren't used to having good-looking girls who know code around - (happend to me at more that one occassion ... like automatically treating a young female PhD in CS with solid Java experience like an outsider ... I noticed 10 seconds in and inmediately appologized all the while she was letting of a little wisecrack to let me know how silly I was being ... quite embarassing actually) - but such stories aside, I'd say this stuff is urban legend. Once you've discussed design patterns with the lady or she's shown you about the projects toolstack or had been babysitting you with solving a problem, the last remaining of such belittling behaviour vanishes instantly and turns into genuine professional respect.
If you have a degree and/or a solid list of projects to show, nobody gives a hoot if you're a girl, guy, hermaphrodite or a giant genderless amobea - main thing is you can code and get the job done.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What's quite interesting about these "too few women in field X" stories that pop up from time to time is:
nobody ever says, "There are too few women in garbage disposal." Or construction. Or window-washing. Trucking. Fishing. Taxi driving. Sewage work. Electric pole maintenance.
The hard jobs which are very indispensable to society, as opposed to someone who decides which pastel green color some "Add to Cart" button is going to be.
So, really, you can safely dismiss all analysis of this kinds as just a manifestation of female supremacist thinking. ("Why is the chosen group underrepresented in this profession? Must be a conspiracy.")
Did this dumb bitch ever go to a college? The sheer number of males in these classes is overwhelming. With gender-specific bonuses and teaching methods, females are well over half of all college students and graduates- but not in technical fields. In addition to the almost assured biological basis, there are cultural ones.
When I want to apply for my job, I didn't see one single chick at the booth at the job faire (except for the folks behind the counter, which was gender split with the HR job faire folks). Guess fucking what? There's less women working technical positions than men. Sure, SOME of the engineers are women, and they are just as skilled as the men... but that's because it's a meritocracy.
If you sort by skill, very few of your top programmers, scientists, or engineers will be female.
Period.
Sorry if reality offends you. I guess you better get even more government programs and laws so that men have to live up to a greater standard, and every company has to pay a tax to attract the shitty women who are incompetent, being that the skilled and competent ones are already fully employed and respected. I'm sure that won't shit all over our country long term, or medium term, as long as your gender equalitarian (and often female supremacist) fantasies are fulfilled.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are working.
I recently interviewed for a senior position dealing with massively parallel hardware for "Big Data" analytics.
I was probably younger than all the interviewers (would-be boss, coworkers, etc.)
I am 50 years old.
I don't intend on retiring any time soon.
In Liberty, Rene
...it is being actively encouraged to have more female applicants for technical degrees. Every year most major tech companies host a "Girls day" where they invite soon-to-be female college students to spend a day at the company trying to convince them that the tech world can be fun and rewarding.
However, despite that, our virtually non-existent unemployment in the field and the fact that our engineers are among the best-paid in the world, technical degrees are still sausage farms. And I'm pretty sure all those guys would be more than happy to have some female presence in their classes and later in their workplace.
On the other hand, non-technical degrees (psychology, translation, arts, etc) are virtually full of chicks. I guess there is a genetic factor after all which makes every sex more prone to make one choice or the other.
It's not PC to say so, but Men & Women are different (just take a look at the segregation in any supermarket magazine racking), so maybe they just don't want to be programmers. My 10yo daughter is most definitely not averse to the idea though.
there are more male programmers than female ones because of the extra range of the Y-chromosome. The last article to supposedly refute that put _teachers_ in with real STEM people and that invalidates their study.
See for yourself in any public high school (where the students aren't self-selected some way). Both the highest-level AP classes and the lowest level prison-prep classes are dominated by males.
Men are not stiff-arming women from the IT workforce.
Why should a capitalist employer seek anything but intelligence, credentials, and skill-set? Should a company hire JUST ANYBODY because of the sentiment: "come on, that's sad" ? I'd totally hire a woman if she was brilliant and talented. If I owned a company and someone tried to force me to hire people I didn't want, I'd sell the company. It's all about money, and not about the employee's race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation. "Ugly underbelly" -- my ass.
