Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues • Hacker News Board

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#111

Post by geofft » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 8:57 PM UTC

FT_intern wrote: post #110

geofft wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are objectively less qualified under represented minorities and females in the tech industry. Just check CS major demographics, stackoverflow demographics, etc. It's an undisputed fact. I'm not sure I understand this sentence. It is an undisputed fact that the proportions of sex, race, etc. in tech are not reflective of the population at large, yes. But I'm not sure how this means that certain groups are less…

>I'm not sure I understand this sentence. It is an undisputed fact that the proportions of sex, race, etc. in tech are not reflective of the population at large, yes. But I'm not sure how this means that certain groups are less qualified. The question you were answering was "On average, do some races/genders make better tech workers than others?". the answer is, yes some races/genders are more qualified to work in te…

> yes some races/genders are more qualified than other races/genders because on average, they are more likely to spend the time to become qualified (see college and CS major demographics). That is why the tech field skews toward a gender or race over others. Because some races/genders are literally more qualified for tech work than others.

OK, sure.

But this article is about fixing the demographics at the college level: figuring out why it is that some races/genders are more likely to become CS majors, and un-skewing that - so that the number of qualified people graduating with a CS degree is no longer biased on some unrelated demographic attribute. Is it not?

And is that not a desirable thing?

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#112

Post by toasterlovin » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 10:55 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #104

toasterlovin wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hunch on my part, but I think the place to look for dimorphism isn't so much in raw ability as it is in motivation and willingness to take risk. This is a non-PC opinion to match yours (which I largely agree with), but I think the desire to learn how to program is highly related to the desire to tinker and build, something which my life experience has shown to be much more prevalent in males than females (w…

For every male I know that has strong opinions about IPAs and Overwatch, I know two women that spend their weekends working on things we call "maker projects" when dudes do them, but other things when women do them because women have been doing them forever. Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time.

> Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time.

Yes, my wife sews and knits. Hence my position that it's not really about raw ability.

I think the entry route to programming has historically had a lot in common with how somebody starts tinkering with machines (cars, appliances, farm equipment, timepieces, etc), despite the fact that programming is about manipulating abstract concepts and tinkering is about manipulating physical machines.

When telling their origin stories, many programmers will start by recounting the first physical computer they owned and how programming was a result of learning how to manipulate that machine. To me, it sounds an awful lot like how car guys talk about their first cars.

Anyway, just a hunch.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#113

Post by toasterlovin » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 11:11 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #105

toasterlovin wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hunch on my part, but I think the place to look for dimorphism isn't so much in raw ability as it is in motivation and willingness to take risk. This is a non-PC opinion to match yours (which I largely agree with), but I think the desire to learn how to program is highly related to the desire to tinker and build, something which my life experience has shown to be much more prevalent in males than females (w…

I'm not sure I buy the tinkering argument. There are types of tinkering that are stereotypically male, but also types that are stereotypically female: see "old wives' remedies," cooking, sewing / knitting, etc. I buy the risk argument in theory; anecdotally, friends who are women in tech seem to worry a bit more than friends who are men in tech about long-term career stability. But tech has been low-risk for the last…

> But tech has been low-risk for the last few decades.

We only know that because we have the benefit of hindsight. But for somebody growing up in the 80s, 90s, and 00s outside of Silicon Valley, I don't think that it would have been seen as low risk when they were deciding what career to pursue.

Think about it. The reason software engineering has been a great profession for the last 3 decades is because an unprecedented number of software engineering jobs have been created in that time span. But most of those jobs didn't exist 3 decades ago (or even just one decade ago).

Somebody who can hack it as a software engineer can probably also hack it as a doctor or a lawyer. Choosing software engineering over law or medicine was definitely taking a risk. You probably had to relocate for a job, whereas jobs in law and medicine exist in most of the country. People were making good money as software engineers, but you couldn't be sure that would continue (I mean, there was the crash in 2000).

Again, not in hindsight. In hindsight, it was a reasonable choice, especially since you avoid huge additional schooling costs. But if you were making that decision 10 or 20 years ago, it was definitely taking a risk vs. the established career paths that law or medicine offer.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#114

Post by Apocryphon » Fri, Jan 06, 2017, 8:18 AM UTC

braveo wrote: post #86

FT_intern wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences. Now with "diversity", we have to specify how we split up the population into groups. We can use gender, race, country of origin, income, etc. The media and general "diversity officers" use race and gender. However, this type of group division is not efficient for the goal o…

If we're going whole hog we also have to include the various drug users and people of differing ages. What if that 18 year old prostitute druggie has a perspective that isn't covered in our scrum standups!

If that druggie can code, why not?