Why so many politically correct people on HN?
Not everybody, of course. But enough to discern a pattern. Programming requires the kind of intellectual rigor and purity that’s incompatible with political correctness. On a good number of the threads, you don’t see enough of the kind of reductionist thinking that one would apply to hacking, applied to just ideas in general. Two examples: every once in a while, the topic of how difficult it is to learn to program well will pop up. And the general consensus often seems to be that anybody can learn to hack well and that learning how to program well has little to do with how smart you are. It’s hard to see how anybody who knows how to program can deny that abstract thinking capacity is a serious factor in learning how to code; and that it isn’t distributed evenly. Second is the issue of why there are so few female hackers or women in technology overall. How many millions of dollars have been pumped into efforts to get girls interested in tech. The results are always dismal. The thinking, even on here, seems to be that women don’t have enough good role models. Hard to believe if you think about it for a second. So few people are willing to admit that the reason women generally don’t get into tech is because they’re not interested in it. I don’t know many females in my life who’d rather spend hours focusing on impersonal abstractions rather than people. It’s generally not a female inclination. This phenomenon plays itself out in college classrooms all over America. How many female nerds do you know? Would be great if more people were honest about what they really believed. You've missed the bus on female nerds vs. male nerds. My wife is a senior Oracle DBA. She's very technical. She has great Unix skills on top of her Oracle knowledge. I know plenty of women like that in tech. Intelligent, highly skilled, motivated. In fact, almost all of the women I've worked with in software development fit that description. On the other hand, the majority of men I've worked with in software development are just putting in time. They're working 15/30, collecting their pay, running their fantasy football league from their desk. They don't really understand what they do, but there's always someone willing to carry them. Why the imbalance? The women who aren't interested in tech move on to something else, leaving behind the good ones. The men who aren't interested in tech linger on, becoming a burden (Wally!). I wish the uninterested, uninspired men would move on as well. It's no fun having a team lead who spends his days surfing porn, YouTube, and NASCAR. This is so far removed from my experience as to make me wonder if you live on the same planet I do. Specifically, I have met one female developer in my entire life, and I have been in a hiring position for 11 years now. Additionally, I have yet to meet even one male developer who cares about NASCAR, fantasy football, or works to simply punch the clock. In my world( that would be the web technology and retail automation industries of Orange County and Phoenix ), female developers effectively don't exist, and male developers care deeply for the technology they use and create. I live in Calgary where, despite the old boy network, we have a large number of female IT professionals and engineers. They still face barriers, but it's improving. Your hiring experience sounds unusual. You never get resumes from women? You never interview guys who sound good on paper, but turn out to be duds? You raise an interesting point on the male developers, and I admit I may be suffering from filter bias - I have interviewed plenty of guys who have no passion for the business, but never hired them, so I am making claims about the guys I actually work with. As for the females, I can honestly say I have received maybe one or two resumes from a female for a developer position, in my life. If you're not receiving resumes from women, you may want to examine your job advertising, benefits, and reputation in the industry. The way you advertise jobs will have a large influence on the type of people who apply. Word of mouth through your all-male developer network isn't likely to reach female developers. The tone of your ads may discourage women from applying (a PDF study: dbem.ws/Sex%20biased%20ads.pdf). The benefits you offer may also discourage women. Vacation time, flexible hours, and maternity leave tend to be as important to mothers or would-be mothers as health and dental coverage (as a father those things are also important to me, but I know dads who don't care). If you've got benefits that only a young single guy could love, you'll get young single guys applying. And then there's your reputation. Software development is a surprisingly small, connected industry. If you've only interviewed one female developer in 11 years (the maximum if you've only ever met one), that statistic is out there. Perhaps women don't apply because they've heard you don't hire women or don't even interview them. If you're not getting female developers applying for jobs, you're missing out on half the talent out there. You may want to check your network on LinkedIn and find out where they are working and why. And more importantly, why they're not interested in working for you. > So few people are willing to admit that the reason women generally don’t get into tech is because they’re not interested in it. I don’t know many females in my life