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Getting More Women Coders Into Open Source
Nerval's Lobster writes: Diversity remains an issue in tech firms across the nation, with executives and project managers publicly upset over a lack of women in engineering and programming roles. While all that's happening on the corporate side, a handful of people and groups are trying to get more women involved in the open source community, like Women of OpenStack, Outreachy (which is geared toward people from underrepresented groups in free software), and others. How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among programmers? Can anything be done to shift the demographics, considering the issues that even large, coordinated companies have with altering the collective mix of their employees?
How about we invite people into the open source community based on merit rather than based on the unholy offspring of SJW fantasies and affirmative action?
Or even there's just the one guy who's a dick to women, but there's the other 10 guys who just let him do it.
Or maybe coding is something that when women try to get involved they discover they are unwelcome. There's the one guy who's just a dick to women. There's one who hasn't washed since 2004. There's one who has to one-up everything she says. There's several who have to hit on her because she's the only woman they get to talk to.
Let's put this another way... What makes the men who code so magical that women somehow just can't get past them in significant numbers, unlike nearly every other office-dwelling profession on earth? Do you really think that we're such troglodytes that these poor, fragile women are physically repelled from the building? I have to laugh if you really think we're all that special, or that they're so fragile.
And isn't it a bit demeaning to women to suggest that they can't make it in the world of programming if we men don't figure out a way to help them along, or become more welcoming, or whatever? Do you realize the incredible advantage a competent female programmer actually has right now, with all the recent focus on getting women into coding and other tech professions? Any company would absolutely *love* to hire good female programmers, and certainly don't want to lose the ones they have.
I'm actually fine with encouraging more women to get into coding and other tech professions. I get irritated with the constant accusation that it's somehow the fault of the people already in those professions. Personally speaking, the lack of female interest in programming has always been a significant negative for me. I'd love to see more women programming, and I've gotten along fine with the very rare female programmers I've worked with in the last several decades.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
here's the problem. all of silicon valley has a ginormous brogrammer culture
Linux isn't developed in Silicon Valley. Redhat is based in North Carolina, Linus himself is based in Portland, Oregon, SuSE is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and IBM is based in Rochester, NY, and has programmers all over the world.
Whether a brogrammer culture exists or not in Silicon Valley is hardly relevant since all the pillars of the open source community aren't in Silicon Valley.
If you count stock, I sold my business for a XXX digit sum. It was grown from the ground up. It was created at the cusp, highly immature and risky as hell. Yet it succeeded. It thrived. It grew and, as the sphere matured, it grew in ways I'd have never expected. The compute power increases made us thrive and manipulate data in new and interesting ways - also, we could store data that was impossibly large just a few years before.
Now, to share a few things...
We were merit based. I'm not hiring you just because you have a vagina.
We had multiple women employees and they were very good at what they did.
We were, at times, assholes to one another - bad work means you do it again.
We had an unbelievably low turn-over rate - truly mind blowing.
We didn't give a shit who you slept with but you don't need to bring that shit into the office.
We probably, eventually, knew your family and wept when you did or celebrated with you.
We did things thought impossible, or improbable, on a regular basis.
We only wanted the best and not some absurd hire because of hurt feelings or supposed inequality.
We had multiple races - including myself.
Screw those who argue that things shouldn't be based on merit. It's infantile and absurd at the very front. Where you pee from or who you love hasn't a damned thing to do with it. If you can't do the work get the fuck out of the way and stop trying to hinder those who can. You don't deserve shit, you earn it. You don't even earn it on your own - you earn it with the help of those around you. Your drama and juvenile fantasies have no place in the real world. You can rightly fuck off back to your basement if you don't comprehend this - it's not difficult.
However, don't worry. We did open-invite interviews where you'd be reviewed by your peers before hiring. You'd have not made it past the interview process. Keep your drama queen shit off my code and out of my face.
Simple enough? The conversation has been had, it's over. Whining isn't going to change this. It's just going to piss people off even more. What you can do is what matters. If you can't do then shut the hell up and learn from those who can. Keep your drama to your friends. I'm not your friend.
[sum total redacted, none of your business and I don't need my ego stroked - suffice to say a lot]
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I think you need to do a little more research into SJW history.
Just look at what happened to the Opal community to see why people have a major beef with "SJWs"
https://github.com/opal/opal/i...
Go back and read the twitter conversation that shit storm was started from
https://twitter.com/elia/statu...
He had an opinion on gender reassignment surgery being done on kids, that's not transphobic, but a couple SJW's started calling for his head. At first they were told to stuff it, so they went to twitter to drum up a mob
https://twitter.com/CoralineAd...
Which included attacking anyone on the project that disagree with them
https://twitter.com/CoralineAd...
Ultimately this Code of Conduct was merged into the project. Now check out who it was that wrote that CoC, that's right the same person that started the issue is the person that wrote the CoC that got shoehorned into the project of someone's opinion on kids having gender reassignment surgery.
What's worse is this line:
This code of conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community.
was added after the fact because by the original CoC, Elia Schito didn't do anything wrong.