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Facebook Launches Initiative To Attract More Minorities and Women To Coding (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has launched TechPrep, a new initiative to attract more minorities and women into coding. The project draws a very strong analogy between the learning of computer coding skills and the learning of spoken languages, a field which is important to people whose first language is not English, and which engages with the popular understanding that women are better at learning languages. TechPrep is seeking to engage with parents and guardians to get its target audience into coding earlier in life.
How about hiring more people over 40 as well.
Hooray smash the patriarchy!
Why not just get people who are actually interested in coding to participate? Why do they have to be women or minorities? That seems rather bigoted.
The way concepts are expressed is irrelevant, what matter is how structured they are to one another. To make a culinary parallel, everybody can use a pan and a pot, but not everybody can marry food in delicate and tasty way.
This, or Facebook is looking for code monkey.
So basically Facebook wants more women and minorities to code so they can export their jobs or have them work for janitors pay.
Fuck you Facebook you racist misoginist bastards.
Another notable finding was that men were five times more likely than women to say that they knew a lot about computer programming.
Holy shit, really? Men are more likely to claim they know a lot about anything.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Define minority please. Heck, for that matter these days, define women! This is baloney. I don't give a rat's ass about a programmer's sex, color, background, etc. I care that they like what they do and that they do a good job of it, without being offensive to the team. Frankly, I care more if they smoke or wear too much cologne and come in stinking up the office several times a day.
It doesn't matter what shape their genitals are.
I reckon these initiatives are close to outnumbering the people in the target groups. They'll have to start moonlighting to keep up with the supply.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
>> popular understanding that women
I believe that the word you are looking for is "stereotype."
E.g., do you care to share any "popular understandings" about ethnic groups and athletics?
--compilers that replace error messages with positive affirmations
--special women/minorities-only campus computer labs so they don't have to look at scary white or Asian men
(A third item is left as an exercise for the reader.)
But not trans women. Oh, I'm sure they have some bullshit that says otherwise. Won't believe it for a second.
Why don't you assholes hire a trans woman I knew who wanted a tech job, had decent skills, but had to detransition to avoid homelessness.
Why don't you assholes hire any of the technically-inclined trans women I know.
Why don't you assholes acknowledge how odd it is that there's a preponderance of trans women who get into tech careers just fine.
Why don't you assholes look into why trans women get shitcanned when a new director takes over despite being liked and respected by all her technical co-workers?
Why don't you assholes come down on the HR bunnies, the high school counselors, the parents, and everybody else who tells women that computers are for boys? Guess who I left out of that list? Geeks! The same demographic you're loudly proclaiming is just a bunch of misogynerds, and double so if we're talking about a gay geek who isn't being a good little sex object for a woman.
Why don't you assholes come down on womyn-born-womyn who go "tee hee math is hard!" Why don't you assholes come down on women who say, "Oh, but computers are easy for you because you're a boy." God I want to slap them into next Tuesday every time I hear sexist, misogynist shit from womyn-born-womyn. Call it internalized misogyny or whatever you want, but that shit needs to stop now!
Sure, call me a misogynerd for pointing all this out. How many women programmers have you mentored? I have 2 successes (50% womyn-born-womyn, but some asshole gashlighting dickhead two-faced manager, a manager sexually harassed and psychologically abused her until she quit ), 3 failures, and the current apprentice's success or failure is uncertain. But I am fucking trying!
What that fuck are you assholes doing beside just calling names?
Captcha: control
Please tell me I'm not the only one bothered by "The project draws a very strong analogy between the learning of computer coding skills and the learning of spoken languages"
People who think computer languages are anything like natural languages know nothing about either.
Not mine, copied from a forum...
sup
{
gimme fibo bitch
a be 1 bitch
b be 1 bitch
putou a bitch
putou b bitch
fibo be fibo widout 2 bitch
slongas (fibo bepimpin 0)
c be a an b bitch
a be b bitch
b be c bitch
putou b bitch
dissin fibo bitch
nomo
}
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
You can be sure anytime employees want more people in a field it means they want to reduce labor costs.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
seeks to analogise coding skills with language skills to make the subject of computer science less forbidding and opaque
Good luck with that. Programming is about logic, not language.
