The Ugly Underbelly of Coder Culture 715
snydeq writes "Today's developers are overwhelmingly young and male, and they're barring the door from a more diverse workforce, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'Software development isn't just failing to attract women. It's actively pushing them away. ... Put all the pieces together, and you're left with an impression of developers that's markedly different from the geeks and nerds they're made out to be in popular culture. On the contrary, developers harbor the same attitudes and engage in the same behaviors you see whenever a subculture is overwhelmingly dominated by young males. They've even coined a clever name for programmers who think and behave like fraternity pledges: brogrammers,' McAllister writes. 'Developers like to think of their culture as a meritocracy, where the very best developers naturally rise to the top. But as long as the industry tends to exclude more than half of the potential workforce, that's nothing but pure arrogance.'"
insert picture of exasperated 50's guy (Score:5, Funny)
Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a male, and I've been involved with programming and software development in one way or another for over 30 years now. My wife has been involved with software product management for over 25 years. Together, we've been to probably 80 to 90 programming language or software dev conferences together, in addition to working with thousands upon thousands of developers, programmers, designers, architects, IT staffers, managers, and executives of all types.
This isn't a problem with the majority of communities. It's actually quite isolated. We've been to Fortran and Java conferences, for example, where everybody is extremely professional, friendly, and tolerant. Those conferences, even 30 years ago when I first attended a Fortran one back in my college days, were quite diverse in terms of gender. There were and are many female scientists and mathematicians who are experts at Fortran, for example.
This is almost solely an issue with the communities related to web development. We're basically talking about the Ruby, JavaScript and NoSQL movements. These communities are among the worst there are. Ignorance, both of social norms and technology, are serious factors in why this is the case. When ignorance is embraced as a core value of a community, the results are never good. Ruby is basically Perl, but 20 years late and with a much inferior foundation. JavaScript is, well, horrible in every way. NoSQL is widely taken to be a joke by professionals, who can easily achieve the same scalability using relational databases, without giving up their many useful and even necessary features.
These failed communities do generate a lot of hype, and that's probably why people think this is a much bigger problem than it really is. As long as they steer away from these rotten communities that are centered around being oblivious to reality, then females involved with the software development field in some way can easily have successful and productive careers, and expected to be treated as equals by their fellow professional male and female colleagues.
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Interesting)
Could someone with mod point mke the parent more visible please? It's definitely informative.
I've been doing this "coder" stuff for 20 years now, and I've never seen either "bro culture" or sexism against female coders - on the contrary there's a a subtle bias towards hiring female coders (doesn't Google have an overt quota?), and development managers are disproportionately female to a vast degree.
But I've always done kernel, systems, and general server-side work, not the modern web-stuff. Perhaps the parent post has a point about that culture? Any front-end veterans care to comment? Or is this just a case of "magaers need to grow up and not staff the dev team with all 20-somethings", regardless of the work?
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Informative)
Every place I've worked we *want* women and have had very few apply. Sure, they have to be competent but having a female name on the resume definitely got you at least a call back.
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank You. At my university, over 99% of the CS majors were male by senior year (97% freshman year). Females aren't applying to the programs, so they cannot be considered for the jobs.
And it's not like the CS department of any university, let alone workplace, does not want women in there. But no amount of bribery will convince them to enter a highly stressful, demanding, and often-times not very rewarding career when there are better ones available.
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Interesting)
[software developer:] a highly stressful, demanding, and often-times not very rewarding career
If you have worked in other industries and that's what you really think, then one of the following must be true... :).
:). On the upside, your degree will help to open doors into other careers.
A. The ship is sinking.
B. You're young and you're expectations are set way too high (welcome to the real world
C. You need to see a doctor about your anxiety attacks.
D. You are useless at the job and should find something less 'demanding'. Not an insult, I'm a useless metal polisher and was (kindly) sacked after the first week of trainning ( filthy, hot, and uncomfortable job anyway
Back on topic, I stated my CS degree in the late 80's with 160 other people, 3 of them were women. Not sure why so few but I don't think it was the prospect of hard work that was scaring them away. In the commercial world I can count the number of female developers I worked with on one hand, 2. There have been plenty of women involved but almost always in a documenting/testing/management role.
OTOH, in the 15yrs before I started Uni I worked as.....
A lumberjack - No females at all.
A deck hand on a fishing trawler - a half dozen of the toughest women you could possibly imagine in a fleet of about 50 trawlers, none on our boat.
A nylon factory worker - Plenty of women, all in the packing area and admin building, none on the factory floor or warehouse. (No men in the packing area).
Builder's labourer - No females at all, although I see a few around today.
Carpenter's lacky - ~200 males building window frames and 1 old lady attaching winders to them.
Taxi driver - Like now, maybe as high as 5% female day drivers, virtually nil on night shifts.
The difference is that the software industry and CS degrees have been actively trying to attract females for at least 20yrs but have failed miserably, All those other industries I worked for pre-1990 actively discouraged them.
Now maybe there are macho software houses full of arrogant young men and pornographic decor that effectively scare most women away, much as they do in some blue collar workplaces. However I've never worked in or seen such a software house. In fact moving from blue to white collar the first thing that struck me was how polite people were to each other in an office, even the bosses say please and thankyou. Not saying white collar workers are better behaved than blue collar (there not, just ask any city waitress how ill-mannered 'suits' can be), but like waitressing, standard office politics requires people to be polite, even if it's through gritted teeth. Standard blue collar politics in a male only workplace is, "Any fist fights and you're both sacked".
