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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?
Fill all the forums with macho bravado. I hear that works every time.
just stop
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Id much rather that the executives worry about their product, and not work quota. While they worry about how to get X into Y, they are not using that time to better their product or their service.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Maybe more women coders would join open source if people didn't act like Linus? Not everyone knows he is quite ''normal'' in real life.
I really wish my company had more female coders, because I'd like to see if they would provide a different perspective. As it is, we only have one, and she is good, but does not work in our sustainment group (instead she works on capital projects only).
Maybe coding is just something that attracts more men than women. I know it's always been that way for me. I've known very few women who take coding up as a profession, and those I have known were always very good (or at least, I've known men who were way worse).
However, it's entirely likely that men and women simply gravitate to different professions. We are not the same, to assume we are is to deny our differences.
We shouldn't mandate a 50/50 split, but we should ensure that there are no barriers to anyone wishing to pursue this profession. Once any barriers are removed (and I'm not sure there are any now), then we would see what the true diversity in backgrounds for coders would be.
Can anything be done to shift the demographics [of open-source projects], considering the issues that even large, coordinated companies have with altering the collective mix of their employees?
Since a large portion of OSS contributors these days, especially to the bigger projects, are employees paid to contribute, the questions of demographics of the tech industry, and demographics of OSS projects, are pretty intertwined. When you have so many gcc, LLVM, Linux, etc. developers employed by the likes of Red Hat, IBM, Google, Apple, and Intel, the demographics of those projects are going to look at least somewhat similar to the demographics of developers within the companies in question.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I have yet to encounter one project manager that actually knows the project inside out and isn't just a glorified office manager.
You know how more women can be involved into open-source ? When there are more women coding open source. That's it. This is not a f**cking social issue.
If diversity improves the quality of code, then let every open source project or company decide that it is suffering from al lthose nasty bugs and lack of vision because there isn't enough estrogen in the mailing list. It isn't my problem. It isn't society's problem. It's not like women are banned from computer science and coding. And frankly, nobody how cares many women are coding, good for those who are, and good for those who aren't. It's coding...not suffrage or human rights or anything of fundamental importance to society. It's like cribbing about how all the cobblers in my town are men , no women. Well, boo fucking hoo.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Do open source coders meet in person much? I am not hip to that scene, but I thought it was mostly done online.
Is there a vagina-to-good-code ratio? Please cite the evidence for this.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
One of the things that draws me to Open Source is that the barriers to entry are absolutely fucking zero. You want to build an Open Source app? Do it. Release it. If people want to use it and contribute to it, they will. If not, they won't (see the billions of abandoned/disused apps on sourceforge, github, etc). Run it however the fuck you want.
However, this really smacks of "Oh, but doesn't feel welcome in the community!" that's been going around lately. So the fuck what? DO IT YOURSELF. Don't wait for my approval. Don't wait to look around to see if anyone cares. If you want to do it, DO IT. You don't like how some maintainer is maintaining a project? FORK IT and make SOMETHING BETTER. Show them how YOU would do it. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP AND START DOING instead of WHINING.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Obviously, all women that want to be coders and have the aptitude to be good ones have a more than good shot at becoming coders. That is what matters. As most women do not want to be coders (just like most men, incidentally, the tiny reminder is just larger for men), "getting more women into coding" sound like trying to trick or coerce people into doing things they do not want and what they have no reasonable aptitude for. That never has a good outcome.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Let anyone with the aptitude and the desire to code do so. Enough of this forced "equality" for something that will never appeal to everybody.
What's next? Forcing equality on nursing? Medicine? Firefighters? Garbage collectors?
Face it: "equality" is a mealy-mouthed politically correct term. The term people should be using is equivalency -- as in people with different skills are getting paid equivalent salaries in different professions.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
you're a dick
You think so? Well let's try something then.
Diversity remains an issue in hospitals across the nation, with executives and project managers publicly upset over a lack of men in nursing roles. While all that's happening on the corporate side, a handful of people and groups are trying to get more men involved in nursing school. How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among nurses? 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?
If you find TFA acceptable, but my alterations not, then I am (not) sorry to say that it is you who is the dick, not I.
Open source projects require a lot of your own time, and women often still take on a bit more of the work caring for the house and kids when they are not at work (usually because they want to).
I've recently applied to join one for the first time. I want to do a bit more at home to boost my resume and skills, and I thought that might be a good way to do it. The reason I never have before is that while I don't have kids or a partner or anything, I have a lot of other interests and coming home from work after writing code all day, to have dinner then sit down to write more code, isn't really that appealing. I love my job, but I also like to play drums, I have dance lessons, I sew, I bake my own bread, I read a lot, play video games, and I'd rather be out with friends for after work drinks than still working for free. Is this because I'm a women and more social? I got into coding because I thought it was fun, not because I was a lonely guy with only my computer for company? Or just because it's how I am. No idea. I DO plan on finishing one of my Android home projects one day though, I swear!
Hey girls! Do you want to do programming work for zero compensation? Do you want to spend your free time doing labor? Then OPEN SOURCE is the place to be! Join us today!
Getting more women into getting Nervals Lobster to stop getting more stories about getting more women into coding.
I've been doing an open source project for about 4 years now (I have been working as a programmer since 1998 - I have a Comp Sci degree, too). Considering some of the places I've found my project in use (Middle Eastern locales) I'm almost certain they don't realize it's a one woman show project. I think we don't get tagged as female devs on our projects unless we cover our stuff with pink ribbons and flowers.
If things like gender are to genuinely supposed to not influence our reactions in the workplace, then we need to stop fucking focusing on them and accept people, men and women, for who they are, or whatever interests they happen to have that may, or may not, happen to direct them into a particular industry.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Are we really pondering the question of how to convince more women to code for free? Why? What barriers are there to their participation?
On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog - just pick a cool l33t name for yourself and start contributing, and when anyone finds out you are (or identify) as a girl, you will become real popular REAL FAST.
Ken
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.
Yeah...uh, some executives may have expressed dismay over the lack of women in E & P roles, but if a "project manager" expressed anything on the matter publicly, s/he would be looking for new employment lickety split. Expressing an opinion in the public square just isn't a part of the job description of a "project manager" (at least in the corporate world).
In any event, I'm not seeing anyone *upset* about this issue. Call me when there's a protest or picket or sumpthin.
After teaching three semester-long high school classes on Java, the tools were more of a problem than the programming. With the typical older computers you have in schools, it took about twenty minutes to boot Windows, login, then load Eclipse and wait for Eclipse to become usable. That was a third of my class time! Also, problems with the UI disaster that is Eclipse seemed to bother the girls a lot more than the guys. Also, stupid inconsistencies like how Java requires the file extension to compile like "javac main.java", but intentionally breaks if you provide it in the command to run the class with, for example, "java main.class". Sun knew they were being assholes when they decided to do this to programmers, but while it just made the guys angry and want to learn more about how to workaround these asinine sort of things, the girls just gave-up. Girls are a lot more sensitive than guys, and they understand when people are trying to screw them over.
How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among programmers?
That's easy.
Let people who want to give encouragement give as much encouragement as they want.
Let people who don't want to expend effort not expend effort.
Problem solved.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How many women would give up their nursing jobs to get more men in the field? How many Teachers?
Sound ridiculous? That is exactly what these vagina counters are doing to men in STEM occupations - they aren't creating new jobs for women, they are taking jobs away from men to give to women...
Ken
I recently realized (I'm ashamed it took me this long) that this line of thought is self defeating. Social justice demands equality in numbers. The benefit, they tell us, is diversity in thought. That a more diverse workplace results in a better product or service due to the diversity of those that contributed their ideas.
But these are the same people who also tell us that women are exactly like men and that any difference is a false social construct. That being the case, then once [oppressed minority] reaches parity with the awful cishet white male, then won't any benefit from having diversity vanish, assuming if ever actually existed in the first place?
In short, if we're all the same except for superficial traits, diversity based on superficial traits CANNOT create a different environment.
Uh, Gamer is not equal to Coder (nor are they mutually exclusive).
That's like saying we'd have more women in the engineering departments at the big three automakers if NASCAR wasn't such an 'old boy's club'...
Ken
In my long (over 30 year) career, I've never once seen anyone hired because they were male despite there being a more-able female candidate.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen - I've just never seen it.
On the other hand, I *have* seen a less-capable candidate hired because they were female.
I'm not saying it's common (not least because I don't think it is) - but I have seen it.
In my experience, whether you keep your reproductive organs internally or externally has exactly ZERO influence on how good your code is - so can we just cut all this SJW bullshit, and hire the best person for the job?
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Recognize that there is no justification for the treatment received by Anita Sarkeesian for challenging sexim in games, that would help.
99% of the treatment she calls harassment is people calling her out on her bullshit. She spins this into "Its because I'm a woman/feminist", but the reality is its just the internet doing what it does best: Calling you out publicly on your bullshit. She is also a public figure at this point, and as such, has been receiving what plenty of public figures get - Non-credible death threats and some pretty mean tweets. So what you are saying is that we should treat her different because she is a woman? Or are you being sexist and not saying that all harassment of that nature is bad, but you will only defend it because it is happening to a woman?
But I thought Friday was SJW day on slashdot.org?
Nope! Unfortunately it has been, and will continue, to be pounded to death. Easy click bait and lots of page views for little effort.
Instead of worrying about penis and vagina counts how about we worry about all the American tech workers who have been replaced by foreign workers. 94 million Americans are unemployed including almost half of them are women.
While your number is incorrect, the point has merit. Instead of worrying about things that really hurt our economy (TPPIP/NAFTA/War/Corruption) people that own media are erecting the same straw man over and over. The lie is being repeated so much that people believe the lie (Bernays and Himmler were assholes, but not stupid). This is the value of propaganda, and the US currently is overflowing with it.
The same lies about discrimination in the workplace are being repeated by people that may be well intentioned, but too lazy to actually check a fact and not quite bright enough to realize they are being used as a useful idiot.
I really don't understand how people can believe this is accidental. If one news station had a different story they would make a mint in readership/viewership. Instead, they all repeat the same exact line of bullshit over and over. Also consider that the only "popular" opposition is controlled.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
1) The desire to have a diverse workforce is inherently prejudicial. The workers should be judged on their abilities, not their sex, not their race.
The observation that their are relatively few women in a particular sector wiggles it's ears and strongly suggests that something prejudicial may be going on. Its reasonable to ask why, and its reasonable to be completely dis-satisifed with the set of bullshit non-answers people like you have come back with.
Me: Hey, I notice there aren't a lot of women in tech, what's up with that?
You: You can't ask that! Its sexist! Your sexist. And your a bully! And you want to coerce women to do something they don't want to do!! (Which presumably in this case is to be forced to spend time with people like you.)
Give me a break.
I don't think a any of the proposed "solutions" are anything of the sort. But I think sexism is a definitely problem in tech. And your response exemplifies it far more than it refutes it.
So just stop with this nonsense, if a women is geared towards a career then it is obviously in her interest.
This obscene festish with blacks, gays and women is really disgusting.
Isn't that discrimination? Why must I be of a certain race or sexuality to be considered for a job? Aren't there laws against this in the US?
While I agree we shouldn't try too hard to even the genders in coding, saying that females coders bring nothing to the table that men bring is nonsense. The sexes on average approach problems differently. Neither is inherently "better", they both have strengths and weaknesses. This brings diversity to projects. Even if men only coded with other men and women only with other women humanity would benefit. With mixed teams we can lean on each other to offer refreshing perspective. Again, this is in averages. Every person is unique.
I keep trying to convince my teenage daughters that they should get into coding since they are absolutely guaranteed to get a great job after college, even if they are just mediocre developers, purely because of their gender! But no... they would rather study things like journalism and anthropology. My mind boggles. I am a professional coder who also teaches a college level web development course on the side. I have the resources and experience to train them, but my offers fall on deaf ears. Sigh. Even after being married to a woman and having four daughters I just don't get girls.
Whether he's a dick or not, he's right.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's time for women to build their own open source culture and projects away from the harmful influence of men.
Fuck off, Anita.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't know how old you are or how many jobs you have had, but you present he same whine we saw yesterday. Perhaps here it was a joke, but I see it the same as yesterday's "Linus wrote an email with curse words in it!" thread. Oh the horror!
Even if I was not a Veteran, I understand stress in the work place. I have been at plenty of jobs with "that fuckup" who made everyone work an extra 20+ hours a week for months on end. I have seen people defend "that fuckup" when people finally get fed up, after months of kindness and ass covering don't change the situation. People have breaking points, and they all vary slightly. Personally, with kids I have the patience of a Saint because they have to learn things. Adults, you get three strikes before I tell you to go pound sand, or something more crude.
As a Vet, I really wish people could see what real anger in the workplace is. The stakes are much more obvious when lives are directly on the line. Correlate that to a guy's life work as people try to do with Linus. His income and legacy both hinge on how good or bad the Linux kernel is/does. Oh I know.. it is much easier for people to whine about the horrors of reading a few curse words at the tail end of a conversation.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Quotas are not competition.
SJWs find an issue in everything. Their solution strikes me as being heavily biased toward quotas and reverse discrimination. They're not so interested in root causes. Finding and remedying root causes is work and work and whining just don't mix well for them.
Only a stupid company (or project or what-have-you) would fail to take advantage of talent. That's one thing I admired about the IBM of some years ago. They made full use of the talent pool without regard to race or gender (at least that's how it appeared to me from the outside). And that's the real answer: Make sure there are no untoward barriers to entry[1], and then make use of the talent that presents itself.
Anything else, like bemoaning imbalances and immediately ascribing that to prejudice, is just lazy SJW whining, pointing fingers and looking for problems without being willing to work toward real solutions.
[1] By this I do not mean take in any "underrepresented" member regardless of qualifications or ability. I mean instead, ensure that anyone with ability and interest is not excluded arbitrarily. For instance, give scholarships and work-study opportunities to people with talent but who can't otherwise afford college.
Most people who get into computers and programming are naturally introverted.
This is a stereotype, and not really true.
On the other hand, it's important to understand that men and woman at NOT the same, and they may have different ideas about what they want to do in life.
The idea that in every field, we must have 50/50 is simply stupid.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The link goes to a blog post over a year old. Is this really an active group? If women want to go Open Source but don't like the current regime, they can just start new Open Source projects under their rules.
