So a female programmer walks into a bar… • Hacker News Board

Re: So a female programmer walks into a bar…

#101

Post by chc » Thu, May 29, 2014, 4:56 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #78

arrrg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you know that? That seems like wishful thinking to me.

I think what he is trying to say is that their cruelty manifests as sexism. As in, they perceive the target's sex as the lowest-hanging fruit that they can attack, and they know it is likely to hurt the target, so they go for it. It's like making fun of someone because they are short. That doesn't make someone a "shortist." It just shows that they are cruel human beings. I see sexism as more of a fundamental belief.…

The idea that somebody must have logically thought about sexism before they can be sexist is bizarre. If I just feel in my gut that women are inferior and never give it any further thought, how on earth is that not sexist?

Re: So a female programmer walks into a bar…

#102

Post by aragot » Thu, May 29, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

ufmace wrote: post #13

Misleading title, there is no bar in this story. But seriously, I think this is a refreshing article, considering the usual gender in tech articles here. I'd like to think that there are plenty of places a woman can work as a professional developer and not be subject to such rampant discrimination and sexual harassment that most of us find it difficult to believe. I recommend everybody believe and act as if there are…

+1 for the refreshing positive stance on the topic. I testify I'm personnally very upset for being pointed out as collectively guilty of discriminating, although I really try my very best to treat people equally.

I sometimes wish we could just forget about sex altogether, rather than point the finger to men in conferences and blogposts. I have seen a man being fired after a debate about the harm of illustrating a blogpost about marriages in the company with ball-and-chains, and I keep thinking the solution was extreme. I am now wary of legal consequences whenever I speak with women at work. Which isn't good, compared to my original intent of treating people regardles of their sex.

Re: So a female programmer walks into a bar…

#103

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 29, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #97

arrrg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, how do you know that? That seems to be wishful thinking. Also, the end result is the same, either way. The intent doesn’t really matter all that much, if only because the mindset of someone going to sexism or racism to be cruel is seriously fucked up. I’m certainly not racist or sexist when I want to be cruel to other people, even if I’m extremely angry and willing to say a lot to hurt the other person. Going…

So, your working hypothesis based on that comment is that they're an otherwise friendly and fair-minded person, but when they see that a woman wrote a blog about programming they feel the need to go out of their way to write a comment telling them to stfu? Anything's possible, I guess. But, based on my particular lifetime of experience with people, jerks are usually jerks in multiple aspects of their life.

[deleted]

Re: So a female programmer walks into a bar…

#104

Post by wmt » Thu, May 29, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #39

mindcrime wrote: post #19

“you’re a chick, leave this crap to REAL developers”. I really don't understand guys who say (or think) shit like this. Honestly, it annoys me not so much because it's sexist, or misogynistic, or bigoted or whatever, but rather because it's fucking stupid . I've been doing this stuff professional for around 20 years now, and I've worked with oodles of female programmers over the years, and I've never seen any reason…

So at what point have you worked with enough women to be allowed to make inferences? At what point do you stop trusting what you've read on the internet and start going by your own experience? Because thinking back over all the people I've programmed with or inherited a codebase from[1], the average female programmer was significantly worse than the average male programmer (which is not to say that I haven't also wor…

So at what point have you worked with enough women to be allowed to make inferences?

When the difference has an over 95% confidence level you usually have enough ground to start making inferences on new individuals. Just don't cherry pick the data, i.e. "good male programmers" versus "all female programmers".

Re: So a female programmer walks into a bar…

#105

Post by bucketsbuckets » Thu, May 29, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

hawkharris wrote: post #32

Have you ever noticed that HN posts concerning gender discrimination tend to attract hundreds of comments? That's not intrinsically bad. What's questionable is the quality of the comments. It seems that almost all the remarks on this page are drawn from opinion or personal anecdotes. Don't get me wrong... personal stories can be interesting and insightful; it's just that, in most discussion threads, HN tends to balan…

I agree that a better empirical-source-to-anecdote ratio is desirable, but let's be careful to draw a clear distinction between I'd like to see more of this and HN should impose a concrete "barrier to participating in discussions about gender".

Inappropriate comments can be downvoted, abuse can be flagged. Comment-policing is another matter, and we don't want that.