So to sum up, there is no doubt in my mind that some male domintaed workplaces are overtly hostile toward females and will openly disscuss (with each other) why they think women should be kept out (and vica-versa with female dominated workplaces). OTOH, I'm clueless as to why there are so few female developers.
PS: When I went to HS boys were not allowed to attend certain classes, typing was one of them (because all the jobs involving typing were female dominated). I was (secretly) interested as a kid in what the girls were learning and it would have been useful when I first got hold of an AppleII. Instead I learnt to 'two finger' type ~35wpm because I was interested in making the computer do something , stopping just to lean how to type faster was always on the bottom of my list. I've had that bad habit for 20+yrs now, I long ago decided the ROI is just not high enough for me to go through all those mind numbing excersices, if I need something typed up fast the missus can do 100+wpm and flirt with me at the same time. Sure, that ancient state sanctioned discrimination hasn't hurt my career prospects in the software industry since typing is definitely not an essential skill for a software dev, but that's aside from the point I'm trying to make.
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is typical male arrogance. Females are shut out of tech carees by this structural patriarcy and you blame us women? This is bull. It's the fault of the males.
Well then enlighten us. What do you want CS students and CS departments to do in order to attract more female students? What exactly is being done to shut them out?
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that the industry has been dominated, lock, stock and barrel, by foreigners on guest worker visas and green cards.
Given that a green card worker would earn the same as a native (as there's no pressure on him to force to work for less, as there is on an H1-B), so there's no competition on price of labor - what does that say about American workers, if true?
Of course, if you look at the yearly green card quotas, it's fairly obvious why it plainly can't be true. Not unless your eye is trained to spot the Indian looking guys in the crowd, and ignore everyone else.
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Interesting)
Women in Engineering (the local Australian female advocacy group at the university I'm at) recognises that the problem isn't that women are some how barred from getting into engineering. They know how many women apply to the courses, how many are admitted and how many leave before completing. Simply, females apply to engineering programs in far fewer numbers; it's ridiculous to suggest they're being barred or forced out by the existing engineering populace, before their uni applications even arrive. It will be four years at least before those women even experience the current work force.
Women in Engineering goes to great length to get female undergrads in engineering. In fact, in my undergrad there were 7 scholarships females could apply for (compared to the three who actually enrolled) vs 2 scholarships males could apply for. The gates were wide open. Double the number of students could take the course, with full financial support. Nothing is stopping them from signing up, they simply don't want to.
The problem is that young women finish their high school certificates, look deep within and don't see engineering there. It simply isn't 'them'. Engineering has an image problem amongst women. It is often seen (perhaps rightly) as a competitive, technically-focussed bandsaws-and-soldering-irons sort of job that alienates you from other people, best suited to career introverts. Few woman wants to work in an environment that they feel is isolating - especially not one which does have a reputation of being 'not for women'.
The sad truth is that there are lots of opportunities for working with other people, and for having growing experiences outside of simple technophile interest. The women I work with in my job enjoy the collaborative parts of coming up with a solution, getting it to work and then getting it out the door. They enjoy what they do. But how do you communicate that to the women looking at career choices just now?
And if you don't believe me, then I urge you to sign up for an engineering program at your local university and find out for yourself - see if anyone tells you "Sorry you can't do engineering: you're a woman". I'm sure they won't. We'd love to have you.
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Interesting)
Few women want to work in an environment that they feel is isolating
I think you've hit the nail on the head, think about 'Penny' from Big Bang Theory (stop drolling nerds). What young woman in real life would want to hang out in Sheldon's apartment? Thing is, 'Sheldon' is just as much a sterotype as the dumb blonde part of Penny's character, and from my long experince "Sheldons" are almost as rare as women in real life software houses, most real life nerds are closer in personality to Raj or Lenorad than the other two, and those that do act like Sheldon rarely have the intelect or skills to be considered irreplacable..
The problem is that young women finish their high school certificates, look deep within and don't see engineering there. It simply isn't 'them'.
Again this matches my personal experience. I have two kids both older than Penny, they have both had access to me as an inhouse software dev and had access to my hardware from an early age. The boy was interested in programming to the point of building a BBS when he was ~12.
;)
My daughter, a self confesed 'tom-boy' and dedicated mum who was hooked on WWF wrestling for a while. She wasn't interested in programming, she was more interesed in using the computer to play games and read about WWF wrestlers than fiinding out how it all worked. They both had the same diverse aproaches to cars, the boy pulled several of his cars apart, the girl complained she had nowhere to park because the driveway was littered with car bits. Nethier I nor their mother discoraged our kids from doing anything because of their gender. But exactly as it was in my childhood. Dad was an engineer and Mum was a housewife, so perhaps just the fact that we had those roles influenced thier behaviour, or perhaps there's an evolved tendency for the wetware in different genders to look at the world from slightly different angles? - I'm starting to think that those two different answers constitute a "chicken and egg" paradox, but I will poner some more while I'm putting out the garbage.
Cannot resist 'sexist' joke...
Child: "How do you have your tea grandpa?
Grandpa: "I don't know, ask grandma".
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:4, Insightful)
It just isn't wired into females to want to learn about engineering, computers, etc. It has nothing to do with how they are brought up, people just can't understand that. Men and women are wired different.
Bollocks. My nephews see nothing in it too. It's not a male, female thing. It's a "some people are, some aren't" thing. How many people do you know, male or female, who are passionate about STEM? I can count the number I know on the fingers of one hand without using all of them.
It has a lot to do with upbringing. STEM is not "sexy" or idolized by the average prole today so it's not recommended seriously to their precious snowflakes.
FWIW, my favorite geeks (in my experience) have been women.
