Think women in tech is just a pipeline problem?

>It is a problem of the vile and toxicity of the tech community in general (just see all the fights over programming languages, about being right vs. understanding each other).

I don't want that to change, I like it. Is that really something only dudes can like? It's an entire part of the IT field really, it's not gonna change. Like, ever.

Not really... When I was younger I worked in several offices where I was the only man there... I'd rather not have that experience again. A workplace is a very different environment when the majority of people are of a single gender. I don't think that this is inherently a bad thing though.

When I work with women, I find I have to edit myself more in general conversation, which I don't like doing and would simply rather not.

My preference has nothing to do with a negative opinion on women, their skill or ability to do a job. I also don't have a problem interacting with them in the workplace on a regular basis (one of the best project experiences I've ever had was with a woman who was the PM on a project). I just prefer to work on a team where the people I interact with the most are men.

TBH I actually prefer when I can do an Army of One project where at least the piece I am working on can go for days without having to interact with others except for lunch. I tend to make it a point to get away from the desk and be more social during lunch break.

In the 1980s and early 1990s there was no HTML and JavaScript yet. Some companies still used IBM mainframes and I had to know JCL/JECL and COBOL before I converted the programs to a different language like Turbo Pascal to run on a PC using DOS. Back then it was hard to learn how to program, not everyone could do it. I learned from books at the library and going to the right high school and college.

During the 1990s during the Dotcom boom I was helping people learn how to program in Visual BASIC and ASP using VBScript and JavaScript. The company would hire people who didn't know what they were doing, and I had to mentor them. Visual Studio had Visual Interdev which made making ASP pages better with an IDE to highlight syntax and preview the page before publishing it.

I learned stuff like Python and Java but most of what I worked for was Microsoft IT shops. My wife wouldn't let me relocate so I was stuck in the Saint Louis Missouri area.

I worked for a law firm that did VC funding and many people who worked before me left to do their own startups. We helped out a lot of local startups.

On Linkedin most people sponsor me for Databases because I had to fix problems with the SQL Server tables and indexes a lot. They'd hire someone to do DBA work and they'd mess it all up and I had to fix it. I did the same thing for VB and ASP code. I was considered a super debugger at the time.

I can do HTML, SQL, JavaScript, I learned C# and other languages. I could still work in theory but I am not medically cleared to work yet.

Part of my breakdown is they changed the deadlines from months to weeks for my projects and I had over 141 projects to be done because nobody else could get them to work. When someone failed to get a project done, they transferred it to me. The code was undocumented, no comments, and a big spaghetti mess and it forced me to rewrite parts of it just to get it to compile without errors.

I tried looking for a different job, but nobody was hiring in St. Louis because there was a recession going on.

If I went back to work, I'd take an entry level programming position and work for less pay and have less stress. I wouldn't mind being a junior level developer after all my experience.

I still get job offers but they are for high level stuff I am out of practice in. If I do go back to work it would be an easier job with less stress. One that they could help me with my mental illness and support me with it.

Surprised not to see this [1] cited next to the Yale study for the sake of completeness.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

As I grew up in the 1970s we knew it wasn't a perfect world. My father's generation wanted to fix things and make it better for our generation.

We had family picnics on the weekends because back then hardly anyone worked on the weekends.

Around the 1980s that had changed and the family picnics had stopped. It was the Me decade, Reagan was in charge, everything had changed and the PC Era had just started with the IBM PC and DOS dominating business.

I got an Amiga 1000 with the 1020 5.25" floppy drive and PC-Transformer software to emulate DOS on it. That way I had all the features of the Amiga and could still run DOS programs like Turbo Pascal for my college on it. Later on I got the Amax dongle and Mac 128 ROM chip to run Mac software on the Amiga. The fact that it ran DOS and Mac software didn't matter as the PCs had dominated the Amiga when VGA and Sound Blaster cards became standard.

I think since the 1970s that the world did get better because we got easier to use software and easier to use computers to make things easier for a lot of people. The Internet made buying things easier and web sites automated things to cut down on costs.

What got worse is that our advanced technology needs carbon burning power sources that contribute to global warming aka climate change. The world is still hell to some people and they might not want to raise children, but some people still raise children anyway.

The truth is most of the people do the hard work to make the elite 1% richer who profit from their labor. The only exception to this is doing your own startup and then building something worth value and then IPOing for millions to make yourself rich. The trick is having a business plan that works, and not just another Dotcom cookie cutter business plan ripped off from another company.