Men also just so happened to have been the architects behind skyscrapers, the hoover dam, the chunnel, and all kinds of brilliant achievements. Men have invented more things and it will probably be like that for awhile. Female empowerment is on the rise and to ask for more would be asking too much. Sexual discrimination is a real issue, but it only exists in the minds of people. Perhaps some employers don't actually hire women based on their sex; I can see how that could be possible. Most of them are NOT like that. Not many women enjoy computer programming, that I've seen (in the Los Angeles area), and it's almost foolish to say they're being discriminated against.
What if lots of women aren't very good (the small percentage of women who program) and just feel discriminated against because they never see other women looking for the same jobs? If it's 90% men there's an incredibly high chance that a man will be hired.
^^^^^^
Yea, there is a problem with the proportion of women in computing. I agree. There's also a problem with the inordinate amount of attention the proportion of women in computing gets compared to the proportion of LGBTs, blacks, and Hispanics.
As Buzz Lightyear would say: "White and Asian guys. White and Asian guys EVERYWHERE!"
I'm currently working on my PhD in CS at a land grant state university. Our CS program has about 800-1000 students (150-200 of which are graduate students). We have probably 75-100 women. We HAD two gay guys -- me and one other. I don't know of any other LGBT people in either the undergrad or grad program. I think the other guy dropped out of the program after last semester, so I guess it's just me and anyone still in the closet. We may have as many as 40-50 people of African descent. I have only met one Hispanic person.
Census 2010 says that the USA is:
50.8% Women; our department is more like 7-10%
12.6% Black; our department is more like 4-5%
16.3% Hispanic/Latino; our department is more like 0.1%
There's no Census data on LGBT people -- that campaign didn't work.
HuffPo says 1.7% and though that seems low to me, let's go with it. Our department is more like 0.1%.
So, let's put that in terms of ratios of gen-pop to my off the cuff estimates of my particular CS program:
Women: 5:1
Blacks: 3:1
LBGT: 10:1
Hispanic: 163:1
But in terms of articles I've read about lack of diversity in CS, 100% were about women. I'm just saying -- diversity doesn't end with boys and girls.
I was getting my nails done the other day (my biweekly treat) and the woman in the pedicure chair next to me was a Java coder. We had a fascinating conversation on unit tests, of all things. Women aren't scared away from programming and IT because it's a male dominated culture, although that doesn't help. Women are just not as encouraged to think of it as a viable career. What needs to change is something deeper and earlier, at the middle school and high school level.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Kid, back when we were in school, the RDBMS community was a bunch of academics, and nobody thought that you'd be using anything that resource-intensive to do Real Work with any time soon. (And it was a big deal when we got a fourth megabyte for the mainframe that supported the entire university's computing needs...) (And yes, we did walk through the snow uphill both ways to get to the keypunch room.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Nah, you can Google it yourself, but the term has been around at least a couple of months, and actually used in at least one startup's job ad (apparently even non-ironically, unless by the time it reached Twitter it had lost the attribution from The Onion, which we can really hope was the case.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A wise old man once told me "in life, you are exactly where you want to be..... otherwise you would do something about it."
Well guess women just don't want to be software engineers. When I was studying my Software Engineering quals, I got given a taineeship which turned out that not a single female applied for. Plus in class in 3 separate years, there was only 1 female enrolled.
I fail to see how this is a gender issue? Its not like coding is a boys club and boys are keeping the girls from joining, anymore than hairdressing is a girls club and the girls are keeping the boys out. Truth of the matter is very few females want to be coders, and very few blokes want to be hairdressers. (Apologies for the stereotyping, but it was the easiest way to make a simple point)
Many American friends of mine have said "A Southern accent costs you 20 perceived IQ points." I had a friend who had a doctorate in Islamic literature, and identified himself as being from Jordan (I think he was actually Palestinian, but his village was in Jordan when he was born), and had a really thick accent even after a decade or more in the US. His wife is from Beirut, and she said "Yeah, he's from out in the sticks, he sounds like that in Arabic also."
