The Secret History of Women in Coding
February 18, 2019 5:54 AM Subscribe
And as the aloof, acerbic nerds got Peter-principled into management, they tended to hire based on tribal affiliation, knowing as all privileged peoples do that the smaller the acceptable candidate pool is, the more likely a person Like Them is to be hired, regardless of competency.
Once this system is in place, any member of the tribe is almost assured employment no matter how inept, while those not of the tribe never get past the first cull.
This isn't endemic to IT, it's a human problem: every organization faces it, and without active countermeasures, such as removing PII from hiring material, anonymized interviews, diversity quotas, and so on, it always comes back.
The fact that socially isolated man-children were happy to work far in excess of their required hours to solve cool problems is certainly a financial incentive for perpetuation, but it's not just that -- it's innate tribalism, and it has to be fought from that perspective as well as any others.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:03 AM on February 18, 2019 [9 favorites]
Once this system is in place, any member of the tribe is almost assured employment no matter how inept, while those not of the tribe never get past the first cull.
This isn't endemic to IT, it's a human problem: every organization faces it, and without active countermeasures, such as removing PII from hiring material, anonymized interviews, diversity quotas, and so on, it always comes back.
The fact that socially isolated man-children were happy to work far in excess of their required hours to solve cool problems is certainly a financial incentive for perpetuation, but it's not just that -- it's innate tribalism, and it has to be fought from that perspective as well as any others.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:03 AM on February 18, 2019 [9 favorites]
I remember about 7th grade, I went to check out a nearby facility run by the school system, where there were computer terminals. So this was about 1979.. I rode my chubby nerd boy ass out there on my bike, and went in. There was a clique of computer people, my age or a little older, in the lab, engaged with something or other. Some kind of chat or game program, I think. They were totally unfriendly and completely ignored me. No one came over to see if I needed help making a login, or to introduce themselves, or anything. I was too awkward and socially anxious to go over and initiate contact, of course. So I slunk out and rode my bike home. If that was my experience, as a math-loving, SF-obsessed, 12 year old boy, I can't imagine how girls were received. I ended up getting into bass guitar, beer, and pot, instead of computers, in high school, which was fab, but maybe not the best use of my abilities.
posted by thelonius at 7:06 AM on February 18, 2019 [15 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 7:06 AM on February 18, 2019 [15 favorites]
This reminds me of the article How to Kill Your Tech Industry that I think I saw posted here a few months ago.
posted by terretu at 7:21 AM on February 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by terretu at 7:21 AM on February 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
I really liked that article. What I don't like is that someone posted it to a Facebook group for newbie coders that I belong to, and the first comment was some guy chiming in to say that maybe women are just biologically unsuited to coding, and maybe it's insulting to women to argue that their natural state of being is inferior to men's natural state of being, which makes men more suited to coding. Maybe the real sexists are the people who think women should be coding. Sigh. There was some pushback, mostly from other guys, but I think most women are just too tired of this shit to engage.
I discovered in my early 40s that I'm pretty good at coding. I've taken a bunch of computer science classes and got As or A+s in all of them. And here's the thing. My mother was close to her aunt and uncle, who lived in my city when I was a teenager. My uncle was an engineer who worked on one of the very first computers, back when computers were the size of a house and about as powerful as my graphing calculator. He had two hobbies: coding and playing the organ. (I think the coding thing was unusual: when he worked on computers, programming was low-status work. But he designed some program to pick stocks for him, and he liked the programming stuff. Also, he made a lot of money on the stock market.) And he decided to try to teach me to play the organ. It was a miserable failure: I'm not quite tone deaf, but I'm close, and I have no interest in or aptitude for music. But it literally never occurred to him to teach me to code. In retrospect, it should have been dead obvious to everyone that I would have been good at it. I got 99th percentile on every math standardized test I ever took, even though I didn't particularly like math class. I loved logic puzzles. I am nerdy and obsessive in the way that most guy coders are nerdy and obsessive. And sometimes I wonder if my life would have been different if my great-uncle had been able to see me as someone who he could teach about computers, rather than to play the organ.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:29 AM on February 18, 2019 [33 favorites]
I discovered in my early 40s that I'm pretty good at coding. I've taken a bunch of computer science classes and got As or A+s in all of them. And here's the thing. My mother was close to her aunt and uncle, who lived in my city when I was a teenager. My uncle was an engineer who worked on one of the very first computers, back when computers were the size of a house and about as powerful as my graphing calculator. He had two hobbies: coding and playing the organ. (I think the coding thing was unusual: when he worked on computers, programming was low-status work. But he designed some program to pick stocks for him, and he liked the programming stuff. Also, he made a lot of money on the stock market.) And he decided to try to teach me to play the organ. It was a miserable failure: I'm not quite tone deaf, but I'm close, and I have no interest in or aptitude for music. But it literally never occurred to him to teach me to code. In retrospect, it should have been dead obvious to everyone that I would have been good at it. I got 99th percentile on every math standardized test I ever took, even though I didn't particularly like math class. I loved logic puzzles. I am nerdy and obsessive in the way that most guy coders are nerdy and obsessive. And sometimes I wonder if my life would have been different if my great-uncle had been able to see me as someone who he could teach about computers, rather than to play the organ.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:29 AM on February 18, 2019 [33 favorites]
Wow "ArbitraryAndCapricious", your history could have been sooo different... Reminds me of the organ/organist sub-plot from Cryptonomicon.
Sigh. But, but even though I ended up programming and in the tech-sector, it wasn't all that inclusive to non-math inclined people either. Someone entering programming was definitely expected to be a "math whiz". While the after-school computer club I attended was populated entirely by boys, it was overseen by the computer teacher, because during the 80's computer labs were expensive enough that students were not trusted with them alone - but even with that teacher (who I would assume would stop boys from gatekeeping), there were no female attendees.
(As a "bad-at-math", but good at "computers", including self-taught programming, I spent nearly 70% of my post-school career fighting myself internally with having "outsider syndrome")
It makes me sad - because the times I have worked with women programmers - they were the "best-of-the-best", without the "tech-bro" attitudes and just as enshrined in "geek culture" as the guys...
For a long period of time - that's what "cultural fit" meant to me - not being male/white, but having a common "geekiness". Do you find "IT Crowd" funny? Do you know what a "redshirt" is ? Was Dilbert on your reading list?
