Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
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Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
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Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#2The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough?
Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough.
So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#3I donated to the Mouse program[0] she mentioned in the article, it looks like a pretty good idea.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#4> Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world
From my personal experience, exactly such courses have proven to have the most long-term value to me.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#5The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough? Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough. So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
Yes, you weren't paying attention :)
She mentioned it a few times - girls like colaborative learning, not lone-wolf learning, and she also put a link in - https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#6> The ’80s were also the era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the rise of the archetype of the lone, antisocial hacker in a garage spending all-nighters building machines that were at many times ambiguous and without a clear path to success. Without going into too much more detail because this essay is already longer than it needs to be, this can be seen as the linchpin in which computer science took a hard turn toward learning and work environments that either pushed many women away entirely or resulted in them feeling like misfit puzzle pieces when they did take on coding.
I would appreciate if someone clarified the argument that the author is making above, because as it reads, she's implying that women don't excel when tasked with individual work involving "ambigious and unclear paths to success". That certainly isn't how she meant it to be interpreted, right?
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#7I don't know that you can call yourself a "failed coder" when, let's be honest, it could be argued you didn't try that hard to be a coder in the first place - it wasn't that you made your living do it but realised in doing so that you were bad at it. I'm not sure bailing out on a high school computing course, because it sucked (I'm not sure being a boy would have made any difference here), is nearly enough qualification to label oneself a "failed coder".
I will share this from my own experience of computing courses at school though, and this is admittedly going back to the late 80s/early 90s: they sucked. They were boring as hell. I had a year of IT classes in year 9 and I got crap grades throughout because I was totally unengaged and, frankly, already operating at a considerably more sophisticated level than the course material. I wanted to solve real problems and write video games, not bugger around with word processing and spreadsheets and deeply basic (no pun intended) programming "problems".
And that's not (just) being arrogant: it applied to plenty of the other card-carrying nerds in the room, although some of them were definitely better at playing the game and being willing to jump through the hoops. This was in a boys' school, btw.
I actually diverged from Comp Sci for quite a while: going into 6th form the schools merged and I realised there was no chance of me getting a girlfriend if I was into computers. Bad decision and, ironically, made no difference in that direction anyway. What it did do was ensure that I didn't even consider CompSci as an undergrad degree. Another bad decision, later corrected with a post-grad conversion course.
And so I finally ended up working as a programmer, which is what I'd always wanted to do, despite my best efforts in other directions.
Anyway, a roundabout way of getting to the point: clearly there's a lot the industry can do to make itself more attractive to females. I've worked with precious few female engineers over the years but enough to know the good ones are as good as any man I've worked with, and I'm sure a similar distribution of skill applies for women as for men. And this is the thing: as well as making the industry a more pleasant place for women to work, we need more women at the top of the funnel. For whatever reason or set of reasons - which I don't pretend to understand - girls are much more likely to either choose not to study, or drop out of studying, Computer Science. If we don't fix that we are always going to have a gender imbalance: I'd argue that one way to normalise women as engineers is to ensure there are more women doing engineering.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#8The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough? Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough. So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
I think it was the collaborative learning rather than isolated learning and debugging she talked about. I agree that it also wasn't very clear to me so I could be wrong.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#9The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough? Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough. So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
She does say:
that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure
*editted formatting
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#10The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough? Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough. So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
She does say: that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure although I suppose you have to imagine what a tech classroom/work environment would look like if it supported folks with such learning preferences since she doesn't fully spell that out. *editted…
Please don't use code blocks (indentation) to quote text. it causes side-scrolling in browsers, making it difficult to read on desktop machines and nigh impossible on mobile devices.
A common method of quoting text on HN is prefixing the line with a ">". I personally like also wrapping it in asterisks to italicize the quote.