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How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

evolver.fm

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Re: How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

#41

Post by pizza »

j4pe wrote: post #37

Just one more data point from this hackathon: Jen is as smart and motivated a 17-year-old I've ever met, and she solved a real pain point of mine with nothing but one day of a two-day hackathon and a greasemonkey script. But. If I were her, and the judges were commanding applause from the audience with specific references to my age and gender (this happened twice) instead of my app and skill - if I became this symbol…

Exactly. I wish instead of articles like "[minority | disadvantaged | young | old] person wins hackathon" there were articles like "[Intelligent] Person makes cool thing, wins hackathon."

Re: How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

#42

Post by flootch »

mnicole wrote: post #25
flootch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See http://www.thepowerbase.com/2013/04/github-graciously-helps-... Women aren't frail damsels that need your condescending efforts, or need your overly protective assumptions that are mainly patriarchy disguised as a cape to help them cross a puddle that you can manage. The key to more women in tech is outreach and education, not patronization and tales that they are frail, and need protection and special treatment.…

No one's saying women need to be coddled; the problem is that people recognize that the current state of the industry/the internet are jerks . You can only tell people to ignore bullying so long, especially when those doing the bullying aren't being punished, but those that are being victimized by it are being told to instead change this perceived weakness about themselves . People should not have to worry about bein…

Recently we had that female Mozilla employee whose code (for a personal project, no less) was made fun of by three semi-prominent developers on Twitter. The consensus on HN was that there was nothing wrong with her code, but that she was being picked on solely for being a girl.

I think that was your consensus, but here is the thread, my very brief rescan of that doesn't indicate to me that her being a woman was the issue, the consensus seems to be that twitter makes it trivial to be an asshole, and many people are happy to jump in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767

In general I see lots of assertion that men in tech treat women terribly, but not much evidence. The evidence that is there usually points to events that took place before employment.

In this case, our 17 year old heroine clearly faced no jerks in tech, though it is likely she faced jerks in high school.

And it's not at all clear to me that any abuse she has suffered as female nerd in high school is any worse than the abuse male nerds face.

Re: How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

#43

Post by cheez »

stmchn wrote: post #31
Jun8 wrote: post #18

Let me tell you a story: The FIRST Robotics Competition high school team (Mechanicats, from Chicago) and I were testing our robot late one night this February. While we were munching pizza, exhausted, a girl from the team came to me and asked if I enjoyed what I do (I'm the software mentor for the team). The reason for the question, she said, was that she was torn about what to study in college. She told me that her…

I'm still not sure how I feel to be getting these advantages though. I feel like, the more advantages like this are offered, the more it dilutes my actual accomplishments. I feel like there's a subtext of resentment and doubt saying "Well, she only accomplished that because she received certain privileges." I recently won a competition, which is great and all, but I always wonder in the back of my mind if I won it be…

This is the problem I have with the recent women-in-tech affirmative action as well. I have a female friend who is exceptionally good at what she does and I would hate to see her accomplishments diminished just because she is a woman.

Re: How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

#44

Post by jorgenev »

mnicole wrote: post #25
flootch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See http://www.thepowerbase.com/2013/04/github-graciously-helps-... Women aren't frail damsels that need your condescending efforts, or need your overly protective assumptions that are mainly patriarchy disguised as a cape to help them cross a puddle that you can manage. The key to more women in tech is outreach and education, not patronization and tales that they are frail, and need protection and special treatment.…

No one's saying women need to be coddled; the problem is that people recognize that the current state of the industry/the internet are jerks . You can only tell people to ignore bullying so long, especially when those doing the bullying aren't being punished, but those that are being victimized by it are being told to instead change this perceived weakness about themselves . People should not have to worry about bein…

> The consensus on HN was that there was nothing wrong with her code, but that she was being picked on solely for being a girl

False. They did not know she was a woman when they made fun of the code. And that was not the consensus. [1]

In fact, if they had known that she was a woman, they would have known better than to criticize. Us men in tech are well aware by now that you have to shelter women from the real world, lest they shatter into a million pieces.

Your delusions of persecution are staggering.

