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As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

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Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#181

Post by cafard »

_jgvg wrote: post #13

I have never seen any career that is so deeply tied to a certain culture as CS/SWE and a certain culture that I'll call X, to avoid any discussions on naming and so on. I see far more diversity in tastes and interests in most other majors and careers, while in CS/SWE, X seems to hold a monopoly. CS/SWE goes far beyond a career, usually becoming close to a religion or way of life. I rarely see doctors, lawyers, or mos…

Are doctors and lawyers really a good comparison? Doctors sacrifice their late 20s to ridiculous hours as interns and residents. The lawyers who make partner in big-name firms work ridiculous hours to do so. In these professions the women are putting in the hours.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#182

Post by mcv »

msla wrote: post #102
Mz wrote: post #34

I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one of them said: “I built a fiber-channel network in my basement,” and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail. At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people…

As a man, I'd never presume to talk too deeply with a coworker about their personal life. It's a gross violation of the boundaries in every sense of the term. Long way of saying I agree with you, I suppose.

In my experience, male co-workers talking about their relationships tend to fall in three categories:

* they talk about how hot women are (which makes me a bit uncomfortable, because I don't talk about women that way),

* they just divorced and talk about how all women are bitches (which makes me even more uncomfortable)

* they talk about their kids (which is often awesome)

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#183

Post by mcv »

brandonmenc wrote: post #131
Mz wrote: post #34

I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one of them said: “I built a fiber-channel network in my basement,” and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail. At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people…

> I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free. This is how you get good at it. If you don't like it as a hobby, maybe it's not a good job fit for you.

I disagree. There are many excellent programmers who don't do it as a hobby. I used to, especially before I was a professional programmer, but I can't find the time or energy for it anymore. Better keep it professional and do something else as a hobby.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#184

Post by mcv »

Archio wrote: post #17
neo4sure wrote: post #6

"And the sexual harassment, while annoying, was just that: annoying. I cannot recall that it ever affected my work, nor that I lost any sleep over it." This says it all. Most women are not like this author. They will loose sleep over it and rightly so.

Here's what I don't understand. Traditionally male-dominated fields rife with harassment issues - like law and medicine - now have much less of a problem, because the gender ratio has been somewhat normalized. Tech companies are actually becoming MORE male dominated - yet medicine and law would be put to shame by the sheer amount of mental and financial resources that tech companies pour into diversity efforts nowada…

I suspect it's because of a prejudice that there's something anti-social about working with technology. And that prejudice effects both the people working with technology (some of whom embrace that anti-social attitude, when in a different environment they'd do something about it), and people who don't want to go into tech because of that prejudice.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#185

Post by mcv »

neo4sure wrote: post #24
Archio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what I don't understand. Traditionally male-dominated fields rife with harassment issues - like law and medicine - now have much less of a problem, because the gender ratio has been somewhat normalized. Tech companies are actually becoming MORE male dominated - yet medicine and law would be put to shame by the sheer amount of mental and financial resources that tech companies pour into diversity efforts nowada…

I can understand it by looking at my own daughters. Without a substantial effort from my part, they tend to gravitate towards nontechnical subjects. Peer pressure, influence from media all play a part in this. The issue is bigger than just a few techi bro's.

Absolutely. It's a society-wide cultural problem. And both the tech bros, the media image, and the idea that women don't belong there, are bad at it or shouldn't want to be there, are the products of that.

Software is one of the few areas where female participation has actually gone down since the 1980s. There used to be more female programmers.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#186

Post by qb45 »

gyardley wrote: post #128
jholman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's very close to what gyardley argued. First paragraph is a claim that people who code in their spare time are liabilities rather than assets. Second paragraph is a claim that the tech industry as a whole should recognize this, and take steps to make sure there aren't too many around. That's not actually arguing for firing (I mean, it might be arguing for that, but not necessarily), but it's at a minimum…

'Coding in your spare time' isn't quite as extreme as having no life outside of tech. Hey, I code a bit in my spare time too, so let me clarify. It's the people who don't do anything else but code that I've, in my experience, had real issues with - they might make great computer scientists, but as a group they're not very good in a team of software developers. Arrogance, problems cooperating with others, excessive ni…

> much more diverse tech industry and a much more functional one.