Programming languages exist because natural languages are ambiguous. This is why the whole legal profession exists.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
So if woman are better at languages then there are differences (surprise) between the sexes. If you open that door, maybe men are better at programming.
Chris Mesterharm
All those things you mentioned as "geek culture" are the new mainstream. Look at the news media: Today is back to the future day? Star Wars merchandising permeating EVERY media outlet? Your logic has failed. My "geek" friends no longer wish to identify with "geek culture" and have since kept all of their inherent "geekiness" under wraps because it has become a giant pain in the ass, and the most obnoxious thing any "geek" can experience is having people talking to them about common interests. To be a geek is to be socially inept, and as such this new found corporate fascination with all things "geek" has created a cultural paradox. Much like how the word "hipster" is regularly used today to describe the exact opposite of what a hipster is.
It is possible that OP is also female, by the way.
What I learned today: It's okay to say women are better at language, but clearly men can't be better at programming.
Please explain how a statement such as "popular understanding that women are better at learning languages" is acceptable while "popular understanding that men are better at mathematics, applying the scientific theory and thinking in a logical manner" will get you lynched. They're both inflammatory statements.
It seems that any statement which includes women must be respectful and filled with praise to avoid social outrage. Any statement which includes men is permitted to disparage them, paint them as unintelligent, as buffoons and as dangerous criminals.
How is this social justice?
There might be 60 developers in my office. 2 of them are white male natural born citizens.
Women in STEM!! Women in STEM!!!
Does it count if the women are transgender? Because I think I am miscounted.
Possible, but not likely based on this quote:
There is the side benefit that accomplishing this will make it a helluva lot easier for me to find a woman with whom I can really have a mutually-satisfying, meaningful relationship. So....GET ON IT!
Let's see what passes the PC compliance test:
"Women are better at learning spoken languages" - PASS
"Therefore men are not as good as woman at learning spoken languages" - Eyebrow inperceptively raised, but PASS
"Men are better [on average] than women at computer programming" - RED ALERT RED ALERT RED ALERT !!!
Is "wiling to work for minimum wage" considered a valid minority now?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And multiple posts by people over 30 were saying they won't even consider working for FB? It's SJW shit like this that experienced engineers loathe.
Not only a girl, but the typical, if not stereotypical, SJW, as far as I can see...
When I was looking through college catalogs in the early 1990's, some degree programs allowed the substitution of foreign language classes with programing language classes. Alas, eight years in Commodore 64 BASIC didn't qualify as an acceptable programming language for college.
Facebook wants female, as well as male, code monkeys. Other than this, I want my daughter to be well versed on critical thinking, mathematics, physics, etc. I most certainly don't want for her to become a code monkey.
Could be bi-sexual, by the way.
"Facebook Launches Initiative To Attract More Cheap Slave Labor" doesn't really have the same cachet to it.
It's 2015. Many women already ARE endeared to geek culture. It's people like you who believe that they couldn't possibly be "authentically interested" in geek culture that are driving them out. They simply don't want to put up with that noise. I suspect your preconceptions concerning women are what's keeping you from finding a relationship, not anything inherent to women themselves.
Nothing in there says the author is not a woman. To say otherwise is misogynistic.
Way to keep the blinkers on homophobe! sex positive feminist lesbians exist!
"The project draws a very strong analogy between the learning of computer coding skills and the learning of spoken languages"
Seems to imply speaking a language, which is not right at all. It's about writing a language. Maybe not coincidentally, male authors outnumber women authors by about the same proportion as in software development.
http://www.theguardian.com/boo...
BTW one of my favorite authors is Mary Stewart, her Arthurian Saga is awesome!
love is just extroverted narcissism
I would love to see an all female roofing team doing shingles at 100 degrees as I drink starbucks at my desk. real tough guy here.
