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Women: Learn to Program This Summer

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Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#121

Post by MisterScrooge »

lawn wrote: post #94
grondilu wrote: post #55

Isn't programming a skill that can be learned alone in a fairly straightforward manner? I mean, most programming languages have extensive documentation, tutorials and so on (at least FOSS dynamical languages like Python, Rust, Perl...). From my personal experience and what I can guess about hackers I've talked to for instance on IRC, that's how most guys learned it : the web is full of resources for whoever wants to…

The problem for many people isn't the lack of material. It's the difficulty of keeping yourself motivated and do what you need to do. Making a commitment, such as joining a class or education, is massively helpful. > I would argue that maybe those women don't have the intrinsic motivation to do so and trying to force it upon them may be a gross waste of time and resources. It may come as a shock but most people don't…

Point well made. I have found that to be true from personal experience.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#122

Post by grondilu »

Pfhreak wrote: post #105
grondilu wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> working on a linux command line, That's an interesting example. Sure, I was initiated to the Unix command line at the University, but it was just that : an initiation. I got hooked quickly though so I was driven to learn the rest all by myself (or rather, with the help of the linux community online). I'm sure it's more or less the same for most linux nerds. I may have bought one or two books about linux though, but…

I was introduced to Linux in college and I thought, "Neat. Now please put me back into Visual Studio where the real coding happens." I was not hooked. It wasn't until I used Linux professionally that I started to really respect (and enjoy) using the environment. And even then it wasn't until I saw another human using it efficiently. It's one thing to read about how useful it is, it's another thing to struggle with a…

> I don't think I could have gotten there with toy/educational examples online/in books.

For programming, the available documentation is not just ludo-educational, it's also the official references, like the RFCs and specifications. There is literally no better source of knowledge for computer science. I haven't delved into technical specs very often in my life, but I have at times and I bet most good programmers do it often.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#123

Post by decebalus1 »

I'm leaning back and watching our profession go to shit. The liberalization of programming is very profitable for software companies. The wages need to go way down as currently we're the contemporary blue-collar job that didn't get screwed up by the modern corporate machine. This has less to do with gender than with plain-old creating inflation within the profession.

Accountants, doctors, lawyers, all managed to closely guard their profession while we're opening up the doors to basically everyone and we think 'it's cute' when the janitor learns how to write web pages. People saluting this should check back in about 10 years to let me know how it goes.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#124

Post by krapp »

grondilu wrote: post #55

Isn't programming a skill that can be learned alone in a fairly straightforward manner? I mean, most programming languages have extensive documentation, tutorials and so on (at least FOSS dynamical languages like Python, Rust, Perl...). From my personal experience and what I can guess about hackers I've talked to for instance on IRC, that's how most guys learned it : the web is full of resources for whoever wants to…

>Now, if for some reason women don't take this road and "need" someone to hold their hand in order to learn programming, I would argue that maybe those women don't have the intrinsic motivation to do so and trying to force it upon them may be a gross waste of time and resources.

Why would you assume that a programming course amounts to "hand holding" just because a single gender is involved?

For that matter, why would you assume the women taking this course are unmotivated?

If this exact same program allowed men and women, would you still be casting the same aspersions only on the women, or would you also be implying that trying to "force" the men to program is a waste of time and resources?

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#125

Post by [deleted] »

mettamage wrote: post #37

If it's an online programming class, then why not extent the offer to people based outside the US? This US protectionism thing is driving me crazy. I'll offer my services to Lambda School and/or YC for free if that means I can extent this offer to EU people, provided that my living expenses are covered. I'm in between jobs so I have the perfect schedule for it. I'm from the EU.

