Being a Developer After 40 • Hacker News Board

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#331

Post by shrewduser » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #232

shrewduser wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it an advantage for a white male from a poor disadvantaged background with little opportunities has to get higher marks to get into a good college than a minority from an affluent background who has been given every opportunity?

No but all the rest is - allowed into a store without being suspected of being a thief. Allowed to apply to that college at all. Allowed to attend a church with influential people who could help. It certainly could have been worse, right? Could have been in that situation, and been black.

that's not an argument against what i'm saying, of course you could always dream up someone less privileged than any example i give.

am i saying racism isn't a thing? no. am i saying that we shouldn't tackle issues of discrimination and features of society that encourage people to fill certain gender roles? no.

all i'm saying is that demonising white males is wrong, and i don't believe in some sort of naive quota system or any other heavy handed intervention for many reasons.

if we want to encourage women into programming that's great start at the supply side, artificially increasing demand with quotas etc or moving further away from a merit based system in any way helps no one.

i have spoken to and know many talented bright females, and there is a general dis interest in STEM usually, especially programming. and if you bother to ask they don't talk about discouragement from entering a male dominated field, or bias or discrimination or lack of opportunity they talk about a general disinterest. could we market to them better? maybe, but there are clearly steps we should take and others we should not.

as for all the other problems with society which for some reason the tech world feels it has to rectify we're going about it entirely the wrong way. we should not discriminate on race positively or negatively if we want to help disadvantaged people let's do that by targeting the disadvantaged without taking race into account. racial profiling unneeded and we don't need to stigmatise anyone.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#332

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:30 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #323

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The term is just too loaded, designed to irritate. For instance the 'privilege' part. A word loaded to mean 'undeserved advantage'. The advantages are supposed to accrue to everyone; being white means being a whole person. Being black means having less than that. But the differences aren't undeserved; they are owed to everybody. So the term seems to call out white people for stealing stuff they aren't entitle…

> A word loaded to mean 'undeserved advantage'. "Undeserving" is not part of any definition of privilege I've ever seen, not even the dictionary definition. I think that's just your personal bias against a meaning that isn't the same that others are intending.

n.

A special advantage, immunity, permission, right, or benefit granted to or enjoyed by an individual, class, or caste. See Synonyms at right.

n.

Such an advantage, immunity, or right held as a prerogative of status or rank, and exercised to the exclusion or detriment of others

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#333

Post by mhurron » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:30 PM UTC

thedz wrote: post #305

maratd wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It jsut paints such a simplistic view of the world, not a real one, but one that is useful for rhetoric. Bingo. Race is just one facet anyway. We're all born with various advantages and disadvantages, none of which we have any control over. Just as an example, some people are better looking than others ... and those people tend to have an advantage, because they're better looking. They can get better jobs, better p…

> That's how life works. Stop whining. No, life isn't fair. Deal with it. I realize that the context is different in the U.S. vs the rest of the world, but would you say "life isn't fair, deal with it" to slaves in the South in the 1800s? Or to segregated blacks in the 1900s? Or to women who couldn't vote? Or, to use a more modern example, to Muslims who are facing prejudice and persecution because of the actions of…

Dealing with it can include working toward change. Screaming 'White Privilege' is just complaining without action.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#334

Post by logfromblammo » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:30 PM UTC

interpol_p wrote: post #231

exstudent2 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your son exercised his free will. Whether you influence him or society does, he ultimately has to be responsible for his choices. Some will be easy, some hard but it's a cliche to disagree with your child's choices. Maybe he's comfortable with his gender and gender roles? Maybe that will help him get a wife someday and you grandchildren. It's not for everyone but maybe it will be for him.

I don’t “disagree with his choices.” I find it frustrating that our culture made him feel ashamed of liking his favourite colour. I find it frustrating that he is made to believe something as arbitrary as a wavelength of light is “for girls.” A child should never feel ashamed of liking something as simple as a colour. That is ridiculous. > Maybe he's comfortable with his gender and gender roles? Maybe that will help…

It isn't an arbitrary wavelength. It's an entire absorption spectrum.

If the wavelength were the determining factor, green would be gender-neutral, and purple would be androgynous.

Not that this particular societal prejudice could ever be explained rationally, of course.~

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#335

Post by sanpan » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:31 PM UTC

I just want to say thanks for introducing me to ponysay. My terminal was dull until you all shared its magic with me.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#336

Post by j4kp07 » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:32 PM UTC

interpol_p wrote: post #268

ManlyBread wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It just means, for example, that it probably would have been even harder if you were an Eastern European woman who grew up in a poor family. Women here get hired easier (because US companies have the same policy for quotas, Intel is notorious for this), I know women who got an internship purely because they were women, there are free bootcamps and classes targeting women... not to mention all these special programs…

Let's look at the stats. Apple's diversity report [1] states their tech employees are composed of 79% male, 22% female. Facebook's diversity report [2] shows 85% males in tech vs 15% female. Google's is pretty much the same, and you can compare them all with interactive graphs [3]. Note the dominance of white and male in the graphs. The programs you mention for women are great, I agree. These are the steps we need to…

LMAO....you literally just said prior to this comment:

"We are not trying to ensure there is an "arbitrary number" of certain types of people working in our field."

