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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.
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."
Yep. Women and minorities work for lower pay.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
What I learned today: It's okay to say women are better at language, but clearly men can't be better at programming.
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 !!!
When I worked at Cisco, I was part of a minority group that two white guys and one Latino guy, all native born. Everyone else was from India.
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.
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.
A 200lb black women wearing a Captain America outfit at Comic-Con is not being part of geek culture.
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.
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.
In a male dominated board. Bring it on fuckers, it is excellent PR.