1984 – When women stopped coding
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Women see the writing on the wall on High School: Med/Law School offer a clear career path to the upper middle class, while CS offers a muddy path at a middle class life.
They also see "rich" old Doctors and Lawyers. They have never seen a "rich" old programmer, because they don't exist. Programmers are washed out by 50, while Doctors are in their prime at 50.
Data: I am an 80's kid. All the smart girls knew to go to med/law school. All the nerdy guys like me wasted time learning 6502 assembly. We are all doing OK, but the women make 2 to 3 times as much as the men.
Alas, I followed my "passion." Blech.
You cannot make a argument that women are just taking the more optimal career path and leaving men to do what is left over.
Outside of San Francisco and (maybe) NYC, "big bucks" for a programmer with no managerial responsibilities is probably somewhere in the $120-180k range. In my very low cost of living area, it's in the $100-120k range. You just cannot get a job for more than $9-10k/mo in the area doing development. Team leads/tech leads are similarly priced, and it's not until you're managing multiple teams that you're in the area of $150k.
And yes a new doctor will be 5-6 years older and make less than a new programmer. But "big bucks" for a physician is measured in the hundreds of thousands. Anesthesiology tops $430k a year in median salary.[2] It's absolutely a harder, more demanding job, and it starts out much less forgiving. But the ladder extends much, much further and depending on specialty it's hard not to end up solidly upper class regardless of geographic area or cost of living.
The 2012 median annual wage for "Computer programmers" is $72k[0]
The 2012 median annual wage for a lawyer is $114k, with an arguably much more difficult job market[1], but is incredibly close to the top 10% of computer programmers (which is $118k).
The 2012 median annual wage for a physicians is above the maximum reported value of $187,200[2]
[0] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/c... [1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm#tab-5 [2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/physicians-and-surgeons.ht...
It's definitely true that doctors make more money over the long run, but if by year 20 (~age 40), the difference is only about 2 years' extra salary, a lot of people would say it's not worth the stress.
1. If you are a programmer who can make an above-average salary immediate upon graduating; and
2. If you are able to save an above average amount of that salary; and
3. If you are exceptionally good at traditional investment decisions (stock picking) such that you can consistently beat the market; and
4. You actually decide to use the money from #2 for #3
Then it's possible to retire after a sub-20 year career. In the same sense that it's possible to win the lottery multiple times. Each of the first three points are by definition exceedingly rare as single traits of any one person, let alone all three together.
An above average salary in most common cases is interchangeable with 'living within means'. You can start with whatever little you have and grow.
Its really not about how small you start, its about how quickly and consistently you are making an attempt to grow.
As an Indian, I don't know much about the US market. But you guys still have index funds, Roth IRA, IRA and real estate to invest in.
In India even cab drivers who made bad real estate decisions have typically reaped X00% returns. People who made intelligent decisions are already retired. Many programmers in early 90's and even 2000's I know are already make big money in rents. And of course that doesn't mean every body did that.
When it comes to savings and investment there really is a binary crowd that I've seen. The first crowd says its just not possible and doesn't even try, the other crowd tries and some how makes it to be known as those "1 in 1000".
I've found people who boldly claim you can invest your way to early retirement always speak in vague generalities, and never have specific advice to offer. "Just be smart" and "pick the right funds" but if you press them on exactly what to do with, for example, $1000 in investable income a month in order to retire in 20 years with $5000 a month in income, they tend to come up short on details.
Programming is now cool and desirable - you can see the shifts everywhere in pop culture. Being a nerd or a geek is a badge of pride for many.
What kind of reaction do you think you'd get if your assessment had the opposite outcome? I'm all for brutal honesty, but it should be a two-way street.
"Uncle" Bob Martin gave an interesting talk in London last night about the need for a professional body for software.
Doctors have the American Medical Association (or BMA here in the UK). Lawyers have the American Bar Association (I think the Law Society is the UK equivalent). They can regulate their profession, ensuring standards, controlling membership through certification, and raising the value/cost of the members.
Perhaps he's right, and we'd benefit from the same in software?
http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2015/11/27/OathDiscussi...
My wife is an architect (residential) and her clients cannot tell her to take a shortcut which violates the Building Code.
I'd love to be able to say "no" to some stupid, short-sighted requests I get from clients. Without a professional organization behind me - I can't, because I will be deemed "difficult" and lose the business.
