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Women: Learn to Program This Summer

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Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#321

Post by princekolt »

DantesKite wrote: post #278

In general, making it easier for more people to get into programming feels feels like a good thing to me. Programming is a game-changer in terms of its ability to amplify talents and interests. It's the longest lever I know of. What stops people from getting into programming, however, is a bit more difficult to determine, but there does seem to be patterns. Less women and blacks compared to asians and whites. Oddly e…

My personal 2c is that it is a lot about perception and awareness. You need to be aware a certain thing exists and how it works before you can aspire to do it. I'm sure you've met people in the past that had jobs you didn't even know existed. And invariably since some populations have been less present in tech, less of that population will be exposed to it, and thus aspire to work in it.

Sometimes the smallest influences can have a big impact, both positively and negatively.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#322

Post by manfredo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #290
manfredo wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the tech companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The media has been heavily pushing the narrative that women are underrepresented at these tech companies - and they are compared to the general population. But I've seen plenty of stories, even from reputable sources like the NYT, criticizing tech companies for only hiring 20-25% women while failing to mention that this is exactly in line with…

> But I've seen plenty of stories, even from reputable sources like the NYT, criticizing tech companies for only hiring 20-25% women while failing to mention that this is exactly in line with the percentages of tech workers that are women. If the industry is systematically unfavorable to women, hiring at the same percentage as the industry as a whole (which is what matching the “percentage of tech workers that are wo…

Sure, but everyone seems to be assuming that it's systematically unfavorable towards women solely based on the fact that women make up less than parity.

That claim only works if one assumes that any disparity is the result of systematic bias.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#323

Post by gridlockd »

jimbokun wrote: post #273
gridlockd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 en…

Jessica made a really good point, that female founders without any coding knowledge can't even assess whether a coder is any good before hiring him or her. Getting the fundamentals in an intense summer course will not only enable someone to develop a prototype on their own, but also assess who is a good potential hire and who is just good at bullshitting.

> Jessica made a really good point, female founders without any coding knowledge can't even assess whether a coder is any good before hiring him or her.

If I followed this line of reasoning, then I couldn't hire a lawyer without knowing law, I couldn't hire a marketing person without knowing marketing, I couldn't hire a sales person without knowing sales, and so on and so forth. I would argue that knowledge in law, sales and marketing are far more important to a founder, yet people obsess over coding.

> Getting the fundamentals in an intense summer course will not only enable someone to develop a prototype on their own, but also assess who is a good potential hire and who is just good at bullshitting.

I don't think that's true. To accurately judge someone else's competence, you have to be at least on their level. Secondly, it's credentials like work experience and education that you go by when hiring. I'm aware that a lot of software developers are often forced to pass lots of silly programming tests, but that's known to not result in better hiring.

If you are a founder and non-technical, you shouldn't hire a random developer anyway. You should have a technical co-founder that you can trust and you should focus on literally everything else. You'll need to do a thousand things, but writing code isn't really one of them.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#324

Post by DoreenMichele »

DBYCZ wrote: post #320
DoreenMichele wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jessica Livingston, an investor who happens to be female, isn't saying "There should be more women in tech." She's saying "If women want to found tech companies, they need to learn to code. Not coding is a barrier to successfully founding a tech company that trips up lots of women interested in founding a company of this sort." and putting her money where her mouth is and offering women an opportunity to learn to cod…

A scholarship for a CS program seems a much more worthy cause, as everyone with an internet connection has access to learn everything needed to begin a career in tech.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19465743

For those folks downvoting me, please note that the thing I replied to was substantially edited. I don't recall the exact original wording. But this was a reasonable reply to the original text.

No, I'm not removing it to accommodate someone's else's bad faith shenanigans and help them look good at my expense. The topic here is sexism. I'm a woman. I'm probably the most "prominent" woman here in terms of participation on HN.

I'm leaving the link here.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#325

Post by nadam »

ajross wrote: post #251
DBYCZ wrote: post #246

Anyone who argues that there should be "More women in tech" needs to go visit a medical college. Completely filled with super smart women interested in science. If STEM women found Coding as interesting as they did Medicine (which is arguably more competitive and prestigious), we wouldn't have any shortage of women writing code. There is nothing wrong with either way, just let people do what they like to do.

