1984 – When women stopped coding • Hacker News Board

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#141

Post by Consultant32452 » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 3:28 PM UTC

kelukelugames wrote: post #128

Consultant32452 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it may have improved I feel like it's still quite low. Outside of the valley and a few other key cities we're still largely considered anti-social dweebs who can't talk to women, have regressive sexist ideologies, are pedantic assholes, etc.

I agree. "Silicon Valley" is a step up from "Big Bang Theory", but we don't have a primetime show like "Grey's Anatomy" or "The Good Wife."

I'm curious how you feel about characters like Abby from CSI or Felicity Smoak on Arrow compared to their male counterparts like Cisco on The Flash.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#142

Post by Verdex_Alt » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 3:34 PM UTC

beachstartup wrote: post #75

mattlutze wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a similar way that some parents will fruitlessly try to coax their children into being the sports starts they want/wanted to be, for some children the "digging about in the computer" bug just won't catch. I hope it won't be too disappointing for you... there's a whole world of experiences to explore with your daughters! I'm on the older edge or in the early middle of the Millennial generation, depending who define…

my parents tried hard (real, real hard) to get me to play tennis and piano, and refused to let me spend as much time on the computer as i wanted to. guess which i did at 2 in the morning while they were asleep? guess which i dropped like a bad habit as soon as i left the house? and this was in the 90s, when dot com mania was at its height. newsflash: parents live vicariously through their kids and project all sorts o…

I think there are two things at play here. The first is that people are predisposed to love and take care of their children (and there's a bunch of associated brain chemistry that helps with that). And the second is that there exist people who don't understand that not everyone is interested in the thing that they are interested in. [This second one seems to be completely uncorrelated with intelligence ... as far as I can tell. Maybe a personality spectrum thing?]

Anyway. If you mix the two together you get people who insist that their children must be exactly like them because otherwise their children would be doomed and that would be unthinkable.

More intelligence (and/or forceful personality / competence) may make the problem worse because clearly you know what you're doing (after all you can describe the thing with such great an articulate words) the problem must be this ungrateful child that doesn't know you're paving a golden path.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#143

Post by jazzyk » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 3:34 PM UTC

kjdal2001 wrote: post #126

delibes wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll focus on the professional salaries... "Uncle" Bob Martin gave an interesting talk in London last night about the need for a professional body for software. Doctors have the American Medical Association (or BMA here in the UK). Lawyers have the American Bar Association (I think the Law Society is the UK equivalent). They can regulate their profession, ensuring standards, controlling membership through certificati…

I saw him give the same talk in Chicago, and the impression that I got was that the body he was advocating for had nothing to do with salaries. The AMA and the Bar might increase salaries by creating scarcity in their professions, but they aren't salary negotiating organizations like a union.

We don't need a union, but a professional body representing us would do wonders. Merely sorting out the H1B visa mess (not necessarily eliminating) would help salaries.

My wife is an architect (residential) and her clients cannot tell her to take a shortcut which violates the Building Code.

I'd love to be able to say "no" to some stupid, short-sighted requests I get from clients. Without a professional organization behind me - I can't, because I will be deemed "difficult" and lose the business.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#144

Post by cableshaft » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 3:34 PM UTC

anjanb wrote: post #55

A lot of indian women are taking to coding/programming career. Currently, the estimate of number of women programmers in india is about 1,00,000. They are expected to grow to 2,00,00 in less than 10 years.

Every female applicant for a programming position I've encountered or seen brought in for an interview have been either Indian or Chinese. Analyst and project management positions have had much more diverse female populations in comparison. But that's just anecdotal, I know.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#145

Post by jazzyk » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 3:36 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #129

flexie wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law is a middle class profession for most lawyers. Very few lawyers make anywhere near $1M per year. I guess that the number of US attorneys consistently making $1M yearly is in the hundreds or low thousands. Median salary for lawyers is $113,530. That's a pay most lawyers don't achieve until they are in their late 30s or 40s. Top 10 percentile is at $187,200. Most lawyers spend 4 years in college and then 3 years in…

Programming also seems like a pretty clear path to management (if that's your goal), which is one of the best upper-middle class professions there is. And once you've proven the ability to manage a team it is much easier to translate that into non-technical management, which opens you up to a plethora of different positions, particularly if you have advanced education (e.g. MBA or similar).

A fair number of developers transition to management, but I would not call the path "pretty clear". It is much less clear than for project managers, program managers, etc.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#146

Post by cableshaft » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 3:39 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #137

grandDesigns wrote: post #78

Because women are smarter. I notice that graph compares Computer Science ($50K-$150K/year), to Medical School ($150K--$1M), Law School ($120K--$1M), and Physical Sciences (???). Women see the writing on the wall on High School: Med/Law School offer a clear career path to the upper middle class, while CS offers a muddy path at a middle class life. They also see "rich" old Doctors and Lawyers. They have never seen a "r…

Your analysis is sloppy on several fronts. 1) Medicine and Law are professions, programming is not. You could arguably compare to CS professors, but that's still apples and oranges. 2) It doesn't make any sense to compare (peak, median, whatever) yearly salaries when you have wildly different career paths (e.g. 0 years of school vs. 10+) , debt, etc. What you want is lifetime earnings. 3) Lawyers in general don't mak…

Regardless of the reality (which everything I've seen concurs with what you've said), there are a ton of people making decisions for school that are influenced by media, parents, etc. that keep telling them that the safest career path is doctors and lawyers. That's starting to change nowadays, but only just.