Typical straw man argument thrown out by sexist SJW
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
"Diversity remains an issue in tech firms across the nation"
It's a bullshit issue, and its importance is artificially inflated by SJW groups. Frankly, these companies that think there has to be a 50/50 split in everything need to get their heads out of the collective asses.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
There is a strong correlation between shit code and developers with dicks. It's pretty strong, but Is it causal?
Perhaps in the case of the perl one-liner -- which is essentially dick-waving...
Required reading for internet skeptics
Yeah man. It's like the prejudice and sexism in hair dressing and dress designing! We need to start training more heterosexual men to be hair dressers and dress designers in elementary school. Either that, or you are an idiot.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
There is not a lack of jobs in STEM. IT, for example, is on the immigration skills shortage list in many countries. They're not "stealing our jerbs!"
Expose everyone to a wide variety of activities from a whole range of fields when they are going through school and encourage them to follow the ones that they find the most interest in. If a girl wants to be a coder, great. If she wants to be an electrician, great. If she wants to be a nurse, great. Same thing for a boy. If they find something that they really like doing then they are going to be much happier in life than if they are just doing a job to pay the bills.
Not if you're white. Also, apparently asian too, nowadays.
Asians have been upgraded to "white oppressor" status.
Build your own fucking community, run by your rules. Shut the fuck up and build something.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Considering we're talking about open source, how it is not open and accessible? You can take whatever code you want and contribute as much or as little as you want. If you don't like the way the project is going, you can fork the code and head off in your own direction and if the community thinks you're doing a better job, eventually you'll pick up contributors.
Forcing morals on everyone else and telling them that if they don't accept it they're being discriminatory is not making things better.
It always has been. They're just trying to get some women involved too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
FORK IT and make SOMETHING BETTER. Show them how YOU would do it. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP AND START DOING instead of WHINING.
Nice try, but Matthew Garrett did just fork Linux and everyone in the Slashdot comments just whined about that. There is no way to win, apparently.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
If women don't care about making code faster and more compact, maybe they should work on other aspects of FOSS. For instance, most of it could use a lot of help in the documentation department.
Documentation is rarely valued as a contribution. We specifically had to go out of our way to hire a technical writer for Mac OS X to get the man pages covered for the UNIX Conformance requirement. And those were just command line commands, Libc, and the kernel interfaces that had coverage requirements.
It's definitely not valued nearly as well as code. The most common comment with regard to it is advice to "RTFS" and some variant of "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand". This is seen in the tools, as well. For example, git is written in such a way that you pretty much have to understand all of it to use any of it. This steepness of the learning curve appears to be intention, and viewed as a merit badge for when someone gets their head around it and Groks it. In the same way that you can do anything in Perl in half a dozen or a dozen different ways, the same is true of git.
Also, your verbal vs. visual thinking bias is showing. Personally, I process software in the same part of my brain that does auditory processing of music (meaning I have a hard time coding if I'm listening to music, as verified by FMRI of the dorsolateral frontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus, Broca's, and Wernicke's areas, among other areas). Language centers tend to be common for processing both sound and software in many coders.
Ironically, if you are good with languages, you tend to be good with code as well, assuming you have a number of computer languages under your belt to generalize from. But if the tools have a crappy learning curve, then it takes a bit of OCD to be willing to invest the time necessary to overcome it. Staying overnight in a computer lab so that you can get time on the machines is not something most people do these days.
I've got three male cousins who are in hot demand because they were smart enough to take these jobs. One's a nurse, one's a primary school teacher and the other works in child care. Though they did what they wanted to do because they wanted to do it, not because they knew they'd be sought after to 'balance' the genders at work.
That's just simply not true. At all. Why do you think that?
5) We need wives and mothers.
Ah, now the truth comes out.
We need husbands and fathers just as much as we need wives and mothers. In fact, we probably need them more at the moment, because the ones who work in the corporate world currently aren't around for their families as much as they should be or want to be. Women are allowed to have a family-work balance; indeed, they are expected to. Men are not.
If we as a society valued care as much as we value making money, institutional sexism in the workplace would be mostly gone within a generation.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
but they do know if you're female
Because I'm lazy right now, lets just go back to the Hitman debacle. She goes off and says the room is there for you to basically kill the strippers and have your perverse fun with their dead bodies. Go google a quick Lets Play - Nobody does this. At all. The few people that even do take the path by the room, they avoid them completely, and just run by. If you even pay attention to the dialogue in that area, you would see that you are supposed to be sympathetic to the strippers plight (dealing with the 'vacation' one of them is taking), and showing how fucked up it can be to work in those situations.
Lets see, there was also the fact that she thinks that Bayonetta is her own mother and doesn't seem to understand how her suit works, or the fact it is made up of her own hair. Oh! Lets not forget that that one game (its name is escaping me) where she cried just viewing some game footage that its a Damsel in Distress trope, yet the female lead SAVES you from being eaten alive from zombies in the opening scene.
If you are not seeing the videos and posts that address the points she was making, you should know something that some people suffer from confirmation bias and really only look in their own echo chambers for information.
Am I saying that she doesn't receive harassment? No. Am I saying that most of threats she receives are non-credible? Yes. She gets the same flack that anyone does online, even if they are non-controversial. Welcome to being in the public spotlight. I don't agree with the harassment that people in the public spotlight get, but to say that this is purely because she is a woman or a feminist is disingenuous at best.
Sexism is a bigger problem is medicine (they make up a good chunk of the 1%).
Make your own community. That's the way of open source.
I can't speak for other people, but personally I do value documentation. Not that I want to spend all my time documenting someone else's work, but when I need to learn about something, documentation is invaluable. No, it isn't as fun as writing code, but that doesn't make it useless. If someone else wants to contribute to FOSS and isn't a coder, but can do tech writing, I for one would appreciate their contribution to documentation.
Just because a lot of stuff isn't documented well doesn't mean it should be this way. git is a bit of a special case: it does have documentation (there's lots of man pages for it), but the problem is that its UI is organically grown, it wasn't really designed with a consistent interface, and it shows (badly). It's very powerful but the interface isn't the greatest; I usually find myself googling for answers when using git, and winding up reading stuff on stackexchange. Good documentation only helps so much when you have a wacky UI.
While I agree we shouldn't try too hard to even the genders in coding, saying that females coders bring nothing to the table that men bring is nonsense.
This isn't a comment about the sex ratio specifically, but if the Silicon Valley brogrammer echo chamber wasn't quite so monolithic, maybe we wouldn't have so much privacy-destroying crapware.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I might have expected that one... Let's cut through this quick:
We can all accept that she made mistakes using those examples. They do not support the points or arguments she makes.
Moving on, can you speak to any of the actual points she's made? So far, all I get are "her example isn't right so we should dismiss everything she says on the basis of those few mistakes." You'll find that you can dismiss anything on that basis. It's completely irrational.
If you are not seeing the videos and posts that address the points she was making,
Well, you haven't managed to come up with anything. If it exists, please, point it out.
Required reading for internet skeptics
STOP INSULTING THEM.
The amount of insults towards a female poster in an open source forum is totally and absolutely ridiculous. Any sign of the girl being smart results in an almost immediate mirage of insults from the open source community. And that is basically in every single open source forum.
The biggest problem the open source community has is the collection of complete and totally anti-social / nonprofessional jerks they have in too many of the development teams.
And no, I'm not a woman. I'm just a guy who is intelligent enough to see reality for what it truly is.
I can't speak for other people, but personally I do value documentation. Not that I want to spend all my time documenting someone else's work, but when I need to learn about something, documentation is invaluable. No, it isn't as fun as writing code, but that doesn't make it useless. If someone else wants to contribute to FOSS and isn't a coder, but can do tech writing, I for one would appreciate their contribution to documentation.
I value documentation as well.
The problem is that the people changing the code out from under the documentation, so that the documentation quickly becomes out of date, or, worse, incorrect and misleading, is those people who are doing that to the code *not appreciating* the documentation effort.
At worst, there needs to be an agreement that things will stay the same for a while, or for at least a major version number, before the documentation goes out of date. And as you've noted with git: when things grow organically and incrementally, it's going to be near impossible to keep the docs in lock-step with the code -- particularly if the only way to make them match up is reverse engineering the code until you know enough about it to document it accurately and completely.
At one point in time, I wrote a rather complete internals book on FreeBSD; but the OS changed out from under the book too quickly, and so it was inaccurate, except for a particular major revision. And even then, there were sufficient differences even in the point releases (to the odd minor version number) that, unless I'd included a CDROM set or DVD with the book itself, there was no way that it was going to be useful for its intended purpose as a college textbook.
So yeah, documentation would be nice, but it's only going to get there as a divided labor effort if we agree to write design documents up front, and then follow a cathedral model for both the docs and the code that come out of those designs.
I think one of the major problems is that when you make something understandable by documenting it ... it makes it a whole lot easier for someone to step in and know how to "improve" things, until the docs are out of date again. At least, that has been my personal experience.
Amazing yourself. The fact that you are unable to comprehend the big scary ideas in my OP says that YOU are the problem, not I. Shut the fuck up and build something.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Non-quantifiable nonsense. "Programming" or "coding" are nonsense, just like amateurs without proper background designing bridges and electrical systems. What matters is SOFTWARE ENGINEERING and all that matters in engineering is MEETING THE SPEC! In this regard the programming world is terribly dysfunctional, far beyond any considerations of the proportions of women vs. men.
Unless you can come up with some sort of research that shows quantifiable, objective measurements such as: that when men AND woman collaborate on software engineering projects that the result is smaller, faster, more reliable solutions??? Then there might be something worth considering real about the hypothesis that there is something about one's GENDER that makes them able to come up with fundamentally different kinds of solutions, such that having a deficit of women is therefore predictive of non-optimal results.
However, considering that programming is ultimately just mathematics and logic, I strongly suspect that the exact opposite would be proven, if such terribly costly and time consuming objective measurements could actually be made--that highly mature programmers regardless of gender, converge to quite similar approaches to solving programming problems, when the ultimate criteria for correctness are SPECS. and the merit functions are purely based on code size and execution speed.
Unfortunately, this shows why books are kinda obsolete for anything that's still under development. For things like awk, sed, grep, etc., they're great, because those things haven't changed much in ages. For a whole OS, not so much; they're all changing constantly. There is an e-book on git at git-scm.org, but being an e-book it gets updated, plus it seems like git has stabilized now.
I'm not so sure the cathedral model is really necessary for a competent and motivated tech writer however. As long as the tech writer can navigate git (using a GUI program like gitk or TortoiseGit or whatever), they can follow the development of the project and then update the documentation soon after changes are made, having the doc updates ready in time for major releases.
But for anything that's still under active development, the docs are always going to be going out-of-date unless someone keeps them up-to-date. This is true of any software project. You can't use a book about Windows Vista for Windows 10.
Because if we take you at your word and then ask for some of that respect ourselves, you say "fuck off, white man".
Actually no. Programming is the imaginations of humans spelt out through mathematics and logic. I am not talking about making optimal code I was talking about new realizations to solving problems. Solving the same problems in another language or faster is not always necessarily all that important except that this reduction allows accomplishments unachievable thus affording new imaginations to wander where we have not tred. The more people we have of different schooling and emotional approaches provides more solutions. When all you have is a hammer then everything is a nail. I am not saying magically more women in CS makes for a better field, just refuting that they contribute nothing. This is why I stressed everyone is different. We all solve problems differently. Some of us obsess over them which provides the concentration needed at times but at other times derails our self. Some of us walk away and bike ride, lightly reflecting and waiting for a Eureka moment that might never come. Likely, most of us do a mix of these strategies. Do you think women and men are not on average emotionally different? Collectively, differences provide more opportunity as we are casting the net wider.
This sort of environment is going to repel a significant proportion of men as well.
"But that's not how it works in real life."
It's only that, well, yes it is. The vast majority of open source software projects, either successful or not, are the creation of just one single person. See? "person", as in "I don't give a damn if they are man, woman or aliens from XK-578".
Anyone can, say, open an account at github and publish their code to their leisure, accept patches from whoever they want and publish about their code and the community of users and developers they want to build around it as much as they want. It's difficult to think of any other human activity more agnostic to personal identity than producing software. And still, there's a gender bias: maybe it comes from somewhere different.
Calling *me* a SJW just tells me you are a frothing idiot with rocks in your head. Care to try harder, or is that drivel the best argument you can do?
Yeah man. It's like the prejudice and sexism in hair dressing
Quite. You think heteromen interested in hair dressing aren't driven away by misogynist peer pressures?
and dress designing!
Is that even dominated by women? I'm far from sure about that.
We need to start training more heterosexual men to be hair dressers and dress designers in elementary school.
Funny. I may recognize that there are issues in several industries... but I don't subscribe to this as a solution for any of them.
Me: Hey, I notice there aren't a lot of men in nursing, or elementary school teachers, what's up with that?
Good question.
Actually no, I never asked that question
You should.
because the answer to it was obvious.
Yes. Quite. Societal peer pressure / peer judgment / being relatively unwelcome by the people there. Men are steered away from pursuing those at every turn.
Just like the answer to why there aren't a lot of women in tech is obvious.
Yes. Quite. But not the answer you wish it was.
Big scary idea's like "This problem everyone is talking about doesn't exist"? Compelling arguments like "you're retarded".
You've got to be kidding me!
Required reading for internet skeptics
I don't understand your point. Do you not work for a Silicon Valley monoculture tech company, or are you admitting responsibility for producing privacy-destroying crapware for the government?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I agree!
We're only hurting ourselves by accepting these kinds of behaviors.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Nah, sounds like you should build something instead of expecting an already established community to cater to your whims.
Brogramming was a hoax. Anyone still taking it seriously is either an idiot or has an agenda.
(which is not to say there aren't a few actual bros out there programming. And a few programmers doing the whole life-imitates-art thing, but they're in the idiot category)
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-...
The problem is that women generally have other things of interest in their lives besides coding. Find a way to ruin their social lives, and a few more might just turn to coding instead of chocolate. It's a numbers game.
I'm starting a campaign to get more women into movies with Shawshank in the title.
From https://www.marxists.org/archi...
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.
Show me where I said that. The fact that you can't comprehend what I said says more about you than it does me. Now, shut the fuck up and build something you fucking idiot.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
You're missing the point entirely. I'd say intentionally.
The sort of adolescent behavior you're defending not only contributes nothing, but is actively harmful to any project. This is very simple. By allowing or encouraging that behavior, you're actively working against the best interests of the project.
