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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines

This would seem to be a bit of a bait-and-switch... If you aren't interested in "computer parts and tech magazines" then what exactly is it about computing that makes you want to do it?

"For the money" is a valid answer of course, a job's a job for most people, but let's call a spade a spade.

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How well correlated are those things with CS or Engineering studies? Star Wars and science fiction won't help you write software. Building a computer from scratch won't really either, these days. (And magazines are a weird one because they're very much a relic of the past, and not as much of a realistic way to pick this stuff up for the past 15 years.)

Tech posters also seem entirely like a high-school/college-age cultural thing rather than a sign of real interest. Most of my (almost entirely male) software engineer coworkers have as their desktop pictures nature scenes, cityscapes, or picture of people, very few have sci-fi/fantasy/anime/whatever screenshots or art.

If you go to more directly-related things like "reading and commenting on HN on a Sunday" where someone is likely to very well be learning things that apply to their job, it would be interesting to see how much of a turnoff that seemed to be compared to the above-listed tangential culture markers. Though even then, while I'm sure business owners love having employees who will willingly do uncompensated work-related study on the weekend, I'm doubtful that it's a thing we should be striving towards.

Science fiction gives the ideas that we can eventually implement ourselves.

How many people working on the first customer mobile phone didn't think it was the Communicator from Star Trek?

In 2001 A Space Odyssey, the book describes the tablet computer.

Scifi has a great cultural and technological precedent in computing: it gives the ideas of what to do next. And that doesn't matter what sex you are (or aren't).

I don't see how this is bait and switch. I am a programmer and I cant't stand star wars or the vast majority of science fiction. Neither do I enjoy running around with geeky tshirts. You do not have to be nerdy to enjoy working with computers.

I am a programmer and I cant't stand star wars or the vast majority of science fiction

Do you expect your colleagues not to mention or discuss these things in your presence?

How did you draw that conclusion? First of all I do not work in an environment where I do not connect with my peers, secondly I said that I do not like this culture, not that I have a problem if people do.

I just understand if poeple do not like it.

That is the premise of the article.

Not entirely. What's your response to this part?

"I felt out of place among my mostly male colleagues because I hated drinking beer and didn’t like being mocked for reading novels. Not to mention that the men who controlled access to the computer made me listen to a barrage of sexist teasing if I wanted to be given that day’s code to run my program."

I'm male. I don't drink beer. I read novels. I don't get mocked for either of them. I don't get sexist teasing. I have seen coworkers do that, though (in more subtle ways)—and that just sucks.

It would be a mistake to interpret or portray this article as "afraid of Star Wars posters" as if Star Wars posters are a thing that actively attacks people who are different.

The premise of the article is that if potential students are exposed to "nerd culture" they are less likely to pick compsci than if the person they talk to avoids this environment. Not sure how you draw a conclusion about work.

I think the parent was complaining that things which definitely have nothing to do with STEM fields (sci-fi and star wars) were interspersed with things that are germanely related (computer parts and tech magazines).

You wouldn't fault an anatomy course for having skeletons in the room or a Physics classroom for having copies of Science laying around, so the parent argues that it's also weird to tell technology educators not to display computer hardware (for instance).

FWIW I ultimately agree with you. Computer hardware and pop sci/tech trade rags have nothing at all to do with most of the Computer Science field.

I don't think any of the things mentioned need to be in a compscie class. At least on my university neither architecture nor math departments were littered with popculture references, yet compsci was. And math and architects dressed better ;)

> things which definitely have nothing to do with STEM fields (sci-fi and star wars)

I respectfully disagree wholeheartedly. Many enter these industries because of their love for sci-fi. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Space X or NASA employee who wouldn't attribute at least some of their aspiration to the creations of Carl Sagan or Gene Rodenberry.

True but incomplete. Some of us got interested in scientific fields because we were interested in science (not science fiction). For me, it was a good teacher at a critical time in HS. Not a role model, as I did not and really do not wish to be a teacher. But somebody who opened a door into something that excited me.

Could you square that circle for me where you are interested in science, but not science fiction? I'm not talking about science fantasy, but fiction rooted in science and the ramifications of scientific development.

This isn't strange at all. I interact with scientists fairly regularly and very few are fans of science fiction in any sense of the phrase.

