Confessions of a Failed Female Coder • Hacker News Board

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#51

Post by js2 » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:16 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #19

politician wrote: post #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…

What's strange here is that the 1980s and 1990s were the period of the "lone coder". This was when Microsoft advertised in recruiting that every programmer got a private office with a door they could close. That's in the past. Facebook now has one of the largest bullpens on the planet in Menlo Park, so people can collaborate. Between office layout, "agile", Slack, Github, and StackExchange, programming is more of a s…

So why isn't female participation coming back up? It was higher in the 1970s and 1980s than it is now.

> "We’re now in an era where computer scientists are no longer universally considered to be ‘80s-style loners, but the structure of workplaces is still often dominated by the manner of thinking that was created by them (see also: “move fast and break things”[1])."

[1] https://xkcd.com/1428/

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#52

Post by walshemj » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:17 PM UTC

0xbear wrote: post #42

“I also, as an ex-Googler, know that the company places a high value on internal open dialogue and personal expression” That’s only true as long as your “open dialogue” and “personal expression” aligns with the prevailing liberal dogma. Step off the officially sanctioned path and the same thing will happen to you as happened to Damore.

mm you mean go of the deep end into far right politics this isn't setting up a Branch of young conservatives in the London google offices is it.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#53

Post by nullc » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:18 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #38

GhostVII wrote: post #21

It's interesting that a lot of her experiences are similar to what the Google manifesto said - that currently, computer science is more targeted towards the way men learn and work than the way women learn and work. Although she was focusing more on the education side of things versus the work side, the core message seems to be that men and women learn and work differently, and that needs to be addressed to get more w…

the snide addition of "Hopefully she doesn't get fired for it." makes it hard to be objective about the rest of your comment, but putting that aside, i agree that there is a tinge of implicit buy-in of gender stereotyping in her writing. it's almost certainly more complicated than just "biology did it". that biology simply _dictates_ the way we learn is naive, rather than being a complicated dance between biological…

> there is a tinge of implicit buy-in of gender stereotyping in her writing

She emphasized that you can't predict an individual from population characteristics many times.

But if you're concerned about overall diversity and not just if a particular individual has access, then you must concern yourself, at least somewhat, with population characteristics.

Sterotyping is a sin if you use it for discrimination, it's humanitarian when you use it -- for example-- to save people from breast and prostate cancer.

> it basically boiled down to "we learn differently", and i just find that woefully inadequate

It may not take much of a difference in averages in the gendered sub-populations to make a big difference in tech's gender balance if you make the assumption that tech is selecting for people several standard deviations away from the norm.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#54

Post by _nothing » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:18 PM UTC

I agree with others that the author's experience may not be as significant to the wider discussion of female programmers as she thinks it is.

I'm a developer now; I could not have made it through a Computer Science major in college. I'd always been drawn to technology and my dad highly encouraged me to pursue IT, but I just didn't find CS itself interesting to me. I was highly, highly averse to the idea of "lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports".

Maybe it is in fact a particularly "male" engineer thing to want to focus only on excelling at one's trade while neglecting everything else in one's life. I was not like that.

So I studied Neuroscience and Psychology because they felt more applicable and "hands-on". I dissected cadavers, ran behavioral tests on rats, crunched data.

Then later I discovered that I really did enjoy programming itself; I realized I loved building things. Now I feel like I could sit through dry lectures on fundamental and complex CS topics that my younger self would find boring. It sounds like the author liked building things too. Maybe if her program had been focused on that instead of other things, she would have felt more motivated.

To me, this seems like a classic case of someone deciding that they're simply not good at math because they were taught it the wrong way or weren't shown why it was relevant.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#55

Post by jansho » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

There seems to be a bit of a contradiction in her post:

> Despite the cargo shorts and the loner attitude, I learned like a girl.

And:

> it was an all-girls school, and every single other woman who took that computer science class that year became an engineer or scientist.

Hmm, it sounds more like she has a different learning style, which is not necessarily down to her femaleness.

That said, I think that at a fundamental level, there are differences in how men and women think. But none are better than the other, we know that we gain richer insights when we take both into account. But in this current political climate, it's unwise to go too deep about this, because it can so easily slip into the really nasty domains. Remember the time when phrenology was used to justify gender and race discrimination?

This is why I dislike Damore. I don't care what his manifesto says, but I bet that he knew exactly what he was doing. Playing games is pathetic, dude.

I can sympathise with the writer as I have a similar story too. I'm permanently put off from going into engineering, but I've accepted that and moved on. (Incidentally it's education and design, to better design learning experiences for everyone!) And that's OK, the burden of guilt of "letting down your kind" is also terrible. Life's too short and there are so many other interesting, under-explored areas ... and you can still get involved in tech. The best bit about tech? It's just a tool.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#56

Post by walshemj » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

Santosh83 wrote: post #11

I suspect its more a cultural/historical thing. Comparatively fewer women go for computer science because they have far lesser role models and mentors and icons of their own sex to look upon. Just like how only few men manage to dig into women dominated occupations. Rather than anything inherent in women that puts them at a disadvantage vis-a-vis men with regards to computer science or "hard" science in general.

And if you are a high performer at high school /uni in the UK women are more likely to go into medicine, law or the city where you can earn more than a train driver

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#57

Post by erik_seaberg » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:20 PM UTC

> The result of this is that STEM education is taught in a way that gives girls an opportunity to collaborate, as well as allow them to access the broader ideas, people, and goals that bring coding off the screen and into the real world.

Contrast this with "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." I think there's a big difference between nerdy obsession and grudgingly making something valuable. If nobody hired coders, it would still be my hobby.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#58

Post by nullc » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:20 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #7

I 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 qualificat…

> and I got crap grades throughout

She was not willing to do that and specifically cited it as a reason that she gave up.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#59

Post by dxhdr » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:23 PM UTC

jansho wrote: post #55

There seems to be a bit of a contradiction in her post: > Despite the cargo shorts and the loner attitude, I learned like a girl. And: > it was an all-girls school, and every single other woman who took that computer science class that year became an engineer or scientist. Hmm, it sounds more like she has a different learning style, which is not necessarily down to her femaleness. That said, I think that at a fundame…

> at a fundamental level, there are differences in how men and women think

It's undeniable there are biological differences between men and women, but this seems far fetched. Biological differences don't manifest themselves in an intuitive way; for example, there is no difference between men and women's hair. However we perceive a large difference entirely due to environmental training.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#60

Post by zengid » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:26 PM UTC

> "Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports"

Just taking this at face value, I think she failed because she was afraid of failing. I've always learned better from having to struggle with something than having someone explain to me how to do it. Its that torturous process of trial and error that unconsciously guides someone towards a solution. Being able to do that on your own is ultimately the hallmark of a professional.

That being said, I _am_ a man, and if what she is claiming is true (men learn more through lone-wolf trial/error, women learn better through collaborative team-work) then I can't say much about why trial/error is so important. Maybe its just more important to me and my context.

I think she has a really interesting point about the importance of putting the 'person' into the equation. I really prefer to watch a tech-talk over a blog post because hearing someone talk about something in a informal language gives a lot of life to whatever they're talking about. Their body language and tone conveys a lot of information about the technology: are they holding 'religious' assumptions?; is it a hard-learned lesson to avoid some pitfall?; are they avoiding talking about negatives to try and sell something?..

Watching the Q&A portion of a talk can be especially enlightening. You really get to see whether they're full of shit or legitimate based on how they react to critical questions.