You are a walking Poster Child for hypocrisy.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#337

Post by dfox » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:32 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #186

manishsharan wrote: post #177

As a developer over 40, my biggest challenge is actually that the management has come to expect weekend work and late nights as the norm. As someone with a family , I can't put in those hours every day and every weekend. Single programmers who can put in those kind of hours are rewarded and those who cant are singled out for ridicule or "performance concern chats with manager". Projects have gone agile and they have…

This is probably an unpopular opinion here, but only a very small subset of developers need to design algorithms or even know any of them by heart. Disregarding a few years that was mostly WordPress consulting, my experience is largely enterprise C#. Lots of line of business applications, glorified CRUD apps, and some client work. Zero need for any ability to write a BST or radix sort. If you're working for SpaceX, o…

Vast majority of developers would benefit from at least passing knowledge of algorithms and data structures.

For past few years I work (not full-time) on what is essentially a prototype of trivial line of business application: stock-keeping system. It is 3 layer and blahblah, with me implementing most of the server side. Amount of various hacks in the server to accommodate requirements of the "It is impossible to linearize a tree in C# without having local SQL database" kind is truly ridiculous (most of these involve few lines of generator-and-list-comprehensions-heavy python code on server).

Somehow there is whole large class of so called "developers", that can only directly transform input to output and anything that requires building some kind of data structure is impossible/unfeasible/whatever for them.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#338

Post by shrewduser » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:35 PM UTC

htns wrote: post #313

mortenjorck wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was astonished when I first learned that in the United States, it wasn't until partway through the 20th Century that people of Italian or Jewish ancestry were considered "white."

Isn't that a myth? Like pink and blue supposedly previously having been associated with the reverse genders.

not a myth, although popularly touted as a myth by people to whom this fact is inconvenient. it's very easy to google examples of racism towards irish and italian immigrants.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=irish+need+not+apply&sour...

here's where the "myth myth" started and was easily debunked by a high school student

http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/High-school-studen...

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#339

Post by mc32 » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #325

mc32 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not working because this phenomenon is not the privilege of a race of people. Go to China and you will find a "privileged class" (urbanites), go to Nigeria and you will find privileged people, Go to Japan and you will find privileged people (those lucky enough to go to the right universities) same with France and go to India and you find "privileged" people. So the problem people have is that it's framed as a "w…

Yeah, absolutely. Being white is not an advantage everywhere. There are some places where beig white is a distinct disadvantage. Like the examples you named. Or, try being a European male in ISIS-controlled territory! That'll get you killed pretty quick, right? No "white privilege" there. In Sunni-dominated regions, in fact, Sunni privilege is a thing. I mean, obviously, right? Sunnis in those regions have a lot of r…

Right but you're skirting right by. The thing is it is a pretty common phenomenon. It's something that isn't intrinsic to white people or any single class of people. It happens to be that in the US whites on average can experience advantage. But if the US had a different history and were colonized by other people there would be other people experiencing this "privilege". I mean, we don't go around calling the issue Sunny privilege to describe it, or urban Han privilege, Sciences-po privilege, yet it is the same phenomenon.

Look at it this way, how would people X feel if we called crime instead of crime "people X" behavior as if only that group engaged in crime? And go around saying, well, true many peoples engage in crime but we wanted to highlight that people X engage in lots of crime too so that the people will be conscious of it and then kerb crime.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#340

Post by blisspigeon » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:39 PM UTC

ManlyBread wrote: post #105

The article was pretty good until this part. >If you are a white male remember all the privilege you have enjoyed since birth just because you were born that way. It is your responsibility to change the industry and its bias towards more inclusion. I'm from an Eastern Europe and my family never was rich, I had to put in a tremendous effort to even get into the industry. Assuming I got an easy ride simply because I'm…

Listen, when I went to high school, there were only a couple of "computer classes" available and I took all of them. When I graduated and went to college, my parents were lower-middle-class and I was a white male, so I didn't get any kind of scholarships or grants or whatever. But my parents had put aside some money and I worked really hard to get through as fast as I could, so I graduated without any debt. Then I got a good job, worked harder, and eventually went back to school. I worked full-time to pay for my masters and phd, and when I graduated I jumped back into another job. The whole time I was putting aside 10-20% of my salary and the result is that now I'm semi-retired. I get to choose what I work on.

There ain't no privlege here. Nobody ever sat me down and said "this is what you need to do". Hell, nobody ever cared about that, just whether or not I could get stuff done. I never had any big friends throwing me tips and jobs like that guy at Sea World training the seals to play horns. I never begged some "angel" to give me money. When I hit a wall, I banged my head against it until I got through. When everyone else was going to "conferences" and "training classes" on the company dollar, I was back at my desk, pounding out code and reading the f'ing manual. And when somebody says I have a duty to make somebody's life easier, I want to ask them where they were when I was sweatting blood?

You want a new "language" for "privlege"? How about spelling it L-A-Z-Y? Anyone could do what I did. It isn't hard. You just have to put in the work and for Goddess's sake stop whining.