The large US company I was in did a lot of work on affirmative action back in the 80s, after getting bashed by a few lawsuits. We didn't have to drop our standards any, but we did have to go to a lot of work to try to reach out to communities where we hadn't traditionally had much contact, and to try to understand the impact of cultural differences. For instance, since we were a technology company, we had a lot of Chinese and Japanese techies, who viewed interrupting people and contradicting the boss as rude - but we were a company full of New Yorkers, for whom any conversation that didn't have three people speaking at once was dull, and not interrupting the boss meant you hadn't been listening. It took a lot of adjusting to make sure we didn't exclude the Asians. And there was a lot of making sure that there wasn't sexist or racist language used (you'd think by the 80s we'd have been better about it that we were, but cultural change takes a long time, and some of my older coworkers were pretty much the first generation of Jewish people at the company.)
And in the early 90s, one of my coworkers who was about 25 and female did a computer systems consulting project at a large aircraft company - where just about all the engineers were male and over 50 and didn't quite know how to react to her, because the current wave of feminism had only been going on for 30 years so taking technical direction from a woman was still pretty radical. And then there was the lunchtime conversation about why almost all the women had left one of our five departments that grew into an almost-everybody-except-management meeting (about everything that people wanted to bitch about, not just sexism issues), and nobody really wanted to have to report to management about the conclusions. (It wasn't my department, and I wasn't at the meeting, but I was rather surprised by it, because their department head was the one I'd have thought least likely to have that problem - but they also tended to promote supervisors based on technical ability, not people skills, so maybe there was too much bro-managing going on at that level.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The findings weren't that the people with Asian-sounding names had problems in the interviews. They were that Asians didn't get called in for the interviews as often as people with Anglo names and similar credentials. It's a much different problem.
And people do often treat immigrants or other people with strong accents as less educated, whether it's justified or not. I'm glad he did get to speak to her in French, and spoke it well enough to find out that she spoke it well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But with 2 registered accounts on slashdot you're definitely a troll.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2787367&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=39697575
This whole post is nothing but pure arrogance.
The company I worked for back in the 80s did a lot of affirmative action, in spite of the grumbling it initially caused from people with attitudes like yours. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to include people who are culturally different from you, but it's worthwhile, and there are lots of different kinds of skills. For an easy example, we were an East Coast company dominated by New Yorkers, where any conversation that doesn't have three people talking at once is dull and boring, and if you're not contradicting the boss that means you're obviously not paying attention. But as a somewhat academic high-tech company we also got a lot of Chinese and Japanese people, who were from cultures where interrupting people and contradicting the boss in public were really rude things to do, and if you wanted to get Dr. Wang's best work, you might want to ask for his opinion or at least not interrupt him halfway through his first sentence. Or if you're ordering sandwiches so we can work through lunch on a project, you might want to ask the Indian contractor if she eats meat (neither did I, by then.)
And then there was dealing with our subsidiary in the south. Y'all know that they refer to women as "girls" down there, but we got a bit of extra cultural warning that it was normal for managers to refer to clerical workflow as "the little girl takes the form to the such-and-such department" etc., and the fact that they had a bunch of rather short women working there didn't make it any less ridiculous even though it wasn't intended to be negative.
On the other hand, after moving to San Francisco in the 90s, I worked for women for about 15 years, some who were techies and some who came from the business side. And maybe half the men in the department were straight - I was very much not in Kansas any more, but most of the cultural adjustment was getting used to working with sales people instead of techies.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And exactly what I said in my post.
Most hiring managers and HR "professionals" I have met have the same (poor) level of reading comprehension, and the same levels of unjustified hostility and arrogance as shown in your post.
On the other hand, technical interviews based on tool, environment or even PL/Library/Framework specifics are in fact ridiculous. What really counts are fundamentals, aptitude and attitude. Tools can and should be easily learned, but NO ONE WANTS TO TRAIN competent people.