All other issues aside, you can not justify that behavior on any rational or technical grounds. It's simply not possible.
You're telling me to build something. Well, I have. So have many other people. We've done it without waving our dicks around and grunting. We've done it without alienating potential contributors or fellow coworkers. We've done it without abusive language, bullying, or intimidation.
Those things are not only unnecessary, they're harmful to the project. By harmful I mean directly harmful. Agitated developers don't work as efficiently. Time spent chest-thumping and dick-measuring is time not spent working toward the project's goals. It also happens to chase out developers who don't want to waste their time dealing with petulant children when they could be contributing something.
I build things. You waste time with petty insults. Go Build Something and quit all this whining and complaining. It's not productive.
Required reading for internet skeptics
^This poster gets it. If I find myself in a so-called "toxic community", I will leave. If I find what that toxic community is doing, production wise, valuable, I will do it myself and try to create a community that is less toxic for me. In my case, I was/am a punk rock kid of the 80s/90s. You want to talk about toxic? The entirety of mainstream America was, in my esteem, toxic. Then in the punk scene itself? The straight-edge vegans and the pc punks were both insufferable. Instead of trying to browbeat everyone into what I thought was the "ideal" punk rock scene (inclusive rather than trying to be a cool kid), I did it myself. I started my own bands with my friends and before you know it, we had a rather large following of punks who had the same sort of inclusive, can do attitude I had. Sure, I can complain about how self-righteous cuntbags the sXe/hardline kids were, or how super sensitive idiotic the PC Punks where, but what good does that do? Do it yourself and don't worry about what other people think. Lead by example instead of whinging about every perceived slight. Shut the fuck up and build something.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
the barriers to entry are absolutely fucking zero
You're welcome.
Now, shut the fuck up and build something you fucking idiot.
I do build things. I find that I'm far more productive when I'm not wasting my time making petty insults and trying to prove that my dick is bigger than the guy next to me.
You should try it some time. You'll find you get a lot more accomplished.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Build your own fucking community, run by your rules. Shut the fuck up and build something.
Despite how disturbed I am by your attitude, I have to admit you may be on to something.
Maybe it's time for female coders to have a github of their own.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
> We can all accept that she made mistakes using those examples.
If one's entire argument is *based* on a faulty premise, it invalidates that argument.
If your world view is *based* on invalid arguments and faulty premises, then you're going to have a warped perspective on things.
*Sometimes*, the little details paint a larger picture. :)
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."
You're missing the point entirely. I'd say intentionally.
The sort of adolescent behavior you're defending not only contributes nothing, but is actively harmful to any project.
Citation needed. People being dicks have managed teams that produce the most well-known products on the planet, continuing over decades - see Linus, RMS and Jobs. Asshole-ish behaviour gets rewarded by the masses *because* it produces what people want.
This is very simple. By allowing or encouraging that behavior, you're actively working against the best interests of the project.
Only if the behaviour is harmful to the project. There is no evidence that this is the case.
All other issues aside, you can not justify that behavior on any rational or technical grounds. It's simply not possible.
You're telling me to build something. Well, I have. So have many other people. We've done it without waving our dicks around and grunting.
Well, so have I. I've actively contributed to the Linux kernel too. And other stuff (opensource) too. So what?
We've done it without alienating potential contributors or fellow coworkers. We've done it without abusive language, bullying, or intimidation.
Those things are not only unnecessary, they're harmful to the project.
Citation needed.
By harmful I mean directly harmful. Agitated developers don't work as efficiently. Time spent chest-thumping and dick-measuring is time not spent working toward the project's goals. It also happens to chase out developers who don't want to waste their time dealing with petulant children when they could be contributing something.
I build things. You waste time with petty insults. Go Build Something and quit all this whining and complaining. It's not productive.
You are actively avoiding the point that open-source is the ultimate meritocracy - anyone who whines that they do not feel welcome in project $FOO is free to start a project $BAR.
It only takes a single developer to start an open-source project that is independent of existing projects. If none/few are started by your favoured $CLASS of people you cannot blame the existing projects for not being welcoming to your $CLASS of people.
It only takes one person to start a project. You are asking "Why aren't more women joining projects?", we are asking "Why aren't more women starting projects?". In the latter question there is no FUD around "toxic environments", "brogrammer culture", etc - yet the women aren't there in numbers anyway.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
My post was about people behaving in an unprofessional and discriminatory fashion. Something the moderators appear to support.
Being able to do the job matters. Being openly toxic towards your fellow workers is grounds for dismissal.
Just because your company succeeded despite people being abusive towards each other does not mean it's the ideal way to do business.
You'd have not made it past the interview process. Keep your drama queen shit off my code and out of my face.
Relax. I would never have wanted to work for you anyway. Besides, you couldn't possibly have paid me enough.
.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Except you've got the context wrong. I was referring to IBM as it
existed some while ago, before they joined the billable hours ratrace
that you describe all too well.
When I collaborate on a coding project with someone, I care about their coding skills, not their sex. I want to get a project done, not fuck them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
True that, though one should maybe note that a surprising number of really good mathematicians and programmers are actually gay.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Only when it comes to science and related fields. They may still be the oppressed underdogs when trying to become driving instructors.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You have to admit, Slashdot comments were pretty depressing today.
FWIW, my comment was not "there is no way to win", but "there is no way to win, apparently". What I meant by this (and I thought it was clear in context, but that might just be me) is that the crowd doesn't have a consistent position, so there's no point trying to appease it. That's pretty much what you said, so I think we're on the same page there.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Get more open source into women.
_________________________________
Woman explaining open source to a guy
"This is closed source"
Lifts her tee
"This is open source"
Build something and PROVE YOUR POINT or fuck off back to your basement with your nasal whinging. It is merit based. You have no merit. If you want some then earn some. Get the fuck up off your ass and do something constructive. If you're right and your way is better you will attract the best and brightest. That's how it works. You don't get to whine and change the existing projects. Build your own. Enough people have explained this to you - there it is in nice simple language anyone can understand.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Nice try. but like three anonymous cowards whined about it and the rest wished him good luck or were entirely off topic. If you are going to go for revisionist history you should probably wait until the article is a little further from the front page. (I suppose it could have changed since I last read it but that's how it was when I read it. Everyone, for the most part, including myself was wishing him good luck and hoping that they'd push and pull.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Fair point. I said "Slashdot comments", but that was faulty memory on my part; Slashdot wasn't the only outlet where this story was covered today. Sorry about that.
It's still true that you can't win, but this has always been the case.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I wonder if there are equal efforts to get more men into projects like community quilts, bake sales, etc? This may seem flippant, but why should it be important that women are not spending their spare time on one sort of hobby/social project, but less important that not many men spend time on others?
Hmm... First you say:
If by "calling her out on her bullshit" you mean misrepresenting her ideas to mean whatever you want them to mean and then "debunking" that?
Then they say:
If you are not seeing the videos and posts that address the points she was making, you should know something that some people suffer from confirmation bias and really only look in their own echo chambers for information.
Then you say:
Well, you haven't managed to come up with anything. If it exists, please, point it out.
And:
We can all accept that she made mistakes using those examples.
Might I suggest that you're too close to the problem and unable to opine objectively? You ask for evidence, you get evidence, you agree with evidence, you dismiss the evidence, you then continue to believe what you've already decided even though you agree with the evidence provided.
As an outside looking in, I'm not a gamer, it does appear that this whole "gamergate" thing is indeed about a developer fucking a reporter in order to get better reviews and that being unethical. Some of those gamers take their games pretty damned seriously and want ethical reporting and full disclosure before they pay good sums of money for their entertainment. They were then shit on and told that they were just sexist for wanting to have ethics in reporting.
Now, sure, at that point they kind of jumped the shark... I don't disagree. Since then we've had unplayable games released that were praised yet simply appear to be being praised because of the gender or sexuality of the developer. And again, the gamers went off the rails. Seeing a pattern start to develop here? I am... I bet it is different than what you see. I see the problem going back to ethics in journalism and the industry as a whole.
Anyhow, this does indeed tie in to the overall subject of the thread and it relates to your sub thread but I don't think you can actually help. You're unable to be objective - your mind is clearly made up. I've seen your other posts in this thread. Your bias is evident and no amount of evidence, as you show above, is going to allow you to be honest with yourself.
That's okay, humans aren't rational generally. You're irrationally basing your opinions due to feelings and that's okay. We're not rational machines, we're rationalizing machines.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Women coders working on an Open Source fork of the Linux kernel ?
(INB4 of course, a fork of the kernel must be OSS..)
You ask for evidence, you get evidence,
Your mistake is thinking that what was presented was evidence against the points she was trying to make. A bad example doesn't invalidate the claim, or address the claim in any way, it's simply a bad example.
Let's try a (bad) example: I claim that most US presidents were straight white males, and offer Hoover as an exemplar. You say that Hoover wasn't straight as you believe him to be a cross dresser. Does my bad example invalidate my claim? Does your argument address the point, or just example?
This isn't complicated.
it does appear that this whole "gamergate" thing is indeed about a developer fucking a reporter in order to get better reviews and that being unethical.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. Though it should be noted that none of what you describe ever happened. No female developers slept with any journalists in exchange for favorable reviews. It was a lie from the start. A lie which you obviously believed.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Only if the behaviour is harmful to the project. There is no evidence that this is the case.
Except for all of the evidence. Developers leaving, numerous accounts of developers refusing to contribute due to the hostility found on LKML, the unimaginable waste of time from the needless flame wars that list is famous for producing. The list goes on.
Linux thrives in spite of the hostility, which has very obviously harmed the project.
You are actively avoiding the point that open-source is the ultimate meritocracy - anyone who whines that they do not feel welcome in project $FOO is free to start a project $BAR.
It's completely irrelevant to the point under discussion here. If you're unhappy with the topic, stop whining about it and go start your own discussion.
You are asking "Why aren't more women joining projects?", we are asking "Why aren't more women starting projects?".
So why hijack this discussion? If you want to talk about something else, go start your own discussion!
Required reading for internet skeptics
It's clearly not a zero sum game, and there are clearly not enough men to fill all available jobs which is why companies are trying to get some many foreigners in on work visas.
More over, the idea that CS should be "protected" from having more women enter because it might create a bit of competition for men is simple misogyny. Would you advocate closing down CS courses and denying younger guys the opportunity to study it, just to protect your job?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As an outside looking in, I'm not a gamer, it does appear that this whole "gamergate" thing is indeed about a developer fucking a reporter in order to get better reviews and that being unethical.
No, gamergate was about a FALSE ACCUSATION about a developer fucking a reporter to get better reviews.
They were then shit on and told that they were just sexist for wanting to have ethics in reporting.
The irony is strong in using a mis-reported accusation to attack someone in the name of ethics.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Open source works best when it is a community. While there are millions of little projects that are buy one person alone, all the big ones (Linux, BSD, LibreOffice, GIMP, KDE, Gnome, GNU tools, GCC, LLVM, Inkscape, EMACS, Vi... the list is huge) are the result of many people collaborating.
The old "just work on your own" trope is simply a way to exclude people from a community. It's offering an alternative to being part of the community, rather than addressing the reasons why the community is difficult to join. Imagine if someone suggested that black people could just go and live somewhere else, they don't have to live in this particular suburb that happens to be full of white people. Don't create problems or animosity, just live and work somewhere else.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The problem you seem to have here, aside from the ability to communicate effectively, is that you think that criticizing something means you want to force that thing to change.
That's not how it works. You can offer criticism without demanding change. Stating what is is not the same as demanding it become what you believe it ought to be. I can also believe something ought to change and say as much without forcing or even wanting to force something to conform to my ideal.
You're free to continue to waste time and effort on pointless flame wars and alienate contributors with your toxic environments in your projects. That's all up to you. I will not. When I build things, I do not allow the kind of hostility that you seem to think is important. I've found that developers are much more productive when they're not busy sending angry messages and fuming over the latest hail of insults.
If you're right and your way is better you will attract the best and brightest. That's how it works.
That's interesting as it seems that the Linux kernel actively alienates the best and the brightest. What does that tell you about that approach?
Required reading for internet skeptics
Can you imagine the shitstorm if female coders started forking OSS projects just because the original had a community that was hostile to them? Actually, it's really easy because you can simply compare these two stories:
Man forks Linux over LKML culture: http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...
Woman leaves LKML over culture: http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...
The guy is just being professional and doing the right thing by walking away and creating a fork. The women is a moaning feminist bitch who should just man up and deal with shit, instead of walking away. It's a double standard, where women are assumed to be acting out of weakness and an urge to nag/misandry.
If you are a women, you can't win. Either you are too weak willed and complaining about nothing, or you have a huge advantage over men, or you are bitch who screams sexism constantly and keeps accusing men of harassing you to get them fired, or you should just fuck off and do your own thing because men just want to be dicks and leave us alone with your feminist clap-trap.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Only if the behaviour is harmful to the project. There is no evidence that this is the case.
Except for all of the evidence. Developers leaving, numerous accounts of developers refusing to contribute due to the hostility found on LKML, the unimaginable waste of time from the needless flame wars that list is famous for producing. The list goes on.
Linux thrives in spite of the hostility, which has very obviously harmed the project.
This "fact" is not obvious. What is obvious is that they are *thriving*. You see "chasing away the good devs", they see "keeping the accountable devs".
You are actively avoiding the point that open-source is the ultimate meritocracy - anyone who whines that they do not feel welcome in project $FOO is free to start a project $BAR.
It's completely irrelevant to the point under discussion here. If you're unhappy with the topic, stop whining about it and go start your own discussion.
You are asking "Why aren't more women joining projects?", we are asking "Why aren't more women starting projects?".
So why hijack this discussion? If you want to talk about something else, go start your own discussion!
You inadvertently proved my point - I'm in a discussion with you, somebody who regularly lambasts others for not following your ideology, and yet .... I'm not threatened at all. If I was indeed threatened I will happily go off and start a new discussion. I will not accuse you of bigotry just because you want to discuss one question and I want to discuss another.
Back to the issue you're really trying to avoid - if existing OSS projects make women feel uncomfortable, why *aren't* they motivated enough to start their own? This is an individual decision for each person; they are either motivated enough to start a project or they are not. If they are not motivated enough to even start (regardless of gender) then OSS might not be a good fit for them anyway.
It's all about motivation. Men are highly motivated to start things. Maybe you should use your platform to motivate females instead of trying to get millions of individuals scattered throughout the world to adopt your ideology.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
So why not? Why do you discourage people from encouraging women to go into open source?