But, even that is a form of gatekeeping.
posted by jkaczor at 8:48 AM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
Sigh. But, but even though I ended up programming and in the tech-sector, it wasn't all that inclusive to non-math inclined people either. Someone entering programming was definitely expected to be a "math whiz". While the after-school computer club I attended was populated entirely by boys, it was overseen by the computer teacher, because during the 80's computer labs were expensive enough that students were not trusted with them alone - but even with that teacher (who I would assume would stop boys from gatekeeping), there were no female attendees.
(As a "bad-at-math", but good at "computers", including self-taught programming, I spent nearly 70% of my post-school career fighting myself internally with having "outsider syndrome")
It makes me sad - because the times I have worked with women programmers - they were the "best-of-the-best", without the "tech-bro" attitudes and just as enshrined in "geek culture" as the guys...
For a long period of time - that's what "cultural fit" meant to me - not being male/white, but having a common "geekiness". Do you find "IT Crowd" funny? Do you know what a "redshirt" is ? Was Dilbert on your reading list?
But, even that is a form of gatekeeping.
posted by jkaczor at 8:48 AM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
I would like to assign this article as a reading assignment to all of the men I know, and have them circle every instance of sexism and then write an essay on the cause-and-effect of each example.
posted by desuetude at 8:52 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by desuetude at 8:52 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
even with that teacher (who I would assume would stop boys from gatekeeping)
This is a pretty funny assumption, just saying. I would actually expect a teacher presence like that to intensify gatekeeping and intimidate girls from using the computers. The teacher, of course, constitutes a gatekeeper on their own recognizance, and the presence of gatekeepers tends to discourage people who don't "fit" the image of what someone who uses the resources looks like. Even without the teacher saying a word, the requirement that a teacher observe who uses the computers and who doesn't can be an intimidating factor for underrepresented people, unless the teacher is actively trying to help recruit them.
posted by sciatrix at 8:54 AM on February 18, 2019 [6 favorites]
This is a pretty funny assumption, just saying. I would actually expect a teacher presence like that to intensify gatekeeping and intimidate girls from using the computers. The teacher, of course, constitutes a gatekeeper on their own recognizance, and the presence of gatekeepers tends to discourage people who don't "fit" the image of what someone who uses the resources looks like. Even without the teacher saying a word, the requirement that a teacher observe who uses the computers and who doesn't can be an intimidating factor for underrepresented people, unless the teacher is actively trying to help recruit them.
posted by sciatrix at 8:54 AM on February 18, 2019 [6 favorites]
Haven't read TFA yet, but please note this passage:
In a 2016 experiment conducted by the tech recruiting firm Speak With a Geek, 5,000 résumés with identical information were submitted to firms. When identifying details were removed from the résumés, 54 percent of the women received interview offers; when gendered names and other biographical information were given, only 5 percent of them did.
As carefully unpacked in this thread by Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, this study appears to never have existed in the first place. It's a bogus stat that has been floating around for years.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:05 AM on February 18, 2019 [11 favorites]
In a 2016 experiment conducted by the tech recruiting firm Speak With a Geek, 5,000 résumés with identical information were submitted to firms. When identifying details were removed from the résumés, 54 percent of the women received interview offers; when gendered names and other biographical information were given, only 5 percent of them did.
As carefully unpacked in this thread by Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, this study appears to never have existed in the first place. It's a bogus stat that has been floating around for years.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:05 AM on February 18, 2019 [11 favorites]
the requirement that a teacher observe who uses the computers and who doesn't can be an intimidating factor for underrepresented people, unless the teacher is actively trying to help recruit them
True - and I highly doubt teachers in the 80's were as aware about inclusion as they are now (in Canada at least). Again, I have that privileged outlook, trusting that authority figures are acting in the best interest of everyone. (Oh, I am well aware of the fact that my career would not have progressed as far as it has, if I was not white and male - the narrative about "pulling oneself up by their own bootstraps" was never true - but I have to admit, during my 20's I definitely believed it was - aging, then having a non-white/female child definitely widened my perspective)
posted by jkaczor at 9:06 AM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
True - and I highly doubt teachers in the 80's were as aware about inclusion as they are now (in Canada at least). Again, I have that privileged outlook, trusting that authority figures are acting in the best interest of everyone. (Oh, I am well aware of the fact that my career would not have progressed as far as it has, if I was not white and male - the narrative about "pulling oneself up by their own bootstraps" was never true - but I have to admit, during my 20's I definitely believed it was - aging, then having a non-white/female child definitely widened my perspective)
posted by jkaczor at 9:06 AM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
The field rewarded aptitude: Applicants were often given a test (typically one involving pattern recognition), hired if they passed it and trained on the job, a process that made the field especially receptive to neophytes.
Once the first generation of personal computers, like the Commodore 64 or the TRS-80, found their way into homes, teenagers were able to play around with them, slowly learning the major concepts of programming in their spare time.
To add to jkaczor's comment, I am struck by the above juxtaposition and how it played out for me as a middle-class kid who was an 11-year-old girl in 1984.
Because of the results of my elementary school aptitude tests, I qualified for summer "gifted and talented" programs for several years to learn about computers. This was ages 8-10 or so. (1982-1984) Fun educational enrichment stuff that happened to involve the principles of logic, right? We learned to write simple BASIC programs, etc, originally on TRS-80s, then schools started buying Apple IIes. (I distinctly recall a unit on Apple Logo towards the end.)
Interesting thing about this early encouragement toward computers -- I AM good at pattern-matching and ontologies, but am basically incapable of doing calculations. I wish someone had been able to read between the lines of those aptitude tests and figure out that I have some degree of dyscalculia. Instead, they were "disappointed" in my math class scores because they "knew" I could do better than this.
Anyway, my cousin got a Commodore 64, and we bought computer magazines and played with programming (stored on cassette tape, of course) and it was a fun hobby, though not an obsession. This was 1984-1985 or so. Middle school for me.
By high school, computers were really only used for students interested in learning programming, and it was very much a thing for math-oriented people. I wasn't remotely interested; I struggled with algebra and had to take geometry twice. I took the minimum of required math classes to graduate, I took AP Bio instead of Physics and took both Latin and French as electives. It had become common to using computers in the home for word processing, accounting, and games, but the line had been drawn between people interested in computers (i.e. programming) and people using computers as a tool, with no more interest in the workings than for any other electronic appliance.
I went off to college and majored in English literature. As far away from my childhood interest in computers as you can get, right? Nah. I honed my skills at using logic, analysis, and meticulous attention to detail through writing. And every time I hear another pundit--or worse another actual university--scoff at impractical pie-in-the-sky degrees like English, my eyes roll right the fuck out out of my head.
