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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?
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.
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.
...therefore I am a scumbag and should be ashamed of myself?
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
Few women enter the field and a significant number of them leave. When I was a freshman in Engineering school it was unusual to see even one coed in a class, the most I ever remember was three. Fast forward a few years, women programmers are treated fairly in the workplace. But once they get married and have a couple of babies their career plans often change. When I worked in a classified environment the government wouldn't let a women keep her clearance when she went on maternity leave because most never came back; it was more cost effective to issue a new clearance for the outliers.
McAllister must have quite a few shills here on Slashdot, we see a disproportionate number of his blog posts and most (like this one) are tripe. Brogrammers? Really? Are they having bromances with each other?
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.
You expect bro's who can't get dates to be nice to women??? Which came first is another question.
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.
I've had enough of your sensationalist BS stories /. Bookmark deleted, and goodbye.
Good point, AC. People certainly do not want to see any kind of sensationalistic, grandstanding behavior when they visit SlashDot. Yeah, that would be really undesirable.
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"
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..
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.
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."
Why isn't there a big media-driven push to get more women driving trucks for the cleansing department? Isn't this sexism too?
That looks more like an overbelly.
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.
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.
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
Been in this industry for some time, first time I've heard the term 'brogrammer.' Where exactly is she getting this stuff?
I am John Hurt.
Used to be common sense that it's a bad idea for women to live with unrelated men. And that women, who lose every time against men in physical struggle, have no place in battle.
A bit oversensitive, are we? Seriously, that was most likely a joke. Or, most likely, the truth. He was probably stating that it's unlikely that there are many woman that would do that. Whatever his intentions were, I highly doubt he has a problem with women.
Stop trying so hard to be politically correct; it's nonsense.
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 saw a senior executive at an internet company get dragged off in handcuffs after pinning a female developer against a wall during working hours.
Not rape but close enough to make every woman who was an employee there pretty damn uncomfortable.
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
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.
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.
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.
Used to be common sense that it's a bad idea for women to live with unrelated men. And that women, who lose every time against men in physical struggle, have no place in battle.
Tell that to the Israeli army. Must be why they keep losing wars.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If leaking private data all over the place counts as professionalism then I'll take blundering amateurs any day.
Also, mindlessly aping a successful company's technical decisions without considering that they're in a different niche to you is going to end in tears; a search engine isn't the same thing as an inventory control system.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't think 'Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister' is a woman. In fact, claiming that he is is probably the most denigrating thing anyone has said about women in this entire thread...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There are a few citations, here's one from Time and another from NPR saying that about a third of women in the armed forces are raped during their time in the service. It's not really surprising when you consider that you take a group of men, teach them to dehumanise people and that force is a valid way of solving disagreements...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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