Not systematic when the system is not at fault (Score:5, Insightful)
which is perhaps better said as "systemic bias".
There is ZERO systematic basis against females in engineering degrees.
There is in fact a nonzero bias towards supporting females in engineering roles.
So what happens when after decades you do not get many female engineers, in any discipline?
You have to realize it's not the system that is the problem, or at least changing the system will not create the balance you seek.
The desire to be an engineer has to come from the female population at large, you can't lure them as though engineering were a kind of trap for them.
How that happens, I'm not sure. But it's far more broadly cultural than any system or set of systems in place.
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Informative)
But I've always done kernel, systems, and general server-side work, not the modern web-stuff.
Perhaps that's why you think it's informative. I'm afraid completely misguided, at least in his mischaracterisation of the languages, I can't comment on the conferences, not having been to many. Ruby may have some superficial similarities to Perl in syntax but it is entirely different in culture, aims, and implementation, it is far closer to Python for example. Javascript is quite an interesting language, if you're not fazed by its unusual object system, of course it has its flaws, but it's by no means worthless. As to NoSQL, I haven't used one of these systems, and some of them cause more problems than they solve, but there's obviously a need for them or people wouldn't keep reinventing them. By the time Google uses something like BigTable, there is obviously some value, in some situations, for dropping relational dbs and going for something simpler. The NoSQL movement has the backing of some very big names.
As to 'ignorance is embraced as a core value of a community' and 'rotten communities', I suspect the grandparent just got carried away with playing to the peanut gallery here on Slashdot - the post is almost entirely free of substance, and what substance there is is wrong, which makes me suspect all the emotional appeals about a rotten community too. I certainly haven't experienced a rotten web community online as described around Ruby - probably he's just been exposed to lots of younger males at these conferences, and been shocked by their mix of ignorance and arrogance - I imagine if the poster met the usual denizens of slashdot face to face he would have the same feeling.
I'm sure there must be some concrete examples of this sort of boorish behaviour at conferences, but it's hardly the norm for Ruby at least.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I agree with almost everything you said, with the exception of:
Ruby is basically Perl, but 20 years late and with a much inferior foundation.
I'm not a Ruby coder, I've never done anything serious with it. But to say that anything is inferior to Perl seems wrong. Even JavaScript with its type inconsistencies feels less of a patchwork than Perl. I hope I'll never have to work with Perl again in my life.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
poor programmers can write bad code in any language
Poor programmers can write bad code in any language and good programmers can write good code in any language. Any Turing-complete language can implement any algorithm. Both of these are irrelevant in evaluating the merits of a language. The things that matter are:
If you're doing a lot of string manipulation, Perl often answers yes to the second,
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two things stand out to me:
- In *any* group there will be jerkwads. I've seen hardware companies run like frat houses and diverse rails shops that were unbelievably professional. And then there's slashdot.
- Younger kids will act less mature and less professional. Get a bunch of kids in their mid-twenties together and they'll do stupid shit. Give them ten years and they'll (typically) grow out of that phase. My guess is that the median age at the Ruby conferences you've attended is much lower than at the Fortran conferences.
Re: (Score:3)
Of course, by no means is stupid shit professional itself, but "professional behavior" and "stupid shit" can come from the same person, given different sets of circumstances. Being in the latter half of my twenties myself, I find that my tolerance for shenanigans is going down, as is my desire to incite or perform them, for what it's worth.
Being 20 years older than you I'd say "professional behavior" is stupider than any shit I've ever seen. Have you ever watched they ways how gorillas act within their natural hierarchies? Like the things "superior" males do to demonstrate their position and how the weaker/younger males and femals react? Look at your colleges (or any company enywhere) at lunch, compare and think... I have come to the conclusion that the gorillas are not half as ridiculous as the human horde. Actually, they are not ridiculous
Yeah... no (Score:4, Informative)
Ruby is *not* basically Perl, I've used both for quite a while now. Ruby's concepts are much easier to comprehend and use in everyday coding. Classes are not some weird afterthought that feels like it's falling apart every second now, they are first class members. The Perl interpreter is way quicker, which is nice, and Perl can do just about everything, but there's sooo much unnecessary syntactic explicitness compared to Ruby. Don't get me wrong, I like both, but Ruby is a very welcome change and brushing it off as just another Perl doesn't do it justice at all. Most of its fame is due to Ruby on Rails, though, and you see how well Ruby is done by all the attempts to copy Rails' API to languages like PHP. It just doesn't work, they are not flexible enough and everything just becomes more cumbersome, though you definitely have a better shot with the features added in PHP 5.3 and 5.4.
Repeating the same old cliche about JavaScript also shows more ignorance on your part than anything else. Yeah, I've been there, been a JavaScript basher myself, but that's a) due to not understanding its most fundamental features (anonymous functions and closures) and b) due to the horrors of cross-browser development (start using Node.js und you know how much of the pain is simply not due to the language itself). Yes, JavaScript has some fundamental issues, but is also so powerful that you can fix many of them yourself (take that, Java). And for the rest, just use CoffeeScript, which compiles to JavaScript but feels more like Ruby, but starts so much quicker than the standard Ruby interpreter even though it has to translate the code first.
And NoSQL *does* offer some advantages for some cases, and of course some disadvantages. There's no clear winner here, it depends on your data structures, how often they change and how you want to query them.
So. I fully reject the technological aspect of your comment. I'm not well connected to the community, so I have no idea what the gender issues there are (other than hearing about some issues at a Rails conference due to sexual imagery in a presentation). But since I don't see the ignorance that is the basis for your argument, I don't feel comfortable trusting your conclusion.