Most scientists are normal people with an aptitude for a certain discipline, enjoy working on interesting problems, and had the luck of having encountered a mentor or two who steered them toward research. None of the ideas that drive the creation of sci fi are necessary to be a scientist. It really is just another career.

In fact, I can't think of a single scientist I (personally) know who became a scientist because of sci fi. (Which isn't to say that they don't exist.)

I'm a scientist who doesn't like sci fi much. I don't hate it, I enjoy some of it, but not the genre as a whole. I like Star Wars for the big pew pew spaceships as much as anybody but I don't like Star Trek at all.

To me, a lot of it just comes across as unimaginative. Oh sure, we've travelled half way across the galaxy to meet an alien race and it turns out they're Space Russians, or Space Jews. Maybe Space Ancient Romans for a change.

While I have read science fiction, it's not high on my list. I prefer various forms of history to SF and I have read one fantasy series (Katherine Kurtz). Perhaps I just prefer to look backwards to understand today (and the near future) rather than far off to anticipate the future? I think I'm more of a problem solver than a visionary.

I also have a problem with anything where the science (or engineering, I guess) isn't right or consistent in my eyes. I find such things TERRIBLY distracting, slaughtering what might otherwise be a good story. Anal, yeah, but then you probably suspected this as this is HN, after all.

This is part of the cultural problem. Why should anyone be called upon to justify their non-interest in something?

No one's being called out. I'm curious about how it works, so I asked. Thankfully not everyone here is as reactionary as you, and I actually learned something.

I think it's better to call it a specific American subculture than "nerdy". All kinds of people have that level of obsession with other things like fashion, but they have their own communities that respect them for it.

If you aren't interested in "computer parts and tech magazines" then what exactly is it about computing that makes you want to do it?

I am a woman with a Certificate in GIS. I know some HTML and CSS. I run some blogs.

I joined an email list -- a parenting/homeschooling list -- when my now 28 year old son was 11. It led to me becoming a moderator of an email list for a time. My advice was seemingly popular on that list. Someone liked my writing and wanted to put some of it on their website. Later, she helped me move that to a site of my own and take over the coding.

There are things I would like to do in this world to help other people -- to educate them, to empower them to solve hard personal problems. I joined Hacker News in hopes of eventually learning to write code to do that. So far, life has gotten in the way.

My two adult sons are masters of framing traditionally male interests in a way that appeals to me. My oldest son got me playing Master of Magic -- now one of my favorite games -- by telling me "It's like SimCity" and then helping me to play it in a way that appealed to my interest in civilization building. My sons want to make video games for a living. If things work out, I may join them in that endeavor at some point.

Having girly motivations does not mean writing code is of no interest to you. You can be interested in people or whatever and see code as a way to accomplish your goals. Mulan is the single best movie I know of that portrays a woman having success in a man's world doing a man's job for girly reasons: She loved her father. She felt guilty that she was a daughter and not a son. If she had been born a boy, she would have been conscripted, not him. So she went in his place -- and saved a nation, to keep her beloved family member alive.

You can be a girly girl and love someone enough that you would murder others over it. We aren't all helpless whiny crybabies. Sometimes, doing things like a girl makes you a total badass.

But there are serious "marketing" problems with how we approach the problem space currently.

> Having girly motivations does not mean writing code is of no interest to you. You can be interested in people or whatever and see code as a way to accomplish your goals.

I've noticed that in some tech circles, social and emotional motivations (and especially ones with negative valence like anger and disappointment) are seen as sort of unreal and invalid. I understand that people often want to focus on choosing the product/technology/protocol/whatever that's objectively the best, but I think there are cases where it's warped the culture such that people get into cliques and develop (sometimes intense) social motivations based on perfectly valid factors like trust and respect, but pretend that those motivations are entirely based on dispassionate technical analysis.

I guess I'm not sure what my point is. Maybe it's that social "drama" is inevitable, but tech communities make it toxic because of a misguided belief that it's irrelevant, and this dynamic causes splash damage for women who are more heavily socialized to value personal relationships. Maybe it's just a brain fart, but I think it would explain a lot.

I think part of the devaluation of emotion is the nature of the work. The computer doesn't care that you've had a bad day. The computer doesn't care that your kid is sick. The computer doesn't care that you're behind on your mortgage, or that your partner left you, or that you could really use a hug. The computer is a cruel adversary, and to beat it, you need to discard emotion (at least temporarily) and embrace its cold, logical way of reasoning about the world. You need to beat it at its own game.