You need to look up the word heterosexual. Now off you go ....
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This makes sense though. The average programmer is.. well, average. Programmers aren't only the best, but there are a lot of average and mediocre and even awfuls in there. But there are few barriers to men becoming programmers; maybe a few parents out there discourage little Jimmy from being an engineer because they want him to be a doctor. But no one ever had their masculinity questioned for considering computing as a career. So the average Joe who can't really decide on a major may choose computer science, why not? They graduate with mediocre grades, then get a mediocre job programming or in IT. But the guy who's really great at computing, who really loves the whole concept, gets a better job.
But then with girls there are a lot more barriers. In the last few decades computing has become stereotyped as a job for men (it wasn't always this way). Parents tell their girls that there are more appropriate jobs for women, why not consider being a nurse, or secretary/admin, or if you seem to like computers then maybe the help desk. The average girl takes the hints. In college deciding upon a major all the peers repeat the message; computers are for boys, and the boys in that department are dorks anyway. So the average girl decides on a different major. So the girl already has to be well above average to go into computing to start with. And they do exist.
So what you end up with is a few good men in computing, a few good women, a whole lot of mediocre men, and very few mediocre women. So yes, the crappy coders are going to predominantly be men.
Now this is where it may sound strange - I think we need more mediocre women in computing! People make arguments all over in slashdot about "let women be accepted into the community by the quality of their code". But I think this is incorrect. We already accept men with shitty code into computing. You know this because you work with them, you've done the code reviews. There are people in every field that seem to have chosen the wrong career path. If you look at the accounting or HR departments, you see a mixture of average men and average women both. So if men can be slackers in computing then women should be able to be slackers in computing too!
You see "chasing away the good devs", they see "keeping the accountable devs".
Even Linus admits he alienates developers. There's also numerous accounts of good developers who have left the project, sick of the toxicity. This isn't exactly a contentious point! The worst of the bunch even agrees with me here. I can only assume that you either don't know or that you're in denial.
(It's also no secret that they're perpetually short on reviewers. Why do you think that's the case?)
I'm in a discussion with you, somebody who regularly lambasts others for not following your ideology, and yet .... I'm not threatened at all. If I was indeed threatened I will happily go off and start a new discussion.
The problem, of course, is that you want to have an unrelated discussion. If you want to talk about something other than the topic at hand, you should go off and start your own discussion. This has nothing to do with threats, ideology, or whatever else you've imagined.
Maybe you should use your platform to motivate females instead of trying to get millions of individuals scattered throughout the world to adopt your ideology.
I know which side of history I'll find myself on. I don't need to do anything. We've seen this same scenario play out countless times before. Equality always wins out in the end. You can fight against it all you want, but tide has already turned. Outdated attitudes like yours are becoming less acceptable with each passing day. I'll bet you're aware of this and find it terrifying. I'm sorry about that. It's no fun being left behind.
I do find your suggestion a bit odd, given your position. You want me to "motivate females", yet you fight (fruitlessly) against every attempt to offer them a chance and equal opportunity, even going as far as to deny that the obstacles they uniquely face even exist. It's not terribly coherent. With any luck, that dissonance will give way to enlightenment and you'll be able to join the rest of civilized society in the brighter future we'll inevitably create.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Well said.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I'm fairly undecided about the "more women as coders" issue. But you know what I am hugely passionate about?
It's also an area where, despite being toted as "no barriers to entry", there is huge underrepresentation, societal pressures, and quite frankly a HUGE need for different perspectives brought on by diversity.
What I'm talking about is the huge underrepresentation of coders dating supermodels. Yes, male coders. Overweight coders. With neckbeards. Living in mom's basement. And not being super rich.
So please help me to start my campaign to get more supermodels to date coders. The details of my crowdsourcing page will follow shortly.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
If you fear about your job in SEM/IT you must be one of the cleaning personel.
Even the most incompetent IT workers, and I meet on a daily basis dozens if not hundreds get only fired when they steal a laptop or commit sexual harrasment or any other more or less criminal action.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
FTFY.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
However, considering that programming is ultimately just mathematics and logic
For a climate simularion perhaps.
For a business application, mostly no.
Most programming is 90% control flow and a Little bit of persistence.
Or did you mean control flow when you said "logic"?
Most of programming is understanding what the bride and groom want to have as meals on the weddding party and: writing the cooking recipe accordingly.
If you can write a cooking recipe of one dish you cook regularily, then you can code.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm somewhat surprised to see so many "let's get girls into technical job xyz" while we never see "get more men to be a nurse!" campaigns. Why is that? And what does this say about the perception of women to which this applies?
The problem here is not that women are under-represented in these kind of jobs; there are very likely good reasons for that that do not involve sexism. The real problem is that they're somehow still given a special treatment. I think this is really sexist; there's nothing that says "girls are special", "girls need help" more than these kind of initiatives. While I'd love to see more female colleagues (or more specifically: more colleagues:p) I don't think this is the right way.
In case women don't get equal chances, yes, let's campaign, but I strongly doubt such barriers still exist in any normal western country.
0x or or snor perron?!
You see "chasing away the good devs", they see "keeping the accountable devs".
Even Linus admits he alienates developers. There's also numerous accounts of good developers who have left the project, sick of the toxicity. This isn't exactly a contentious point! The worst of the bunch even agrees with me here. I can only assume that you either don't know or that you're in denial.
(It's also no secret that they're perpetually short on reviewers. Why do you think that's the case?)
All OSS projects are perpetually short on staff - even the the ones like Gnome, who have an outreach program for women. Are you also willing to argue that it's due to their policies that result in their short staffing problem?
I'm in a discussion with you, somebody who regularly lambasts others for not following your ideology, and yet .... I'm not threatened at all. If I was indeed threatened I will happily go off and start a new discussion.
The proble
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
In the good old days of mainframes, tabulating machines and to a time computers were groups of women doing boring calculations for researchers, there were plenty of women working in computing/mathematics related fields. They were the large majority of people working in the field, and had major contributions to computer science, e.g. Grace Hopper invented the first compiler.
But most women don't like male competition on the job, I don't mean competing, I mean males competing for dominance.
Male competition is partly responsible for long work hours, hostile work environments, socially destructive schedules and family unfriendly policies.
Men compete in ways that cause damage to bystanders, making life for women that want to have a life and a family outside work much more difficult.
While I agree we shouldn't try too hard to even the genders in coding, saying that females coders bring nothing to the table that men bring is nonsense. The sexes on average approach problems differently.
Wait a minute.
Just a few years ago it was drilled that men and women are the same. Now they are different again?
It's hard for me to keep up - can you SJWs please make up your rotten minds?
Any parasite wants to "make things more open and accessible". That is was parasites do.
"Inclusivity" is a prerequesite for parasitim.
Anybody who can pull his own weight does not need "inclusivity", does not need to "make things more open and accessible".
If we can get a little more hatred of the blacks and hispanics we can become a full-blown subsidiary of Stormfront!
Best Slashdot Co
Open source works best when it is a community. While there are millions of little projects that are buy one person alone, all the big ones (Linux, BSD, LibreOffice, GIMP, KDE, Gnome, GNU tools, GCC, LLVM, Inkscape, EMACS, Vi... the list is huge) are the result of many people collaborating.
And many of them (like Linux, Emacs, gcc, most GNU tools) were started by White men working on their own without any community whatsoever.
Even when Linus created git, he started it on his own and only let the community work on it later. - Even though he was already famous and would have had no problems of finding a community right from the start, it was better to work alone at first.
There is absolutely zero barriers for anybody to start their own, better projects.
But that is exactly what the SJWs NOT want to do. [b]They don't want to create anything, they want to take over things that were created by others.[/b]
They are parasites, plain and simple.
I use my visual center while programming, but most of what I call programming is thinking about the problem. When I'm coding, I'm not sure what I'm using. I cannot walk and discuss difficult problems because I will lose track of what is around me, sometimes even lose my balance as I model the problem visually in my head.
At least one time when I was going for a walk with my co-worker, we were discussing something very interesting to me and I nearly fell over because my visual orientation while shuffling stuff around in my head did not play well with my orientation in the real world. I had to suddenly stop walking and purposely focus on something in front of me to quickly regain my balance.
Another time I was sitting at my desk when I had a sudden moment of brilliance when working on designing a difficult system for nearly two weeks. When that happen, I had a huge rush of ideas that suddenly fell into place, causing my visual model to quickly take shape, during which time I noticed my actual vision started to tunnel, and I could not see anything outside of the center of my vision, and then I started to see sparkles. As soon as the moment was over, my vision returned to normal. I was mentally drained for the rest of the day.
No it isn't. Some people are trying to make it an issue. The people that are in OSS development want to be there. The people that don't want to be there, never got into it or left it.
We are living in a society where whining pays off (Affirmative Action, etc.) and whining has worked numerous times in the past.
Of course they will try their proven tactics whenever they see something shiny they want. They do it because it works!
The point is that the meritless SJWs want to tell people of merit what to do.
If you want any respect: Earn it.
Otherwise we will respect you as much as you respect us - which is not at all.
narcc cannot build something.
Huh? When did I ever claim we were the same? Oh you mean some general rhetoric that you think I am party to. Hey dumbass I am my own person with my own opinion. I don't need to group in with anyone. You don't know me and obviously are not taking the time to understand what I am saying. I personally feel like the world does not need to cater to you and as such you need to take life by the reins and make it your own. This applies to everyone. I don't feel like their needs to be anything done to equal out gender distribution but recognize that different people and different sexes can create diverse code that might solve problems in new ways. It isn't that hard of a concept to understand.
The sort of adolescent behavior you're defending not only contributes nothing, but is actively harmful to any project.
Absolutely wrong.
When you respect those that have contributed something (= Meritocracy) you get contributors that feel respected and are therefore willing to contribute.
If you turn it into some SJW-convention where every idiot can get brownie-points based on his race, gender or perversion, then you may attract a lot of useless SJWs but you will lose the actual contributors because they no longer get respected because they are not "diverse" enough.
Get it through your head: We don't want you, we don't need you, you are parasites that are poison in every organization. You are not just useless, you are actually harmful.
Go away and die.
Yet for some strange reason "toxic" Linux is thriving while "diverse" Mozilla is stagnating or regressing since the SJWs have took it over.
Just for the record, I personally think that forks are good (and not "redundant" as is so often claimed).
I think it is great that I can have both OpenOffice and LibreOffice installed - and I don't want to kill off either.
Yeah, I know, I'm probably in the minority on that one...
I could be mistaken but I seem to recall that this was something they had admitted to. As an outsider, I suppose, I will defer to your knowledge.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You absolutely and completely nailed it.
I think the target of her videos are SJWs.
For some reason the law does not apply to white men.
The problem is, most software projects - be they in-house or open-source, tend to have a few scraps of documentation written at the beginning, then as the project takes shape, the basic premises mutate, but no one has the resources to go back and correct/enhance the original documentation. The actual app is full of unstated assumptions because the developers have been doing it so long that they've forgotten that some of that stuff isn't as intuitive as it seems to them. Or worse yet, stuff that's flat out misleading or wrong because of the early-stage changes.
That's a far bigger problem than the relatively smaller changes that come between software releases.
Good documentation requires good coding practices. It's now common practice for the developers to put in JavaDoc/Oxygen/whatever comments into the source code, but the next step up is to remember to explain in the comments what the module is actually supposed to do and give some samples of how its methods are supposed to be called. If you use the JavaDoc system to its maximum potential, you can produce quite literate docs, not just a brute-force enumeration of functions. Few do, however and that includes Sun/Oracle.
These source-bound docs can be used to create the internal documentation set/developer's guide. The next step is to produce usable user documentation. For that, it's usually better to have someone who's a documentation specialist with direct and immediate access to the developers. AND developers who aren't useless jerks who just blow the documenters off with "Read the Code!" AND, incidentally, it wouldn't hurt for code reviews to include comment reviews and witholding integration until the docs are accurate. There's too much artificial urgency in software development anyway.
These days we have really good resources for creating quality docs on a wiki-style platform, so that's the next level I'd shoot for.
Finally, however, a "frozen" copy in the form of an actual book-structured document is important to me. Sometimes I get lost wandering around the hyperlinks on a wiki. In fact, sometimes I'd really actually have a dead-tree reference than even an epub or PDF. Sure it's out of date the minute it's frozen, but the idea is that it's easier to take something that's chronologically consistent and interpolate the latest mods than puzzle through a bunch of stuff that's all over time and space.
I thought you wanted segregation?
There is nothing stopping anyone from starting or contributing to an open source project and you know it. A code commit doesn't have your gender assigned to it.
Men go: "ooh, that sounds like a cool thing to do; it doesn't matter how many hours per week I work, that I don't have a life, that nobody will ever recognise my contribution, it's still cool and hey, doing it in my free time is even cooler!"
Women go: "why would I work in a field that has some of the lowest satisfaction scores, asks me to give up my personal life, and then on top of it also do that stuff for free? That's crazy!"
...or a woman...or a kid...or a grandma...or black...or gay...or whatever. Personally, I have never looked at code or used a library and thought...this looks like a woman wrote it. Code works or it doesn't. Who cares who wrote it? Some women may face discrimination in the workplace. Some may be hired and/or promoted simply because of their gender. I once had a woman on my team who wanted the company to lay her off for the severance package. She did just about everything she could do...come in late...leave early...play games...etc.. The company instead let other men go at layoff time. They wanted her in their stats.
People being dicks have managed teams that produce the most well-known products on the planet, continuing over decades - see Linus, RMS and Jobs. Asshole-ish behaviour gets rewarded by the masses *because* it produces what people want.
That's three examples, and just in the tech industry. There are plenty of non-assholes in the tech industry as a whole, and even more in other industries.
It is more true to say that Linus et al are successful *despite* being asshole-ish.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Recognize that there is no justification for the treatment received by Anita Sarkeesian for challenging sexim in games, that would help.
99% of the treatment she calls harassment is people calling her out on her bullshit. She spins this into "Its because I'm a woman/feminist", but the reality is its just the internet doing what it does best: Calling you out publicly on your bullshit. She is also a public figure at this point, and as such, has been receiving what plenty of public figures get - Non-credible death threats and some pretty mean tweets. So what you are saying is that we should treat her different because she is a woman? Or are you being sexist and not saying that all harassment of that nature is bad, but you will only defend it because it is happening to a woman?