These languages are not popular because there are obviously better alternatives, they are popular because they better match the mental concepts of many programmers and answer a whole lot of the "why the fuck...?" questions I had about your beloved classics. They make me rejoice. "Finally!"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We have an all male Development and QA shop. However, the CEO, CFO, most of marketing, about 1/3 of sales, and all the administrative support staff are female. We have an on-going debate about why Dev and QA lack females, here are a few of our thoughts:
* Severe shortage of females applying for Dev and QA positions
* We are in a relatively out of the way location for a software shop (thus a small pool of applicants)
* Our Dev job openings are all looking for 15+ years of experience
* We have a very demanding
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent is a truly astonishing mix of plain truth, half-truths, and utter BS. Yes, the problem is real, no it's not universal--far from it. So far, parent and I agree 100%. But then parent claims:
This is almost solely an issue with the communities related to web development.
Technically not true at all, but may be based on a limited sampling, so I'll give parent a half point for this one.
Then, however, parent goes completely astray by identifing some technologies that he, personally, doesn't like, pointing out that the problem does occur in the communities associated with those particular three technologies (which may or may not be true, I haven't checked), and then leaps to the preposterous conclusion that bad technologies attract bad people! From three data points, and dubious categorization skills (I don't like it == bad.) There are plenty of communities associated with crappy software where it doesn't arise at all. (I'd argue the reverse, that it sometimes arises in communities associated with good software, but that assumes there is such a thing as good software--a hypothesis I'm not ready to accept.) This is all simply false, bordering on troll territory.
In my experience--and I'm also male and also have been involved in programming and software development for over 30 years--the problem seems to arise in small and/or insular communities. I've heard reports that it's widespread in software communities associated with banking and large financial institutions, which tend to be fairly insular, but are in no way small or (at least as far as technology goes) failed. Note that banking is not a subset of web development.
It doesn't arise in all small communities, but when it does, it can feed back on itself, and become remarkably hard to evict, even as the community grows. People who deny that it happens are either deliberately ignoring it, or have simply never had enough exposure to the communities where it does occur. I managed to get by for nearly ten years as a software developer before I encountered it, which may be in part because I'm male, but once I saw it, it was impossible to deny. It's not as universal as some suggest, but neither is it a non-problem, as others suggest. It's a minor problem except in the communities where it occurs, where it's a major one. None of which has anything to do with whether or not Ruby, JavaScript and NoSQL do or do not suck.
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to admit, as a long-time FreeBSD user I'm disappointed, and somewhat surprised, to see that you hold this opinion of JavaScript. The OP is correct; there truly is nothing good about JavaScript. One cannot defend JavaScript.
JavaScript is not a "mature technology" in any reasonable sense. FreeBSD is a mature technology. It was built upon a solid set of principles to begin with, by very competent developers, and this is evident in its high degree of quality and its high degree of reliability. None of this applies to JavaScript.
JavaScript is not a "functional programming language" in any sense. Merely having anonymous functions does not make a language "functional". By that token, C++11 and even VB.NET can be considered to be functional programming languages, when that clearly isn't the case. Tail recursion, immutability and continuations are examples of core concepts from functional programming that JavaScript has limited to no support for. We can't consider JavaScript to be "functional" when so many critical elements of functional programming languages are missing.
JavaScript's performance still leaves much to be desired, even when using the most capable and modern engines available today. Anyone who has seriously used it knows its performance limitations very well. It's much easier to get much better performance when using Python, Ruby, Lua, Erlang, the .NET CLR, or the JVM.
Many of the most popular JavaScript libraries, with jQuery being a good example, are merely there to make JavaScript slightly less painful to use. They merely bandage up a very broken language, rather than making a solid language even more powerful. Node.js is completely unremarkable. I worked with very similar LISP code in an academic setting 25 years ago. Other JavaScript-centric technologies, like the HTML5 canvas tag, are inferior compared to graphics libraries like BGI that we had back in the 1980s.
It's very telling that "JavaScript: The Good Parts" is treated as the community's most widely respected book. It's a book that goes out of its way to highlight the small portions of the language that are semi-usable, while encouraging large parts of it not to be used! No other major programming language's most important book is like this. They all say how to use the features of the language, and not how to intentionally avoid large portions of the language in question!
In the future, JavaScript's popularity today will be looked back on as an oddity. It'll be seen as a "triumph" of ignorance and stupidity, and it'll be understood that it was merely a mistake that snowballed. It's unfortunate that intelligent developers such as yourself will have gotten caught up in this avalanche of idiocy.
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:4, Informative)
I despise Javascript as much as the next person, but the current alternatives are delightfully hideous.
Why doesn't the /. community try to create several new ones, and we'll see which ones work?
Here's some things I'd want in them:
1.) True Classes / Object Oriented support. None of this hacked on bullsh*t.
2.) Namespaces. Just make sure it has them.
3.) Multiple constructor support.
4.) Inheritance.
5.) Interfaces.
Feel free to add whatever you'd like below.
Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because there's difference between coding style and significant whitespace.
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Are we talking about the same thing?
1. I'm talking about a scripting language that is used for selecting your state, and then up pops a city selector, and it gives you a list of retailers where you can buy a given product. Stuff like that.
2. You're talking about esoteric language features.
What's the need for #2 when JavaScript is just fine for #1?
Re:NoSQL a joke? (Score:4, Insightful)
If leaking private data all over the place counts as professionalism then I'll take blundering amateurs any day.
Also, mindlessly aping a successful company's technical decisions without considering that they're in a different niche to you is going to end in tears; a search engine isn't the same thing as an inventory control system.