[1] Here is what they saw, no indication of femaleness: https://github.com/harthur/replace

> I’m not entirely sure what drives someone to the conclusion that because “harthur”, which turns out to be be “Heather”, is a woman, that by default, I would intentionally discriminate against [Women]. Not every single thing on the internet is about gender equality, or about a minority. In fact, the only reason I’m writing this post is because this kind of continued behavior on the internet is one of the primary reasons this is such a problem.

See http://justcramer.com/2013/01/24/being-wrong-on-the-internet...

And here is the relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767

Re: How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

#45

Post by dmschulman »

taroth wrote: post #6

Anyone else find the tone of this article to be condescending? "Let’s focus on how one teenage girl, Jennie Lamere, defeated a room full of smart, motivated, experienced, full-grown men. This would seem to be instructive to the greater argument about women in technology, and besides, it has the added bonus of being -> based in fact rather than opinion As if the argument for women is based primarily on opinion. “It’s…

I didn't like the author's choice of the word "defeat" to describe Jennie's accomplishment. I didn't know hackathons pitted the men against the women! I understand the connotation (the odds were "against" her in some regard) but I don't feel like it sends the right message.

Re: How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

#46

Post by freiheit »

greatquux wrote: post #23

I was pretty flabbergasted to hear she's learned more at hackathons than her AP Computer Science class. What the hell are we doing in our educational system then? Is any of it actually worth anything if it's not resulting in real learning?

AP classes are intended to let you pass a test that's equivalent to the introductory university class in that subject, not to be equivalent to a degree in that subject.

In other words, I'd expect the AP Computer Science class to be roughly equivalent to "CS 101" or "CS 1A", or whatever they happen to call the CS class where you learn what about conditionals, loops and basic variables is.

Re: How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

#47

Post by zachlatta »

err_badprocrast wrote: post #28
greatquux wrote: post #23

I was pretty flabbergasted to hear she's learned more at hackathons than her AP Computer Science class. What the hell are we doing in our educational system then? Is any of it actually worth anything if it's not resulting in real learning?

Introductory (aka prerequisite) computer science classes seem to be aimed at people who're learning from nothing. If you already know C++ in depth (or whatever language is used), a lot of it is just language-specific feature review. YMMV, this is judged from local state college/community college. about the education system, I'm of the opinion that high school is mostly a waste of time; I dropped out 2 years early and…

How did getting out of high school early go for you? I'm finding that high school is seriously lacking. To supplement, I've been working on my computer science major at a local community college. Unfortunately, doing both college and high school is extremely time consuming and I've been looking for alternatives to high school.

Re: How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

#48

Post by zachlatta »

EdJiang wrote: post #15

Having run almost a dozen hackathons for high school and college students, I'm not surprised at all to hear this story. At our last CodeDay in Seattle, a 17-year old HS student built an app that's received over 175,000 downloads on Google Play. http://www.geekwire.com/2013/student-programmer-creates-succ... We've run CodeDay in five cities so far, with 30-100 students attending each event. If anything, it's a good si…

Hey!

I went to the first CodeDay in LA a few weeks ago and it was quite fun! I'm looking forward to future CodeDays!

Re: How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

#49

Post by dmschulman »

One thing I picked up regarding the article itself and not the story:

"If you remember one thing from this article, it should be that the father of this prize-winning girl hacker (Paul Lamere, director of developer community for The Echo Nest, which publishes Evolver.fm) did not, as one might suspect, force, cajole, or otherwise convince his daughter to take up hacking."

Jennie's father is a part of the website which published an article about Jennie. It doesn't detract from my understanding of the story much, but I felt this fact diminished Jennie's accomplishment in some small way. Not in any meaningful way of course, but I wonder if this story would have been published if Jennie's father was not part of Evolver.fm's parent company.

Re: How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

#50

Post by shirro »

Some messages in there for me as a parent. Make time for chatting with my kids informally and away from distractions like tv and Internet. I have been for a few short hikes with my youngest and I probably should be doing more activities like that instead of us both sitting in front of a screen. Also if I treat girls like real human beings and talk to them about life, art, science, tech or anything else and value their opinions they turn out to be just as competent as boys which shouldn't really be surprising.
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