If we were willing to identify and encourage aptitude through less-biased means and companies were willing to engage in a little more critical thinking, employment prospects in this country could look very different.
posted by desuetude at 9:09 AM on February 18, 2019 [19 favorites]
Once the first generation of personal computers, like the Commodore 64 or the TRS-80, found their way into homes, teenagers were able to play around with them, slowly learning the major concepts of programming in their spare time.
To add to jkaczor's comment, I am struck by the above juxtaposition and how it played out for me as a middle-class kid who was an 11-year-old girl in 1984.
Because of the results of my elementary school aptitude tests, I qualified for summer "gifted and talented" programs for several years to learn about computers. This was ages 8-10 or so. (1982-1984) Fun educational enrichment stuff that happened to involve the principles of logic, right? We learned to write simple BASIC programs, etc, originally on TRS-80s, then schools started buying Apple IIes. (I distinctly recall a unit on Apple Logo towards the end.)
Interesting thing about this early encouragement toward computers -- I AM good at pattern-matching and ontologies, but am basically incapable of doing calculations. I wish someone had been able to read between the lines of those aptitude tests and figure out that I have some degree of dyscalculia. Instead, they were "disappointed" in my math class scores because they "knew" I could do better than this.
Anyway, my cousin got a Commodore 64, and we bought computer magazines and played with programming (stored on cassette tape, of course) and it was a fun hobby, though not an obsession. This was 1984-1985 or so. Middle school for me.
By high school, computers were really only used for students interested in learning programming, and it was very much a thing for math-oriented people. I wasn't remotely interested; I struggled with algebra and had to take geometry twice. I took the minimum of required math classes to graduate, I took AP Bio instead of Physics and took both Latin and French as electives. It had become common to using computers in the home for word processing, accounting, and games, but the line had been drawn between people interested in computers (i.e. programming) and people using computers as a tool, with no more interest in the workings than for any other electronic appliance.
I went off to college and majored in English literature. As far away from my childhood interest in computers as you can get, right? Nah. I honed my skills at using logic, analysis, and meticulous attention to detail through writing. And every time I hear another pundit--or worse another actual university--scoff at impractical pie-in-the-sky degrees like English, my eyes roll right the fuck out out of my head.
If we were willing to identify and encourage aptitude through less-biased means and companies were willing to engage in a little more critical thinking, employment prospects in this country could look very different.
posted by desuetude at 9:09 AM on February 18, 2019 [19 favorites]
I'm also a "bad at math and good at computers."
I had a great teacher once who encouraged me to pursue programming and helped me sign up for a class over the summer at Carnegie Mellon. There didn't seem to be experience tiers (maybe because it was a summer class?), but it was honestly the most hostile-to-women classroom environment I've ever been in, and we were mostly solving math problems in our assignments. I wound up stepping away from programming for five years after that experience.
Do they not use Fisher's system over the summer? I found the difference between Fisher's program changes and my experience to be striking. There were only two women in the class, out of maybe 25, and this was in the late 2000s.
posted by marfa, texas at 9:14 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
I had a great teacher once who encouraged me to pursue programming and helped me sign up for a class over the summer at Carnegie Mellon. There didn't seem to be experience tiers (maybe because it was a summer class?), but it was honestly the most hostile-to-women classroom environment I've ever been in, and we were mostly solving math problems in our assignments. I wound up stepping away from programming for five years after that experience.
Do they not use Fisher's system over the summer? I found the difference between Fisher's program changes and my experience to be striking. There were only two women in the class, out of maybe 25, and this was in the late 2000s.
posted by marfa, texas at 9:14 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
Instead, they were "disappointed" in my math class scores because they "knew" I could do better than this.
That is one of the things that has made me furious for decades... My guidance counsellor steered me well away from computer science, due to my poor math scores. (Maybe I should consider being an "electronics technician" instead...)
... And - to relate back to the female/male subject at hand - anecdotally in my experience, the best math students in high-school were predominantly female...(90% at least)
Why does it make me angry? Because, in the real working world - the vast bulk of computer programming requires very little deep math skills... Yes - people writing very low-level or highly-specialized algorithms need to factor in many things - and use their math and fundamental computer science skills deeply.
However... programmers building a user-interface that collects/updates information, leveraging some sort of back-end database (or webservices) use libraries, tools, interfaces and operating systems written by other people. If you can add, subtract, multiply and divide - you will typically be "ok". For example, I have only ever met one person who needed to know "monte carlo algorithms" for the project we were working on - one other time, it was someone doing low-level encryption logic... In 28 years...
posted by jkaczor at 9:25 AM on February 18, 2019 [7 favorites]
That is one of the things that has made me furious for decades... My guidance counsellor steered me well away from computer science, due to my poor math scores. (Maybe I should consider being an "electronics technician" instead...)
... And - to relate back to the female/male subject at hand - anecdotally in my experience, the best math students in high-school were predominantly female...(90% at least)
Why does it make me angry? Because, in the real working world - the vast bulk of computer programming requires very little deep math skills... Yes - people writing very low-level or highly-specialized algorithms need to factor in many things - and use their math and fundamental computer science skills deeply.
However... programmers building a user-interface that collects/updates information, leveraging some sort of back-end database (or webservices) use libraries, tools, interfaces and operating systems written by other people. If you can add, subtract, multiply and divide - you will typically be "ok". For example, I have only ever met one person who needed to know "monte carlo algorithms" for the project we were working on - one other time, it was someone doing low-level encryption logic... In 28 years...
posted by jkaczor at 9:25 AM on February 18, 2019 [7 favorites]
(Oh - and the fact that female students were better at math does not, nor did not make me angry - bad writing on my part... heh, if anything I was always envious...)
posted by jkaczor at 9:27 AM on February 18, 2019
posted by jkaczor at 9:27 AM on February 18, 2019
Why does it make me angry? Because, in the real working world - the vast bulk of computer programming requires very little deep math skills...
QFT. I talked with a family friend once who was thinking about maybe trying to become a DBA, but who was concerned because she hadn't been good at calculus in high school. Calculus! I told her to forget worrying about that, she was intelligent and precise and good at organization, and obviously could be successful.
Knowing how to do simple Boolean logic and how to keep from screwing up loops with off-by-one errors is the bulk of what you need for most workaday coding work. Maybe also, say, understanding what integer division and modulus operators are, and being sensitive to floating point errors. And a lot of code I have seen is filled with indicators that the programmer didn't know logic at all- solecisms like "if (some function result ! = false)", or, worse, deeply nested loops that should have been done with some kind of clear if-else if-else logical expression.