Wait... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
Men are repulsed by it too. Environments uncomfortable for women are also uncomfortable to a lot of men.
Re:Maybe. (Score:4, Interesting)
Been in this industry for some time, first time I've heard the term 'brogrammer.' Where exactly is she getting this stuff?
Flamebait (Score:5, Informative)
Why do we even bother with the garbage from ___Word. The entire network is uninformed trolls, with sensationalist news devoid of technical merit. It's no wonder the world looks like a frat house to them. They are looking in the mirror.
Re:Flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
Because contrary to what these articles might lead you to believe, we're very sensitive about these kinds of things. We do want our sector to be a meritocracy. We don't take kindly to being painted in a broad brush as though we're all frat boys, since we take great pains to overcome the types of biases these sensationalist articles paint us as being plagued with.
It's quite disconcerting to many of us to hear us described this way. Especially for those of us who have actively nudged people into the workforce in an attempt to stem the tide of popular opinion that this article portrays. It means our hard work might be undone, because human instinct is to believe in the simple scapegoat, and not search for actual solutions.
Re:Flamebait (Score:5, Interesting)
Where? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah the article is ignoring the real problem...
As the lead developer on a software team, I'm one of the ones interviewing potential candidates. Typically the vast majority of applicants are male, and the females who apply typically can't pass our coding questions and tests. Granted most males can't either, so the ratio is probably about the same (in regards to the pass vs fail). The fact isn't that women aren't pushed away, it's that there are just very vary few of them.
I'm completely unbiased on the male vs female front, but if a male OR a female can't answer the tech questions and complete the coding tests properly, there's no way I'm going to hire them. End of story. We only hire Sr level devs (or ALMOST Sr), and only about 1 in 15 or 1 in 20 applicants are actually capable of high-mid-level or sr-level coding. We typically see less than 1 in 20 candidates actually being women. In our current round of hiring over the past month, we've seen about 15 males, and only one female. We've only hired one person so far, and it happened to be one of the males.
It's not that we're biased against women, it's just that the numbers are against them. I honestly couldn't say if males are better programmers than women, because I haven't worked with, or interviewed enough women to know if there are decent female coders out there... I HAVE hired a very capable sysadmin who was female once, and she was absolutely wonderful at her job. There was nothing we asked of her that she couldn't do... She was lost in a round of layoffs a few years ago, and I've been sad about that ever since.
There will unfortunately be sexism, racism, and other forms of bias in ALL environments, but saying the coding industry has an ugly underbelly of sexism is just ignorant. The fact of the matter is that most young male programmers would jump at the chance to get a talented female among them.
Re: (Score:3)
transgender-friendly workplace?
Re:Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm completely unbiased on the male vs female front
I think if you don't realize your bias then you are unwittingly probably part of the problem.
There was some excellent research showing that when researchers submitted resumes with identical credentials to firms, but one with a white sounding name and one with an Asian sounding name, the white sounding names had a significantly hire success rate in getting calls. I doubt this discrepancy is from a conscious policy.
http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090522/resume_english_090523/20090523/?hub=TorontoNewHome [toronto.ctv.ca]
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/work/right-rsum-wrong-name/article1145212/ [theglobeandmail.com]
http://aascpress.metapress.com/content/662555ttv6344365/ [metapress.com]
On a personal and anecdotal note, unrelated to hiring, there is a family that frequents my business. They are Muslim, and the mother has a thick Arabic accent. I just discovered the other day that she also speaks French (I am fluent). Being from Morocco, her French is flawless and better than mine. After talking with her for some time in French, I just realized that I had been implicitly thinking of her as less educated, due to her Arabic accent when speaking English. Upon hearing her flawless French, I saw my implicit attitude change entirely.
I work really hard to be aware of bias and to not let it get in the way of my interactions with people. But it's there for all of us, despite the effort we put in. It does no good to pretend otherwise.
Re:Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
What, precisely, is "the problem", in your view?
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If you or any of your friends who are having trouble finding work are really as good as you say, I have a job for you. Guaranteed interview regardless of age, provided you mee
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If everyone will only hire the top 1%, and no one will train/mentor anyone, why do you think it is so hard to find good coders, or encourage others to join the so-called "profession"?
As matter of fact, we don't want the top 1%. Those are geniuses, but they are also unmanageable loose cannons who do whatever they damn please and you can't stop them short of firing them.
We want reasonable people - those who we can work with. This excludes the topmost strata (we don't need a LKML-style flamefest every day
Re:Where? (Score:4, Insightful)
I work really hard to be aware of bias and to not let it get in the way of my interactions with people. But it's there for all of us, despite the effort we put in. It does no good to pretend otherwise.
Indeed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window [wikipedia.org]
Re:Where? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you may be seeing bias where simple demographics are at play.
Where I work, my group has eight people when we're fully staffed. When we have an opening to fill and HR starts sending us resumes of potential hires, perhaps one candidate in fifteen is female. So with all other things equal and assuming no gender bias at all, simple percentages result in our department being all male the vast bulk of the time.
Hell, even if we were to purposely decide we specifically wanted to fill a slot with a female, we can't very well hire candidates who don't apply.
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If you've done any work in epistemology over the last fifty years you'd be well aware that the biggest problem with bias is that we're not always aware of it, and even when we are we don't always know what to do with it.
That is not even close to the same thing as "everyone has bias, whether they know it or not", which is what you implied originally.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm completely unbiased on the male vs female front
Well that's a pretty strong claim. On what do you base that?
