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1984 – When women stopped coding

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Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#51

Post by gutnor »

dagw wrote: post #31
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.

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.

That's not the direction it is taking. It will be more like 1 highly paid developer doing everything himself.

When I started working, it took a team of testers, a team of dba, and a team of sysops in addition of the developers to build anything. Nowadays, no only the development team is smaller, but the sysops, dba and testing are the responsibility of those developers too through automated tools. On the client side, there used to be BA and Testers, but nowadays, BA and Testers are often the same persons.

The tshirt from several years ago "I will replace you by a tiny script" has proven quite true. Old job that required qualified people before have been replaced by scripts, not "blue collar" worker. A huge amount a developer entering the market could lower the salaries, but any simplification to the developer role is going to be handled by automated tools, not human.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#52

Post by mstade »

cheez wrote: post #25
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…

The problem is you haven't caught up with what computers have become: a utility. They were a novelty when you were growing up, but they are a utility now. What that means is that people who deal with computers are going to be professionals ranging from the spectrum of architect to plumber: there are more plumbers than architects. Do you think your plumber had an innate desire to be a plumber? No. They looked at their…

I use the plumber analogy all the time, but most programmers I know vehemently resist this notion. I find nothing wrong with being a plumber, and think many of my colleagues would do well in realizing they aren't high flying architects but actually just well compensated plumbers.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#53

Post by noarchy »

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.

North American (Canada to be exact) here. I'm seeing jobs being outsourced by some of our local shops to places like Armenia and Romania. You can hire very competent developers on the cheap (relative to North America, at least). I expect more of this in the future.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#54

Post by nmc »

aggieben wrote: post #49

Can someone post the TL;DR (uh....TL;DL?) from the podcast here? Looks like a decent discussion going on, but can't tell that anyone actually listened :-) I'll cop to the fact that I'm just not going to spend the time, though I'm interested in the conclusion(s).

The post was updated with a link to this transcript/summary: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#56

Post by adrianN »

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.

So? It's not like the people in Slovenia, Poland, or the Philippines are less intelligent or less well educated than people from Western Europe.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#57

Post by yourapostasy »

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.

That sentiment might be jumping the gun. I was just a kid playing around with a DEC PDP-11 when the TRS-80/Apple ][/Commodore Amiga wave of personal computers hit homes (I wasn't exposed to the earlier, Homebrew Computer Club-era, MITS Altair/Apple I/Heathkit H8 wave of personal computers). I clearly recall IT staffing at the company where the PDP-11 came from heavily staffed by women. However, even the daughters of those women at that time who I got to meet, to the last one, had zero interest in anything having to do with computers. Except maybe for the occasional game that caught their fancy. Usually storyline-driven themes like On-Line Systems aka Sierra Entertainment titles and Pac-Man clones; they rejected all of the dungeon crawlers or shoot-up themes. I recall even as a youngster thinking at the time the displayed gender preferences very odd, as computers to me were neutral territory where neither gender had an obvious physical or social advantage at the outset.

I am guessing that the early marketers likely observed the same emergent social behaviors, and decided to market to where the money was. Meeting hundreds of people in the industry, it is vanishingly rare to find a woman who bugged her parents as a young girl for an early-era home computer; that story is so common among men it is a pedestrian trope. I'd dearly like to know from marketers who were involved in that era to chime in on what kind of market research led them to tilt the early marketing towards men and boys.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#58

Post by nmc »

cuillevel3 wrote: post #8

I don't think it's about absolute numbers, women did not stop coding. It's just more men starting to code, which makes the share of women smaller.

This is probably true, but equally bad. Why would so much more men than women start to code?

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#59

Post by lucozade »

ishener wrote: post #12
ishener wrote: post #10

The actual article is here: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

I think it's important to also show the graph of absolute numbers of computer science students. Maybe the absolute numbers will show that the number of female students did not decrease, but rather the numner of male students increased dramatically, making the female share drop. Just an angle I would pursue.

I had the same thought so I checked [1].

Really very odd graphs of both male and female students. I haven't seen anything that really explains the peaky total number let alone the ratio profile.

Interestingly the higher degrees seem to be pretty stable in ratio terms. Not sure what they may be indicative of though.

Very strange.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#60

Post by wernercd »

krylon wrote: post #44
DanBC wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have Minecraft which had the potential to create legions of people interested in programming, but the reality is that it's an awful awful introduction to programming. Microsoft could, if they port it to a sensible language and structure, drag in millions of young programmers.

> Microsoft could, if they port it to a sensible language and structure, drag in millions of young programmers. The first thing I would like them to do is include some form of programming tools with Windows. On a Mac[1], you have Python, Perl, and Ruby available on a default installation, and you get XCode for free from the App Store. A fresh installation of Windows, OTOH, is a barren wasteland in comparison, and the…

Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is considered a top-notch programming environment... and it's free.

It would be the perfect place to put something with built in programming hooks into Minecraft.

And... there is already too many people putting too much garbage on devices that people don't need... last thing we need is being loaded down with crap - whether Python, perl or Visual Studios - on a default install of Windows.

(Why the F* is Candy Crap included with Windows 10 now? Much less Note and other crap that should be opt-in... not clean install > remove, remove, remove... /rant)

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