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To Solve the Diversity Drought in Software Engineering, Look to Community Colleges (vice.com)

Posted by msmash on from the an-idea dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Community college is not flashy and does not make promises about your future employability. You will also likely not learn current way-cool web development technologies like React and GraphQL. In terms of projects, you're more likely to build software for organizing a professor's DVD or textbook collection than you are responsive web apps. I would tell you that all of this is OK because in community college computer science classes you're learning fundamentals, broad concepts like data structures, algorithmic complexity, and object-oriented programming. You won't learn any of those things as deeply as you would in a full-on university computer science program, but you'll get pretty far. And community college is cheap, though that varies depending on where you are. Here in Portland, OR, the local community college network charges $104 per credit. Which means it's possible to get a solid few semesters of computer science coursework down for a couple of grand. Which is actually amazing. In a new piece published in the Communications of the ACM, Silicon Valley researchers Louise Ann Lyon and Jill Denner make the argument that community colleges have the potential to play a key role in increasing equity and inclusion in computer science education. If you haven't heard, software engineering has a diversity problem. Access to education is a huge contributor to that, and Denner and Lyon see community college as something of a solution in plain sight.

8 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. alternative by micahraleigh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How about we start allowing ourselves to hire developers over 45 ?

    1. Re:alternative by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Based upon that statement, you MUST work in HR and not in any kind of engineering.

  2. Solve? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There isn't a diversity problem. Diversity isn't related to any challenges in software engineering.

  3. problem by religionofpeas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you haven't heard, software engineering has a diversity problem

    There's unequal participation. That doesn't mean there's a problem.

    1. Re:problem by religionofpeas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We should expect to see participation at around the same percentages as the population of the area.

      Why should we expect that ? Do you think everybody has the same interests ?

      Try a simple experiment. Go to youtube, and look up videos on "Arduino". Check the ratio of men and women. Now do the same for "Scrapbooking".

      Nobody is stopping women from ordering an Arduino and recording a video, and nobody's stopping men from ordering some scrapbook supplies. The barrier to entry is extremely low in both cases. How come we still see this division ?

      Simple: different interests. The average woman thinks Arduino is stupid, and the average man thinks scrapbooking is stupid.

  4. Does diversity results in better code? by sinij · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does diversity results in better code? Please provide citations.

  5. Quality Beats Diversity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At least in the minds of everyone but the Social Justice Warrior set.

    Being a different skin color or sex doesn't improve coding ability. The year is 2017, not 1959; there are no legal structures keeping black people from studying programming or being hired by any company who choses to do so. Jim Crow is dead.

    Stop pretending that the United States of America is the most racist nation in the world, when in actually it is probably the least racist country.

    Just stop shoving this SJW bullshit down our throat, Slashdot. It isn't helping, and it isn't working.

  6. Big fan by AlanBDee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm a big fan of Community Colleges for one reason, they're inexpensive. I think we can all agree that you don't need a degree to be a good software engineer, although a degree can increase the salary you can demand and the return on investment is worth it.

    Given that, it makes sense to start in a Community College and then finish up at a local in-state university. If I look at Salt Lake Community College and Weber State University in Utah you could do this for under $20k with room to spare.

    In the end, it's how well you can program, not what school you went to.