You probably don't discriminate on purpose, but according t studies our impression of a person varies based on factors that we are not consciously aware of.
If makeup [go.com] can make a woman look more trustworthy, and tall people [suite101.com] earn more that short people, I'd say that people can hold biases that they're themselves unaware of. Some may be biological rather than cultural. Men have been shown to take different economic choices after being shown a photograp
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Yeah the article is ignoring the real problem..
The simple fact most girls have no interest in being programmers. Just like most heterosexual men have no interest in fashion design, hair and make-up or painting nails for a living. And guess what, it's not because of hordes of sexist females keeping them out of the occupation. Why is it any surprise that most women have no interest at being stuck behind a keyboard all day (and night) for a career?
Re:Where? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actively inclusive? What does that even mean? Including females just because they're females even though they aren't skilled? That's blatant sexism in itself. I sure hope that's not what you're encouraging...
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That's what is happening. Go and ask your HR department about the hiring filters they need to apply to meet ether government mandated standards or to maintain the 'goodwill' presence in the industry.
Re:Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
So...by your logic, women falsely perceive men as being bad company in the workplace (sexism), so they choose career paths that they "think" is friendlier to women (more sexism), and then they complain that the career path they chose NOT to pursue is biased against women (even more sexism).
By your logic, women are the entire reason this bias exists...and the bias is completely artificial. The so-called feedback loop was started, and is continued by women themselves.
Re:Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
yes I saw the same problem in my research at MIT. My lab was offered to present projects at the Harvard Business School. On the day of the presentation, I brashly chastised the organizer for not accepting any projects by female researchers, to which he replied "no females applied."
You can't win if you don't play. Male coders are not handed jobs, it's competitive. And yes, most male coders welcome ladies in their environments because in addition to being good team members, they have natural radiance and the gender balance soothes certain kinds of altercations. But it seems like there's a lot of complaining going on and no applying.
And I don't comprehend this argument that coders have to "make their environment more inviting to women." How? Just _apply_, subscribe to hiring bulletins, call and ask for interviews, send resumes, network. There is no conspiracy against women. As someone above said, we're too busy working to organize a conspiracy and don't want one anyway.
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This subject tends to make men believe they are being accused of being sexist. That somehow the imbalance is a consequence of deliberate or perhaps inadvertent sexism. The thing is this: there doesn't need to be overt sexism for an environment to be uninviting.
Any situation where there is an existing gender imbalance leads to this imbalance being reinforced simply because it is less comfortable for the minority and more comfortable for the majority.
So when it is suggested that we need to make special effort
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And that belief is accurate.
If that were the case, it actually would be a matter of principle, and arguably PC. But thi
Re:Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Whiteboard coding is taboo, no programmer I know writes code on paper or a whiteboard. Why on earth would I ask someone to do that.
Because some developers actually think about what they're coding, and design first? And it's a hell of a lot easier to diagram on a whiteboard than on a PC?
3. Algorithmic programming? Don't care most of these are well known patterns and a 30 sec google search can come up with a answer. I do not need a cowboy that is going to try to refactor well known patterns or existing libraries just for the sake of doing it.
This makes zero sense. Who said that using algorithms will cause you to do this? This is a non-sequiter.
As an older male sys admin (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/
There are times that I've thought one of my female coworker friends needs to "lighten up", and I've thought that about male coworkers too. But there are many times when I've seen that the women are correct, and that they've been singled out in an unfortunate way. It really turns them off to a field that needs a more equal gender balance, and that's too bad.
I think XZVF kinda hit it on the head, too.
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I saw a senior executive at an internet company get dragged off in handcuffs after pinning a female developer against a wall during working hours.
Not rape but close enough to make every woman who was an employee there pretty damn uncomfortable.
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Used to be common sense that it's a bad idea for women to live with unrelated men. And that women, who lose every time against men in physical struggle, have no place in battle.
Tell that to the Israeli army [wikipedia.org]. Must be why they keep losing wars.
Re:Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm the manager of a local programmer user group. In our monthly meeting, not five minutes goes by without some sort of perverted joke or comment. It doesn't really cease when we have any women show up our meeting (typically only one). Nice and inviting, yeah.
Though there always exceptions, programmers tend to be relatively socially awkward lot. It comes out in our jokes, in our dress, in our environment. (Ask your co-worker chuckling, "That's what she said...", wearing a video game t-shirt, with Star Wars figure strewn about his cube, as he hums the "Ocarina of Time" while coding ....) There isn't a "No gurls alloud!" sign, but there doesn't have to be. There are plenty of brilliant women who would make great programmers, but who are totally turned off by the culture. It's all about feeling welcome. (Yes, I know there's the rare girl who embraces the subculture, but that's not the point.)
Re:Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Where? (Score:4, Insightful)
The "That's what she said" and other sexist jokes are definitely a problem, but I don't see anything wrong with the rest of your stereotype. If girls don't like the geek culture, fuck 'em. The same goes for all the guys who think they're too cool for it. I like that an argument in the break room is as likely to be Star Wars vs Star Trek as it is to be emacs vs vi. I want to be able to say "The cake is a lie" without explaining myself.
