Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the reaction arose because of the person being put on the spotlight would not have been so if she have been a male. Meritocracy being part of the dev culture, promoting somebody achieving regular stuff because of the gender is ill-perceived. It's like when you go to a conference, and half of the talks are a promoted minority of some sort but they are not that good. You feel cheated. The fact is there are wome…
There is almost certainly a degree of 'diversity PR' about this post - specifically because this is an intern simply 'doing her job' by implementing an alg she was probably asked to implement. And I'm certain interns are doing all sorts of cool stuff at G that we don't talk about. But ... That said, it's probably ok. I do believe that tech is more or less 'meritocratic' ... but surveys on 'why there are not more wome…
When being a geek in the 90 was basically being the less popular people in the area, nobody wanted to be part of the crew. Slowly but surely, with unrecognized hard work, geeks built something, and nobody helped them until shitload of money and cool stuff were made.
They were a minority none helped and that people basically disrespected through media, stereotypes, etc. And you never heard any girl saying they wanted to be part of it.
Now being a geek is cool and well paid. And it becomes a trend to help minorities to be part of it.
I followed some of those efforts, such as pyladies, django-girls... I spent some time in Mali myself to help some people here to become Python dev with NGOS programs. It works. The community is better because of it.
But the feeling of it being unfair can be felt on a lot of forums and comments. This is not sexism.
It's more along the line of "so now you want it ?" and "oh but you want it easy too ?".