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Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

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Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#371

Post by listenallyall »

kortilla wrote: post #152
netdevnet wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that thanks to those tech wizards, most companies don't need tech wizards to build tech products and most tech workers don't need to know anywhere near as much as you would need to back in the days. The same kind of "I just love to code" tech wizard that builds an amazing service/library/product, overworks itself while letting big companies extract max value out of it and contribute nothing or extremel…

>Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily. Why does this surprise you? Google didn’t even employ the chefs that made the food consumed by the employees daily either. Just because you made a thing that was useful doesn’t mean you have the skills that Google is looking for. Homebrew was very useful because Mac osx didn’t have a good package ecosystem for one…

Identifying unmet demand is probably the most valuable skill any Googler can have, it already has enormous engineering talent. It's the difference between GMail or Android (or Search, obv), vs throwing away hundreds of millions on Google Glass or Google+

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#372

Post by Manuel_D »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #331
rsanek wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

take a look at the gender breakdowns for employment in the Nordics. probably the best social support structures / 'equality' in the world, and yet the ratios are among the most extreme anywhere. when you're taken care of, you do what you like. when you have an economic need, you'll take the job that pays and will pull you out of poverty, even if you don't care for it.

This argument is pretty common, but blaming the victim is wrong. It is not like Nordics solved the problem but women still choose different jobs. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190831-the-paradox-of...

The bigger question is whether there actually is a "victim". Imagine governments started a lottery, where a random selection of women were forced to work in STEM regardless of their preferences. That'd solve the gender disparity overnight! But is that a good thing for women?

The reality is that most people want men and women both to be able to freely choose their profession. The underlying debate is whether the disparity is due to choices or some sort of discrimination. Many people - including some in this comment section [1] - insist that anything other than parity is proof of some sort of discrimination.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40929639

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#373

Post by Manuel_D »

cauch wrote: post #344
jimbokun wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, some one has to sit down and write or debug the code. It's never going to be as human oriented as something like teaching, being a therapist, or managing people full time.

But it is as human-oriented as other science fields that are typically considered as more people-oriented and these fields attract a bigger proportion of women. Also, one of my point is that the "non human oriented" is also part of the image, but not of the reality. I see more and more successful developers that explains that "sit down and write or debug the code" on your own is not a fundamentally big part of the jo…

> But it is as human-oriented as other science fields that are typically considered as more people-oriented and these fields attract a bigger proportion of women.

Bigger, sure, but not by much. STEM (presumably what you mean by "science fields") are bigger in aggregate ~25% women. Some of these are smaller (~10% of electrical engineers are men). Some are bigger, biology IIRC is about 50/50. Computer science is about 20% women. This is actually pretty close to the average of "science fields" as a whole.

I agree that developers aren't special. But neither is the gender disparity among software developers. People so often forget that gender imbalances >20% is actually the norm not the exception. If you dig through the Bureau of Labor statistics, most jobs have significant gender disparities. Dog groomer have as stark a gender disparity as developers. So do driving instructors, and insurance adjusters. There's actually nothing unusual about the level of gender disparity in STEM.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#375

Post by shiroiushi »

randomdata wrote: post #133
netdevnet wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that thanks to those tech wizards, most companies don't need tech wizards to build tech products and most tech workers don't need to know anywhere near as much as you would need to back in the days. The same kind of "I just love to code" tech wizard that builds an amazing service/library/product, overworks itself while letting big companies extract max value out of it and contribute nothing or extremel…

> Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily. This should be in the mind of every dev imo. To be fair, he does not come across as the kind of person you would want to work with, no matter what kind of software he is able to produce. Once hired, others actually have to work with him in such companies. In fact, Apple did end up hiring him soon after said rejec…

How bad could he have been? According to the parent, his software is used daily by that company. At the very least, they could have just hired him full-time and then stuck him in a remote cubicle by himself, reporting to one manager who just keeps tabs on him, and told him to basically just keep working on that, and if he has spare time, think of other convenient projects to work on that customers might like.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#376

Post by shiroiushi »

mikepurvis wrote: post #85
gramie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, we consider a marriage successful if it ends in the death of one of the partners.

There are lots of possible definitions for success— making it until death parts you is the obvious one, but "success" can also be producing fruit in terms of community, family, or even career. And there are of course marriages that make it until death, but the partners and everyone around them spend the whole time miserable; that's hardly a success either.

>And there are of course marriages that make it until death, but the partners and everyone around them spend the whole time miserable; that's hardly a success either.

Maybe according to your personal opinion, but the general opinion of society at large has been, for centuries if not longer, that these miserable marriages were in fact "successful" because they kept the two people married which was apparently much more important for various reasons (like religion or social stability) than whether the people involved were actually happy or not, which was not considered important at all until recent years.

I think society is going through a lot of "growing pains" now because of this change in attitude and the idea now that people's happiness is of prime importance in a relationship.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#377

Post by Aperocky »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #359
Aperocky wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe better compensated, but not sure about more prestigious. I have no interest seeing the day to day of that job.

Organizing apes to do things is always more prestigious than a single ape doing the work. The organizer ape gets to claim that they did the work of the group. Think about a plaque on a bridge. Who does it say built the bridge? The guy who never touched a shovel after the ground breaking ceremony.

You're mistaking the chief engineer/funder (likeliest candidate on that plaque) with the management of the construction company/contractors.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#378

Post by shiroiushi »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #325
Aeolun wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only place I see/hear a lot of female devs is in India. In Japan the ratio might as well be zero.

>In Japan the ratio might as well be zero. may change in the coming decade or 2. Late 2010's had Japan's version of the US 70's where women entered the workforce in droves. But COVID may or may not have stalled that phenomenon. I imagine they will bring in more women before they loosen their immigration policies.

Loosen them how? By importing poor, uneducated people and putting them to work as software engineers?

Japan is already stupidly easy to immigrate to if you're an experienced software engineer, probably easier than any country in the world. The main obstacle is the language barrier, but there are a fair number of companies recruiting foreign engineers and offering workplaces that use English, because there's a huge shortage of software engineers here, which largely stems from how software has traditionally been treated very poorly compared to other more traditional engineering disciplines here.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#379

Post by xpl »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #276
elric wrote: post #269

This is such a difficult topic. When I started my undergraduate in CompSci, the department of 300 students had exactly 3 women. The faculty had way more female instructors than it did students. The Commucation Sciences department, which was on the same campus, had the inverse student population. I'm all in favour for letting students making their own study (and career) choices, but when the imbalance is this great, I…

> Trying to keep barriers for entry low seems worth while. With Section 174 (increasing business taxes on SWE salaries) + high interest rates, this is a big ask for US employers who loath hiring at the entry level in the best times. To me, the real problem seems to be solving US employers' unwillingness to hire anyone without experience, after which the rest (hiring underrepresented groups) will follow. But why would…

> With Section 174 (increasing business taxes on SWE salaries)

It looks like they’re going to fix it:

https://abgi-usa.com/section174/latest-and-greatest

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