As a Darwinist of sorts, I'm afraid that if this actually were true, we would be seeing some serious disruption of those nerds by much more functional diverse teams. The cat's been of the bag for so many years that somebody ought to have exploited it by now. But so far, it seems that one poster child example of a company which made tons of money bringing computing to the masses is Apple, under the lead of no one else but You Know Who, and (allegedly) with quite obsessive, arrogant, nitpicking and abrasive people working under him.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#187

Post by mcv »

true_religion wrote: post #166
Archio wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why do young men study CS in college if programmers aren't glorified? Not to mention that being a "nerd" and "computer whiz" has never been a culturally attractive label, no matter what people might say today.

Men in America, but not in the world in general, are more money conscious than status conscious. They're more likely to salve the idea of not having a respectable job with thinking about how much money they are making.

I doubt it. There are a lot of men who care a great deal about status. I've even heard of men who don't want to date women who make more money than them, because they feel it hurts their status. If they cared more about money, they'd gladly date a richer woman.

The problem is this patriarchal idea that men should be the main breadwinner. Our culture tells them they've failed at being men if they're not the main breadwinner. It also tells them they need to go all-out making money, which makes it easier for employers to convince them to make long hours. At the same time, women have this cultural role of mothers, where they should be concerned with having children, and put their children before their job, and therefore can't be expected to work as hard as men.

Alright, that doesn't explain why women are more prominent in other hard-working jobs like medicine and law. Still, it's a cultural prejudice that's still very much felt in much of society.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#188

Post by mcv »

noncoml wrote: post #90
the8472 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The google memo argued that altering the job to be more people-focused instead of thing-focused - e.g. more pair programming - would achieve the same goal without what may be seen as affirmative action.

> The google memo argued that altering the job to be more people-focused instead of thing-focused - e.g. more pair programming - would achieve the same goal without what may be seen as affirmative action. While it did mentioned that, it didn't really argue that. After all this is something that happens after you are in the company. The main argument was that Google should stop conscious efforts to increase representa…

Suggestions I strongly disagree with.

> "we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases"

Isn't the whole point of biases that we should try to correct for them? Biases are ruining accuracy.

> "Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts."

I strongly disagree with this suggestion that software engineering is like homelessness, violent death, prison (well, sometimes) or school dropout. Those are things we want everybody out, not extra people in.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#189

Post by mcv »

zby wrote: post #40
ucaetano wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yes there is a root cause in biology No. Proof: http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachel... If there was a root cause in biology, in 1980 there wouldn't be the same % of women in CS as in business, or almost the same as social sciences. Or almost the same as there are women in math/stats today. Something happened in the early 80's. I have a hypothesis for that, tied to the rise of video-games, s…

It is not a proof. Come on! This is a complex thing - there might be many factors involved. I don't say that nothing happened in 1980s - and your theory about video-games only moves the problem to another area, why women don't like video-games like men?

Women do like video games. But in the 1980s, it did seem like more of a boys thing. I'm not sure why.

Re: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

#190

Post by tzs »

ucaetano wrote: post #35
zby wrote: post #19

Similar to the diagnosis by Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eieVE-xFXuo Personally I think it is oversimplification - the thing is that - yes there is a root cause in biology - but than that root cause is multiplied by social circumstances. If there are few women in tech - then it is costly for employers to adjust to them (stuff like adding women sizes t-shirts) - plus it is also cheaper intellectual…

> yes there is a root cause in biology No. Proof: http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachel... If there was a root cause in biology, in 1980 there wouldn't be the same % of women in CS as in business, or almost the same as social sciences. Or almost the same as there are women in math/stats today. Something happened in the early 80's. I have a hypothesis for that, tied to the rise of video-games, s…

If you look at the actual numbers of men and women in CS rather than just the percentage of women, you'll find that whatever happened in the early '80s affected both men and women. Before that, the numbers for both men and women were growing, with the women growing faster (hence the rising percentage of women). Then the numbers of both men and women started falling for several years, with women falling faster (hence the declining percentage of women).
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