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I'm an independent consultant, so I'm not hiring anyone. :-) By "our" I'm referring to the culture romanticized on Slashdot, Reddit, etc. Programming is certainly an expressive art that feels natural to the group I referred to, but let's be honest: we're business people doing business things. We need to conduct ourself in a way that is welcome to all. We need to discourage those social practices which harm our industry in the long run. There's millions of developers overseas who are having great careers and
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I'm just pointing out that our subculture makes people outside that group feel uncomfortable, and shy away from it as a life choice. If you entered a field where most of your contemporaries were all "gangsta thug" types (not talking crime, just the culture) or were a bunch of cowboy boot, pickup truck driving folks who talked about deer hunting all the time, wouldn't you find yourself retreating to an area where you felt comfortable? I think that's just human nature. Why should a professional work environme
Re:Where? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Where are all these women who are being excluded? At the last place where I worked, every single female candidate for programming positions was hired. Yes, all two of them. One was very good, the other was hmm, maybe average on a good day, but with such a tiny sample size that is pretty meaningless.
My gut feeling has always been that it's simply a job most women aren't interested in. For a job that requires a college degree, coding doesn't pay very well, and has a rather low social status. A woman who is sm
Same problem where I work (Score:3)
I can't say how many women actually send in resumes, because HR filters resumes. However I doubt there's any real bias going on in that because:
1) HR is heavily staffed with women.
2) The HR people know little to nothing about the job, they just filter based off of a list of requirements (things like "must have experience with Microsoft Windows" and so on).
3) They deal with jobs of all types, technical, clerical, administrative, teaching, custodial, maintenance, etc, etc.
4) I work at a university. Diversity
There ^^^ (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, there it is.
Re:Where? (Score:5, Funny)
I like having women at work. Especially young/attractive ones.
And women like having young/attractive men around. Which is why they steer clear of fields populated by all you neck-beard developer types.
Not what I've seen (Score:4, Informative)
I've been a Silicon Valley software engineer for 15 years. I see no disparity of gender that's a concern.
I work in a team of 6. We just hired a senior engineer, a woman. Of the 9 people I interviewed, I only recall 2 men in the interview. In our team, there are 2 men, me and another guy in another so called discriminated class - age. He's 53. Our entire dev team is about 50/50 and might even be tipped to the female side.
When we went to universities to screen for interns, no identifiable difference at one I went to at San Jose State.
Now, there is a disparity in American v. Indian (and some Chinese and Russian), but I don't think it's anyone's fault. Those are the people looking for the jobs.
Granted I have seen some companies that put their white male faces from a Portland company right up front [simple.com], but my personal observations in Silicon Valley are quite different.
diversity (Score:5, Insightful)
diversity is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves. hiring someone because they are female, or of a certain race doesn't improve anything.
The problem with this is... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that whether you're going to be a good coder is generally decided by the time you're like 18. For those of you keeping score this is _before_ you typically enter the workforce.
I think this is pablum is just a bunch of silly navel gazing. Most of us are too busy doing work to run around acting like 15 year olds.
More common in my personal experience as a developer in a large corporation is that there's a rush to hire women developers of any ability. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find good candidates when _half_ the applicants are pre-screened out due to having a Y chromosome?
To be honest, I have only seen or heard about _great_ female developers online working other places, I've never met one in my job and I've been there a looong time. I've worked with decent and even good ones, but a great one that is the "go to gal"? Never.
I attribute this largely to upbringing. I think we'll see more in the future, but my generation and the next few generations tended not to immerse girls in technology from a young age like they did boys. I think in the current generations this is more common.
Re:The problem with this is... (Score:5, Interesting)
She is the same age as me and started her career earlier than me. Today I am a VP System Engineer at a fortune 500 and she is a Registered Nurse.
I think that about sums the whole snafu up.
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That's sort of sad. Do you know why she switched careers?
I am a developer.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I am a developer.... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, of course not. You're a scumbag and should be ashamed of yourself because you're male.
No evidence to back up theories (Score:5, Insightful)
I've read this article twice, and the only supporting facts for the author's conclusions seem to be some stats about declining female enrollment in CS and the personal tale of one woman who had a slightly shitty experience at one place she worked.
WTF.. I could provide a lot more evidence to support a flat earth theory.
I don't doubt that there are places where women have a tougher time than males in the IT dept, but the conclusions this author is making seem shaky at best (not to mention flying in the face of everything I've seen in my own somewhat lengthy career in the field.. admittedly myopic but just a valid and apparently more diverse than the evidence used by the author).
Computers used to be marketed to "Boys" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Computers used to be marketed to "Boys" (Score:5, Interesting)
Guys build products that appeal to themselves. Imagine that.
If girls aren't getting into the industry on the ground floor due to lack of interest, you can hardly blame it on "institutionalized sexism". It was simply never there to begin with. They weren't there to influence the industry because they chose to be.
Clueless geek males trying to "appeal to girls" likely would be an even bigger disaster. It would probably trigger even more severe whining about sexism.
Payback ? (Score:3)
You expect bro's who can't get dates to be nice to women??? Which came first is another question.
We welcome female programmers (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never seen this in any of the teams I worked in. Hell, we welcome women. If I told the team we were hiring a woman, they'd be like "f*ck yea! is she hot?? bring it
!" And I'd be all like, "dudes, you can't bang a coworker, man!" But then I'd be like thinking, "actually she's hot braah I'm all over that yo." But other programmers might make the move first, so I be like, "yo why you be playin?".
And then we'd drag race to settle it. In my mind.
Actually, we all sit in our respective corners and rarely talk.
Female programmers kick ass! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm an old Commodore 64 guy, a coder that has been around since the ZX80 jupiter ace days, yes...I've been around and been into every computer and every language you can think of - never mind that...it's besides the point I am about to make... ...Nowadays I work as a 3D artist at a smaller ad-company, we live in a rather huge building containing various companies, some working with programming...that of course work with us...since we're like a big family in this house we rent...if you like.