1% of a large number is a large number. Adolescent name calling is one thing, escalating it into death threats (whether "credible" or not) is unacceptable whether the victim is male or female.
Especially when all the person is doing is discussing something trivial like video game entertainments. I mean, who gives a fuck apart from dysfunctional twelve year olds?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
A couple of things, first Nathan Grayson did admit to sleeping with the dev, but he claimed it was days after he'd written his last article about her. Sorry if I find that a little to coincidental. In any case, Nathan did write about her, he was also thanked in the game he shilled for her, he didn't disclose any of that.
https://archive.today/5IBg1
http://archive.is/WtK25
https://archive.today/0KhZv
But the, "Sex for good reviews" is still just a distraction that's thrown in. "Sex", rather than "relationship", because it lets people push the argument toward being about a women and her sex life while ignoring Grayson is the one in the wrong who had the breach of ethics. "Reviews" is used to intentionally obfuscate the issue because he did write about her and her game, but he didn't review it. To a lot of people "write about" and "review" are pretty much the same thing so most don't catch the use of the term "review" until the start getting hammered over the semantics.
This is done to keep people from discussing all the stuff that came out AFTER that incident. The GameJournoPro list, the black listing of journos and devs that didn't toe the line, financial ties between journalists, judges and indi devs, the "Gamers are dead" articles and other journos that covered friends and roommates without disclosures to name a few.
If you do get past the depression quest incident, then they'll likely just start dismissing everything else as unrelated and/or trivial and will claim it's not what gamers are concerned about or they'll use the old, "If you cared about ethics, you'd be going after publishers instead of women" (because some journalists happen to be women and therefore cannot be talked about), which is Kafkatrapping you into defending yourself against accusations of misogyny instead of talking about the blatant ethical violations.
Only where it makes sense for academic reasons, not just because some guy has no social skills and can't interact with other people without screaming expletives at them.
So yeah, segregated bathrooms, changing rooms, introductory CS classes, fine, there are clear reasons and no-one is disadvantaged. Segregated software projects so some guys can be brogrammers, fuck no.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Look at this study : Sex differences in human neonatal social perception.
Will you also say that this difference among children of an average age of 36.7 hours, is because of societal sexism?
I learned how to program alone in the beginning of the 80s. It's me who asked my parents for a computer as my Christmas gift. And I insisted a lot. It's not something they would have done otherwise. No one pushed me into programming as no one knew what it was about.
The interesting thing is in the 80s there was even fewer girls into computers then now. And no, no one was trying to dissuade them to learn to program as no one knew what is was. But the fact is computers and programming are just more natural for boys than girls. It's not because of sexism, it's because boys and girls have different interests. I'm pretty sure that if there wasn't social pressure for "equality", we would be like in the beginning of the 80s, that is with even less women in programming than the situation now.
So when you talk about sexism, give me a fucking break. No. Scratch that. There is a problem of sexism in tech : women are privileged over men.
Sound ridiculous?
Yes. Because it is.
One of the things that draws me to Open Source is that the barriers to entry are absolutely fucking zero.
Sure. As long as you don't mind putting up with a community that still thinks dick jokes are clever.
I agree with all of your merit based comments but the drama seems to come from those who choose a confrontational style of communication. Putting people down and being an asshole just because you can is the height of drama.
5) We need wives and mothers. If we don't have them, we will all die of deprivation when we reach retirement age.
Because women belong in the home, amirite?
You do not occupy the moral high ground, and you should stop.
Aaaaand bang goes another irony meter.
No they aren't. Who ever steered a man away from becoming an elementary school teacher???
The other teachers, his social peers, his parents and friends, the people doing the hiring who subscribe to the same attitude as your ... "men obviously choose to teach older kids" so obviously if your applying for this job its just until you can get transferred to the high school... so I'll just hire a nice lady teacher who actually wants the job and I won't have to replace her... unless we need a token man because my boss is saying we need diversity, then I guess the job is yours...
Despite that, I don't deny that men and women may naturally gravitate towards teaching different grades.
It is encouraged in fact
Sure. Just like women are encouraged to be in tech.
Choose a random women: "You now develop open source software".
She refuses? Bullet to the head. Ask a second one. She refuses? Bullet to the head. Quite sure the third will happily start coding. Rince/repeat until desired ratio is reached.
The interesting thing is in the 80s there was even fewer girls into computers then now.
Well that would be a lot more interesting if it were true. Lets see what the department of labor says about that:
http://www.dol.gov/wb/factshee...
Scroll down to the 2nd graph "Employed computer systems analysts, scientists by sex 1983 - 2001"
In the 80s women made up nearly half, and the gap has increased. So there were in fact more women computer scientists and systems analysts in the 80 than now. Not less. That pretty much trashes your entire thesis.
But you know what, I completely agree with you that men and women are likely biased towards different things. And I agree its pretty likely in a world with no sexism men would still be prevalent in some fields and women prevalent in others. I don't dispute that. I'm not suggesting every job needs to be 50:50 men and women or: sexism !!
But just because that is true, that doesn't mean sexism doesn't exist, and isn't a problem in any industry.
Additionally, when the women who ARE in tech leave tech they most frequently cite the culture as being the primary issue. That doesn't line up with your thesis that they aren't interested in the subject... they WERE interested in the subject, they enjoyed the subject, they left in droves because of the culture. And yeah... I have cites for that... three different studies.
http://www.npr.org/sections/al...
http://www.fastcoexist.com/301...
http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/...
Not totally convinced? That's fine; you owe it to your own intellectual integrity to accept that maybe the situation is more complicated than "women don't like computers as much as you do" after all.
So when you talk about sexism, give me a fucking break. No. Scratch that. There is a problem of sexism in tech : women are privileged over men.
In the sense that all these over-the-top-sexist (pro-feminist) and highly ineffective programs to get women back into tech exist, I completely agree. They don't solve anything, and if anything make things worse. They are part of the problem, but they are not the entire problem by a long shot.
Guys don't want women coming in to their existing communities
Your are intentionally obtuse and it's not doing you any favors. Guys want women coming in to their existing communities. What guys don't want is women changing their communities.
You don't go into a community and change it to suit you. You go into a community and you adapt to its culture or you start your own Casino... well you know how that quote goes.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Nonsense. There is a strong social aspect that you refuse to acknowledge. You have this mythical ideal of a meritocracy that simply does not exist.
Politics, bias, interpersonal conflict, all trump technology -- even in the Linux kernel.
Required reading for internet skeptics
So yeah, segregated bathrooms, changing rooms, introductory CS classes, fine, there are clear reasons
Wait WHAT ?!?
I mean, Bathrooms and Changing rooms have to do with Lady parts vs Man parts, but I'm not clear on what CLEAR reason you see for Introductory CS classes... Last I checked (and I admit my introductory CS classes were about 20 years ago), there was no genital involvement.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Linux isn't thriving, it's surviving. They have a constant shortage of reviewers. Why? Because so few developers stay with the project long enough to be able to contribute as reviewers. The toxic environment alienates developers. Even Linus agrees with me there.
Mozilla, in contrast, is constantly innovating. They're leading new standardization efforts, building new products, and making dramatic improvements to their core product.
What bothers me is that you seem to be defending this childish behavior as essential to the success of a project when it's clearly detrimental. I've yet to see any rational justification for that -- presumably because one does not exist.
Required reading for internet skeptics
All OSS projects are perpetually short on staff
Linux has no shortage of contributors, they have a shortage of reviewers. That is, people who stay with the project long enough to contribute as reviewers.
Lots of people want a kernel contribution on the resume, very few want to stick around after they've waded through that vile cesspit.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I'd agree that it should never be done just because one can. In fact, I'd say that people should be encouraged. However, that's not always the case when tempers flare and whatnot. Personally, I'd not work with Linus. However, it's not like people don't know what to expect going in.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Thank you. I thought that I'd read that stuff before. I'm an outside watching while eating the proverbial popcorn. It's mostly just to amuse myself that I even check on it and I only bothered because it kept coming up and I had no idea what the hell an SJW was. Someone had accused me of being an MRA and I was baffled. I looked it up and giggled as it couldn't be further from the truth. I'm an egalitarian and employed numerous high quality engineers and programmers that were female and very good at their job.
Oh no! I want people to be good at their job! That means I'm some sort of sexist, racist, or homophobic or whatnot? It's even more confusing because I spend a goodly amount of time hanging around with the 'genderqueer" community. I'm also racially mixed. :/ Ah well... I really don't understand it and the more I try to get it (the whole understanding of the thinking process - of both sides, really) the more confused I get.
I will say that there has been horrific behavior on both sides at this point and that no side is able to claim the moral high ground from what I can see. I'm sure certain individuals can but the groups, as a whole, have failed to do so. I also wonder who's trolling who and pretending to be acting on behalf of the other group. I'm sure there's some much like there are Republicans who pretend to be Democrats just to make them seem a caricature.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I could be mistaken but I seem to recall that this was something they had admitted to. As an outsider, I suppose, I will defer to your knowledge.
I wouldn't call myself an insider, but I have looked into it. The supposed review-for-sex review doesn't actually exist. The entire base prmise of gamergate was in fact a lie posted in an 8000 word rant written by Zoe Quinn's ex when he got dumped.
Obviously it's hard for me to prove a negative, but I'm sure if I'm wrong, a friendly neighbourhood gater will pop in and correct me.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm sorry, but I was there in the 80s. And no, women were not half of the "computer system analyst", if by "computer system analyst" you're talking about software engineers or programmers. They were not even one tenth. I'm guessing with "computer system analyst" they include data-entry employees, as pretty much all of them were women.
The problem with sexism in our society is now men are a lot more often victims of sexism than women. Pretty much all schools and workplaces are now organized with feminine social interactions in mind. There's not much place where hierarchy and separation of tasks prevail, a social organization which is natural for men, still exists. Schools and workplaces are now all about "sharing" and other form of feminine interactions. But somehow, sexism against men is ignored. In 1980 there were as much men than women in universities. Now, after countless reforms to make schools and universities more appealing to girls, there's 50% more women than men. But this is ignored. Men's need are ignored, only women matter.
The computer field is one of the last which is still somewhat organized primarily in a masculine way. It's still about separation of tasks instead of sharing tasks. So I wonder if it's not men who are rushing in this field as it's one of the last place which is not entirely feminized, rather than women fleeing it.
You're talking about "culture". But you have to realize that we can't have a "culture" which satisfies both sexes. It's either a "culture" for men or a "culture" for women. So what do we do with this? Do we just ignore men's need because, let's be honest, they are not socially as important as women?
Do you know if they're hiring?
It appears that someone has chimed in and posted links to the sources. It's up above and below my earlier reply. There appears to be some serious ethical issues indeed. I'd thought that was what I'd read at any rate. Either way, the current behavior from both sides is despicable. I'm pretty sure that there's no moral high ground remaining to be had at either end of the spectrum.
I do believe EncyclopediaDramatica actually has a pretty decent article on the subject as well. As I recall, that's where I started my search and I went on from there and looked at postings from both sides in an effort to try to figure out what the hell an SJW was and why someone was calling me an MRA. Silly me for wanting to judge on merits. My bad. They automatically assume I'm sexist when, really, their gender is the least of my concerns and not really a concern at all unless I plan on sleeping with them or, you know, looking at them while they're naked.
*sighs* I'm a bad person by default. I don't even have to do anything. I mean, yeah, I'm an asshole but I should at least have done something that deserves an insult before it's blindly thrown. Trust me, give me a few minutes and I'm sure I'll do something to give you a reason to insult me. Just throwing them at me by default seems a bit silly and counterproductive. It makes me not want to consider their points, no matter how rational they might be. Imagine that! I don't like to listen to spittle flecked zealots. Again, I'm sure that makes me a bad person. I mean, yeah, I guess I kind of could be but not for that. Ah well...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Most software organizations I've seen can use as many good people as they can get. There simply aren't a fixed number of jobs for techies.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
We don't have people studying dress design and hair dressing in elementary school anyway.
However, if heterosexual men are indeed socially inhibited in becoming beauticians, it means that there's talent going to waste out there, and we won't have as good a beautician force as we might otherwise have. This applies to every occupation and group.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
1. Hire them. No, I don't care what your excuse is. No, I don't care what your HR execs and your frat brothers on the board tell you. Just do it.
2. See 1.
3. See 1.
4. RTFM. See 1.
5. Repeat as needed.
Thus endeth the lesson.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It appears that someone has chimed in and posted links to the sources.
Not really. Only one of them contains any mention of the game in question. The mention is one word, which hardly qualifies as a review, and it was written before they had a relationship.
what the hell an SJW was
AFAICT "SJW" doesn't actually mean anything more than "stuff I hate on the internet". There seems to be no constency of its use and it's used as an insult to shut down conversations. It's the internet equivalent of a politicians "terrorists, paedphiles and criminals".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You're assuming those alienated are the best and brightest. I'd submit that such is untrue. And you're certainly free to complain but do it quietly so as to not disrupt those who are working. Your "look at me" skit is pathetic as is your perpetual victimhood. Get the hell out of the way and stop disrupting the people who are trying to get stuff done. Is this too complicated? Do you not understand?
I've read your other posts. You have empathy, that's great and a noble thing. So do I. However, you can't be objective nor can you stop being disruptive. Your childish behavior isn't going to get you what you want. Say your piece and then accept the answer you're given. If you want control then get off your ass and take control.
Go to github and click 'fork.' Tada! You're now the boss. Good luck and try to do good work and we might follow you or use your code. Keep your code in sync as well as you can and push and pull as needed to better the project as a whole. You didn't get your way once and stomping your feet and whining isn't going to change that. You're not the boss. You said what you had to say and were given an answer. Yet, here you are repeating it again and again throughout the thread even when you've been shown to be both illogical and dishonest.
You're not doing your 'side' any favors when you do things like agree with the data given and then insist the problem still exists even though you agree with the data you asked for and were given.
TL;DR You're dismissed. It's not that I don't like you, I don't but that's besides the point and nothing personal. It's that you're empathetic and that's a good thing but it doesn't make for a good, rational, discussion. Like I said, it's nothing personal - I don't much like anyone. There are few people that I truly like because people, for the most part, suck. Sometimes, I don't even like myself.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
What nobody's explained to me is what ethics have to do with gaming journalism. Has it improved that tremendously since I last paid attention to it?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What nobody's explained to me is what ethics have to do with gaming journalism.