Even if your wife thinks it's good idea to violate the building Code in some isolated case, she still can't legally do it.
You're just looking for someone to back you up because you think your client is short-sighted. You'd have equal leverage to your wife's if your software was processing data in a regulated industry and a client asked you to do something against regulations.
I believe that licensing and authoritative standards bodies are inevitable in software engineering, but I think it will radically change the face of the programming job market, removing many of its most attractive qualities. It will be a very dark day, and the end of the era of the self-taught programmer, when something like the American Software Engineering Association gets to set the rules.
Median salary for lawyers is $113,530. That's a pay most lawyers don't achieve until they are in their late 30s or 40s.
Top 10 percentile is at $187,200.
Most lawyers spend 4 years in college and then 3 years in law school to land a $60,000 dollar job in their late 20s. Then they spend another 5-10 years paying off the student loans. Many programmers make that kind of money in their early 20s without any formal education.
Also, it's too early to say at what age programmers are "done". There were few developers in the 1970's and 1980's and they are now nearing retirement. Let's wait and see how it goes with the bigger generation of developers that are now in their 20s and 30s. My guess is that many of them will continue until retirement.
Management is not about selecting objectively good tools, and it's not about making hard choices or settling disputes. It's about keeping everyone that works for your employer happy, which is, frankly, 95% about the superficial.
I'm not sure how it is for lawyers, but I would imagine there is also a significant up front investment before you start making real money (if you ever do). Contrast this with CS where you can make 6 figures right out of college with significantly less pain during the training process.
Law school alone (ignoring the cost of passing the bar or anything else) is prohibitively expensive for many people.
For 2015-16, Yale law school is $78,000/yr[0], Harvard is $85,000[1] (including an optional $2400 health plan), Columbia is $65,588[2], and Stanford is $54,183[3]. So you're looking at $165-255,000 in fees, expenses and tuition over three years.
The majority of my friends who are attorneys and have taken the bar also spent several months (up to 6-8 but that does not seem to be the norm) doing nothing but studying for it full time. Everyone took out additional loans to cover expenses, or lived with their parents for free. So it's not uncommon to have $150k in just law school student loans when all is said and done.
So the median is still higher for attorneys than for developers, but most attorneys would have student loan obligations in the 1.2-2x median salary range, so often several times more than they're making right out of school.
It was bad enough making $45k as a junior developer with $20k in student loans, I can't imagine making $60k as a junior associate in a similar area with $175k in student loans.
[0] https://www.law.yale.edu/admissions/cost-financial-aid/cost-... [1] http://hls.harvard.edu/dept/sfs/financial-aid-policy-overvie... [2] http://web.law.columbia.edu/admissions/graduate-legal-studie... [3] https://law.stanford.edu/apply/tuition-financial-aid/cost-of...
1) Medicine and Law are professions, programming is not. You could arguably compare to CS professors, but that's still apples and oranges. 2) It doesn't make any sense to compare (peak, median, whatever) yearly salaries when you have wildly different career paths (e.g. 0 years of school vs. 10+) , debt, etc. What you want is lifetime earnings. 3) Lawyers in general don't make anything like what you think they do. Doctors distribution is also lower than your range suggests.
You are right that some of these professions offer, for a smallish number of people, a clear path to a solid upper middle class salary (and few options outside of that).
I still regularly hear people talk about how cushy and rich all lawyer jobs supposedly are.
i heard another explanation - that the home computer brought about a shift in how pop culture did perceive programmers, from now on it was a thing for male geeks. Was that because home computers did not have a particularly friendly user interface at that time ? I don't know.
Before that it was like any other white collar office job, after that popular culture became to associate it with you know who. It might be that this image did have some influence on career choices.
Again, these are all guesses because nobody can anything definitive on the subject.
Dealing with mainframes is probably kinda secure job. Dealing with personal computers seems very sensitive to economic fluctuations.
Maybe women just kept doing what they have always done. And men conquered this new front where employment is less certain. Just like with gold rushes in the past. So the news is no news.
On top of that I'd also like to see innate cognitive ability factored in.
My guess is that once all the relevant variables are accounted for there's not much difference between the different professions.
It will boil down to what one likes to do. Because that's going to be what you stick with and develop excellence in over time. Medicine, law, and programming are all pretty radically different field, so whether or not you enjoy the work is really going to matter. Pick one you like and you'll do fine.