Is it any wonder that we programmers tend to view logical reasoning as more useful than emotional reasoning?

I did once post an article here about how emotional labor is deemed to be women's work and the social expectation is that women must do it. It was fairly man-bashy, so it unsurprisingly got no attention here. It got a great deal of very positive attention in a different forum I belong to. It was a huge positive, eye opening discussion for a great many women who have boatloads of legitimate frustration and anger about this issue and how it negatively impacts their lives.

The degree to which women are expected to deal with the emotions of other people means that women in male dominated environments get dumped on in a way that becomes very problematic for them. Women are not allowed to say "Not my problem." If they try that, there is hell to pay. So I do not believe this is more problematic for women because they value social relationships more. I think it is more problematic because everyone around them will blame them if they do not smooth things over (I mean for other parties -- like mom interceding between fighting children), will cry on their shoulder and expect them to care, etc.

This is one reason tech needs to value diversity: Most men simply don't have substantial skill in dealing with certain things. When you lack social and emotional savvy, it is not uncommon for the fallout to involve things like being sued by people who are mad as hell at you. The way to minimize outcomes like that is to have people on board who will recognize the problem early and act to resolve it before it involves lawyers and bad publicity. But they cannot take effective action if they do not have real power and are not sincerely respected.

Thank you for replying.

What a strange expectation we have here. I have a couple lawyer friends; none of them have lawyer magazine, or wear lawyer t-shirts.

Lawyers have their own 'uniforms' - they certainly don't tend to wear the normal day-to-day clothing of the general public.

A telling remark. So far as I can see, lawyers dress pretty much identically to every other professional --- except computer professionals, who actually do have an idiosyncratic dress code.

I don't see that at all. Lawyers in general dress better than most other professions except finance. I've worked in hospitals and never saw the doctors dressing as well as lawyers[1] - some consultants do, but far from the majority doctors. Friends of mine are in architecture, and I don't see that there either. Same with engineering in general - neat casual seems much more par for the course. Academics also don't often fit the bill.

In contrast, the 'neckbeard and star wars t-shirt' is something I've never personally seen working in tech. Neckbeard, yes. I've worked in one waterfall shop and four agile shops, and liaised with techies in enterprise from time to time (zero t-shirts there) - the 'sci-fi geek visible at 100 yards' is a trope, a stereotype. The techies I've worked with have been overwhelmingly male (only one female developer in all that time) and about half of them were family men. That's something the 'computer professional' stereotype actively opposes, instead painting people that are into computers as social losers who can't get a girl.

IT is more accepting of shabbiness in dress than other professions, but I simply don't see the sloganed t-shirt as being the actual standard attire of computer professionals. Instead it seems more to be a shorthand stereotype, just like a white coat and stethoscope signals 'doctor' in the collective mind.

[1] I do have bias here - when I say 'lawyers', I mean ones in business. I haven't had interaction with lawyers dealing in personal matters. I imagine they dress to suit.

I think you're making observations from a biased selection of lawyers. BigLaw corporate lawyers wear suits and ties. But most lawyers aren't that, and most of them wear business casual just like everybody else.

Meanwhile: if you select down to consulting software developers, particularly those working at major (500+ headcount) firms selling to Fortune 500 companies, you're going to find that they don't dress like the stereotypical software developer either. Those consultants are the CS equivalent of BigLaw lawyers.

I don't think "I've ... liaised with techies in enterprise from time to time" marries up well with "if you select down to consulting software developers". :)

The biggest headcount of a company I've worked in tech with is 60, most of whom were not in IT. The other tech companies are all 10-20 people, including part-timers. Only one company I worked for sold to Fortune 500 - ironically this one had the shabbiest dress of all.

Three of those companies had lawyers - they all dressed in suit-with-optional-tie. As did their visitors (visitors rarely optioned out of the tie) and the lawyers I'd talk to from other companies (admittedly a rare occurrence). Apart from the medical sales at the waterfall place and finance staff, I rarely see a suit jacket in the neat casual dress of other staff (IT or otherwise).

I realise this is all anecdata, but at the same time, the 'neckbeard and t-shirt' idiom is a grossly incorrect stereotype.