From the linked article ..
"It seems that various studies have been able to prove that women are better than men when it comes to speaking a foreign language.".....
"Studies conducted on this topic"
[citation needed]
Before they institute another program aimed at targetting specific sections of the population they should study whether doing so (in any subject) has ever worked in the past. [It hasn't.]
That's why I said possible.
Keep whining, or why don't you just shave your neckbeard, buy some decent clothes, and bathe once in a while shitlord? I'm a girl btw.
And why don't you lose some weight, stop wearing butch-dyke overalls, and shave your armpits occasionally, you land-whale?
See how bigoted assumptions work both ways? Or is it only fashionable to insult males?
Are they cheap labor, or slaves? Make up your mind.
Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I look back on my white suburban youth in the 70s and 80s. I want to reach out to the other races and say: Guys, the ship sailed. Insist on a good general education and pray your parents aren't idiots who ignore you. That way when the next ship is getting ready to sail you might have a chance of boarding. Don't listen to these schmucks who want to "teach you how to code". Go back to the fundamentals of math and logic that created the need for code, and think about that while you're in the class. If you can't think about one thing while listening to another, this message isn't for you. You're not smart enough and nothing will really make a difference. If you just follow the program you'll get dumped into the work force just in time for code to be a commodity. That's where we're moving. "learn to code" is here today and gone tomorrow. Logic, knowledge, and discipline are timeless.
No you're not. Quit with the lies, thanks.
That's what I thought. "Attracting minorities and women" is code for, "we're aiming tp pay minimum wage with no benefits".
Would you like files with that?
There isn't that much difference. The main reason you'd want slaves is so that your labor cost is close to zero: the only cost involved with a slave is the initial purchase price, and then the ongoing maintenance costs (mainly food, but also housing and medical care). Of course, these days with government welfare programs it's probably cheaper to hire cheap laborers than to buy slaves: by paying the workers minimum wage, they qualify for government assistance, so you effectively outsource some of the cost of that worker to the government, and by extension the taxpayers at large. With slaves, you have to pay for all their costs, plus you have to go to the trouble of managing their daily lives too, instead of letting them do it themselves like you do with non-slave workers.
You show a remarkable lack of personality, but good job bringing your gender into the discussion for no discernible reason other than to put down males you deem as unacceptable mates (because they don't fit into your off-the-shelf worldview)
If you count food, shelter, training and potential medical bills, slaves are more expensive than wages.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We need more H1B visa. Look, in the US we only get applications from white males, but we want diversity in our company!
For example, Indians are really underrepresented in our work force!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's a higher salary for the new people they hire on, though.
You said "recruited'--of course, anyone is free to join those jobs. But he's saying you'll never see people saying the balance isn't 50/50, so we need more female miners.
If there is such a campaign to balance the genders in mining, by all means, link us to it.
grave bait
Thanks, I always wondered what came after MILF.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now that he's past 30, I wonder if Zuckerberg will pay attention to it.
http://www.fastcompany.com/303...
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
A 200lb black women wearing a Captain America outfit at Comic-Con is not being part of geek culture.
I think I just puked a little, in my mouth.
These professions are more male dominated than IT
Lets deal with the most pressing gender imbalance problems first
Welding
Central Heating Installer
Car Mechanic
Construction Worker
Electrician
Truck Driver
Brick layer
Excavation Worker
Gardener
Do geeks very laid more now? Do they get hassled less? Do women swoon and men feel small at the sound of a Star Wars quote from a neckbeard? The mainstream may have appropriated geek things but little has changed for the average geek. Just watch Big Bang Theory for an example of how geeks are viewed.
...can get the outsource shaft like everyone else lol
Impossible. University of Washington Assistant Professor of Social Justice Sapna Cheryan has made her career demonstrating that first of all, women don't like geek culture, and second, that's why there aren't so many women in tech, and third, if we just stomped on the geeks, made them dress like normal people and put away their toys, we'd have parity between men and women in tech.