who’d rather spend hours focusing on impersonal abstractions rather than people. You're partly right, I think, but you have to take into account group psychology. People like being in groups. A lot of women probably don't go into tech (or condition themselves not to be interested in tech) because there are few women in tech at present. For example, assuming you are a male, pick any occupation (even a well-paid one) where 95% of employees are women, then spend a few weeks there. Very soon you will be tired of listening to other women talk about nails, babies, and other female business. Now the same applies, in reverse, to women who are afraid of joining a male-dominated field. It's a self-perpetuating pattern. > Would be great if more people were honest about what they really believed. Why are you implying we're not? I do believe there is no big issue with female developers, apart from the fact they (still) don't fit the typical female role idea in the minds of too many people. Most girls will follow the group and do what their older friends / family / ... did and where they feel they should be. And that simply does not include "nerdy" positions. Then again there's the thing discussed a couple of months ago - too many developer communities are just unused to women developers and create weird situations. Bring up some project on typical forums and mention the name of a woman leading it. See how many will turn into "look, it's made by a woman and she's pretty too" threads, forgetting the project itself completely. Point it out and you'll meet with lots of aggression :( Surprisingly, I did meet a few women leading interesting software projects and a number of developers - majority of them in eastern Europe. In UK, I haven't met any... (apart from those who migrated) Just a data point. > the reason women generally don’t get into tech is because they’re not interested in it This is the interesting part. The real question is - are they not interested because society makes them think they shouldn't be or because women are naturally different from men in a way that makes them not interested. I think we'll only find out once "geek girl" stops being a bad thing for teenagers and guys in development stop being more interested in the "woman" part of "woman developer" (in work context at least). Whether we really need to fight that hard to change the current situation is a completely different question though. Maybe it just needs time and 1-2 generations to correct itself. The interesting part is that (IIRC) CS has the lowest number of women in all tech fields. You can find plenty of women in other tech fields. Sigh. There is no such thing as a "female inclination". I know, it's almost unbelievable, but there's no secret rule book on what women have to like. I wish I had the answer why women are not interested, but from what I see from inside the industry as well as from what I hear from my non-tech gfs, there are many components. Missing role models are one of them. Before you go dismiss that off hand because it doesn't fit your world view, how many female role models can you name? How many male ones? Notice something there? Then there is the fact that quite a few guys get very defensive if you even mention the idea of interesting women in tech. It comes across as not wanting them around. In my previous industry (games) you can also add in that many places are a frat house on steroids - not too appealing to a lot of women. because I believe it has more to do with social conditioning than any sort of natural inclination. does that mean i'm politically correct? I believe that development is still a profession in its infancy. Or maybe it is an infantile profession. The books written on it may as well be saying that we should be leeching people to cure AIDS. Nothing considered of much substance deals with people's personalities, tendencies, etc. Everything is about some process applied to everything like a hammer. And it doesn't work or it isn't new-and-shiny so someone else will invent some other language or tool or process and that will be the hot thing. Are we trying on clothes for a fashion show or are we trying to solve problems? Why in the hell do we need a new version of Mac OS, Windows, Linux, ...? Wouldn't the old version have gotten it done 1000000 times faster? Solving problems does not and should not involve new and shiny. We should all focus on: (1) our differences: we are not the same and we change- we should do work in a way that best utilizes our potential productivity- psychology/neurology should play into planning teams and projects, (2) better data collection and reporting: we should all be analyzing metrics about development and the services and products we provide, with A/B testing, feedback loop, etc. (3) Solving problems together: we need to limit forking to small R&D groups that do A/B testing and present their findings back to the core group, imo. (Why is Linux still not the most popular OS for the Desktop? imo, the reasons are variation and lack of cohesion in the community- not because it is mostly a free and volunteer effort. Linux sucks on the Desktop because we aren't working together on it- we don't have to use it, so why should we? Limit options and focus!) ... So basically, you are saying that we are skirting around the fact that you have to have a certain type of mind to do well in development, and I agree, but I think that is a problem, not a solution.