Note: The top end in annual comp for doctors and lawyers may be $1M but you really can't compare that to the top end in annual comp for CS because many developers at the top end are compensated in equity - which isn't paid out as income on an annual basis.
[1] go to US News and World Report "Best Jobs" and drill down by salary and region. Alternatively, you can go to the BLS site - which is what the US News numbers are based on.
[2] I'd also like to acknowledge that these numbers "seem" low to me. It's based on BLS data by region, but dev salaries seem higher than this in SF.
I've posted this on HN a few times, and I've realized that I need to qualify this with a few statements.
I have no problem with nurses earning higher salaries than software developers. It's a difficult and vitally important job and nurses deserve their high salaries and high scores on surveys of professional respect.
Yes, programmers have more upside, but check the BLS directly for higher percentile salaries. It isn't until you get to the 90%ile for devs and nurses (in SF) that the devs earn more, and even then, it's only by a whisker. There are also lots of downsides - age related employment issues can get pretty bad for software developers. I do think that nurses have better job stability, experience few age-related employment issues in middle age, and may actually have better job flexibility (they can't wander off and get a cup of coffee whenever they feel like it like most devs can, but many nursing and medical specialties have remarkable options to scale back on work for a period of time, such as having a kid, without severely compromising the long term career path).
Another complicating factor - anyone who reads a book on PHP can call him or herself a "software developer" (though BLS stats base this on people who use the title or something similar on a tax return, I believe). Nursing, on the other hand, requires a degree and formal licensure. So it's not quite apples-to-apples. Then again, we separate out physicians from nurses, whereas we include very high salary devs in that number, so again, it's complicated and difficult to make these comparisons.
Also, these are numbers for San Francisco - nurses do not out earn developers everywhere. However, the higher concentration of devs in SF/Silicon Valley could skew the numbers as well.
I'll stop here, and simply acknowledge that interpreting this data is certainly more complex than simply listing some medians. My real problem is that most analyses of why group X isn't going into profession Y almost never consider the possibility that this may in fact be a highly rational response to market signals. This isn't the only factor, and the social issues NPR mentions are highly relevant. However, we really do need to explore the extent to which a preference for law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentisty, or even dental hygiene over software development may be highly rational.
What are you trying to prove? Nurses are a frequently-identified national shortage. So, unless you are trying to, by comparison, establish that there is also a shortage in dental hygienists (which I have no problem believing), I'm not sure what you are trying to establish.
Last time I talked to her, she was quite happy with her choice.
But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part.
While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer.
Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a "normal" thing on computers, I really don't have high hopes for the future of the development community at all, much less for the future of women in this field.
But, getting back to the topic of my daughters, my experience has been that:
1. If given the choice, they would not choose the constructive, mechanical toys I grew up with where they might get into robotics or mechanical engineering (e.g. Thames & Kosmos or Mindstorms) although one enjoyed putting a tin can robot together.
2. They also would not choose the electrical kits to put things together and get into electrical engineering, although I did get a kit and my daughters played with them a few times. It just took too much time and attention to have anything happen, and when it did, it wasn't exciting the way it was for me as a kid- it was boring compared to their phones and tablets.
3. As for development, I was able to show one of my daughters how they could play music by programming in emulator of an old computer, but they had little interest. I was able to get that daughter to work with me to use Scratch to program something for about an hour and she really liked it, but she's not asked about it since.
Today's environment is just not the same. As much as parents who are developers try to get their kids into development, I just see it as a losing battle.
What the world needs is an operating system (or systems) or even an application or set of applications that almost everyone would want to use that require programming in some form or fashion to accomplish everyday tasks better.
But, iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux and most applications that people use and games people play- they don't really work like that so much. You can get by without learning to code as a casual user, and the bar is so high now to create anything that a casual user would actually want to use or play. The closest thing to it really is a spreadsheet application or rules in an email application, and most users barely use those.
I am advising my kids to have good technical skills but also great people skills.
However, programming any major system today does require extensive knowledge and I dare say a CS degree as well. It's becoming more and more like an engineering discipline, and as such I think we're going to see a shift towards programming being something you need a college degree to perform.
I know and have worked with programmers with and without a CS degree (I'm one of the ones without).
As far as I can tell it's no indicator of programmer skill at all.