Sure, that's not enough to know how to do low level graphics programming or numerical methods simulations or other kinds of advanced work. But, as you say, the bulk of work in something like web dev or mobile apps never goes near linear algebra or the like.
posted by thelonius at 9:45 AM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
QFT. I talked with a family friend once who was thinking about maybe trying to become a DBA, but who was concerned because she hadn't been good at calculus in high school. Calculus! I told her to forget worrying about that, she was intelligent and precise and good at organization, and obviously could be successful.
Knowing how to do simple Boolean logic and how to keep from screwing up loops with off-by-one errors is the bulk of what you need for most workaday coding work. Maybe also, say, understanding what integer division and modulus operators are, and being sensitive to floating point errors. And a lot of code I have seen is filled with indicators that the programmer didn't know logic at all- solecisms like "if (some function result ! = false)", or, worse, deeply nested loops that should have been done with some kind of clear if-else if-else logical expression.
Sure, that's not enough to know how to do low level graphics programming or numerical methods simulations or other kinds of advanced work. But, as you say, the bulk of work in something like web dev or mobile apps never goes near linear algebra or the like.
posted by thelonius at 9:45 AM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
I mean, I got plenty of exposure to computers as a kid, but something about the combination of guys being incredibly dismissive of my interest, which alone would have probably not being an issue, and guys trying to turn conversations on the late-90s internet about code into requests for pictures of my breasts even before I'd turned 18... you know, it put me off a bit.
If you can add, subtract, multiply and divide - you will typically be "ok".
Even that, I don't need to know how to actually do those operations, I just know how to tell computers to do them. If you can use a calculator, you can maintain a typical application. The only thing where I'll concede that people need how to do more complicated stuff without overt interest in security or the actual science of computer science is if they want to get into working on AAA games, and even then, I mean... why, because that industry is notoriously terrible to work in. Logic. The thing you need to be good at to do conventional software development isn't math, it's logic. Not even necessarily formal logic! Just the ability to break down and solve complex problems.
posted by Sequence at 10:17 AM on February 18, 2019 [9 favorites]
If you can add, subtract, multiply and divide - you will typically be "ok".
Even that, I don't need to know how to actually do those operations, I just know how to tell computers to do them. If you can use a calculator, you can maintain a typical application. The only thing where I'll concede that people need how to do more complicated stuff without overt interest in security or the actual science of computer science is if they want to get into working on AAA games, and even then, I mean... why, because that industry is notoriously terrible to work in. Logic. The thing you need to be good at to do conventional software development isn't math, it's logic. Not even necessarily formal logic! Just the ability to break down and solve complex problems.
posted by Sequence at 10:17 AM on February 18, 2019 [9 favorites]
scoff at impractical pie-in-the-sky degrees like English, my eyes roll right the fuck out out of my head.
Lol, my utterly non-tech mom years ago helped me with my very first bug, I had no idea where to look pre-internet days to find what the mysterious term "syntax error" meant.
I can't say that every female programmer I've worked with was phenomenal, but none was ever bad, usually great and had vastly less drama or attitude. Was culturally quite weird, my first programming job had almost 50-50 mix, always worked with smart women, until it was fewer and then an issue.
What is it with societies regressing? Is this studied? What with anti-vaxers, growing flat earthers, and increasing rather than reducing gender bifurcations it seems like there could be a new dark ages or Idiocracy.
posted by sammyo at 10:30 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
Lol, my utterly non-tech mom years ago helped me with my very first bug, I had no idea where to look pre-internet days to find what the mysterious term "syntax error" meant.
I can't say that every female programmer I've worked with was phenomenal, but none was ever bad, usually great and had vastly less drama or attitude. Was culturally quite weird, my first programming job had almost 50-50 mix, always worked with smart women, until it was fewer and then an issue.
What is it with societies regressing? Is this studied? What with anti-vaxers, growing flat earthers, and increasing rather than reducing gender bifurcations it seems like there could be a new dark ages or Idiocracy.
posted by sammyo at 10:30 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
I had no idea where to look pre-internet days to find what the mysterious term "syntax error" meant
As with leveraging computers/calculators to do the actual math, having access to the "internet" at large has been a force-multiplier - unfortunately, it has also proven to be a toxic environment to anyone who isn't a white male. But, at the very least one can pretend to be someone else online. For awhile... Until you actually want a job, or get "doxed/outed".
posted by jkaczor at 10:48 AM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
As with leveraging computers/calculators to do the actual math, having access to the "internet" at large has been a force-multiplier - unfortunately, it has also proven to be a toxic environment to anyone who isn't a white male. But, at the very least one can pretend to be someone else online. For awhile... Until you actually want a job, or get "doxed/outed".
posted by jkaczor at 10:48 AM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
Calculus!... Knowing how to do simple Boolean logic and how to keep from screwing up loops with off-by-one errors is the bulk of what you need for most workaday coding work. Maybe also, say, understanding what integer division and modulus operators are, and being sensitive to floating point errors.
Starting around high school the math curriculum seems really focused on preparation for calculus.
I think there have been attempts previously to take it in other directions. Googling around isn't finding me any really great discussion.
I like calculus, and it has lots of connections with other parts of mathematics, but there's also a lot you can without it. Especially in today's job market I'd think a curriculum that was more focused on the needs of computer programmers would be useful?
(Which still doesn't mean those classes should be gatekeepers for any kind of programming career, so this is a bit of a derail, sorry.)
posted by bfields at 11:22 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
Starting around high school the math curriculum seems really focused on preparation for calculus.
I think there have been attempts previously to take it in other directions. Googling around isn't finding me any really great discussion.
I like calculus, and it has lots of connections with other parts of mathematics, but there's also a lot you can without it. Especially in today's job market I'd think a curriculum that was more focused on the needs of computer programmers would be useful?
(Which still doesn't mean those classes should be gatekeepers for any kind of programming career, so this is a bit of a derail, sorry.)
posted by bfields at 11:22 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
I am so tired of this article, which is unfair of me because it's important and getting worse. But I think i've been sent a copy of a new version every five years since 1995, and they all refer to the unknown story or secret history or whatever, when (a) everyone who has been programming knows and (b) each article has a lengthening history of previous articles to cite. It's not a secret history, it's a suppressed one.