Re: So a female programmer walks into a bar…

#106

Post by bucketsbuckets » Thu, May 29, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #65

hawkharris wrote: post #32

Have you ever noticed that HN posts concerning gender discrimination tend to attract hundreds of comments? That's not intrinsically bad. What's questionable is the quality of the comments. It seems that almost all the remarks on this page are drawn from opinion or personal anecdotes. Don't get me wrong... personal stories can be interesting and insightful; it's just that, in most discussion threads, HN tends to balan…

As long as we're going meta here, I am thinking it would be more accurate statement would be that policy discussion posts tend to attract hundreds of comments. Policy discussions are the bike shedding topics of forums like this one. Everyone can participate because they require only an opinion and the barrier to having direct experience is low. I don't believe it is a bad thing, rather it is the fact that a lot of pe…

Exactly. Discussions on these topics inherently require subjective value judgments on top of "more objective qualitative and quantitative sources", and I can't imagine trying to limit the comments to only the latter.

Re: So a female programmer walks into a bar…

#107

Post by woah » Thu, May 29, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #46

devgutt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an easy way, especially if you don't have any arguments, to diminish other people. Doesn't matter the gender. If one was a guy, the other one would say "you're a PHP developer, leave this crap to REAL developers". This is not sexist, it's just plain stupid, as you said.

I had ColdFusion developers make fun of me for using PHP a few years back. ColdFusion. Yep.

What is ColdFusion?

Re: So a female programmer walks into a bar…

#108

Post by austinhutch » Thu, May 29, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

I wonder how significant the importance of the long-time/early female employee was in shaping a welcoming culture. It is easy for a group of extremely like minded and homogenous (male) group to start a company and grow to a decent size before any diversity is introduced. It might prove to be a powerful strategy to consciously introduce diversity before most would start thinking about "company culture". (Obviously I don't mean this as something only white male founders should worry about, I think it could be powerful for all young companies)

Re: So a female programmer walks into a bar…

#109

Post by phkahler » Thu, May 29, 2014, 5:05 PM UTC

andrewguenther wrote: post #15

Over 50% of this article is a job posting... I find it a little messed up to take a real issue and spin it as a hiring campaign. A footnote about the positive work environment at Netguru? Sure. But this is just plain advertising.

Even worse, the link goes to some dude who copied the blog so he could get page views instead of the author. HN posts it with a link to his page, not hers. He doesn't even talk about it, just "hey this is cool I'm gonna repost it so I get hits."

Re: So a female programmer walks into a bar…

#110

Post by ufmace » Thu, May 29, 2014, 5:10 PM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #29

ufmace wrote: post #13

Misleading title, there is no bar in this story. But seriously, I think this is a refreshing article, considering the usual gender in tech articles here. I'd like to think that there are plenty of places a woman can work as a professional developer and not be subject to such rampant discrimination and sexual harassment that most of us find it difficult to believe. I recommend everybody believe and act as if there are…

I was recently in an 11 week class for Machine Learning. 3 of the best students in this course were females. What was funny to me was how gender was never really an issue for anyone. Competent people are typically awestruck by smart people who are displaying brilliance. I was always cracking jokes about "well, I'm not (insert her name here), so I'll have to go look at her code before I can do that." The big differenc…

Interesting touchstone for something that I've always thought about these things, but that seems to go against the popular opinion here.

From my general experiences, I believe that the majority of what appears to be sexism, racism, etc is actually about respect, and not what the poor treatment appears to be about. When a person has self-respect and is generally respected in the peer group, these sorts of ridiculous, cruel, ad-holmium type attacks just don't happen, or vanish about as soon as they start.

When a person does not respect themselves, though, or acts in such a way as to lose respect in their group, then there's a certain type of person (mostly those brogrammer idiot types) out there that will seize upon that and attack that person with whatever they think will make them the most uncomfortable and upset. Sexism, racism, bigotry, any way that the person is different from the others, anything that they're insecure or uncomfortable with. The person doesn't really feel that way; they just use it to attack the weak. Of course, that's pretty asshole-ish behavior too, and I'm not sure that I'd call that better than actually being bigoted.