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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..."
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.
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.
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
Yeah the article is ignoring the real problem...
As the lead developer on a software team, I'm one of the ones interviewing potential candidates. Typically the vast majority of applicants are male, and the females who apply typically can't pass our coding questions and tests. Granted most males can't either, so the ratio is probably about the same (in regards to the pass vs fail). The fact isn't that women aren't pushed away, it's that there are just very vary few of them.
I'm completely unbiased on the male vs female front, but if a male OR a female can't answer the tech questions and complete the coding tests properly, there's no way I'm going to hire them. End of story. We only hire Sr level devs (or ALMOST Sr), and only about 1 in 15 or 1 in 20 applicants are actually capable of high-mid-level or sr-level coding. We typically see less than 1 in 20 candidates actually being women. In our current round of hiring over the past month, we've seen about 15 males, and only one female. We've only hired one person so far, and it happened to be one of the males.
It's not that we're biased against women, it's just that the numbers are against them. I honestly couldn't say if males are better programmers than women, because I haven't worked with, or interviewed enough women to know if there are decent female coders out there... I HAVE hired a very capable sysadmin who was female once, and she was absolutely wonderful at her job. There was nothing we asked of her that she couldn't do... She was lost in a round of layoffs a few years ago, and I've been sad about that ever since.
There will unfortunately be sexism, racism, and other forms of bias in ALL environments, but saying the coding industry has an ugly underbelly of sexism is just ignorant. The fact of the matter is that most young male programmers would jump at the chance to get a talented female among them.
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?
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 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.
http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/
There are times that I've thought one of my female coworker friends needs to "lighten up", and I've thought that about male coworkers too. But there are many times when I've seen that the women are correct, and that they've been singled out in an unfortunate way. It really turns them off to a field that needs a more equal gender balance, and that's too bad.
I think XZVF kinda hit it on the head, too.
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 completely unbiased on the male vs female front
I think if you don't realize your bias then you are unwittingly probably part of the problem.
There was some excellent research showing that when researchers submitted resumes with identical credentials to firms, but one with a white sounding name and one with an Asian sounding name, the white sounding names had a significantly hire success rate in getting calls. I doubt this discrepancy is from a conscious policy.
http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090522/resume_english_090523/20090523/?hub=TorontoNewHome
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/work/right-rsum-wrong-name/article1145212/
http://aascpress.metapress.com/content/662555ttv6344365/
On a personal and anecdotal note, unrelated to hiring, there is a family that frequents my business. They are Muslim, and the mother has a thick Arabic accent. I just discovered the other day that she also speaks French (I am fluent). Being from Morocco, her French is flawless and better than mine. After talking with her for some time in French, I just realized that I had been implicitly thinking of her as less educated, due to her Arabic accent when speaking English. Upon hearing her flawless French, I saw my implicit attitude change entirely.
I work really hard to be aware of bias and to not let it get in the way of my interactions with people. But it's there for all of us, despite the effort we put in. It does no good to pretend otherwise.
In all of these discussions, the assumption is implicit that a group (whatever group is under discussion, programmers in this case) should change their behavior because others don't like it and are pushed away from the activity by it. But why? Presumably those who are there now are there because they enjoy that environment. If you change it so that someone else is more comfortable with it, then that destroys the enjoyment of those who were there to begin with. So why, exactly, is it imperative that things be as bland and unoffensive as possible? What makes the outsiders' wishes more important than those of the insiders?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
It's almost like young people are lacking in experience due to not having been around long enough to have gotten it yet.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I think you may be seeing bias where simple demographics are at play.
Where I work, my group has eight people when we're fully staffed. When we have an opening to fill and HR starts sending us resumes of potential hires, perhaps one candidate in fifteen is female. So with all other things equal and assuming no gender bias at all, simple percentages result in our department being all male the vast bulk of the time.
Hell, even if we were to purposely decide we specifically wanted to fill a slot with a female, we can't very well hire candidates who don't apply.
Imagine all the people...
yes I saw the same problem in my research at MIT. My lab was offered to present projects at the Harvard Business School. On the day of the presentation, I brashly chastised the organizer for not accepting any projects by female researchers, to which he replied "no females applied."
You can't win if you don't play. Male coders are not handed jobs, it's competitive. And yes, most male coders welcome ladies in their environments because in addition to being good team members, they have natural radiance and the gender balance soothes certain kinds of altercations. But it seems like there's a lot of complaining going on and no applying.
And I don't comprehend this argument that coders have to "make their environment more inviting to women." How? Just _apply_, subscribe to hiring bulletins, call and ask for interviews, send resumes, network. There is no conspiracy against women. As someone above said, we're too busy working to organize a conspiracy and don't want one anyway.