This particular argument is just not interesting to me. I disagree with you: I think lawyers dress like pretty much all the rest of the accountants, salespeople, marketing managers, and project managers that make up the modern workforce. I think that if there's any profession that does have an informally enforced and idiosyncratic dress code, it's the programmers, with their surreptitious warnings to preferred job candidates not to wear a suit to the interview.

I respect that you've had a different set of experiences and drawn different conclusions, but respectfully: I think I'm just going to be hard to convince otherwise on these points, and having a message board slapfight over which jobs wear more ties --- I can visualize myself trying to Google my way to a survey answer to this question now --- shudder --- just seems like a terrible use of our time.

I'm happy to agree to disagree, though we both agree that IT is more tolerant of shabbiness. I do think that your definition of 'professional' is too narrow - 'professionals' are more than finance, sales, and middle-managers. I guess my point was primarily that the stereotype of developers doesn't seem to match up with the actuality of developers. I just get verbose and waffley at times.

And yes, this isn't a debate that should send either of us a-searching :)

But would anyone write an article saying that potential law students were put off by walls of law books and big mahogany desks?

law books : practice of law != {star wars, jokey t-shirts} : software development.

I thought they were going for this:

{law books, mahogany desks} : practice of law ~= {computer parts, tech magazines} : software development.

More appropriate analogy: law students being put off by Sex In The City.

That's in some hypothetical world where the law industry is for some bizarre reason as obsessed with Sex In The City as the tech industry is obsessed with science fiction. Conversations among coworkers return to Sex and the City references with tedious regularity. The meeting rooms at your firm are called Carrie and Miranda and Samantha and... the other one. Your firm's senior partner shows you, with pride, the signed portrait of Sarah Jessica Parker that occupies pride of place in his office. I can imagine that would be pretty alienating for anyone who isn't a SatC fan.

Luckily law isn't so ridiculously obsessed with some tiny facet of pop culture.

Law pretty much requires you at least be comfortable with some douchey stuff. It's very classist. Some of them look like you just murdered a baby if you got mcdonalds for lunch. Their version of nerd is pretentious yuppie.

It's not far off from working in tech and not being a nerd. Maybe even worse since nerds don't actively look down on regular people the way lawyers do.

I suspect the reason why women find the nerd culture more off putting is because being nerd is sort of bad. So thinking tech is nerdy means tech is embarrassing and undesirable. Not that they won't fit in. They don't want to fit in.

Either way, the solution is to encourage some women to do tech and they can trail blaze. Then future women can see that you don't have to be a nerd to do tech.

I got into computers because they were amazing devices that I could make do things. I have no interest in hardware, other than using it to write software. Tech magazines are reference materials, and as such, aren't all that interesting. Professionally, I managed to combine my academic and hacker interests into spending decades making software that others can use to do THEIR work: solve problems, understand Nature, ...

Its a prop for being low social status. If they wanted masculinity instead of low social status, they would have used football posters and GQ magazine for props in their thought experiment.

I'm not quite sure what a prop would be for low social status women.

>Its a prop for being low social status.

Its a prop for having a functioning brain. Other than the star wars and science fiction stuff (which I haven't seen at any tech companies I've worked at here in the bay), the rest of the props indicate that you have a genuine intellectual interest in the field.

We don't make fun of NASA for decorating their offices with space paraphernalia or claim it means a low social status. Frankly I'm not interested in people coming into this field who are stupid enough to think that people genuinely excited about what they do have a "low social status".

Do you mean "prop" as in holds something up or "prop" as in, a thing from a scene in a movie? Because I am having some difficulty in parsing your comment.

A "prop" as in a piece of scenery used in a play or movie. In this case nerdy posters are used as props to give a certain vibe.

Probably trashy women's gossip magazines, lots of pink etc. That would do it for me.

This is probably it, there's even movies about it (Legally Blonde, etc). What's different there is customer-facing vs non-customer-facing roles, a lawyer who shows up in court in non-professional attire is going to get flak, and I don't know what the immediate female-heavy analogue for a back-of-office, not-customer-facing male-dominated engineer department. The usual examples of female-dominated professions like nursing and teaching don't fit that comparison.

But it's very disingenuous to call engineering low social status these days. Wearing Star Wars t-shirts or talking about computer parts and technology 24/7, yes, that will still receive at least some ribbing, if not more, but that's not the same as being an engineer by day. In my recent social experience, reaction after someone asks "what do you do?" is pretty uniformly somewhere on the positively-neutral-to-impressed spectrum.

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