I do not want to spend my life learning every possible toolchain or combination, and/or moving every three to six months just for a fucking job. That is my point. I have a master's degree in CS, another technical master's degree and over 20 years experience. I have taught college-level CS courses, coded professionally for fortune 500, as an independent, and for academic research projects (mine and other's)
My point is that knowing what I know now, I would never choose this career path. CS/SD/programming SUCKS as a career path for a person with even above-average math/science skills -while MANY other careers are far more rewarding for such people (especially women, who are smart enough to avoid this dead-end, soul killing "career". That, after all, is the topic of TFA.)
If only 1% of your applicants can meet your "technical" requirements - perhaps it is the interview process and mindset that is broken, not the pool of talent? Oh no, it can't be you genuises that are way off-base, can it?
Also, back in the 80s, the high-tech company I worked for tended to hire from Ivy League schools or equivalent high-end colleges. You weren't going to find a lot of black students there, and you weren't going to find a lot of women at MIT (though Harvard and Radcliffe had just recently started integrating their programs), and being bright and talented didn't necessarily mean you could afford to go to the places they hired from. They started recruiting at women's colleges, and at historically black colleges. And even there it took them a while to figure out some of the cultural and program issues - I had one coworker who had a math degree (computer science degrees weren't common yet), and was bright and articulate, but out of his depth; he'd have been a good high school math teacher, but we needed an academic research type, and hiring him didn't help him or us, and having a manager who was a space cadet made it take a while to figure out it had been a mistake.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Don't you guys get tired of going on and on about diversity, equality and all the crap.
Here's what you do: start a company and employ everyone except white males. Then everyday when you go to work you can feel good and virtuous.
Alternatively move to Bangalore and work in a company there. Trust me there is plenty of diversity there, just not a lot of white males.
On top of that, you only have a kind of development that consists of stringing libraries together and drawing GUI.
Sometimes that's what pays the bills. Lots of people need a useful program be it GUI or CLI written around the precompiled library provided by vendor of 'ExpensiveSensor500'. Not saying its great, not saying it wouldnt be nicer if the vendor had more than a library. But this is reality. Vendors cut corners to pad profits & someone has to fill that corner in.
XML - A clever joke would be here if
That's an education issue. They haven't been educated about which hole of the goat to use.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Sometimes that's what pays the bills.
Sometimes bank robbery, spam, copyright lawsuits and tanking the economy pays the bills -- it doesn't mean, anyone should do it. Even for a simple GUI, there is the right way (few developers who know how to use Qt) and the wrong way (hordes upon hordes of monkeys with C#). The right way is actuallty cheaper in the long run, but boss doesn't get to have hundreds of retards around to boost his ego.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
There just aren't enough talented female programmers to balance the gender ratio. It's not that men don't want women programmers - quite the opposite - I even suspect that in some places being female is more likely to get one interviewed - and probably given the job, if competent. The problem is that fewer women are interested in programming. Interest in programming generally starts at an early age, and the skills that enable one to be a very good programmer are learned at an early age. Some women I have met just decided they would get a CS degree in their second year of college. The women I am thinking about are fine, competent programmers, but lack the passion of the nerds.
So, what major open-source project was started by a woman? Which operating system had a female chief architect? Well...there you go.
Posted as AC because they don't let women have accounts here.
Read that one more time.
uh-huh.. and people should listen to you because?.. you hate microsoft? .. yawn..
Typically because OSS developers are terrible at creating usable UIs for normal people .. OSS world has horrible tools when it comes to creating GUIs. Even a shitty developer using WPF and Visual Studio would be preferable than some anti-ms zealot wasting hours in vi writing Qt code.
culturally there is still the idea that math and science are for boys and language and communication skills are for girls.
I do not think that is true at all anymore. Also for decades movies have influenced culture to where it is well accepted across most cultures that women are intellectually equal to men, and can do anything they want.