Apparently it's unethical to not write a review about a game which isn't released, written by someone you're not in a relationship with.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm inclined to agree though, if you actually want to expend the effort (not that I'm suggesting you waste the time), the ED article is an excellent place to start and has a lot of actual citations and stuff. (Strange, considering it is ED. They also have an amazing article on South Ossetia but that's another topic.)
I think we can likely agree that the antics have gone too far at both ends and that the rest is just noise and pretty much invalidates their point. *sighs*
Also, I think you may be looking at it with a little bias. I'm not so quick to believe it happened so shortly afterwards (the relationship) when there's some evidence to suggest that might not be true. I'm unable to judge, either way and accept that I don't know but with the rest of the evidence (again, there's an ED article that will send you on a strange trip if you want it) it really makes the BS meter ping.
As an outsider, it's amusing and makes me chuckle from time to time. I'm perfectly okay with watching a mentally ill person hurl insults at another mentally ill person. In fact, I find it more entertaining than television. I am, indeed, an ass. I'm not so much an ass as to go to the Special Olympics to laugh at the participants but I get to do it in the privacy of my own home in the form of watching these Gamergate folks.
What I was hoping, when I first heard about this - which was not that long ago - was that it would spark a meaningful and adult conversation. I'm a friggen' idiot. *sighs* I don't know what I was thinking.
Is there an real problem with their being so few females in coding? Why is it a problem? What is the cause of the problem? How can we fix it? What evidence is there that they want to go into coding? How large a problem is this? Those sorts of questions. I seldom see them asked and answered by rational people with data - and that comes from reading lots of people opine. Truth be told, I have neither a nickel invested nor a care in the world. I just like watching the drama and occasionally poking those who are illogical. Sometimes I poke the interesting ones to see what happens next.
We all have our hobbies. ;-)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I'm guessing with "computer system analyst" they include data-entry employees, as pretty much all of them were women.
I'd suggest you actually check what that includes rather than just make something up to fit your preferred theory. I'm not doing your homework for you one this one.
The problem with sexism in our society is now men are a lot more often victims of sexism than women.
A lot more often the victims than they used to be sure. But more often than women is stretching it. We're still doing better than women despite all the advantages they supposedly have. I'll give you that where before sexism just affected women, it now also frequently affects men, and I agree that's anything but useful progress.
So I wonder if it's not men who are rushing in this field as it's one of the last place which is not entirely feminized, rather than women fleeing it.
That's pretty much just speculation; with nothing to back it except maybe wish fulfillment. And even if its true, it simply underscores that a proper balance hasn't been struck yet... both elsewhere, and in tech. It certainly doesn't justify keeping tech the way it is.
In 1980 there were as much men than women in universities. Now, after countless reforms to make schools and universities more appealing to girls, there's 50% more women than men. But this is ignored. Men's need are ignored, only women matter.
Yep, its a genuine problem. But its not the only problem. And its sort of inevitable.
Imagine a world where there was only mens clothing.and women had to wear it despite the poor fit. Then one day we realized that was wrong, and we started adding women's clothing. Suddenly there's clothing that's comfortable for women all over the shelves and its a poor fit for you. And when you go shopping there's less clothing available to you, because some of the shelf space that used to be for men is now not. (There's only finite shelf space after all... ) So you moan about how nobody cares about you, and every week there's less selection for you. Things have gotten worse for you. Its not your imagination. Every gain they make is at your expense. This "change" is an inevitable part of becoming equals.
But your counting down from 100% shelf space. Your fear is that we've traded places, that women are now on top, and men are the disadvantaged bottom; and that nobodies noticed yet.
But that's not the case, you've just lost 35% of your shelf space.
That's sort of where the world is right now, we're changing to accommodate them, and the mechanisms in use are blunt ugly; often ineffective, and grossly unfair. (And I agree we're doing it WRONG.) But at the end of the day, by practically all measures, we're still on top. Comfortably. We haven't traded places.
I DONT support these stupid feminist programs that are crude, ineffective, and unfair. But at the same time I do recognize that changes are necessary.
But you have to realize that we can't have a "culture" which satisfies both sexes.
I have to realize something you just made up on the spot and declared is a universal truth?
There's no question that men and women are different, but to suggest that a workplace culture can't exist that supports both is simply unfounded. Especially systematically across an entire industry. All tech jobs everywhere must cater to your so-called masculine needs. Give me a break. Plenty of other jobs manage to meet the needs of their male and female employees just fine. Men aren't fleeing like rats from a sinking ship from other more gender diverse industries.
Do we just ignore men's needs because, let's be honest, they are not socially as important as women?
Its pretty clear I don't believe that. And I've said a number of times that I think the current approaches to leveling the field are broken, wrong-headed, and often counter productive.
Are you a traffic engineer? Willing to work in North Carolina or Florida? I know they don't need programmers nor IT staff specifically for that department (it's a huge parent company now) but I know they're always looking for quality traffic engineers. I don't believe there's any more cross training though I believe they still send employees off for additional education but I don't know how they work that now.
We used to pay for it all, cut their hours to 30 if applicable, keep their benefits, and pay them the full 40 hours and they signed an "obligation" (not a contract) to continue with the company for five years. They were still free to leave but they'd be breaking their promise and, believe it or not, if you treat your employees with respect and like humans they don't run off even if they're offered more money. Funny that.
I've been back on numerous occasions but it's damned difficult to leave. I do miss the place, the work, and the people. This being in public I'll continue to skip the name but the email address works. If you're a traffic engineer and looking to get out of muni work or are being underpaid there's actually a good chance that there's a company who will treat you right. If you have any experience modeling pedestrian traffic, something often needed for things like malls or convention centers, then there's an even greater need. It's also an area that you're not going to find a lot of H1-B applicants unless that has changed in the past eight years.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
There aren't many women unclogging sewers, collecting trash, or scooping shit at feedlots either, but I don't hear people bitching about it.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Which is convincing our field that diversity helps and lack of it has real impact on the people in it and the society we contribute to.
Because, if you look at discussion like this, too few are willing to admit it is an issue. Too many get defensive and throw up a ton of unrelated issues.
Because it's scary to admit you may not be as rational as you think you are, that you act on societal biases like most people. Even worse, it really hard to have a moment of doubt that you actually may not be a very good person, and all your technical skills and accomplishments does nothing to change that.
That's what this is about. Addressing diversity issues makes things better for everybody. But, no, too many steadfastly refused to accept anybody else's perspective if it is different from their own.
Look at this discussion. Not one well moderated comment had anything that remotely looked like an answer posted in the post itself. Not surprising, because it is clear that not enough people see the issues that do exist and wouldn't be that difficult to solve.
From this, it is clear that there are plenty of programmers that are threatened by the mere idea that they, as a man, could have to work with (or be replaced by) a woman that is just as skilled as they are. This is an ages old theme that plays out over and over again in every aspect of society.
The people that do really well welcome the challenge as an opportunity to improve and learn from all sides. I saw it the CS lab when I was in school. Most were clueless, many resentful, but the really smart ones just worked *with* the women in our class. They didn't tell them what to do, didn't judge, but just collaborated.
To this day, I know a few that resent that the women in our class ended up in the positions they did (most notably, one at JPL working on the Pathfinder mission). The simple fact is that she was that good and they weren't.
My career isn't going well at all, but I'm not going to blame it on so called social justice warriors and affirmative action just to feel better. Easy for me to do. One of my PhD cohort that worked with my advisor was a female. She got a faculty position somewhere, I didn't. In the end, I didn't set myself up like I thought I did, and she did better. End of story.
Making yourself feel better by dismissing progress as the action of out of control protestors (SJW) or as affirmative action gone out of control doesn't actually work in the long run.
Perhaps, if it were true. It's not. The graphs aren't stacked. Click on the "text version" link and you get the actual data. In fact in 1983 there were 199,000 men employed as computer systems analysts, and 77,000 women.
Year: Men Women (thousands)
1983: 199 77
1984: 217 93
1985: 258 101
1986: 253 133
1987: 303 144
1988: 338 141
1989: 383 184
Of course, this also fails to take into account other job categories such as "Computer Programmer" (which is now broken into three subcategories, as I recall)
but I don't hear people bitching about it.
I'm sorry. I don't follow?
Is your complaint that more people should be bitching about it? Because you'd be right, the culture in many of these pretty sexist; even hostile to women. One of my first jobs (still in high school) happened to be 'shit-shoveller' -- and the level of vulgarity and outright pornography that was common at the 'workplace'... definitely grounds for a lot more than just a "complaint".
But are you saying we as a society should spend a lot of resources encouraging women into unskilled low paying jobs that are rapidly becoming automated as part of a long term objective to improve equality? I'm not sure what your argument here is?
No shit sherlock. Nor do we have valid computer science classes there, though you hear the "need" for them discussed, and this is an extension of that which asks "should we have extra special ones that focus on girlz power!!!????". You completely missed my point, based on your erroneous assumption that the disproportionate male to female ratio in tech is due to bullying, or as you put it "social inhibition." We have neither for a reason, and it is the same reason. Women are different from heterosexual men on a very fundamental level. That difference is not a deterrent to growth and progress, but rather a fundamental component thereof, and that difference should be embraced, not dispelled. Only an idiot would try to reject the natural order of the universe, while simultaneously claiming a higher moral ground in the doing of the unnatural act.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The graphs aren't stacked.
I know the graphs aren't stacked. Just looking at the graphics you can still see the curves do not change at quite the same rate.
Your text version link was quite helpful. I took the women as a percentage of the total [ women / (men+women) ] for each year graphed it, and then tossed a trendline on it.
Women, as a percentage of the total are declining. (interestingly both '83 and '01 happen to be about 27%. But the trendline shows a clear decline. See for yourself
http://s29.postimg.org/qit3twb...
You said "In the 80s women made up nearly half [of employed computer systems analysts and computer scientists]". They did not. They made up about 1/3rd. The trend you show is quite weak. BTW, the numbers for 2014 are 511,000 computer systems analysts, 34.2% women, and 29,000 computer and information scientists (no gender data available). If all the computer scientists are men (and I can see three who aren't from where I'm sitting), that's 32.4% women. Right back in the same range as the 1980s.
I'm not sure why those two categories were chosen; I'd think Computer Programmer, Software Developer (Applications) and Software Developer (Systems) would be more relevant. Those categories are more like 20% women right now; I don't know about historically.
Fair enough. I overstated it from eyeballing the chart. But we're still seeing a declining trend. And I admit its weaker than I originally thought.
Well said.
How do you know this?
Sure, some people are jerks. That happens. But what the result of using "SJW" and "political correctness gone mad!" is, is that it gets thrown the moment someone says "hey, how about we try to be a bit more nice to other people? you know, try it, see what happens." All of a sudden many people go "rah! you can't tell me what to do! You're such a SJW!"
It's reactionary, stupid, and hinders having a good community.
All these so-called SJW people are trying to do is give a voice to people who don't have much of their own to stop them being so excluded. Because being excluded causes them to have less of a voice. You see how there's a feedback loop there, right?
If you want to exclude people who aren't like you from your own community, that's your prerogative. What is happening is that people are saying that it is not a good way to have the optimal community.
Also, your parasitism point is ... weird. It doesn't make sense. How does making it easier for more people to get involved make them parasites?
I have news for you - If you are an egalitarian, you are considered an MRA now. Its the way things go.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. Though it should be noted that none of what you describe ever happened. No female developers slept with any journalists in exchange for favorable reviews. It was a lie from the start. A lie which you obviously believed.
Except nobody ever claimed that. She was sleeping with someone who gave her favorable coverage. She is also a rapist by her own definition - She had unprotected sex with someone else which violates her boyfriend's consent, ergo rape. For people who try to take the high ground, I find it amusing that everyone who defends Zoe Quinn and overlooks this part of her is basically a rape apologist. Way to side with the abuser.
300 figures silly!
No, what SJWs want is to kick out the people who are already IN whatever community they are attempting to take over, and replace them with themselves and their friends. Or at least render the existing memebrs subordinate to the SJWs and their friends.. They call it inclusiveness, but they don't mean it.
She was sleeping with someone who gave her favorable coverage.
Again, this is completely untrue. This has been debunked countless times.
She is also a rapist by her own definition
That's just delusional.
Required reading for internet skeptics
[citation needed]
I'm all for seeing more women in coding and IT in general, but why force it? Sometimes women just aren't interested. Granted the thing with Sarah Sharp and Linus Torvalds doesn't help make it look like an inviting environment, and that could be off-putting, but anyone serious about getting into it ought to be smart enough to realize there are a lot of other projects they can get involved with or they can start their own if they don't want to deal with people like Linus Torvalds.
You're beating your head against a wall. The SJW types don't get it because they are just too fucking stupid.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
You're forgetting about its LEGO
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
AAArrrrggggghhhhhhhhh
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Q: Hey, I notice there aren't a lot of men in teaching and then numbers are going down, what's up with that?
A; All straight men are all pedophiles and rapists. That's why we don't let them lead Girl Guide troops and take them camping in the woods. Gay men are fine that's why we let them lead Boy Scout troops and take the boys camping in the woods. It's justice.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Sorry about the editing job above. I was distracted because not only am I drunk, violent and angry, I am also raping a baby harp seal.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I have worked in a couple of jobs where a woman was in an executive position over a team of male developers. In both cases the woman was petty, vindictive and quite frankly a hateful bitch. You couldn't complain about it though. I wonder why?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I do not understand this view at all. Wait 15 years and this problem will fix itself. It takes time for change to filter through the generations. For instance, white people will become a minority in 2043. It's going to happen, with or without programs encouraging more minority babies. We can see that based on existing data. Women are dominating college now -- that means that they have every opportunity to go as high as they'd like to, with or without additional programs forcing their acceptance into specific careers/positions.
In fact, the share of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies has more than doubled in the past five years (from ~2% to more than 4%). The reason it's not higher now is likely because the people at the very top are also the oldest people in the organization. Namely, there's still a large segment of the upper crust of the working class that's from the last generation of women who were family-focused instead of career-focused. Although it's changing, Gen X and Boomers still dominate the workforce (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/11/millennials-surpass-gen-xers-as-the-largest-generation-in-u-s-labor-force/), and most Millenials are still in the early stages of their career. You don't get to be the heads of the largest companies overnight. When I hear these complaints that bitch about the lack of equal results vs equal opportunity, I roll my eyes. The writing is on the wall, but they want it now. It's unreasonable to expect drastic workforce demographic changes overnight.