The company next door has a woman employed, she is rather new into the business, but she really kicks ass. When it came to programming, I could literally ask her anything, she was modest, not implying that she actually knows anything, but she kicked ass every time...every time she found the answer to any of the programming issues that we had at hand, any problems we had...she solved. In other words...Women can KICK ASS when it comes to coding, and trust me...I am as old SKOOL as it comes, I've been coding everything from C64s to microcontrollers at any bit..but she?...She understood everything...and fixed it all...you know what that means? This is a woman! She kicks ass at coding...she is a natural...and I don't believe for a second that women can't kick it at this stuff, it's just a matter of attention, women can do this stuff as well as we can. Seriously...
Probably not in the workplace, but in college (Score:5, Interesting)
At work, we're all probably too busy with work to bother with this shit, but I remember in college, whenever there were a bunch of us in the computer lab working together on something (more specifically the Linux lab that was separated off from the regular computers), guys would be looking out into the window to the regular computer lab, and make some of the most misogynistic comments I've ever heard, and talk about how "nasty that bitch is" or what a slut this other one is, or how they'd tap that one, and they even did this when there were women in there with us (who didn't say anything). I didn't really know what to say, but just sat there in shock.
Re:Probably not in the workplace, but in college (Score:4, Interesting)
BS (Score:4, Interesting)
I really wish everyone would get off of the whole equal outcome bandwagon and care about equal opportunity. If a woman applies to a job and gets denied because she is a woman, I care about that. If a woman applies to a comp sci school and should get in based on merits but doesn't because she is a woman, I care. If there are less women than men (or vise versa) in any field I don't care. I don't care about ratios of men, women, blacks, whites, gays, lesbians, liberals, conservatives, or any other group. I care about competent people getting jobs they deserve.
This article sums it up (Score:3)
http://arstechnica.com/staff/forcequit/2012/04/sandwich-makers-finally-described-as-female-under-facebooks-leet-speak-option.ars [arstechnica.com]
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Very few women drive bin lorries. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why isn't there a big media-driven push to get more women driving trucks for the cleansing department? Isn't this sexism too?
... not even going to read the comments. (Score:3)
Already angry enough for today.
Here we go again... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like another complaint about there being too many white males in computing without being so overtly racist/sexist about it. What I want to know is why this is such a bad thing? It's not like women or minorities are being discriminated against on anything but merit. There are plenty of Asian/Indian developers. What more do you want?
And why should the coding culture be neutered for the sake of diversity? Why should the minority dictate the emergent culture? This is just more anti-white diversity-sanitizing nonsense. You're in a white male dominated field. Computing has always appealed to white males in general. Perhaps it's biological, perhaps it's cultural, but there is no reason to suggest that this is a problem. Adapt, become part of the culture, and guide it. Nobody should be expected to adapt to you just because your the one black, Islamic, homosexual, mentally/physically handicapped, transgendered computer scientist. If you are uncomfortable about being surrounded by white males then I suggest you pick a different career that caters to your white-male phobia.
Hogwash (Score:5, Insightful)
I have not seen it in my 30+ year IT career (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, there are more men than woman in IT. But this article make it seem like men are actively working together to keep woman out. I have never seen anything like that.
I figure that woman stay out of IT because woman are smarter than men, at least in terms of common sense.
Maybe it has something to do with woman doing more to take care of the children, so the long, unpaid, hours of many IT jobs don't appeal to woman?
Maybe woman tend to be more social, and don't care for work that often lacks social interaction?
Maybe it's a self perpetuating problem where woman don't want to be a field where there are hardly any woman?
Maybe it's because IT is being taken over by visa workers who are mostly men?
Maybe it's because other fields, like health care, are far more stable, and professional?
No reason to jump to the conclusion that men are actively conspiring against women.
Re:It starts before the workforce (Score:5, Insightful)
Few women enter the field and a significant number of them leave. When I was a freshman in Engineering school it was unusual to see even one coed in a class, the most I ever remember was three. Fast forward a few years, women programmers are treated fairly in the workplace. But once they get married and have a couple of babies their career plans often change. When I worked in a classified environment the government wouldn't let a women keep her clearance when she went on maternity leave because most never came back; it was more cost effective to issue a new clearance for the outliers.
McAllister must have quite a few shills here on Slashdot, we see a disproportionate number of his blog posts and most (like this one) are tripe. Brogrammers? Really? Are they having bromances with each other?
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I've had enough of your sensationalist BS stories /. Bookmark deleted, and goodbye.
Good point, AC. People certainly do not want to see any kind of sensationalistic, grandstanding behavior when they visit SlashDot. Yeah, that would be really undesirable.
Re:WHAT? (Score:5, Informative)
If you've been a programmer for over ten years, odds are that you don't work in an environment where you'd hear the phrase. There's some funny presentations mocking this group on YouTube. Basically, think the coder who got past his awkwardness and is basically now a douche. Works out, has some tats, wears Ed Hardy, has a feaux-hawk or a similarly trendy haircut, drinks 7 Red Bulls a day, listens to dubstep, and only codes in whatever's considered the new hotness (Node.js or Rails). In other words, a little start-up monkey (working at a company with a cool name like "douche.ly") who'll evaporate from the industry when the current startup bubble pops.
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So the developers calling themselves "brogrammers," they're actually mocking themselves, and being sexist, towards themselves?
Or let me guess... you didn't read TFA?
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I can create a Facebook community dedicated to plumbers who hate Nintendo games, and will get 21000 people to sign up.
Re:What a load of drivel!!! (Score:5, Funny)
It's almost like young people are lacking in experience due to not having been around long enough to have gotten it yet.
No (Score:5, Funny)
That looks more like an overbelly.
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