[deleted]

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#126

Post by chongli »

lawn wrote: post #94
grondilu wrote: post #55

Isn't programming a skill that can be learned alone in a fairly straightforward manner? I mean, most programming languages have extensive documentation, tutorials and so on (at least FOSS dynamical languages like Python, Rust, Perl...). From my personal experience and what I can guess about hackers I've talked to for instance on IRC, that's how most guys learned it : the web is full of resources for whoever wants to…

The problem for many people isn't the lack of material. It's the difficulty of keeping yourself motivated and do what you need to do. Making a commitment, such as joining a class or education, is massively helpful. > I would argue that maybe those women don't have the intrinsic motivation to do so and trying to force it upon them may be a gross waste of time and resources. It may come as a shock but most people don't…

It may come as a shock but most people don't work with their ultimate passion.

The problem is that people learning programming for the first time, who don't have a passion for it, can find themselves in a class with those who do. I have witnessed, first hand, people who were beginners getting left in the dust by their classmates on a group project and ultimately dropping out of CS/SE entirely.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#127

Post by gridlockd »

dzink wrote: post #4

Spreading this as far and wide as I can. Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years and there are too many programs and teachers that teach it poorly, alienating large segments of the population. Lambda is among the best. I hope they can scale past 40 students for this in the future.

> Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years...

I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders. You need sales, marketing, accounting, management, HR, legal - and even the IT guys often truck along fine with little to no coding skills.

If you need code written to perform your task that usually just means the UI of your application isn't powerful enough. So get a coder to add that feature to the UI. You don't need to become a coder yourself.

Here's why we really need "more coders" all the time:

- the web frontend is getting reinvented every year

- the latest trends in infrastructure design ("terascale micro-micro-micro-services as a service") need attention

- the latest devices and platform SDKs need to be dealt with

- the insane amount of technical debt accumulated through all this churn needs to be paid off

Which is all fine only as long as the money keeps rolling in.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#128

Post by akho »

Pfhreak wrote: post #105
grondilu wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> working on a linux command line, That's an interesting example. Sure, I was initiated to the Unix command line at the University, but it was just that : an initiation. I got hooked quickly though so I was driven to learn the rest all by myself (or rather, with the help of the linux community online). I'm sure it's more or less the same for most linux nerds. I may have bought one or two books about linux though, but…

I was introduced to Linux in college and I thought, "Neat. Now please put me back into Visual Studio where the real coding happens." I was not hooked. It wasn't until I used Linux professionally that I started to really respect (and enjoy) using the environment. And even then it wasn't until I saw another human using it efficiently. It's one thing to read about how useful it is, it's another thing to struggle with a…

StackOverflow / SuperUser are decent for those kinds of demonstrations these days. Better than anyone I worked with, anyway.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#129

Post by prolepunk »

decebalus1 wrote: post #123

I'm leaning back and watching our profession go to shit. The liberalization of programming is very profitable for software companies. The wages need to go way down as currently we're the contemporary blue-collar job that didn't get screwed up by the modern corporate machine. This has less to do with gender than with plain-old creating inflation within the profession. Accountants, doctors, lawyers, all managed to clos…

Sure, whenever someone comes up with initiative to encourage women to do anything, inevitably people start crawling out saying everything is going to be screwed up because of that.

Not be cause of women, of course, that would be a misogynist thing to say, but because of some completely unrelated and irrelevant reason.

yeah, right.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#130

Post by malvosenior »

fzeroracer wrote: post #111
navigatesol wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you actually consider yourself transgender, you would quickly be caught and removed just as quickly. In the current cultural zeitgeist it'd be unimaginable to see someone get fired because they didn't conform to someone's rules of "transgender enough" based on their social media profile. This is both the beauty and the irony of said zeitgeist; make all the rules you want, can't stop someone from playing.

Yes, you can actually. These sort of arguments remind me of the transgender bathroom fears: What's stopping a man from pretending to be transgender in order to enter the woman's bathroom? Well, the answer is that people that are transgender will have a history of being transgender or acting in such a way that confirms they consider themselves that gender. So any lawsuit as a result of this would look into your past,…

You either accept that people can choose their own gender or you don't. People don't get to police the reason someone may identify as female or male. History on social media should have nothing to do with it. Do you think everyone makes this choice at an early age and broadcasts it publicly?
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