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Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

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Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#151

Post by jordanlev »

dokem wrote: post #94

It's really not that complicated. Technical people recognize technical ability. Throwing together a CRUD site in some framework is really not that complicated and can be achieved without really understanding what's going on. When you started learning Clojure you got a little more respect because you were broadening you're horizons. It's not some conspiracy systems programmers have against web-only devs: The web dev l…

"Throwing together" anything using anything is not really that hard, but understanding the problem, making trade-offs with limited time and budget, writing maintainable and well-tested code, making something easy to use, accessible, efficient... these are all very difficult to pull off regardless of whether you're building a CRUD site or not.

I would also disagree that the web dev learning curve is not that steep... sure to get something to "compile" (well, show up on the screen) is stupid easy (

Hello world

)... but to actually make a functional, usable, performant, efficient, accessible, beautiful site or app requires managing a lot of complexity across a bewildering amount of environments and tools.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#152

Post by tptacek »

smhost wrote: post #150
tptacek wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This logic comes up all the time on HN. I always wonder whether the people repeating it really believe that commercial software development is so intellectually challenging that it is only practiced by people at the very top end of the cognitive spectrum.

No, I was just wondering whether the mean for women is significantly to the right of the mean for men, or whether mid-to-low skilled women aren't being hired for some other reason (hiring bias, self-selection, or whatever). Or maybe my experiences don't generalize, and there actually are a bunch of mid-to-low skilled women whom I've simply never encountered.

My subtext is that commercial software development is so cognitively unremarkable and routinized that you're not going to see any indication of male/female cognitive differences in the demographics of our field.

It's an argument that doesn't play well on message boards, because software developers love to believe that they're part of a cognitive elite "inventing the future" and "eating the world", when in fact really the overwhelming majority of us are performing a bog-standard white collar symbol manipulation job no more challenging than the job done by an accountant or actuary.

Nerds like to pretend that we're all working on the graph isomorphism problem alongside Babai, but really most of our days involve basic wiring of data from one place to another; form fields to database rows to packet fields to page markup. We want to believe we're brain surgeons, but most of the time we're barely even dentists.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#153

Post by ken »

pault wrote: post #38
shawn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Look at how many plates I can juggle at once!” “Aren’t you just trying to walk to the store?” “Look! I added a fifth! Everyone do this now!”

I don't understand your analogy. What is walking to the store without juggling any plates in web development? I'm not aware of any stack that allows you to write styles, markup, business logic, and database queries in a single language.

I'm doing that today with Clojure/EDN: Garden, Reagent, Clojure/ClojureScript, HoneySQL.

(You might think it cheating somewhat because HoneySQL is just a thin syntactic wrapper on SQL, but then again, if I weren't cheap/poor, I could use Datomic, where it really is the same language.)

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#154

Post by freshhawk »

throwawaymath wrote: post #37
s3nnyy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experience looking at thousands of CVs and talking to people who are behind the CVs.

That's not a statistic, nor is it quantifiable. I'm not taking issue with your experience, I'm taking issue with the fact that you've implied your claim has quantitative rigor to it, because I'm extremely skeptical that's the case. For what it's worth, I'm challenging you as someone who is neither a JavaScript developer nor a Clojure developer. I'm of the opinion that biases like the one the author laments are perpet…

In english, "statistically speaking" can mean you are making a claim about the odds of something rather than a 1:1 correspondence. It is extremely common and absolutely correct.

For example I have not run a study but I am very confident that, statistically speaking, tall people are better at basketball than short people. I am saying that I have an opinion that if you were to try and choose good basketball players, biasing yourself towards the tall people will increase your odds of making a good choice. I use the phrase "statistically speaking" to make it clear I am not saying "All tall people are better at basketball than short people".

In a lot of contexts you will drop the phrase completely because you are talking to other smart people and they will know that the context of your statement is in the realm of populations and odds, but online there are a lot of pedants with poor communication skills so you have be extra clear.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#155

Post by cperciva »

bsder wrote: post #132
wellpast wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your question assumes that the programming talent bell curve for men and women are different, which I wouldn’t expect to be the case.

Almost nothing in nature matches that statement. The "Bell Curve" for females of a species generally has a significantly narrower standard deviation for practically any genetically driven characteristic. The problem is that none of this applies to an individual .

The "Bell Curve" for females of a species generally has a significantly narrower standard deviation for practically any genetically driven characteristic.

Isn't this limited to traits which are influenced by XY chromosomes? (Usually due to males having only one X and thus being more likely to express recessive genes?)

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#156

Post by Hydraulix989 »

denkmoon wrote: post #146
GijsjanB wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 0 years hiring people, my experience is this. The language(s) you write code in don't mean a thing. It's the ecosystem. I'm a JS programmer, but that is not why you should hire me, it's my experience with the DOM, HTTP, indexeddb, File API, documentFragment, Fetch API, TreeWalker, NPM, WebGL, interactive SVG, the pros and cons of React, when to use Redux, Basic login, NGINX, Docker, etc, etc, etc. My point is…

When I see an interviewee list out a bunch of things they have "experience" with like that, I assume they actually mean "I used this once".

It's hard to avoid touching the DOM, HTTP, NPM, React, NGINX, Docker, etc. on a daily basis if you're doing any kind of serious work; it's not just some disjoint list of obscure buzzwords.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#157

Post by dang »

21 wrote: post #86
iwangulenko wrote: post #20

As someone running a technical recruitment agency, I can assure you that it is true that someone having built stuff in Clojure is more likely to be considered as a good engineer than someone who did JQuery all the time. Recruiters use an intuitive approach to conditional probability. Given only the info alone (if someone did JQuery or Clojure) exposes you to two bell curves, with the X-axis being "programming ability…

Now apply this logic to men in tech and woman in tech bell curves and see how that works out. Is it still rational?

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. Especially not this, for the god knows how manyth time.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#158

Post by neonate »

drawkbox wrote: post #120

The deeper tech you know the more underground and probably experienced you are. The more languages you know, you are probably better in all of them because knowing multiple languages is better to see core parts like standards, systems and patterns. If you know a functional programming language that also probably means you have more experience in the deeper end, doesn't mean you are better but you have been around and…

Not a he.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#159

Post by minikomi »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #92
oblio wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://i.redd.it/bka1gb843z7z.jpg

Funny, but presumably just selecting for recruiters with deep knowledge of pokemon, not programming languages.

And you're assuming pokemon trainer abilities aren't congruous with tech recruiting.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#160

Post by webthrowaway »

SCdF wrote: post #3

> when I told other software people I’m a web developer, I got treated like shit. I was a lower class of coder because I wasn’t “solving cool problems” because making web sites is easy. Of all the stupid arrogant awfulness in tech that has crossed my path this one is definitely high on the list of the most baffling. Web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work I've ever done, by a country mile. (Whether that…

It does, though. Isn't it possible that other programmers disparage web development not for being easy, but because it's unnecessarily complex?

Even of people who look down on "web development", I don't see anyone claiming that writing Google.com is easy.

There's lots of types of projects that I don't think very highly of, even if technically challenging and competently implemented, simply for being not worthwhile.

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