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Mistakes we've made

hackerschool.com

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Re: Mistakes we've made

#31

Post by sthatipamala »

peterwwillis wrote: post #27
sthatipamala wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call the word itself gendered. The problem is it appeals disproportionately to men (for a variety of cultural reasons described in the study). It's not in Hacker School's interest to skew their appeal toward certain groups of people for no reason.

Personally i'm much more concerned with why "i love programming" appeals more to one gender than another, and would prefer to see the cause of the problem tackled first. Abandoning the wording removes any need to have a conversation about things like gender-leaning language in the first place, further burying the issue.

It's a worthwhile question. The referenced study ("Unlocking the Clubhouse") explores part of the issue and is a very interesting read. Take a look!

Unfortunately, the lead time for solving the root cause is at least 1 generation. We will have to use stopgap solutions until then.

Re: Mistakes we've made

#32

Post by steveklabnik »

mantrax3 wrote: post #17
nicholasjbs wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked book ( Unlocking the Clubhouse [1]) is based off a multi-year study of Carnegie Mellon CS majors. They found it was common for the male CS majors to describe themselves as "in love" with programming but much less common for female CS majors to do so. (That's obviously greatly simplified, but that's the gist of it.) [1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unlocking-clubhouse

I know women, programmers, who are in love with programming. Hell they're more in love with programming even maybe than I am. We have wonderful arguments about SOLID, and CQRS and event-sourcing and queues, and pipes, and job servers. Loving your job isn't exclusive to men. Anti-sexism is reaching a different type of extreme, where certainly we should be hiring women who don't love their job, just so we're not sexist…

Until you can demonstrate empiric data like the book can, I think I'll stick with the book, rather than an anecdote from a day-old account.

Re: Mistakes we've made

#34

Post by sown »

ritchiea wrote: post #15
nicholasjbs wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked book ( Unlocking the Clubhouse [1]) is based off a multi-year study of Carnegie Mellon CS majors. They found it was common for the male CS majors to describe themselves as "in love" with programming but much less common for female CS majors to do so. (That's obviously greatly simplified, but that's the gist of it.) [1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unlocking-clubhouse

It would be even better if this was about more than gender. I am not one of the gender inequity deniers in this industry and I don't see anything wrong with valuing a better gender balance in the industry, in fact I think it's a good thing. But love is such a loaded, unclear term. Why is it not good enough for someone to enjoy programming and have an intellectual curiosity about programming? To me that sounds like pe…

> Why is it not good enough for someone to enjoy programming and have an intellectual curiosity about programming?

For me, it's not so much programming, but the power it gives me. The capabilities that programming gives me. I can sure talk about static vs dynamic typing, but I'm going back again to things like power.

Programming the same thing over and over again sounds kind of boring, but making something new sounds grand!

Re: Mistakes we've made

#35

Post by dragonwriter »

mantrax3 wrote: post #17
nicholasjbs wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked book ( Unlocking the Clubhouse [1]) is based off a multi-year study of Carnegie Mellon CS majors. They found it was common for the male CS majors to describe themselves as "in love" with programming but much less common for female CS majors to do so. (That's obviously greatly simplified, but that's the gist of it.) [1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unlocking-clubhouse

I know women, programmers, who are in love with programming. Hell they're more in love with programming even maybe than I am. We have wonderful arguments about SOLID, and CQRS and event-sourcing and queues, and pipes, and job servers. Loving your job isn't exclusive to men. Anti-sexism is reaching a different type of extreme, where certainly we should be hiring women who don't love their job, just so we're not sexist…

> I know women, programmers, who are in love with programming. Hell they're more in love with programming even maybe than I am.

Two things: 1) "I know people" is anecdote, it doesn't say anything about broad social trend. 2) The issue isn't whether women are as likely to share the feeling men call "love" toward programming, its whether women who have that feeling are as likely to call it "love".

Re: Mistakes we've made

#36

Post by mantrax3 »

aliakbarkhan wrote: post #28
mantrax3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know women, programmers, who are in love with programming. Hell they're more in love with programming even maybe than I am. We have wonderful arguments about SOLID, and CQRS and event-sourcing and queues, and pipes, and job servers. Loving your job isn't exclusive to men. Anti-sexism is reaching a different type of extreme, where certainly we should be hiring women who don't love their job, just so we're not sexist…

What you're saying is essentially that women should be discriminated against simply because they don't use the same phrasing as you. You're arrogantly demanding that they change the way they see the world simply because you don't like it. A person who doesn't say they "love" their job can still be as dedicated and passionate about it as you are -- they just put it in different terms. If a particular group of people i…

Are you seriously implying that we should split English into "women English" and "men English" now?

Even if a woman is less likely to call it "I love programming" when she sees "if you love programming, come check out site" do you expect she'd react something like "woah, fuck that I don't love programming, I merely like it with sufficient intensity"?

Are we going to analyze women like these strange animals, with their own language and what not? I prefer to see them as people.

I don't have to mimic precisely the dictionary and phrasing of a woman to effectively communicate with her. Speech is flexible enough to accomodate unique expression while expressing the right intent.

What have we turned into that "I love my job" is controversial language all of a sudden?

Re: Mistakes we've made

#37

Post by AlliedEnvy »

We're also updating our internal review system to obfuscate applicants' names to avoid any subconscious bias during our application review process. We'll soon be considering applicants named "Blue Dart" and "Purple Rover" rather than "Jane Doe" and "José Smith".

Careful. I am reminded of a classic hacker koan (perhaps, appropriately for a hacker school):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan#Uncarved_block

The situation would likely be better than before, but this may be trading one set of subconscious biases for yet another.

Re: Mistakes we've made

#38

Post by nicholasjbs »

coffeecodecouch wrote: post #29
nicholasjbs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was initially our assumption, but we've learned that there are some people who are interested in (and ultimately great fits for) Hacker School who don't primarily interpret the word as we do. Also, while most people who come to Hacker School understand our use of hacker , many of their families and friends don't. And that's caused Hacker Schoolers a surprising amount of annoyance ("What do you mean you're quitti…

Sorry for the late reply, I was temperately banned after my comment got downvoted twice. > Also, while most people who come to Hacker School understand our use of hacker, many of their families and friends don't. And that's caused Hacker Schoolers a surprising amount of annoyance ("What do you mean you're quitting your job and moving to New York for Hacker School?!") That's a really great point, I hadn't though of th…

I don't know. We've considered a number of names but haven't found one we really like. We're open to suggestions :)
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