What's the evidence that women aren't coding because they aren't "interested"? If you want to make that argument, don't you need to go and refute all the anecdotal evidence that women aren't entering tech careers because they don't feel welcome? I cite as evidence the fact that women in med schools have not, in fact, always been well represented and that the same kind of rhetoric about their "interests" was used to e…

I don't have evidence why they do not choose tech carriers. But I know that as a kid I was fascinated by being able to program a computer. I have seen many-many likeminded boys in the demoscene (in eastern Europe), but not a single girl. (Entrance was free for girls on demo parties, while boys needed to pay.) And it was absolutely not a career choice, we did not care about the money or a career, we just enjoyed to program, or more precisely we just could not imagine not to program. I never knew why girls do not program but I assumed that they are not that interested. And not just not interested in programming, but also not interested in boys who program. This was 30 years ago. (Things changed since then, it is more cool to be a programmer nowadays.)

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#326

Post by SolaceQuantum »

tomp wrote: post #311
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stack exchange has nothing to do with whay I'm getting at here, and I apologize if I've been unclear. Let me say for example, in a 2004 survey... "Women were also employed in higher rates than men in environmental engineering (9% to 4%) and chemical engineering (7% to 4%). However, they were less likely than men to be employed in mechanical engineering (8% to 17%) and electrical engineering (12% to 18%)". [0] Doe…

> Or that chemical engineering is the engineering field with the most amount of doll-like objects being interacted with? Another reason might be “contact with people” variable. As a programmer I can work the whole day and not interact with anyone, and I like it. I never worked in chemistry or engineering, but if my high-school lessons are any indication, chemistry involves a lot more interactive lab work than say phy…

If it's the contact with people angle, has the proportion of women in computer science increased with the collaborative nature of computer programming? Open source initiatives? Can we track the number of meetups, conferences, with the population of women engineers? I'm legitimately curious.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#327

Post by 80mph »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #177
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…

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 learn. I would love to learn to code. It's the reason I originally joined HN closing in on a decade ago. (Proof: my first post, the day I joined: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713015 ) But I have found that one barrier to me getti…

What are your thoughts on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465762

Posted by a user with a female name & received substantial feedback.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#328

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #290
manfredo wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the tech companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The media has been heavily pushing the narrative that women are underrepresented at these tech companies - and they are compared to the general population. But I've seen plenty of stories, even from reputable sources like the NYT, criticizing tech companies for only hiring 20-25% women while failing to mention that this is exactly in line with…

> But I've seen plenty of stories, even from reputable sources like the NYT, criticizing tech companies for only hiring 20-25% women while failing to mention that this is exactly in line with the percentages of tech workers that are women. If the industry is systematically unfavorable to women, hiring at the same percentage as the industry as a whole (which is what matching the “percentage of tech workers that are wo…

[deleted]

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#329

Post by dragonwriter »

DBYCZ wrote: post #320
DoreenMichele wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jessica Livingston, an investor who happens to be female, isn't saying "There should be more women in tech." She's saying "If women want to found tech companies, they need to learn to code. Not coding is a barrier to successfully founding a tech company that trips up lots of women interested in founding a company of this sort." and putting her money where her mouth is and offering women an opportunity to learn to cod…

A scholarship for a CS program seems a much more worthy cause, as everyone with an internet connection has access to learn everything needed to begin a career in tech.

It's funny how the same people who argue that there are real differences between men and women that are biological in origin which produce all of the differences in representation in tech can't imagine that there might be real, at least on-average, differences between men and women (whether of biological or socialization-rooted origin) that affect what learning methods and contexts they are most successful with and in.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#330

Post by alexashka »

jimbokun wrote: post #285
alexashka wrote: post #44

'breaking into the startup world' - sigh... How do you break into being a domain expert via 5-10+ years of experience? What do people think start-ups are exactly? Random people with no domain expertise coding their way to great products?

Jessica explicitly says in her blog post that many of the women who consider applying to YCombinator have a lot of useful business skills and domain expertise for the business they want to start, but are held back because they can't code an initial version of the product.

My comment was in regards to a young daughter asking how she could break into the start-up world. The author suggested that coding was a good idea.

The author went on to mention that learning in the span of a summer would help pick a good team member or even build a prototpe him/herself.

We know from both studies and personal experience, that tech interviews just don't work all that well. This is tech interviews done by professional programmers and managers. We don't know how to pick people who are good vs talk like they're good!

This is not anecdotal - it is well known via studies, done by top psychologists.

Given that - how would a summer coding bootcamp help pick a co-founder? It's certainly better than nothing. It is also not clear how much one would benefit from 3 months versus taking one of the many excellent online courses and working at your own pace, such as Harvard's CS50, freely available on youtube.

Regarding building your own prototype after 3 months of programming - I just want to throw my hands up in the air of this wishful thinking that 3 months is anywhere close to enough time. You will need someone who's tech savvy, and then you're right back to the same difficulties.

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