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.'"

Comments

Re:That's it

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously that time of the month!

Re:Where?

[bigstrat2003]

I think if you don't realize your bias then you are unwittingly probably part of the problem.

You're making the (unprovable, and thus invalid) assumption that everyone has bias, whether they know it or not. That's ridiculous.

Re:insert picture of exasperated 50's guy

[Surt]

Sure, they get scholarships. They also get harassment. Lots and lots of harassment. Worse than the black kids.

Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference?

[KZigurs]

"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." - I have a problem with this comment. Happy to agree that so far anything that's been publicly demonstrated indeed has been just an exercise in breaking ACID for no reason, but relational databases have their limits as well. So yes, NoSQL movement is a joke, but relational databases aren't necessarily the safe haven as they may seem.

For background: Just this afternoon company I work in lost around USD 500k (estimated) just because our relational database is working hard at the limits. We are one of the reference cases for the vendor.

Re:News Flash: ~1/2 of all coders are below averag

[Alex Belits]

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.