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What happened to all the female developers?

blog.fogcreek.com

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Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#131

Post by gnaritas »

cma wrote: post #118
saturn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it the case that if you want to get rich as a GP or specialist you have to start your own business, too? Also known as a practise? It is known that you'll never get rich working for someone else, but that applies to all trades and I don't see any reason why starting one as a programmer is dramatically different from starting one as a GP, or a plumber, or any other kind of highly skilled and valuable trade.

"or specialist you have to start your own business, too? Also known as a practise?" The number of practicing dermatologiests strictly limited to an amount determined by a council of dermatologists via the AMA. Programmers have nothing remotely similar.

This applies to all doctors, when you can artificially limit your supply, of course salaries are high, you make sure of it. If everyone who was qualified to be a doctor -- i.e. residents who should already be but don't have that magic piece of paper --, was made a doctor automatically after X years of residency, wages would be no higher than programmers.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#132

Post by bluekeybox »

Locke1689 wrote: post #7

And she said that one of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in competitive language. The language of competition not only doesn’t appeal to many women, it actually puts them off. This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the best grades,…

> Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS, but not in medicine?

From my experience, the primary thing driving those who aspire to work in the medical field is not so much salary as employment security. They compete early on (in college and in medical school) so they wouldn't have to compete later when they enter the workspace. I think that the promise of job security (guaranteed employment) has a particular appeal to women. I suspect that their thinking is that once they graduate, they can relax at the high-paying secure job and invest their time and resources into growing children. On the other hand, to me, as a young man looking to enter the startup field, ventures with ongoing high risk and high payoff appeal more than employment guarantees.

I dropped out of premed and started programming and studying art sometime in college partly because I was turned off by people whose primary career motivation was job security and who did not have any serious creative pursuits besides their career goals.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#133

Post by btilly »

ry0ohki wrote: post #76
true_religion wrote: post #5

It's my understanding that in the early days working with computers was considered manually labor, something akin to data-entry of today. The "real" scientists and business people would instruct their CS conterparts to do a task, and how that task was accomplished was neither interesting nor remarked upon. As computation became cheaper, CS still retained many qualities of data entry especially in the business sector.…

That was my first thought, that these "computer analysts" of the 70s were glorified secretaries running punch cards through a system. It seems like I would have remembered or known a few more older female computer scientists if they were really 40%+ of the work force.

I've certainly known some. Anecdotally the ones that I knew tended to start in the mainframe world. Not so many in the Unix world. Which is kind of surprising given that I don't have many connections to people in the mainframe world.

If my small dataset isn't a coincidence, then someone who lived in the Unix world could easily be blissfully unaware of how different other environments were.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#134

Post by groby_b »

Lambent_Cactus wrote: post #114
saturn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as programmers I was all primed with a fiery response about how good programmers in hot markets should be pulling more than 200k, lousy markets at least 100k, and anyone who wasn't is either a lousy negotiator or not good, but then I remembered where I was. The crème de la crème. Yeah, "staff programmers…

Whoa, where are good programmers in hot markets making more than $200k? Is that counting stock compensation, or actual salary? I'm seeing sub-200k salaries for Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-San... http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Facebook-Software-Engineer-P... http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Microsoft-Software-Developme...

Seconded. $200k _is_ possible if you factor in all bonuses, but even then it's not an easy gig to land. Not even for brilliant programmers right in Silly Valley. I'd like to see a pointer to those opportunities...

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#135

Post by rick888 »

joshuacc wrote: post #32
rmc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I thought, but FogCreek and Joel Spolsky probably has billions of in bound links from Joel's writing. Surely they wouldn't need to attract in links?

1. The fact that Joel's blog is on a separate domain means that Fog Creek doesn't reap all the SEO benefits that it could have from links to his writing. 2. Having people visiting the same website where the software is actually sold gets them one step closer to purchasing. 3. There's the "top of mind" marketing effect of constantly having Fog Creek's blog posts on the front page of HN and other tech news aggregators.

If it's on a separate domain, it's probably because they want to do some SEO testing without losing any rankings for the origianl fogcreek site.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#136

Post by groby_b »

MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #74
FeministHacker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere buried at home I have an old Cobol programming book, talking about how, as a programmer, typing was beneith you. Instead you were instructed to write neatly on cards and supply these to the typist for her to type in.