To be fair, You can be sure anytime employees don't want more people in a field it also means they want to reduce labor costs. (i.e. companies always want to reduce labor costs.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
They are mo' cheap
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Dude, your best hope lies now, as it always has, in the hopes that cybernetic women are just around the corner. Keep on pulling for her!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Dude, for someone who can't figure out how to create A Slashdot account and log in she's probably out-geaking him. Besides, what you got against BLOW?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I have seen this attempt time and again over the decades, and they never seem to gain traction. Why not? Simple. It's all about the passion, and especially in today's world of the Internet, with endless resources available online for free at every level to for anyone even mildly curious about software development.
If you are interested, you already would've Googled and checked it out. Many sites allow you to write code in your browser in just about every major language out there. Development platforms can be setup and downloaded for free to any computer. Etc., etc. So what will FB do that will enhance what's already there? I think they will get maybe a handful interested, but you will not see the "sea change" they seek. You either have the knack or you do not, and no amount of flag-waving will change that much. "Women" and "Minorities". I don't see the point in targeting specific demographics like that. It's very condescending.
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AME562/research-fellow-in-engineering-women-only/
I had the misfortune of working with a girl in IT that didn't like to take baths very often. It would get so bad that we would light scented candles to help freshen up the air. Several of us filed complaints with HR which amount to nothing because for some reason HR wouldn't do anything. I ended up moving into the server room because she was in the cube next to mine. Thankfully she took a position in a different division of the company in a different state.
Women represent more than 50% of the world's population. People of color represent something like 90% of the world's population. I'm a Finn. People of my ethnicity represent something like 0.07% of the world's population. Is this program meant for me?
In a male dominated board. Bring it on fuckers, it is excellent PR.
I don't care about wrestling, but don't call it "geek culture".
Is 8% of the world's population small enough to be a 'minority' for you?
Oh, wait... somebody apparently decided that white people, and ONLY white people, have to give our countries to everybody else on the planet, and allow them all to move here. Why?
WHY?
We are a minority on this planet. Why re we always discriminated against?
Because coding is like talking to people.
Listen up, computer. I want an app that shows pretty pictures of people. You know the kind that makes them look good. Then other people can look at these pictures and decide if they like the other person.
And so she spoke. And there was Tinder. For she had the words and the time was right.
Yeah, sounds like that might just work.
Africa for Africans, Asia for Asians, White countries for everyone in the name of diversity
It's a good idea to make the US economy more competitive by having twice the engineers/programmers... after all, we have to compete with countries that don't have a discouraging culture who probably have more programmers, thanks to a lack of self-limiting beliefs and stereotypes.
The same example of trying to make economic slavery look good.
Perhaps there are differences between woman and men and among races.
Perhaps some are interested in "coding" and others are not.
Multiculturalism and perversity is just as bankrupt as Lysenkoism...
Adopt the philosophy of Volunteerism and you will feel better because you can concentrate on yourself
instead of trying to use everyone else...
Asperger Syndrome is about 4 times more prevalent in males. Males are about 4 times more prevalent in coding jobs. I believe the vast majority of software developers to have (undiagnosed) Asperger Syndrome and I believe that that fully explains the "lack" of female software developers.
Now let's go invent the Overly Considerate Disorder that affects mostly females in order to explain the lack of male nurses so we can finally put an end this "equality" bullshit.
0x or or snor perron?!
i'm really sick of this employer cynicism i see on slashdot. it basically comes down to: "i'm am highly skilled and no one else can be".
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
I'm really sick of employers treating us wage slaves like shit.
Hey, I'm all for anyone and everyone doing things they haven't done before but I wonder once we all become coders where will the jobs be?
So with all these H1-B stories floating around, I assume they mean white people when they say "minorities"?
Oh, but by that logic, SCIENCE isn't strictly a science because you have to use Language to talk about anything in science!