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

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.

Comments

alternative

[micahraleigh]

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

Re:alternative

[jellomizer]

We don't want Old guys who specialized on these old time sharing mainframe systems where you had a big system, and you had charged the customer for the computing needed then provided the data remotely back to them. To be working the state of the art cloud computing platforms, where we charge the customer for the computing needed then provide the data remotely back to them.
Or these guys who specialized in Witting desktop apps for Single use PC's with under 4 gigs of RAM and screen sizes under 12" to be making mobile apps on these mobile devices with under 4 Gigs of Ram and screen sizes under 12".

A lot of the new stuff, is just a rehash of older technology, the theory behind it is the same, just some of the details have been improved.

Re:alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a white man, given the choice to work with either another white guy or with a cute asian woman who's single, I'd pick the asian woman. Not because I'm a man, but because I'm a man AND a lonely nerd.

Re: Solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny I actually never hear it in that direction. I'm always hearing about how the brown people and women are complaining about the nice things white old men built and want in on that.

Re: Solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

Asian guy here. I've actually never heard complaints from asian guys about 'equality' in software dev. If anything, we discuss how there's a severe lack of black dudes there and how that would fix economic imbalances, if they would join and take interest. 'Brown' people are overrepresented in the tech industry compared to background demographics... unless your definition of 'brown' is 'not white', as in including black guys.

The loudest SJW types who push for forced diversity are always white men and women themselves, from downtown cores, leaning to the left. I'm certainly not complaining about them, but pointing it out that the noise really comes from white SJWs.

Kinda similar to another thing: I know well over 1000 muslims in north american and have never heard of one single one wanting 'happy holidays' over 'merry christmas'. That whole thing was also started by SJWs and muslims end up paying the political price. (Christ is a holy figure for muslims, so even the most religious muslims are happy to celebrate his birthday).

credits may not transfer and few offer 4 year degr

[Joe_Dragon]

credits may not transfer and few offer 4 year degrees.

Even when credits do transfer some 4 year Colleges may force you to retake classes or say you may have X credits but only some of them counted to what you need to get the degree from us.

problem

[religionofpeas]

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

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

Re:problem

[edittard]

If there wasn't a problem, We should expect to see participation at around the same percentages as the population of the area.

Basketball is pretty racist then.

Re:problem

[religionofpeas]

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.

Does diversity results in better code?

[sinij]

Does diversity results in better code? Please provide citations.

Re:Does diversity results in better code?

[AlanBDee]

The best developer on my team is a girl from Vietnam. My experience has been that diversity is a good thing, but I'm not convinced that there is a "diversity problem". We're so desperate to find competent developers that we couldn't be discriminatory if we wanted to be.

Solutions require problems

[Dog-Cow]

In order to solve something, there must be a problem first. As long as no one consciously attempts to exclude a group, there is no issue. If women or Blacks or whoever feels uncomfortable, that's their problem to solve. It's not anyone's job to make someone else comfortable. If more women join, the atmosphere will change of its own. No one needs to force "diversity training" (unfortunately, it's a thing) on anyone.https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/12/04/1915224/to-solve-the-diversity-drought-in-software-engineering-look-to-community-colleges#

Quality Beats Diversity

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Big fan

[AlanBDee]

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.

Not $104 per credit. For most in Oregon, it's free

[StevenMaurer]

Here in Portland, OR, the local community college network charges $104 per credit.

Thanks entirely to the Democratic ownership of the state legislature and the governorship, Oregon promises free community college for any legal state resident starting out college from highschool (or GED), who isn't a trust fund baby, and has at least a 2.5 GPA, via the Oregon Promise Grant. You do have to file out some forms, but then you're golden.

You must meet all of the following criteria:

• Complete an Oregon Promise Grant Application by the appropriate deadline
• File a FAFSA or ORSAA application and list at least one Oregon community college
• Be a recent Oregon high school graduate or GED recipient
• Document a 2.5 cumulative high school GPA or higher; or a GED score of 145 or higher on each test
• Plan to attend at least half-time at an Oregon community college within 6 months of high school graduation or GED completion
• Be an Oregon resident for at least 12 months prior to college attendance
• Must not have more than 90 college credits completed or attempted
• Beginning with Fall 2017 applicants, students may be subject to eligibility criteria based on their Expected Family Contribution (EFC). The EFC limit for 2017-18 applicants is $18,000. New applicants who are above the EFC limit will not be eligible for an award. The EFC criteria is subject to change.

There are plenty of web development classes as well.

CS != Web App Development

[ErichTheRed]

I agree that looking to other sources for hiring programmers is a good thing. Not everyone is rich or brilliant enough to go to Stanford and get a CS degree, nor does every developer in your company need to be a Stanford grad. I'm in systems engineering with no formal university training...I got a degree in chemistry way back when. Since most of what I do is integration work getting developers' "masterpieces" working in production, it's very clear that a large percentage of developers have very little idea about how the machines their code runs on work.

Real computer science education starts pretty close to first principles and builds up. It doesn't start at a web framework or query language 478 levels of abstraction up the stack and work down. The big problem with "software engineering" is that people actually do need some of this first-principles understanding to be useful outside of the abstracted environments. Both community college and university education is often derided as being too theoretical because unlike coder bootcamps they don't start you off at a point where most problems are solved. But if inexperienced developers had some clue about how the magic box works beyond gluing together more magic libraries and frameworks on top, software quality might improve.