I still regularly hear people talk about how cushy and rich all lawyer jobs supposedly are.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#147

Post by pc86 » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 3:42 PM UTC

Thriptic wrote: post #133

grandDesigns wrote: post #78

Because women are smarter. I notice that graph compares Computer Science ($50K-$150K/year), to Medical School ($150K--$1M), Law School ($120K--$1M), and Physical Sciences (???). Women see the writing on the wall on High School: Med/Law School offer a clear career path to the upper middle class, while CS offers a muddy path at a middle class life. They also see "rich" old Doctors and Lawyers. They have never seen a "r…

It's quite a different story now. You're looking at a ~14 year incubation period before you're making those types of numbers as a physician (bachelors, med school, residency, fellowship), plus having to take on significant debt. An overwhelmingly large number of physicians also report a low quality of life and urge others not to enter the profession. I'm not sure how it is for lawyers, but I would imagine there is al…

> I'm not sure how it is for lawyers, but I would imagine there is also a significant up front investment before you start making real money (if you ever do).

Law school alone (ignoring the cost of passing the bar or anything else) is prohibitively expensive for many people.

For 2015-16, Yale law school is $78,000/yr[0], Harvard is $85,000[1] (including an optional $2400 health plan), Columbia is $65,588[2], and Stanford is $54,183[3]. So you're looking at $165-255,000 in fees, expenses and tuition over three years.

The majority of my friends who are attorneys and have taken the bar also spent several months (up to 6-8 but that does not seem to be the norm) doing nothing but studying for it full time. Everyone took out additional loans to cover expenses, or lived with their parents for free. So it's not uncommon to have $150k in just law school student loans when all is said and done.

So the median is still higher for attorneys than for developers, but most attorneys would have student loan obligations in the 1.2-2x median salary range, so often several times more than they're making right out of school.

It was bad enough making $45k as a junior developer with $20k in student loans, I can't imagine making $60k as a junior associate in a similar area with $175k in student loans.

[0] https://www.law.yale.edu/admissions/cost-financial-aid/cost-... [1] http://hls.harvard.edu/dept/sfs/financial-aid-policy-overvie... [2] http://web.law.columbia.edu/admissions/graduate-legal-studie... [3] https://law.stanford.edu/apply/tuition-financial-aid/cost-of...

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#148

Post by cheez » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 3:56 PM UTC

noxToken wrote: post #127

roymurdock wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 22 so I'm kind of caught between you and your daughters, but my understanding is that Minecraft is that new "OS" or "application" that is exceedingly fun while teaching programming in the phone/tablet age. It's phenomenal how popular it is among the younger generations...its coming to replace the legos of my (relative) youth. MSFT is pushing it down the coding/education path as well - they recently launched a Min…

I was preemptively horrified before I clicked your Minecraft link. I taught a summer camp for middle/high school kids that wanted to learn how to make Minecraft mods. It was a disaster. We specifically put that the kids must have programming experience in a Java-like language before beginning, but all the affluent parents saw was, "Get your kids out of the house for 9 hours a day for an entire week!" Don't get me wro…

Was this at the university camps? I sent my daughter to the gaming sessions and she absolutely loved them. I didn't send her to Minecraft for the reasons you stated :)

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#149

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 4:01 PM UTC

grandDesigns wrote: post #78

Because women are smarter. I notice that graph compares Computer Science ($50K-$150K/year), to Medical School ($150K--$1M), Law School ($120K--$1M), and Physical Sciences (???). Women see the writing on the wall on High School: Med/Law School offer a clear career path to the upper middle class, while CS offers a muddy path at a middle class life. They also see "rich" old Doctors and Lawyers. They have never seen a "r…

that is a good explanation, however it does not explain why women did choose programming as a career path before 1984 - were women less clever/was a high salary less important just before 1984 or was programming a more promising career path? I don't know.

i heard another explanation - that the home computer brought about a shift in how pop culture did perceive programmers, from now on it was a thing for male geeks. Was that because home computers did not have a particularly friendly user interface at that time ? I don't know.

Before that it was like any other white collar office job, after that popular culture became to associate it with you know who. It might be that this image did have some influence on career choices.

Again, these are all guesses because nobody can anything definitive on the subject.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#150

Post by scbrg » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

gauthr wrote: post #109

scbrg wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be nitpicky, but you probably want to review how you typed those numbers. The second is smaller than the first, and the commas are not grouping the zeroes in groups of three. I suppose you mean either 10^5 or 10^6, but I'm not sure which.

They're using the Indian numbering system -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system

Wow, I did not know about this. Thank you for the link.

As sibling poster points out though, there still ought to be an error in the numbers as written, as the second is smaller than the first, but the context of the text implies that it should be larger.