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1984 – When women stopped coding

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Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#31

Post by dagw »

cm2187 wrote: post #13
Crito wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar profession. Children who develop an interest in programming will become about as common as children who are interested in tablesaws or cutting torches.

Programming is more akin to engineering than factory working. Languages are getting simpler and more powerful but programs are getting more complex. 15 years ago a typical developper didn't need to worry about multithreading, connectivity or security. It's fundamentally an intellectual job and will remain.

The future probably won't be 15 highly educated, highly paid developers working on a simple web app like today. It will be 1 highly educated, highly paid developers guiding 15 lower paid 'blue collar' developers in developing a web app.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#32

Post by aaronem »

saint-loup wrote: post #20
purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

Maybe they're just not into it. Maybe that's perfectly fine for a child no to grokk what his parent likes.

Sure. It's also perfectly fine for a parent to expose his kids to his own interests, in case there might be among them something that will fire the kid's imagination.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#33

Post by hvidgaard »

Luc wrote: post #27
cm2187 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is more akin to engineering than factory working. Languages are getting simpler and more powerful but programs are getting more complex. 15 years ago a typical developper didn't need to worry about multithreading, connectivity or security. It's fundamentally an intellectual job and will remain.

From my Western European point of view, I see a lot of these intellectual jobs being outsourced to Slovenia, Poland and even the Philippines. I am advising my kids to have good technical skills but also great people skills.

Outsourcing has its uses, but the majority of programming jobs cannot be oursourced, and with time it will become even less profitable to do.

However, programming any major system today does require extensive knowledge and I dare say a CS degree as well. It's becoming more and more like an engineering discipline, and as such I think we're going to see a shift towards programming being something you need a college degree to perform.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#34

Post by apalmer »

Doesnt intuitively make sense to me... adult women stopped being drawn into the computerfield at the same time that male children began getting computers as gifts? wouldnt their be a distinct lag effect of maybe 5-7 years between when the boys got their computers and entered the work force?

I think the shift probably had more to do with the perception that computer programming was 'important', a lot of the early view on computer programming was driven by the physical interface... women were viewed as suitable for programming because they were historically suitable for typing and secretary work... i think on some level it was being viewed as a form of dictation that was in a bizarre 'shorthand'...

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#35

Post by sklogic »

Crito wrote: post #9
purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar profession. Children who develop an interest in programming will become about as common as children who are interested in tablesaws or cutting torches.

I hope that there won't even be such a profession as programming. Coding must become a basic part of the general literacy, and almost all the professions must include a degree of coding. Programmers should disappear just like scribes did.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#36

Post by aaronem »

Crito wrote: post #9
purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar profession. Children who develop an interest in programming will become about as common as children who are interested in tablesaws or cutting torches.

Have you never been around, or yourself been, a boy child? I can count on no hands the number of boys I knew in my youth, myself included, who were not interested in tablesaws or cutting torches.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#37

Post by mattmanser »

hvidgaard wrote: post #33
Luc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my Western European point of view, I see a lot of these intellectual jobs being outsourced to Slovenia, Poland and even the Philippines. I am advising my kids to have good technical skills but also great people skills.

Outsourcing has its uses, but the majority of programming jobs cannot be oursourced, and with time it will become even less profitable to do. However, programming any major system today does require extensive knowledge and I dare say a CS degree as well. It's becoming more and more like an engineering discipline, and as such I think we're going to see a shift towards programming being something you need a college deg…

Programming a major system has absolutely no need of a CS degree.

I know and have worked with programmers with and without a CS degree (I'm one of the ones without).

As far as I can tell it's no indicator of programmer skill at all.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#38

Post by TurboHaskal »

Because they know better than doing unpaid overtime, keeping up to date in an ever changing industry driven by popularity contests and having to work for free on some open source project because somebody thought that what you do in your free time is somehow more relevant CV wise than what you actually do for a living.

I wouldn't worry much anyway. We won't be seeing many of those articles once the bubble bursts.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#39

Post by skoczymroczny »

Wintamute wrote: post #11
purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

I think you're right. Back in the 70s/80s/90s kids had to work at using their computers. In order to play a game in the early 80s I had to hook up a tape recorder, fiddle with the volume, tape a 1kb RAM upgrade to the back of the computer and write some code to start playing a game. In the 90s I had to wrestle with AUTOEXEC.BAT and COMMAND.COM for hours to make DOS recognise my sound card. Technical effort and persev…

I think you mean CONFIG.SYS :)

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#40

Post by DeusExMachina »

jessaustin wrote: post #17

The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers... And these... were marketed almost entirely to men and boys. Great, another travesty for which we have marketing to thank.

The hate towards marketing that is present on HN is almost comical at times.

My experience is that, the more you study how marketing works, the more you realize marketing is about what people already want and try to appeal to that. Sure, big companies like Coca Cola have more sophisticated techniques to make their brands appealing, but still, if you look at Coca Cola's marketing, what they sell is "happiness", which is what people want, and they make the association to their beverage.

From this point of view, there is no "travesty" to thank marketing for. The reality was that probably personal computers were more appealing to men, so it made more sense to spend marketing resources towards them.

Why it was more appealing to them is a good question to ask, and it could be because of many reasons, including culture and society. But marketing probably didn't create that desire, it just used it.

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