I'd like to think we've grown a lot as a culture since then. I mean, seriously, do we really want to return to a time when the ALTER verb existed? :3

Unfortunately, we're still in that time. I don't see "ALTER TABLE" go away any time soon :)

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#137

Post by dpritchett »

rick888 wrote: post #135
joshuacc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The fact that Joel's blog is on a separate domain means that Fog Creek doesn't reap all the SEO benefits that it could have from links to his writing. 2. Having people visiting the same website where the software is actually sold gets them one step closer to purchasing. 3. There's the "top of mind" marketing effect of constantly having Fog Creek's blog posts on the front page of HN and other tech news aggregators.

If it's on a separate domain, it's probably because they want to do some SEO testing without losing any rankings for the origianl fogcreek site.

The wildly influential Joel on Software blog has been on joelonsoftware.com for ten years. FogCreek.com is where they sell their products.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#138

Post by temp_id »

curtis wrote: post #100
benmccann wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you don't have to be able to program to be accepted to a CS program, so that shouldn't have a dramatic effect on why there are so few female students interested in CS.

This is true, but I'd contend that people who already know how to program are a lot more likely to enter a CS program, so you still get an imbalance. The situation I'm describing is based on my experience in the U.S. In other countries it might well be the case that hardly anybody male or female, learns to program before college. If my theory is correct, then there should be less of a gender imbalance in CS programs…

Data point for one non-U.S. country: in India, computer programming (in BASIC/Pascal/C/etc.) (and also a bit of elementary computer architecture and elementary computer science) has been part of the schools' curriculum for some years now, AFAIK. High schools, that is, not colleges. (The use of the term "school" to mean college (as well as high school or lower) is an Americanism, I believe.) Also, even in schools that don't have computer subjects as standard, many students join private computer classes. I'm not commenting on the quality of those classes, which can vary widely - from hole-in-the-wall fly-by-night operators (cashing in on the software "boom") to quite good ones, that's another story entirely ...

Also, I don't have specific numbers, but going by observation and reports, there are a good number of girls/women who go into the software field. It's seen as a good option for women workers here because it is a white-collar job, seen as prestigious - good office environments, at least in the mid- to high-end companies, air-conditioning, good pay compared to many other types of jobs, etc.)

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#139

Post by neutronicus »

joeyo wrote: post #73
gaius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite. Can't outsource a surgeon, can you? Not to mention the social prestige.

At the risk of getting quite off-topic, in my opinion most physicians will eventually be replaced by a combination of Bayesian diagnostic software and surgical robotics. There will be an intermediate period where physicians will control and oversee the software and robots, but this too will pass. Those tasks which cannot be easily roboticized (for example, all the soft skills) will be shifted over to nurses.

It's sor tof happening (not the tech part). I dated a nurse practitioner for a while, and the medical industry is putting more and more responsibility into their hands to save money.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#140

Post by bartonfink »

Duff wrote: post #91
rdouble wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS ... but not in medicine? Maybe they are just more practical. The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as programmers. If you do pre-med but can't get into med school, you can still get into public health, physical therapy, dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, etc... If you do CS but can't get a job at…

More than that, medicine is more portable. At a typical large company, the ingress point into the company is at an entry-level position. Many women want to interrupt employment when they have children, which isn't practical for a IT person or programmer at a bank or government agency. My mother, to use a fairly typical example, is a nurse. She took 5-6 years off at various times when my siblings were born or when day…

More to the point, medicine is portable because people need doctors everywhere. You can practice medicine in New York just as well as you can practice medicine in Ouray. Further, barring highly specialized fields (e.g. pediatric oncology, transplantation surgery), the work you'll be doing will be more or less similar and available wherever you go. Software just doesn't offer that.

Most of the places I've seen that advertise telecommuting are really only paying lip service to the idea that where you develop software simply doesn't matter all that much. You see places that say you can work from home one day a week, and call that "remote work." There are some companies that acknowledge this fact, and are structured for true remote work, but software engineers as a class are far more tied to location than doctors are.

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