The whole revanchist masculinist mess reminds me of "clubs out" riots of apprentices in the Early Modern period. Every so often, especially when economic conditions were straitening, old open customs would get overturned by cooperation between a few men in power and the apprentices' riots. Women got kicked out of guild mastery they had had for decades, foreigners were barred from trade. (Pretty sure I have this from The Prospect Before Her, The Jewel House, and somewhere in Braudel's Civ&Cap. Pointers to contemporanous sources appreciated.)
posted by clew at 12:15 PM on February 18, 2019 [6 favorites]
The whole revanchist masculinist mess reminds me of "clubs out" riots of apprentices in the Early Modern period. Every so often, especially when economic conditions were straitening, old open customs would get overturned by cooperation between a few men in power and the apprentices' riots. Women got kicked out of guild mastery they had had for decades, foreigners were barred from trade. (Pretty sure I have this from The Prospect Before Her, The Jewel House, and somewhere in Braudel's Civ&Cap. Pointers to contemporanous sources appreciated.)
posted by clew at 12:15 PM on February 18, 2019 [6 favorites]
when (a) everyone who has been programming knows
It's a well-covered topic, and I understand your reaction to yet another... but if everyone who has been programming knows, they've got a funny way of showing it.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:20 PM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
It's a well-covered topic, and I understand your reaction to yet another... but if everyone who has been programming knows, they've got a funny way of showing it.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:20 PM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
Lots of them know and don't care, some of them feel that as soon as there was money in programming it became men's territory, and when I said `suppressed' history I meant the psychological more than the censored sense. All the people who would have to think differently if they remembered different facts just... don't remember.
posted by clew at 12:27 PM on February 18, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by clew at 12:27 PM on February 18, 2019 [8 favorites]
This bit of pushing women out annoys me greatly because (I guess) even from my being a guy side I got lucky and hit an era and environment where this wasn't much of a thing. I haven't been in the 90's and beyond kids learning to program bits. Nor the world of startups, nor the business world. I really wish girls who want to program now had the same general experience I had because as of a couple of years ago a good chunk of the ST&M peeps were women throughout my career. This whole brogrammer shit gets me graar.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:10 PM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by zengargoyle at 1:10 PM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
"Why does it make me angry? Because, in the real working world - the vast bulk of computer programming requires very little deep math skills..."
In the 90's (and more recently) I heard it postulated among programmers that universities had steep math requirements for computer science degrees as a way to keep down the number of entrants to the programs; the universities couldn't handle the demand and needed a way to weed out students, having absurd math requirements was an effective way of doing this.
I have no idea how truthful this theory is, but I've heard it multiple times over the years.
posted by el io at 1:17 PM on February 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
In the 90's (and more recently) I heard it postulated among programmers that universities had steep math requirements for computer science degrees as a way to keep down the number of entrants to the programs; the universities couldn't handle the demand and needed a way to weed out students, having absurd math requirements was an effective way of doing this.
I have no idea how truthful this theory is, but I've heard it multiple times over the years.
posted by el io at 1:17 PM on February 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
People get pretty foggy about the definitions of both computer science and math, which makes it hard to judge that theory crisply. I think computer science is nearly a subset of math, and math is defined by proofs rather than computations, but this is partly because I am an acerbic solitary late-night loner. It's also because my fondness for even informal proofs has saved coders who don't care about math repeatedly over decades -- proofs might tell you that no matter how long you spend tightening your code you will not succeed, but tightening your code never will.
It is dead weird talking to good professional coders who don't know about computability and undecidability and also `feel' like that can't really be a thing. They have generally heard of GEB but not read it. I blame EDM.
When I'm either really grouchy or really happy I extoll math as at least three and arguably part of six of the seven liberal arts.
posted by clew at 1:36 PM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
It is dead weird talking to good professional coders who don't know about computability and undecidability and also `feel' like that can't really be a thing. They have generally heard of GEB but not read it. I blame EDM.
When I'm either really grouchy or really happy I extoll math as at least three and arguably part of six of the seven liberal arts.
posted by clew at 1:36 PM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
When I was in high school, I took a comp sci class in java. I wasn't really enjoying it, so at the end of the semester I transferred to something else. In an effort to keep a woman in the class, the teacher gave me 100% for the reporting period. Um, thanks? That is not how I want to get ahead in class. In my career as a healthcare data scientist, women are generally in the minority and I have taken people by surprise when they realize that I know what I am talking about. It is pretty fucking insulting.
I'm not the most efficient coder, but as others said, it is more about logic than anything. Having experience combining together relational information and coding in SQL, R, or Python and creating visual stories with Tableau will take you a long way. If you deal in data, I really recommend R over Python - I am banging my head against weirdness in Pandas that just works in R.
posted by source.decay at 1:38 PM on February 18, 2019
I'm not the most efficient coder, but as others said, it is more about logic than anything. Having experience combining together relational information and coding in SQL, R, or Python and creating visual stories with Tableau will take you a long way. If you deal in data, I really recommend R over Python - I am banging my head against weirdness in Pandas that just works in R.
posted by source.decay at 1:38 PM on February 18, 2019
I work for a computer company that is pretty close to 50% women, but about 40% of those are not from the US originally, which really highlights the differences between the culture in different countries and how 'gender coded' jobs in the US are. My computer coding (business coding, not engineering) college classes were 25-30% women back in the late '90s, but the best women then got jobs 'consulting', which essentially wanted them for sales support and meeting clients, not actual programming or leading programming teams.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:46 PM on February 18, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:46 PM on February 18, 2019 [5 favorites]
Regarding math and programming, Computer science *may* require math (NP and crypto theory and network compression algorithms blah blah blah) but real modern IT work certainly does not. The vast majority of today's programming is UI with some data rules that rely on underlying libraries of hard stuff written by other people: you don't write encryption code, you use it. A zillion years ago companies did write their own frameworks for a lot of things, and someone did need to maintain the winsock code or the cross-platform graphics library or the proprietary database. There was a lot more bare metal programming that required a lot of grit. (It still didn't require a man, but I digress.) Over time the influence of Windows, the internet and mobile standards have really simplified the industry. Now the challenges are keeping track of a huge list of features and trying to secure an ever-burgeoning code base.
But even as a CS major back in the 80s I thought that the link to math was pretty bogus. The first time I saw a computer in the late 70s I was hooked, and other than a few pretty contrived classes in college I haven't used a lot of math since then. (I happen to be good at it, but no one has asked yet and I'm in my 50s.) The industry as a whole would have drawn in quite a different mix of people if the control of the computer labs had been handed over to the librarian or the language dept or just about anyone else other than science or math, or if the problems were drawn from anything other than graphing exercises or plotting data sets from the physics lab.