Men have every right to be upset, because the future of younger male Millennials is potentially being robbed because of imbalances exhibited in Gen X/Boomers big picture demographics. By stacking the deck at the bottom (college/opportunities/etc) in favor of women, all they're doing is strangling the future of young males today. 30 or 40 years from now the ratio could very well be 70-30 in favor of women, and all you accomplished was torpedoing the chances/dreams of a generation of men. No one deserves special privileges. It should be a level playing field, with everyone given the same opportunities to succeed. If THAT is broken, fix it. But if equal opportunity is already there, men of this generation should not be intentionally disadvantaged merely because of existing demographics in the workforce or because generational change takes a long time.
Again, this is completely untrue. This has been debunked countless times.
Okay, so she gets favorable press from Nathan, thanks him in her game, then sleeps with him within a week timeframe of the article being published. Obviously there was a relationship of sorts there. Remember, Nathan did publicly say he slept with her, and she never denied it outright.
As for the rape by her own definition: 1) She had unprotected sex with Josh. 2) She had unprotected sex with Eron shortly there after. By having unprotected sex with someone else during their break period then having unprotected sex with him, that provided ground for his consent being revoked by having sex with him under false pretenses. Ergo rape. What happened to listening to the victims?
Especially when all the person is doing is discussing something trivial like video game entertainments. I mean, who gives a fuck apart from dysfunctional twelve year olds?
I see this a lot. Its almost like people don't realize that the video games industry is the largest form of entertainment media in the world. So yeah, it is kind of a big deal. It may not be to you, but there is a ton of money generated by the industry.
I do not understand this view at all.
How so you seem to agree with me.
Wait 15 years and this problem will fix itself. It takes time for change to filter through the generations
I don't disagree that time is a crucial element to fixing the issue; but you can't seriously think that a hands off approach will solve all equality problems.
For instance, white people will become a minority in 2043.
That line of reasoning really doesn't really apply to men and women though. We've always been in roughly equal proportion.
When I hear these complaints that bitch about the lack of equal results vs equal opportunity, I roll my eyes. The writing is on the wall, but they want it now. It's unreasonable to expect drastic workforce demographic changes overnight.
I agree.
But if equal opportunity is already there
Is it?
all they're doing is strangling the future of young males today. 30 or 40 years from now the ratio could very well be 70-30 in favor of women, and all you accomplished was torpedoing the chances/dreams of a generation of men.
Didn't you literally JUST say big picture it will sort itself out over time. Why won't that sort it self out before it gets that far out of whack? We'll see this big crush of women ...and react and a then a generation later things will stabilize.
Meanwhile, it seems you feel women don't have the right to be upset today about the inequality that is clearly present... it's ok to torpedo their dreams today because, "it takes time for this shit to work through the system; don't worry things will be better for your grandkids" ... and in the next breath men have "every right to be upset" about a possible future that may not even come to pass where they might be at even a modest disadvantage.
I'm really doubting women will be holding 96% of the fortune 500s before things start to level off; and extremely confident that even if they surge over 50% due to misguided programs that it won't be much over 50% and it won't last the next few thousand years. So WORST case one generation of men has to deal with the prospect that he's only got 90% of the prospects he'd have had if he were born female. Big picture... so what? Just part of the long term process.
Out of curiosity, would it be "more fair" to ensure men are never at a disadvantage; but let it take a few extra generations for women to catch up?
Personally, I don't think its going to happen; and the suggestion that millennials men are already at disadvantage is laughable. They have better prospects than women. Maybe some future as yet unborn generation and the pendulum will have crossed over and they'll have fewer prospects than women, but your deluding yourself if you think millenials is that generation.
But if equal opportunity is already there
You haven't demonstrated "equal opportunity" is already there.
men of this generation should not be intentionally disadvantaged merely because of existing demographics in the workforce or because generational change takes a long time.
I completely agree. I think a lot of the programs aimed at "correcting the problem" are themselves offensive, ineffective, and counter productive. And I do think its a gradual process that's going to take time. But I don't begrudge women for wanting results faster. If you were the gender that only had 4% of the fortune 500 spots, would you be satisfied? I think not... you think millennials have every right to be upset, and they aren't even at a real disadvantage.
Your claims get softer and softer the more facts we introduce: Here's the article you mention, give it a read.
It's pretty clear than anyone covering that topic would have, by necessity, mentioned Quinn. There are a lot of names mentioned in that article because it's about a game jam reality tv show of which she was a participant. To not mention Quinn would have been an odd omission. As for any special treatment, look at how much coverage Quinn gets compared to everyone else, and if that's positive, negative or neutral in general and in relation to the many other people mentioned and quoted in the article. There's no reason to suspect she was granted any special treatment.
It's pretty obvious to everyone that she wasn't exchanging sex for press coverage. You can believe that if you want, it's not impossible, but there is absolutely no evidence to support it. How do you justify this belief?
As for the rape by her own definition:
Still absurd nonsense, lacking any grounding in fact.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I think based on a number of factors, and observe, that men and women are very different indeed. I do not think that women contribute nothing different than men, for that would be an unwarranted conclusion, ie., there just isn't enough evidence. The truth is I just don't know. So I have two perspectives on this:
1. As you implied, men and women are emotionally different, as well as different in many ways which we probably don't even know about, plus the other kinds of differences we do know about. Though, the last time I looked into this, there didn't seem to be any remarkable science suggesting that we differ radically in cognitive approach, though there are probably some more subtle general differences that may become better understood in time. There does seem to be slight differences in variance of IQ for ex., though this is probably only relevant at the tails, and not so much for the -0/+2 sigma band likely to account for most programmers. Nor is it clear how differences in IQ map to cognitive skill distributions.
The point being, that I strongly disagree with the self-contradictory nature of feminist arguments, that on one hand gender differences are all socially constructed, yet in the next breath, I hear them tell me how having diversity of gender, race, sexuality, etc. leads to "more solutions."
I don't think there is any proof of this at all. But I will grant you that it is, remotely, plausible.
But if we are going to accept that as an open hypothesis, then there's a big problem with "all gender differences are socially constructed" don't you think? Because, IF the socially constructed theory is true, THEN it is the only mechanism by which diversity of people types can lead to "more solutions!" Yet it is the goal of feminists to ELIMINATE socially constructed conditioning, isn't it? Which means feminism's goals are mutually exclusive. If you eliminate the sources of social conditioning, you are left with an amorphous mass of undifferentiated personalities--in which diversity does not and cannot exist!
2. So to approach this scientifically, we need two things: a) evidence that diversity of gender leads to better solutions--however you want to judge what constitutes better is open to debate. But just "more" solutions I don't think really matters because having more shitty solutions does no one any good, which doesn't help our crusade to make the world a better place does it? b) We need further evidence that *gender* itself is the CAUSE of better solutions. This is tricky, because the social dynamics of co-ed vs. predominantly unisex environments may differ. For pete's sake, there are even pheromones! We have only begun to scratch the surface as to how many subtle variables may be involved, many of which are side effects of gender and yet which may affect outcome.
At this point, I'm quite certain that no such evidence exists for gender being causative of "better solutions". Frankly, I don't even think human beings are capable of carrying out this science objectively in the first place.
So what if it's true anyway? What does it mean? Does it justify force of law to compel male dominated coding communities to invite and "be nice" to women, since it seems the slightest offense can make the typical women completely loose confidence in her most deeply held interests?
Once again we run into a serious problem of logical contradictions and mutually exclusive goals if we go down this road, because remember--the premise is that men and women ARE fundamentally different, or else diversity is FALSE. And so if we are still working with that premise, and we really have no choice because it is true and everybody knows it--then it is also possible (and even likely) that men and women differ significantly in the degree to which their average personalities are drawn to programming!
Therefore, this entire issue of "there aren't enough women in programming" is a non-issue because IT IS THE VERY MANIFESTATION OF DIVERSITY!
Even the simplest program flow control with nothing but a few if then else statements is logic, yes indeed.
Here we go with the "anybody can code" theory again. I will only say this--I think it's bullshit because there is much more to it than just being able to spell things out step by step. I will simply give an anecdote. If you think it's meaningless, fine. Hopefully some will "see" the meaning here:
I once hired an intern to help me with electronics design work. Part of his job would be to learn to use the scripting facilities of a PCB CAD program, then write a program to take human data entry input descriptions of high pin count devices and automatically turn them into the functional and mechanical models needed within the program, a process which, to do by hand, is extremely tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming.
Well this kid absolutely kicked ass on this problem, and wrote a piece of software that is now an important asset to my operation, in just about 2 months.
He also tried to make a few actual PCBs. Here he didn't fare so well. The first run had a serious oversight--forgot to see if the mechanical orientation of a connector mated correctly with another--that sort of thing. So he revised it and we did a 2nd run. Uh-oh, another few small mistakes that made it not quite useful. I think the 3rd rev. turned out Ok.
Now this sort of success rate is not quite good enough in the hardware design world, because, re-spins of boards are $$$. What's even worse is when lack of attention to detail results in faults you don't discover until some time down the road, when suddenly 1000s of products come back on warranty because someone didn't take the time to read every single fucking word of fine print in a datasheet, and investigate the potential significance of every single ambiguity!
Can anyone do this? No fucking way!
I am not trying to say that my intern could not have developed more attention to detail with experience, or that all people who aren't inherently this perfectionist can never develop satisfactory attention to detail. It is highly possible and probable that some might. But I am absolutely certain that there are also some people who can never, ever, develop the sort of attention to detail needed to do engineering with a success rate high enough (in the >=95%, preferably 99% range, or even much higher, depending on the sub-field) to be successful, regardless of their overall intelligence.
Now what has this got to do with whether anyone can code or not, since clearly they are different, or else why did my intern do so well at the programming problem and not so well at the hardware design?
For starters, programming has a much shorter feedback period. You blow two board designs, and by the time the 3rd is working, your competitor has had a several month lead in the marketplace. But if you are playing footloose with code, you notice the big errors, and are able to correct them, in minutes or seconds.
However, what separates programming from recipe writing is that you are dealing with a machine that has absolutely no idea what you really mean, and so ultimately, the level of attention to detail required to get programs to work right is actually very high. High enough in fact, that when combined with the fact that one must learn a programming language, which involves some unavoidable level of abstractions as well as all sorts of weird arbitrary rules, the result is that there will be a proportion of people, again regardless of intelligence, who will simply be unable to deal with it and will give up due to frustration.
The programmers who persist and get past the frustration do so because there is something that makes them inherently like programming, and this, by definition, cannot be learned or taught.
Finally, there will be some who will struggle to grasp even basic abstractions, and even more who will forever be baffled by higher abstractions. Now many might be able to accomplish useful goals through progr
Your so called "segregated software projects" are not segregated at all. There are no rules or laws that bar certain genitalia from committing code. But you want rules on genitals in places where genitalia doesn't matter.
Just curious, what is your end game, or victory condition? a 50/50 split? or more women than men? Is that victory in-achievable if there is an ass hole on the internet?
Even if I've employed women over men because they were the most suited for the job? They also look nicer in a skirt but that's besides the point. ;) Either way, I fail to see how I'm bigoted by being preferential to quality over gender. I just don't get it. I didn't hire because of altruism, I hired because I needed help. I hired the best and brightest I could find because I wanted someone who was as good or better than myself.
I hired IT staff, engineers, programmers, etc... I can not wear all those hats as well as a specialist can. I know, it's taboo to admit such here but really - I had better IT staff, programmers, and engineers than I was able to be. I'm a maths geek. I am not a programmer. I can code in a variety of languages, I can secure and admin a system, etc... I can't do so as efficiently or as consistently as the professionals. That's why I hired them.
I didn't, and I still don't, care who they slept with or where they peed from. Quality, that's the metric. Hell, not even quality - I hired some who had not proven themselves yet but had a good education and were able to demonstrate that they'd reward us for the effort we put in to train them. (It's hard to find traffic engineers.)
I had multiple races, genders, and sexualities working WITH me. (Not for me. They worked with me. A few people even had a higher salary than I had, at least on paper.) I even had a DB admin who's species was questionable. I am not sure if those guys are humans. I really have no idea. Hell, we even had a male secretary. It's not like we were some mythical cabal where we scoffed at womenfolk and would hire someone less capable because of their gender or sexuality. You're an equal until proven otherwise and then you might just be more superior. Equal in the sense of what you're valued at by the company on paper - everyone gets treated more or less the same. We pulled no punches but we laughed and, truly, cried with one another.
Hell, we had times where we shut down the office because someone had a death in the family and we wanted to go to the funeral or to comfort our coworker and friend. We got shitfaced together. Laughed our asses off together. Yelled at each other. Called each other names just to piss them off because they came in to work with a hangover. And we got over our hurt feelings (if we had any) and moved on. It never, not once, crossed any sort of line from what I observed.
If there was a customer in the building our behavior was (usually) different. If not then we were a clothing optional facility! No, not really. But, sort of - we were much more relaxed and comfortable without customers in the building. We still wore clothing. Not always shoes though. I used to meander around in socks or moccasins all the time. Another was always in sandals and another was barefoot - even in the winter.
We were a happy bunch in an immature business sphere. We worked hard, played harder, and all that.
I say all that because, well, it baffles me that people will know this (and some do) and still seem to think that I'm an "MRA." I simply don't get it. Shouldn't a men's rights activist be just as proud and respected as a woman's rights activist? If not then why not?
I certainly am a men's rights activist. I'm also a female rights activist. I think a better term would be to say that I'm a human rights activist. I mean, yeah, I've met people from this site in the real world. I've met others from other sites. I'm not exactly unknown or anything. So, I operate under the assumption that I have no privacy so people have access to everything I've said, personal opinions, etc... How are they still concluding, with all this evidence, that I'm a bigot?
I'm not. At least I'm pretty sure I am not. I don't go out of my way to support anyone above the other except based on what they do or what they have done. I am not sure how this makes me a bad person. I've tried asking, I truly don't understand, and I get ignored once the questions become uncomfortable. At least that's what I'm
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
What if that ubernerd, brony and pony BDSM loving person is your no. 1 contributor? Who cares what it does while not coding, if the code is awesome, functional and just fits in?
The end game is that everyone who wants to participate has the opportunity to do so without having to put up with bullshit due to their gender/age/race/sexuality/etc.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Even the simplest program flow control with nothing but a few if then else statements is logic, yes indeed.
