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The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

2019.phpce.eu

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Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#101

Post by [deleted] »

nikofeyn wrote: post #53
esotericn wrote: post #26

Tangent that may be relevant here. I used to be involved in access work for those from underprivileged backgrounds. It's very difficult to get poor kids to apply to University even if they have the grades, for reasons I expect are pretty similar (social environment, not 'fitting in', having few role models, etc). Going back further - tons of them simply don't have the grades or skills, because they weren't interested…

> This stuff is difficult. i don’t think it’s that difficult. the government finds a way to spends billions and trillions of dollars on tons of stuff that has no meaningful impact. if the government cared, they would increase the budgets of schools to fund good teachers’ salaries. if i could pull a six figure salary teaching, i would do it in a heartbeat. but there’s no way i would teach in this current educational e…

[deleted]

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#102

Post by esotericn »

bonoboTP wrote: post #86
HarryHirsch wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to follow up on that: at the high end universities do make an effort to recruit clever kids from underprivileged backgrounds, and they implement programs to bring them up to speed; there are pre-freshmen programs, summer classes, supplement lectures, peer mentorship, &c pp. It actually works. That said, what is the focus on individual diversity good for? It's the system that holds people back, and as the parent poste…

> recruit clever kids from underprivileged backgrounds, A very serious question I've been thinking about lately, and may sound absurd at first: what about non-clever people? It seems that discrimination of less intelligent people is the last standing type of discrimination that is widely socially acceptable to the point of calling someone "stupid" being a very normal thing where nobody bats an eye. This is not intend…

Ultimately this is what I mean re the "difficult" part of the other comment.

I don't have strong opinions on "how to fix the world", because I don't think there actually are solutions that scale beyond small tweaks; most of the time, people define a problem first, and then go after solutions, without really articulating why it's a problem, or whether the solutions will create a world that's better.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#103

Post by EdwardDiego »

jbob2000 wrote: post #73
Yver wrote: post #42

There is something unsettling in men refusing to attend an event because not enough women wanted to be there. (only one woman applied) They asked the organizers to find more women for them. "Bring me some women!" said the male speakers.

It’s very patriarchal, the men still control the event. They used their power to end the event when there are probably many people, women included, who would have liked it to continue so they could attend. But no, daddy event organizer knows best, make sure to follow him and listen to what he says!

I suspect that their capacity to deal with the bullshit was exceeded and they gave up. But sure, Daddy Event Organiser.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#104

Post by EdwardDiego »

sagichmal wrote: post #71
EdwardDiego wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would you propose those speakers do differently? I always find in life that you get better traction when you approach people with a solution instead of just a problem. So perhaps they could've said "Hey, I think it'd be good to increase speaker diversity, and I really recommend person X, she's amazing at Y, I could approach her and ask if you'd like?" Instead of just yelling "There's not enough women!"

But that is exactly what the second speaker did. The organizers refused.

I don't see where in his blog post he approached them with names, so please quote it for me if I overlooked it.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#105

Post by delfinom »

bonoboTP wrote: post #79
mises wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more people realized that if you want to increase representation of a population, you're looking at the wrong part of the pipeline by trying to get more of that group at the conference (beyond a reasonable effort). If some one is passionate about increasing that group, it makes much more sense to try to address this at the educational stage. You won't magically increase the number of women in tech by opening c…

The idea is that to increase the number of girls in the beginning of the pipeline, they need to see a path ahead, see role models and not feel weird about their career choice. This needs to be done in many parts of the pipeline at once.

Yes but putting undue burden on a small time organizers of a conference is kind of ridiculous. They do these things on a budget and on personal time outside their normal jobs. Companies and professional societies are far better suited to trying to promote diversity at all parts of the pipeline.

All this does is kill any event that isn't run by them and negatively effects freedom in the industry.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#106

Post by sp332 »

listenallyall wrote: post #97
sp332 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a couple minutes of research, the lowest number I could find for women in CS was from https://web.archive.org/web/20141221112502/http://floss2013.... Without getting into how accurate it is, I'm just taking it as a very conservative estimate that 10% of OSS software programmers are women. So out of 250 submissions, we'd expect about 25 of them to be from women if the sample is unbiased. And the odds of having o…

This is absolutely the worst kind of analysis. Find some results we don't like, then work backwards using bogus inputs (that are easily refuted, as tzs did below, or which themselves may have been biased, faulty, outdated, not directly relevant, etc) and arbitrary math to determine, yep, the process was biased! I just proved it! Let's call out these bad people! There's no possibility that I am wrong, it has to be tho…

Either the ratio is around 250:1, or they got insanely unlucky, or the sample was biased. What's another possible explanation?

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#107

Post by neffy »

DannyBee wrote: post #88
nikofeyn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This stuff is difficult. i don’t think it’s that difficult. the government finds a way to spends billions and trillions of dollars on tons of stuff that has no meaningful impact. if the government cared, they would increase the budgets of schools to fund good teachers’ salaries. if i could pull a six figure salary teaching, i would do it in a heartbeat. but there’s no way i would teach in this current educational e…

These are very complex systems with lots of variables and interdependencies/connections between the variables. Suggesting that simple, direct, change of the variable that has direct linkage to pretty much all other parts of the system, will achieve some specific result, is almost certainly wrong. In fact, pretty much every mechanism taught of how to effect change in large scale systems says not to do that. In this ca…

Wanting to, and being hired to do it, are two very different things.

Increasing the salary for teachers would mainly result in having better teachers, and a slightly higher tax bill.

It's not incorrect to say that there can be unintended consequences. It has been argued that one of the side effects of emancipating women, has been a decline in teaching standards, since the days when that was one of the few jobs women were allowed to do.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#109

Post by mises »

bonoboTP wrote: post #79
mises wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more people realized that if you want to increase representation of a population, you're looking at the wrong part of the pipeline by trying to get more of that group at the conference (beyond a reasonable effort). If some one is passionate about increasing that group, it makes much more sense to try to address this at the educational stage. You won't magically increase the number of women in tech by opening c…

The idea is that to increase the number of girls in the beginning of the pipeline, they need to see a path ahead, see role models and not feel weird about their career choice. This needs to be done in many parts of the pipeline at once.

I don't buy this idea that you need to see people with certain characteristics to feel inspired or something. What kind of kid thinks, "Oh, I'm a girl and he's a boy," when she sees a guy giving a talk? From personal experience as a child, those things simply don't register as differences until we're taught to register them. Maybe we ought to go back to, "Look, smart people are doing cool things in comp sci. Maybe you should go into comp sci if it interests you."

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#110

Post by aaron695 »

We NEED on a personal level to start ignoring Twitter. It is toxic.

We also need to stop dealing with people who participate in Twitter. They are toxic. When they leave many will repair. But until then, don't deal with them.

I'd go as far to say, most of the toxic behaviour on Facebook and other SM grows and is kept alive by Twitter.

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