My wife was a pretty good programmer. She got out of college in the 90 and was hired to code C++ on the Mac by a company that was having trouble finding developers. Her Accounting major (ha!) was a great fit, given her love of rules, process, detail, etc. We're still together because I stopped touching the checkbook, but she left programming because the guys were too into the heroic 60 hour/week crash landing model instead of modest, consistent and competent progress that hit the same timelines. She just got tired of the macho and stayed at home once we started having kids. She has never missed that industry for a day.
posted by Cris E at 3:08 PM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
But even as a CS major back in the 80s I thought that the link to math was pretty bogus. The first time I saw a computer in the late 70s I was hooked, and other than a few pretty contrived classes in college I haven't used a lot of math since then. (I happen to be good at it, but no one has asked yet and I'm in my 50s.) The industry as a whole would have drawn in quite a different mix of people if the control of the computer labs had been handed over to the librarian or the language dept or just about anyone else other than science or math, or if the problems were drawn from anything other than graphing exercises or plotting data sets from the physics lab.
My wife was a pretty good programmer. She got out of college in the 90 and was hired to code C++ on the Mac by a company that was having trouble finding developers. Her Accounting major (ha!) was a great fit, given her love of rules, process, detail, etc. We're still together because I stopped touching the checkbook, but she left programming because the guys were too into the heroic 60 hour/week crash landing model instead of modest, consistent and competent progress that hit the same timelines. She just got tired of the macho and stayed at home once we started having kids. She has never missed that industry for a day.
posted by Cris E at 3:08 PM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
"gender-coded jobs"
Oh yes, this is still a thing:
"Lisa is an OK programmer, but we need a manager and women are good at all that stuff. "
"Jennifer, you bother writing complete sentences, you should do all the documentation."
"OK, we've got the acct exec and an engineer for the site visit. Who are we getting for eye candy?"
"Do you know anyone who will sit still and run this entire test script completely for all the data sets?"
Yeesh.
posted by Cris E at 3:17 PM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
Oh yes, this is still a thing:
"Lisa is an OK programmer, but we need a manager and women are good at all that stuff. "
"Jennifer, you bother writing complete sentences, you should do all the documentation."
"OK, we've got the acct exec and an engineer for the site visit. Who are we getting for eye candy?"
"Do you know anyone who will sit still and run this entire test script completely for all the data sets?"
Yeesh.
posted by Cris E at 3:17 PM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
In the 90's (and more recently) I heard it postulated among programmers that universities had steep math requirements for computer science degrees as a way to keep down the number of entrants to the programs;
Hmmm - that makes alot of sense. Reminds me of the other "big lie" that was told to me, when I was determining my post-secondary educational path and future career direction. So - I had never gravitated towards scouting, but I was involved in "Cadets" and had put some thought into signing up with the Canadian Forces to do my education (especially because my family was definitely NOT going to be able help me financially), start a career and maybe even "see the world". Already knew I wanted to do something with computers/technology, and figured that would be a good overall direction - and had an uncle who went down that route with some success.
However... when I visited the recruitment booth at a college/career-fair, I was informed that there were no roles for computer programmers or technologists... None, but... would I be interested in just signing-up for general infantry?
It bugged me for years and years - until 3-decades later when I was talking with a friend, who had gone down that path, that the simple explanation was... "Oh, that recruiter had a quota, didn't care what you were actually interested in, just in filling their numbers".
posted by jkaczor at 4:30 PM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
Hmmm - that makes alot of sense. Reminds me of the other "big lie" that was told to me, when I was determining my post-secondary educational path and future career direction. So - I had never gravitated towards scouting, but I was involved in "Cadets" and had put some thought into signing up with the Canadian Forces to do my education (especially because my family was definitely NOT going to be able help me financially), start a career and maybe even "see the world". Already knew I wanted to do something with computers/technology, and figured that would be a good overall direction - and had an uncle who went down that route with some success.
However... when I visited the recruitment booth at a college/career-fair, I was informed that there were no roles for computer programmers or technologists... None, but... would I be interested in just signing-up for general infantry?
It bugged me for years and years - until 3-decades later when I was talking with a friend, who had gone down that path, that the simple explanation was... "Oh, that recruiter had a quota, didn't care what you were actually interested in, just in filling their numbers".
posted by jkaczor at 4:30 PM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
Ugh.... Is it just me, or do half the answers in this recent "Ask-MeFi" question actually suggest turning this young lady away from computer programming?
posted by jkaczor at 5:15 PM on February 18, 2019
posted by jkaczor at 5:15 PM on February 18, 2019
Mary Ellen Wilkes is one of the women featured in the NYT article. Some MeFites might be
interested in her work on the LINC laboratory minicomputer in the 1960s --- she wrote several reports and papers about it:
1. Conversational Access to a 2048-word Machine, Comm. of the Association for Computing Machinery 13, 7, pp. 407–14, July 1970.
2. Scroll Editing: an on-line algorithm for manipulating long character strings, IEEE Trans. on Computers 19, 11, pp. 1009–15, November 1970.
From [1]: "LAP6 is an online system running on a 2048 word LINC which provides full facilities for text editing, automatic filing and file maintenance, and program preparation and assembly. ... The small memory has had surprisingly little effect on the functional specification of the system ... and perhaps operated with a positive effect on the criterion of simplicity. Compromises were, of course, necessary, but we also found that operating features which may seem highly desirable, for example, to a professional in the computer field, can be so much excess baggage in an on-line applications environment. ..."
[2] describes the ingenious virtual memory scheme: "An algorithm that runs on a 2048-word LINC provides efficient on-line editing of character strings virtually unlimited in length. Fixed-address LINC tape holds the character sequence in the manner of a scroll. Edited characters are spliced directly in or out of the scroll as it moves across a display scope under the viewer's control. A 512-character "playground" created at the splice point provides sufficient ease to permit changing the scroll contents dynamically..."
posted by JonJacky at 7:56 PM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
interested in her work on the LINC laboratory minicomputer in the 1960s --- she wrote several reports and papers about it:
1. Conversational Access to a 2048-word Machine, Comm. of the Association for Computing Machinery 13, 7, pp. 407–14, July 1970.
2. Scroll Editing: an on-line algorithm for manipulating long character strings, IEEE Trans. on Computers 19, 11, pp. 1009–15, November 1970.
From [1]: "LAP6 is an online system running on a 2048 word LINC which provides full facilities for text editing, automatic filing and file maintenance, and program preparation and assembly. ... The small memory has had surprisingly little effect on the functional specification of the system ... and perhaps operated with a positive effect on the criterion of simplicity. Compromises were, of course, necessary, but we also found that operating features which may seem highly desirable, for example, to a professional in the computer field, can be so much excess baggage in an on-line applications environment. ..."