The issue may be cultural but if so it's far more complex than any idea that people have for what roles girls and boys should have, we are long past that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes lack of diversity is a problem in the technical space. It's an historical artifact like the human appendix, a leftover from the past. Prejudice is common, learning to live without it is a struggle to some but mostly the issue is denied or ignored.
They aren't pissy about the lack of men majoring in French or arts.
They're just pissy because technical fields generally make a shit load more money then the fields where women vastly out number the men.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
No. Sorry. Can't agree with this article at all. Virtually every point he made is incorrect, at least based on my personal experience. I work in the Finance Industry in NYC. I go to conferences. I work with large teams. I've interviewed hundred of candidates myself, and I've been involved in even more hiring phases. I have former coworkers who are now scattered across dozens of companies in NYC, and we keep in touch.
If you are good, no one gives a whit about your age, your race, or your gender. As long as you are able to articulate well in English, work on a team, and think and solve problems, you can keep progressing. You just have to be good. I'm way past the "peak" mentioned in this article, and I'm still studying, practicing, and learning new technologies. It's what we do.
Are there more men than women? Yes, in every shop I worked in, this was the case. However, the ones we DO have are always part of the team, just as much as anyone else. In fifteen years of Software Engineering experience in the Defense, Medical Imaging and Finance industries, I have never, ever seen any of the issues this article brings up.
uh-huh.. and people should listen to you because?.. you hate microsoft? .. yawn..
Why listen to me? This is the position of everyone except Microsoft and Microsoft-only-trained people.
Typically because OSS developers are terrible at creating usable UIs for normal people .. OSS world has horrible tools when it comes to creating GUIs.
Even if it was true, it would not in any way change the fact that Qt is superior to all Microsoft GUI toolkits that ever existed.
Even a shitty developer using WPF and Visual Studio would be preferable than some anti-ms zealot wasting hours in vi writing Qt code.
A person who does not hate Microsoft, is either unfamiliar with Microsoft, or is not qualified to do anything with software development. Same would apply to a scientist in the time of Renaissance who did not hate Inquisition -- that would make him an intellectual prostitute.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
My classes in college and HS always encourage women and girls to program. The guys there don't care if you're a guy or a girl either. Now that I'm in the working world, it's still the same views. The women simply lose interest or don't think this is a "girls" field to be in.
The *vast majority* of women wouldn't ever want to come near a line of code. There's nothing wrong with that. Men and women ARE DIFFERENT.
Research has been done on this issue. I have read it right here on Slashdot. Yes, I am too lazy to look it up.
Young women, just getting out of high-school have been shown to have a perception that programming is full of dorks and geeks. Dorks and geeks who will stare at them but not know how to interact with them. Now, this perception is mostly manufactured by Hollywood but young high-school aged girls and boys are very susceptible to the stereotypes fed to us by Hollywood. The perception is so strong that merely decorating a room with a couple of Star-Wars posters was enough to affect young-women's perceptions as to whether they would like to pursue a given career. If you don't fix the public perception that all programmers are geeks and dorks then you will never attract high-school girls to the field.
I suspect that the stereotype is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy as well. Not a lot of young, high-school aged boys like to associate or be associated with dorks and geeks. So it may be that only the more dorky and geeky boys are choosing the field merely because of the stereotype. It is amazing how powerful the urge is to be who everyone expects you to be, when you are that age. I haven't seen research on this one, but I imagine if you remove the constant reinforcement of that stereotype by Hollywood, you would see more girls and less dorky guys entering the field.
An ex of mine got a degree in CS, back in 1996, in order to get on the Y2K bandwagon. She worked mostly with COBOL and some crazy scripting language I had never heard of. According to her, there were a lot more women where she worked than are typically reported in programming shops today. Why? Because a lot of these women came to programming later in life. After they had gotten over their stereotypes of what programmers were like. To them, programming was nothing more than yet another white-collar job that paid a lot more than being a secretary.