201–210 of 452 posts
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Nothing quite matches that triumphant moment when you finally discover the root cause of an issue that's been bothering you for days.
At which point you bang your head into the wall because the fix is so bloody obvious. :-)
No way CS Department is worse than Laws Department.. It's hard to pinpoint the Women in IT issue, but last years there are a huge movement trying to make everything more gender neutral in IT... Which other branch is investing more on that that ours?
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Could this actually be good, or at least quite understandable? (I'm not actually sure whether you intend your comment to just be descriptive, or also judgemental.) Does anyone expect college music programs to be easily accessible to people who didn't play an instrument, or sing in a choir, during high school? Similarly for dance, and drama, and art. And if you're right that mechanical engineering schools no longer ex…
> "There remains the possibility that a toxic culture in high school has prevented some students from realizing that they are interested in computers" I take some issue if the characterization is "the nerds" are the toxic ones here. It's been a while, but the high school culture was overall toxic if you were not attractive and popular, and computer geek types were frequently targets for their interests. Young women w…
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This is why I got a BA (liberal arts and sciences) and a MS in CS. I wanted a traditional, classical university education not just a CS degree. I did not want to be stereotyped.
> I did not want to be stereotyped. Did that work at all? Someone would have to be looking at your resume, skip your jobs and graduate degree and then notice what you did for undergrad.
I don't think CS is a high social status field at all . You're deluding yourselves. Outside of our peers also in the industry nobody cares that you're a staff engineer at Google. Absolutely nobody. They'll assume you're doing IT work like the characters in the IT Crowd if they even bother to think about it at all and haven't already walked away. Here's a concrete example to make it really obvious. How many computer s…
> I don't think CS is a high social status field at all. I totally agree with you. I believe this is one of the factors why women hesitate to enter the field. They are more socially aware than we are. Also, even in IT areas, technical capable people are relegated. We get good salaries but we don't get fancy titles. We are the only profession that allows to be managed by outsiders. Financial firms(and finance departme…
Some people get titles like "code ninja", although I suppose "fancy" isn't really the right word for that.
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At which point you bang your head into the wall because the fix is so bloody obvious. :-)
And that can be demoralizing in itself. Early in my career, after make a stupid 'single character mistake' that broke my entire program, I started to think "maybe I'm not cut out for this".
Easy. The educational aspect is pretty awful. And after you get through that, the big companies treat you like a leper unless you went through a few chosen schools. I went to a big state school in the 90s. The first two years were a hazing, with a brutal curve designed to drop class size from 1000+ (CSI 200) to about 80 graduates. It was sink or swim and awarded grit. The only major worse was biology where organic ch…
Is your "CSI 200" a general-interest course? I went to a fairly large university's computer science program, but even the intro course for the majors was probably only about 200 people/semester, which at this particular institution, meant taking the "200" level courses as a freshman. The 100-level courses were the courses the department taught to the rest of university for general requirements of other degrees. Those were easily in the thousands, but they were not majoring in CS. The gulf between a 100 and 200 course was still fairly large, but it wasn't a "hazing", it was similar to the difference you'd see in any department offering general courses and specialist courses like biology or physics.
I don't we particularly had "hazing", but just like any other major, it isn't for everyone, and there is a certainly baseline you're going to need to be able to succeed. This is not unique to computer science, or even engineering. If your school had a music program, did you ever ask them what they were expected to do? I minored in music and I was grateful for how much free time I had relative to the ones majoring in it.... and CS was no slouch with the homework, obviously.
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>They are more socially aware than we are. Is there any evidence that women are more likely to choose careers with high social prestige? I find this doubtful, since in North America at least the traditionally female-dominated job sectors seem to be the ones with lower social prestige. Compare the prestige of a nurse with a cardiac surgeon: which is more stereotypically male?
This also isn't true in places other than North America. In countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, there is way more gender parity in IT than in the USA.
India also has problems it seems, eg http://bwsmartcities.businessworld.in/article/Is-India-Inc-C.... I wouldn’t say any country has really solved this problem.