[2] describes the ingenious virtual memory scheme: "An algorithm that runs on a 2048-word LINC provides efficient on-line editing of character strings virtually unlimited in length. Fixed-address LINC tape holds the character sequence in the manner of a scroll. Edited characters are spliced directly in or out of the scroll as it moves across a display scope under the viewer's control. A 512-character "playground" created at the splice point provides sufficient ease to permit changing the scroll contents dynamically..."
posted by JonJacky at 7:56 PM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
I can't find a link to it anymore, but I remember reading Bob Harper (a CS professor at CMU) blogging about a new introductory programming course he started for new CS undergrads. The class taught functional programming (SML) right away, as opposed to a mainstream imperative language (typically Java or Python). What he found was that, unlike most other intro to programming classes, in his class, the best performers were mostly women.
His explanation was that most while most men who enter the CS program have likely had some exposure to programming in high school (as the article notes), most of the women don't. And it turns out that the previous exposure was actually harmful, because it was mostly in an imperative language and so gave them "bad habits" that were harder to shake off when they needed to think and code functionally. In contrast, the women who didn't have any previous exposure found functional programming simple and conceptually easy to grasp, and thus performed a lot better.
posted by destrius at 10:34 PM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
His explanation was that most while most men who enter the CS program have likely had some exposure to programming in high school (as the article notes), most of the women don't. And it turns out that the previous exposure was actually harmful, because it was mostly in an imperative language and so gave them "bad habits" that were harder to shake off when they needed to think and code functionally. In contrast, the women who didn't have any previous exposure found functional programming simple and conceptually easy to grasp, and thus performed a lot better.
posted by destrius at 10:34 PM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
Whoo, that article terretu refers to is damning stuff and there's no Silicon Valley bro-ism in it at all.
posted by clew at 10:56 PM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
Meanwhile, the British government, the largest computer user in the nation, called their computer workers the “machine grades” and later, the “excluded grades”—excluded from equal pay measures brought into the Civil Service in the 1950s. Because their work was so feminized, the government declined to give them equal pay and raise their pay to the men’s rate on the basis that the men’s wage was almost never used. Therefore, the lower, women’s wage became the default market rate for the work. So concentrated in machine work were women that the majority of women working in government did not gain equal pay.
Well-heeled young men tapped for the positions often had no interest in derailing their management-bound careers by getting stuck in the “backwater” of computer work, which had still not fully shaken its association with low-level, feminized labor. [...] As a result, the programming, systems analysis, and computer operating needs of government and industry went largely unmet. Although there were plenty of women who had the required skills, the government all but refused to hire them, and private industry largely refused to promote them.Followed by a couple of colossal stupid industrial policy choices and the UK's lead in computing is gone.
posted by clew at 10:56 PM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
everyone who has been programming knows
Not everyone is our age. A close friend’s son is nineteen, has been programming since high school, and for the last year or so has been working with organizations that teach younger kids introductory programming.
He’s very smart but YOUNG. At this point in his life this is ancient history (from before his mother was born!) that he has never heard of, yet. I’m sending him this article.
posted by D.C. at 3:15 AM on February 19, 2019
Not everyone is our age. A close friend’s son is nineteen, has been programming since high school, and for the last year or so has been working with organizations that teach younger kids introductory programming.
He’s very smart but YOUNG. At this point in his life this is ancient history (from before his mother was born!) that he has never heard of, yet. I’m sending him this article.
posted by D.C. at 3:15 AM on February 19, 2019
I've been sent this article by four different people; I was one of the first wave of mid-to-late-90s students admitted to Carnegie Mellon under that revamp of the system mentioned in the article. I loved programming in high school, where I was in a majority-female class, with a female (queer!) teacher. Once I got to CMU I was one of ten women in my year, had no female professors in the three years I stayed in that major, and was told frequently by students and professors alike that I was taking up space that should have gone to a male student.
There are a several other reasons I flamed out spectacularly, some of them personal and not at all to do with the culture. But in some ways I sacrificed three years of my life, all of my self-confidence, my career ambitions, and tens of thousands of dollars of my parents' money to being a sacrificial guinea pig in a program that was well-intentioned but not entirely able to overcome the people in the program and the lack of anyone checking in to see how I was doing, anywhere along the way.
Sometimes I think I might stop being both angry and guilty someday about that entire experience. The year 2019 is not yet that year, apparently.
It's fine. I ended up switching majors and I really liked my final program, and I'm happy in my career now. But there is another version of me who ended up being the roboticist she dreamed of being, and I will probably never stop feeling like I let her down, and wondering what she might have created.
(And a note to destrius' comment - I was the last year that the program taught ML instead of Java, and I fucking *loved* ML. It made absolute sense to my brain and I did really well in that class. If there's a newer program that's brought that back, I'm delighted to hear it.)
posted by Stacey at 6:50 AM on February 19, 2019
There are a several other reasons I flamed out spectacularly, some of them personal and not at all to do with the culture. But in some ways I sacrificed three years of my life, all of my self-confidence, my career ambitions, and tens of thousands of dollars of my parents' money to being a sacrificial guinea pig in a program that was well-intentioned but not entirely able to overcome the people in the program and the lack of anyone checking in to see how I was doing, anywhere along the way.
Sometimes I think I might stop being both angry and guilty someday about that entire experience. The year 2019 is not yet that year, apparently.
It's fine. I ended up switching majors and I really liked my final program, and I'm happy in my career now. But there is another version of me who ended up being the roboticist she dreamed of being, and I will probably never stop feeling like I let her down, and wondering what she might have created.
(And a note to destrius' comment - I was the last year that the program taught ML instead of Java, and I fucking *loved* ML. It made absolute sense to my brain and I did really well in that class. If there's a newer program that's brought that back, I'm delighted to hear it.)
posted by Stacey at 6:50 AM on February 19, 2019
Once I got to CMU I was one of ten women in my year, had no female professors in the three years I stayed in that major, and was told frequently by students and professors alike that I was taking up space that should have gone to a male student.
Oh dear, I'm really sorry to hear that you had such a bad experience. I was in the class of 2007, and by then the ratio was a lot higher, maybe 20-30%. Hopefully the women in my class had it better... I didn't notice any overt sexism and discrimmination anywhere, but I was generally quite antisocial (shy) and as an international student I didn't hang out that much with most of the CS majors.