Thought about that, after I was finsihed writing. We don't call that logic, but control flow. With logic we usually mean boolean algebra, horn logic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_clause) or predicate logic.
I'm not arguing that _everybody_ can code, or should learn coding. However the majourity could. The question is where to draw the line. What is actually coding/programming?
Writing a socket based program that does http request is not really a challange, but tedious. I guess I would Need a few hours (if I want to do more than simply write "get URL" to the socket).
However using an HTTP library from Python, or curl in a Shell script is easy.
My favourite teaching languahe still is Pascal.
A Pascal programm looks like a cooking recipe.
Ingrediences: types and consts
Tools: variables
ToDo's: procedures
Fitting all together: the main program
I agree with most of the stuff you write ... about abstraction, level of detail etc.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Beyond that, it goes to show the cronyism that is present in the journalism field. He is credited in the game back in Feb 2013 according to the game files last edit dates.
Still absurd nonsense, lacking any grounding in fact.
The point stands that they had an agreement, she violated it, and it revoked their agreed consent before the issue. What is sex without consent?
everyone who wants to participate has the opportunity to do so without having to put up with bullshit due to their gender/age/race/sexuality/etc.
Break out the champagne. For the most part that has been achieved. A few ass holes != industry standard. That doesn't even address the ability to avoid said ass holes by forking and starting your own committee around a project.
Small % of women in open source != less opportunity and more bullshit because gender.
My argument is:
Women occupy "the center" of "the ladder". There's a few at the top, percentage wise less than men, but they're well established at the top as CEO's board members, elected officials etc... There's next to none at the very bottom, an area all but exclusively occupied by men. In the middle women get preferential treatment to men due to government pushes.
Why aren't people bitching women aren't at the very bottom also? If they really want equality they will want to be equal across the entire spectrum, not just the middle and top. Women not wanting to do open source where the door is literally open to anyone who wants to help from anywhere with an Internet connection, and in the case of OLPC's and the like even open to those who don't is not the fault of men. It is because women aren't doing it.
It is dishonest to say they want equality then not take the bottom rung too.
Stop pointing the finger at men when women chose not to do something.
I have shoveled shit, painted fences, picked cantaloupe, chopped weeds, washed cars, and moved furniture myself. I know what the workplaces are like, is it up to men to soften up or women to toughen up? I've worked with women that had toughen up and were worse than the men, they all hold a special place in my heart and I respect them greatly for it. I can't wrap my head around the concept of expecting the entire world to change to accommodate the incompatibilities of a few unwilling individuals because another part of the society thinks those unwilling individuals need to be in positions they're incompatible with. The case of open source, being so accepting and wide open proves my point, not the other way around.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Your assumption that my assumption (which isn't really an assumption) is erroneous is unsupported and, I believe, wrong.
First, this isn't an assumption. It seems to me a very likely circumstance. In general, when we see women or men or minorities rare in a field, we often find that there are social pressures involved. If a girl announces in school that she wants to be a hairdresser when she grows up, no real problem. If a boy does, there is going to be a big problem with his peers. That's social inhibition.
Gender roles have changed considerably over history. If it turns out that our society has actually gotten them right biologically, without explicitly researching and testing, that would be a near-miracle.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yes. If things unfold in the natural order of things that would be a real miracle! That miracle is called life. Everything is as it is supposed to be. Sara Sharp is supposed to push back the way she is, and we are supposed to realize she is an immature person not ready for the pressures and realities of the LKML. We are supposed to recognize that she is tilting at windmills, and trying to get something to go her way because she is a child. I realize that. You don't quite seem to yet, but I certainly hope you will grow until you do. Have a nice day!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
> "one of of our bridesmaids had to turn him down at a convention, and found out he hit on her mother before she was born. The man will pursue anything remotely feminine." ... and is apparently also a time-traveller, hitting on someone before they were even born. That's an impressive feat.
Yes. But note in this case it's not coming from the hairdressers; it's not the female and gay male hairdressers who dominate the profession who are driving heterosexual men out, it's the male peers of the boy who presumably have no interest in hairdressing at all.
Same goes for the tech professions at the primary and secondary educational level. Whether or not Linus is an ass (or whether or not I am, for that matter), has absolutely no effect on girls in school who may have an interest in tech. Whether their female peers disapprove has a huge effect.
The suspicion of the claims that she slept for favorable coverage does NOT mean the Kotaku article.
On the RPS article, you should note the date is early January, three months before they had any sort of romantic relationship. Regardless, there's no reason to suspect that there was any sort of exchange or arrangement. Quinn's game is highlighted along with two others in the RPS article, naming them as standouts in a list of 50 other games. If there was any sort of exchange, it's not evident from the article.
Beyond that, it goes to show the cronyism that is present in the journalism field.
I'm not convinced. I'm surprised you are. Quinn's later relationship to Grayson doesn't seem to have had any impact on his coverage of Quinn's work either before or after their romantic involvement. He never even reviewed the game.
this whole "gamergate" thing is indeed about a developer fucking a reporter in order to get better reviews and that being unethical.
He never even reviewed the game. The evidence just doesn't support this claim.
To the softer claim: I have to question why the only example of cronyism in the industry that sparked this outrage was a tryst between an obscure indie developer and an even more obscure freelance journalist. Particularly when there's no reason to believe that their romantic involvement had any impact on the journalistic work either before or after their romantic encounter.
Quinn and Grayson are held up as the smoking gun, yet their story does not exemplify the problems GG claims to be deeply concerned about. You can hardly blame anyone for thinking that they have a different agenda, particularly with all the other rhetoric that surrounds the movement, and the lack of evidence
The point stands that they had an agreement, she violated it, and it revoked their agreed consent before the issue.
Again, there's no evidence here that she's a rapist by her own definition. Where has she offered up this alleged definition? Where's the evidence these other things took place? What's the point? How does that relate to the other claims?
Required reading for internet skeptics
Ask Barbra Streisand.
The Streisand effect happens when someone attempts to hide something that was public, thereby calling attention to it.
In this case, we have an obviously false claim, supported by no evidence, that no one is trying to cover-up. The two are unrelated.
I suspect it's because the problem they claim exists does not, or that there is no evidence to support their belief. Repeating the obvious lie, in hope that people will believe it, has thus become their only option.
The question, then, is why continue to make false claims? What do you hope to accomplish? To call attention to a problem that doesn't seem to exist in hopes that it will become solved? How would you know? If the problem of ethics in games journalism was solved, there would be no evidence of ethical problems -- which is exactly the state we find ourselves in now.
Could it be that GG has a different agenda than the one they claim? Perhaps one more closely aligned with the rhetoric you hear from GG supporters?
Required reading for internet skeptics
Bingo.
No one was trying to cover-up? Really? What is it you said earlier?
Ah. Right.
That's not an attempt to hide information. That's removing a disruptive and anti-social element from their forums.
Remember, there is NO EVIDENCE to cover-up. No attempt has been made to remove any damning information about the subject because none exists.
You can't hide something that doesn't exist.
Required reading for internet skeptics
"They're not even [within] 100 miles [of Baghdad]. They are not in any place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion ... they are trying to sell to the others an illusion."
Well, then present some evidence. As you've seen, all the stuff floating around doesn't even begin to support the claims being made.
Given the lack of evidence, why to you continue to believe that obviously fictional narrative? What purpose does that serve? Aside from blind delusion, the only reason I can see is that you believe promoting that nonsense somehow supports an agenda unrelated to ethics in game journalism.
Required reading for internet skeptics
And you dodge the fact that Grayson is in the games Thank You dev files since Feb 2013 (Last revision of the files), and the article was released Jan 2014. Good job trying to divert attention and then set up strawmen arguments. You also keep diverting back to REVIEW when I keep saying FAVORABLE COVERAGE. I see no reason in continuing this if you regularly dodge points that put holes in your argument and keep trying to use a strawman argument about reviews when I have repeatedly said favorable coverage. Hell, go look up the Gamer Noche article headlines - It states favorable coverage, not reviews. The other side twisted it for reviews so they could shoot it down fast, when, in fact, nobody has ever made that claim from the beginning.
GameJournoPros mailing list.
/thread
And you dodge the fact that Grayson is in the games Thank You dev files since Feb 2013
I didn't think it was relevant, as he's in a giant list of people that at least one of the many people involved in development presumably knows in the rather small (as far as people go) games industry. You're making quite a few assumptions here.
Of course, even if we accept the claim that they did know each other (which isn't unreasonable) it does not in any way support "the claims that she slept for favorable coverage".
You also keep diverting back to REVIEW when I keep saying FAVORABLE COVERAGE.
Which, is ridiculous. The best you can manage is a single mention in a list of standouts in a giant list of games by an obscure freelance writer three months before they had any sort of romantic relationship. It's just foolish.
the claims that she slept for favorable coverage
are completely false. There is absolutely no evidence to support this.
The other side twisted it for reviews so they could shoot it down fast, when, in fact, nobody has ever made that claim from the beginning.
In the post I replied to:
this whole "gamergate" thing is indeed about a developer fucking a reporter in order to get better reviews and that being unethical.
This is obviously false. It's just as false when you replace "review" with "favorable coverage".
It's pretty clear that Quinn didn't exchange sex for reviews (as none were given) or for "favorable coverage". After Grayson and Quinn became involved in a romantic relationship, Grayson wrote absolutely nothing about her or her game, and virtually nothing before hand (see above). It's false on it's face. Anyone can see that. I suspect that you know it's total nonsense. Why continue to promote an obvious lie? It completely undermines your credibility.
On GG itself: Why is this obviously false narrative the best example you have of corruption in games journalism? You have but one completely fictional example of the thing you're claiming the movement is intended to address. What can anyone conclude but that this oft-cited mission for GG is completely untrue and that they have a completely different agenda?
Required reading for internet skeptics
I'm not so quick to believe it happened so shortly afterwards (the relationship) when there's some evidence to suggest that might not be true.
Either way though, it's not a review. This is the problem: the entire thing was based on a false premise.
Also, I think you may be looking at it with a little bias.
I'm not sure what qualifies as bias in this context. Most of what I've read about gamergaters paints them in a rather poor light. So these days I'm biased against them, but I don't think it's unreasonable to judge people based on their behaviour.
Is there an real problem with their being so few females in coding?
It depends. If there's simply something fundemental about women which makes them on average less likely to prefer coding on average and the differences in numbers are simply a reflection of that, then no, there's no problem.
If there's other causes which are pushing out people who would otherwise like and be good at programming then yes, I think that is a problem, just as much as it's a problem that there's huge pressure for men to not be infants and junior school teachers these days.
I seldom see them asked and answered by rational people with data
Surely you want them answered by people with data :)
But yes, data is good. We have of course piles of anecdotes and things we may have personally observed (I've seen some conferences where women have been subjected to some rather shoddy behaviour and other ones where there has been nothing wrong at all---curiously IME the quality of behaviour correlates strongly with the quality of conference). I have many more anecdotes of course.
But as to hard data, it's difficult to get. That said people have tried a few controlled trials with various things, such as submitting CVs to jobs and have in some cases found bias.
There's also some interesting effects:
http://blog.ian.gent/2013/10/t...
essentially given a group with some bigoted members equally distributed then a minority sub-group will be disporportionately on the receiving end of bigorty. This means that in essentially any industry where there's s significant gender imbalance, the minority will be on the receiving end of quite a lot of shoddy behaviour.
The result is that even if the gender imbalance is perfectly natural, then one still needs to put in effort to make sure the minority is not mistreated.
Truth be told, I have neither a nickel invested nor a care in the world.
Well that's fine. At the moment I'm not in a position where I can have any real effect, or be affected by it (employees? Ha! I need revenue first). I have been in the past. I suppose when I see bad behaviour going on around me, with people I can influence, I can either try to influence it, or I can accept it.
I've become less and less comfortable passively accepting such things as time has gone on. There's lots of nice quotes and platitudes I could wheel out along those lines, but ultimately it's a personal choice based on feelings, or if you prefer axioms. After all, logic does cannot underlie everything: it has to have an axiomatic foundation on which it rests.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Pardon the short reply.
There are far more pressing issues that I worry about on behalf of others. If you're in a position to help then, by all means, help. I don't really have much that I can do to help - I already don't judge based on innate qualities or even quite a few choices. If you have two equally qualified candidates for employment and one is male and the other female then the socially responsible thing to do might be to hire the female. If she's more qualified then the business choice should clearly be to hire her. If the male is more qualified then, by all means, it's not a bad thing to hire him.
I sit, most of the time - I'm not in the area currently, on the board at my local credit union. The board makes decisions on certain large loans (we're all share holders - it's very different from a bank). I've never seen the board (and we're in a closed session) make a decision based on gender, skin color, sexuality, etc... In fact, I can't say it's certain, but I think we may have made some riskier loans because the applicant was female. I'd consider that sexist behavior.
I'm really not in a position where I can have any impact in a manner that I'd be comfortable with - assuming that it is a problem. If you are and see it as a problem then, as said, it's good if you can change it even just a little. I have other concerns (like malaria is an example) that I donate to.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Attacking the source of the information, not the information itself. Geeze man, I thought you could do better than that.
Why bother?
Do you think Bat Boy is really leading secret missions in Afghanistan or do you dismiss those claims out-of-hand as the source is obviously not credible?
The question, however, is why you would link to known kooks and tabloids as though they supported your groundless claims? What's next? WND? Weekly World News? The Onion?
The simple fact remains: There is no cover-up. For a conspiracy to exist to hide some information, it is necessary that there be something to actually hide!
If you believe they're trying and failing to hide something, what is it? Can you name that thing?
Obviously not. It doesn't exist. The facts don't fit your twisted narrative.
Required reading for internet skeptics
The facts don't fit your twisted narrative.
Its like you get it, but you're missing the one step to understand the point I tried to make in the post. So close man, one day, you will finally get it. Anyways, as I said earlier, you are just a waste of time. You find ways to discredit any information that disagrees with your twisted narrative. I wish I could live in such a sheltered world, but I prefer to read up on things and draw conclusions based on reals not feelz.
So you're saying you can't name the mysterious thing that's being covered up?
Why am I not surprised?
You find ways to discredit any information that disagrees with your twisted narrative.
What information? So far, all we've seen is outright lies and innuendo. Try bringing some facts to the table.
Required reading for internet skeptics