(And a note to destrius' comment - I was the last year that the program taught ML instead of Java, and I fucking *loved* ML. It made absolute sense to my brain and I did really well in that class. If there's a newer program that's brought that back, I'm delighted to hear it.)
The class is 15-150, and it's been going on for several years now. I love ML too! I wish I could code in it all the time.
posted by destrius at 7:03 AM on February 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
Oh dear, I'm really sorry to hear that you had such a bad experience. I was in the class of 2007, and by then the ratio was a lot higher, maybe 20-30%. Hopefully the women in my class had it better... I didn't notice any overt sexism and discrimmination anywhere, but I was generally quite antisocial (shy) and as an international student I didn't hang out that much with most of the CS majors.
(And a note to destrius' comment - I was the last year that the program taught ML instead of Java, and I fucking *loved* ML. It made absolute sense to my brain and I did really well in that class. If there's a newer program that's brought that back, I'm delighted to hear it.)
The class is 15-150, and it's been going on for several years now. I love ML too! I wish I could code in it all the time.
posted by destrius at 7:03 AM on February 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
It's gotten a lot better over the years, for sure! I was not heavily involved in the founding of Women@SCS but I was so glad when it got up and running; it would have helped me a lot. I found my community elsewhere - largely at the Women's Center, now a dorm laundromat, RIP - and it was certainly not all bad that I was basically forced to look outside my program for social interaction. But they seem to work a lot harder at supporting their students these days, and I'm really glad about it.
(Somewhat glad. The fact that they're losing the amazing Lenore Blum because of the amount of sexist bullshit still on campus, though not specifically in the department, is disheartening. Improvement has been made, but there's a long way to go. But some of the worst of the old guard retire every year, and I pin some of my hopes on the fact that it's a war of attrition, if nothing else. Someday everyone in that department will have come up in a world where women were always integral to the work.)
posted by Stacey at 7:23 AM on February 19, 2019
(Somewhat glad. The fact that they're losing the amazing Lenore Blum because of the amount of sexist bullshit still on campus, though not specifically in the department, is disheartening. Improvement has been made, but there's a long way to go. But some of the worst of the old guard retire every year, and I pin some of my hopes on the fact that it's a war of attrition, if nothing else. Someday everyone in that department will have come up in a world where women were always integral to the work.)
posted by Stacey at 7:23 AM on February 19, 2019
I didn't even want to go into computer science. I just wanted to have an interest without getting shamed for it by dudes who geek-tested anyone who dared make a peep.
I found my way into some more friendly waters after high school for awhile. I fell into the local BBS scene early (1992, I was a sophomore in college) and met a lot of dudes who were DEEPLY into hacking, programming, machine-learning, and also all corners of the proto-internet both legit and not. There was definitely a sizable subset of dudes--both very young dudes who had been programming since childhood, and older guys with established military/government careers--who were like "oh, hey, you can grok these concepts, neat. Remind me to define our silly jargon as I go so that we can have a conversation."
And then that blip was gone, too. It all turned into coding jobs, and nobody is having conversations in lay language, socially, about underlying concepts and problem-solving. It's all just jargon jargon jargon and if you can't follow, it's "aw, too technical/boring to bother explaining, right?" I dunno dude, if you can't explain it, maybe you don't understand it that well.
posted by desuetude at 7:34 AM on February 19, 2019 [2 favorites]
I found my way into some more friendly waters after high school for awhile. I fell into the local BBS scene early (1992, I was a sophomore in college) and met a lot of dudes who were DEEPLY into hacking, programming, machine-learning, and also all corners of the proto-internet both legit and not. There was definitely a sizable subset of dudes--both very young dudes who had been programming since childhood, and older guys with established military/government careers--who were like "oh, hey, you can grok these concepts, neat. Remind me to define our silly jargon as I go so that we can have a conversation."
And then that blip was gone, too. It all turned into coding jobs, and nobody is having conversations in lay language, socially, about underlying concepts and problem-solving. It's all just jargon jargon jargon and if you can't follow, it's "aw, too technical/boring to bother explaining, right?" I dunno dude, if you can't explain it, maybe you don't understand it that well.
posted by desuetude at 7:34 AM on February 19, 2019 [2 favorites]
unpacked in this thread by Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, this study appears to never have existed in the first place. It's a bogus stat that has been floating around for years.
The piece's author posted an update, a pretty thoroughgoing mea culpa for getting this wrong, with a shout out to Piper for raising the issue:
https://twitter.com/pomeranian99/status/1099034020334264320
Full disclosure: I know the writer personally and have a high regard for his ethics. I also track the women in tech space - no one benefits from an unreliable study continuing to circulate.
posted by maximka at 12:06 PM on February 22, 2019
The piece's author posted an update, a pretty thoroughgoing mea culpa for getting this wrong, with a shout out to Piper for raising the issue:
https://twitter.com/pomeranian99/status/1099034020334264320
Full disclosure: I know the writer personally and have a high regard for his ethics. I also track the women in tech space - no one benefits from an unreliable study continuing to circulate.
posted by maximka at 12:06 PM on February 22, 2019
Thanks maximka, the full ed note is here:
Editors’ Note: Feb. 22, 2019
An earlier version of this article cited a study conducted by the firm Speak With a Geek into gender-blind tech-job applications. After the article’s publication, questions were raised about the study. Upon further review, the magazine has been unable to confirm that this study was undertaken as described, and so reference to it has been removed from the article.
posted by ellieBOA at 10:29 PM on February 22, 2019 [1 favorite]
Editors’ Note: Feb. 22, 2019
An earlier version of this article cited a study conducted by the firm Speak With a Geek into gender-blind tech-job applications. After the article’s publication, questions were raised about the study. Upon further review, the magazine has been unable to confirm that this study was undertaken as described, and so reference to it has been removed from the article.
posted by ellieBOA at 10:29 PM on February 22, 2019 [1 favorite]
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Shades of this article.
As programming was shutting its doors to women in academia, a similar transformation was taking place in corporate America. The emergence of what would be called “culture fit” was changing the who, and the why, of the hiring process. Managers began picking coders less on the basis of aptitude and more on how well they fit a personality type: the acerbic, aloof male nerd.
It doesn't help that some of the narratives going around at the time really played into that. As much as I like "Soul of a New Machine", it's about acerbic aloof nerds working late into the night, more for love than any other remuneration. And any industry that models itself on "love" is probably looking to exploit people, and will build cultural narratives about that.
posted by zabuni at 6:15 AM on February 18, 2019 [12 favorites]