With that being said, how can colleges REALLY train? I got trained at my local community college a few years back (2008-2010) in VB and Cobol. How fast can most places REALLY respond to a moving target like this?
Also, a degree is no indication of programming skill... but neither is having a job. You can churn out code, hopping from one place to another, and still be a shitty programmer.
That's one of the biggest issues... How can you REALLY tell what someone is going to produce? There are no consistent certification processes and no consistent measure of what makes a good programmer.
There is a lot of knowledge to be gained by experience, but sometimes it's useful to have knowledge gained from books, and in particular from books you had no interest reading in the first place (which is the real value of a degree: forcing you to go through a process that includes stuff you like and stuff you dislike).
I occasionally come across situations where those useless subjects suddenly contribute something useful for the problem at hand. I would never have studied them by myself unless forced by the goal of finishing college. At the very least, I would have never studied them to any sufficient depth to make them useful.
Sorry, is mee too dumb-dumb to read bookie wookie?
Does that mean that you cannot program of design programs? No, but there are people out there with more education better suited to design, say, a large scale medical system where certain guarantees must be given.
But we need the tools to get there. Easy languages, technologies that are immune to basic security risks, and that provide safe ways to do multi-threading easily. Right now we are in the unsustainable position where the tools require skills that too many developers lack. And the result is regular data leaks, corporate systems full of bugs, etc.
A profession can't rely on all of its members to be very smart to deliver quality. But it will be an intellectual profession nevertheless.
When I started working, it took a team of testers, a team of dba, and a team of sysops in addition of the developers to build anything. Nowadays, no only the development team is smaller, but the sysops, dba and testing are the responsibility of those developers too through automated tools. On the client side, there used to be BA and Testers, but nowadays, BA and Testers are often the same persons.
The tshirt from several years ago "I will replace you by a tiny script" has proven quite true. Old job that required qualified people before have been replaced by scripts, not "blue collar" worker. A huge amount a developer entering the market could lower the salaries, but any simplification to the developer role is going to be handled by automated tools, not human.
Little boys love power tools and fire.
more kids than ever have access to computing devices (tablets and smartphones) but very few actually know how to do anything with them at all. I don't see that future you are talking about.
Or using a tiny screwdriver to lift the tape deck when it wasn't possible to move the head.
So the first thing I did that ever resembled programming was a boot script that would give you a menu of which game you wanted to play. It would say "1) Beneath a Steel Sky 2) Dune 2 " etc. And they it would prompt you to put the right CDROM in.
I think my most vivid learning experience was when I managed to delete autoexec.bat.
Origin games often requires that kind of things... but they were the best games of all on MS-DOS PCs! I remember the time when most people wanted to buy a PC because of Wing Commander.
So as you say, even with 8MB in XMS (or sometimes EMS, depending on the game I think, using EMM 386), the 640k boundary was an issue and I too had the joys of paring down my `autoexec.bat` and `config.sys`
But no `dwcfgmg.sys` and my "plug n' play" soundcard wouldn't work. It was a small driver, but the games of the day seemed to demand the entire 640k at startup or they just wouldn't work :(
So often it was no sound, or no game at all. Oh what I would've given to trade that for manual soundcard configuration.
This is crucial. A lot of people seem to be suggesting that because it's easier to get into computers kids are missing out on programming. But in reality it's the other way around - only the people who were wired up for engineering could get into computers previously and nowadays everyone can use them - you can still get into programming and plenty of kids still do - and it's easier than ever (I had no internet when I started coding - only the F1 help manual of QBASIC and my below basic English - what I could have done if I had all these tutorials available today :( ) - they just aren't the only ones in to computers so they aren't as visible as they used to be.
Think of it like this - every kid probably had some electric toy car or some such toy in the last 20-30 years. But not every kid took that car apart to see what cool shit he could do with the electric engine and batteries.
Even if the tech industry is better for men than for women, it's probably still the best industry for women in absolute terms.
Some women in tech notice this and move away before raising a family crashes their career. Some don't notice this and are forced to shift careers when re-entering the workforce. Both of these outcomes result in a high attrition rate for women programmers. I have no clear solution for this dilemma.
because they get pregnant?
Tangentially related, but this is why I think Emacs is a great... should I say, 'platform'. Maybe not for young children as in the case you talked about with yours, but a quote from one of RMS's talks about Emacs [1] I think shows what I mean:
> The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.
Maybe it was the syntax of lisp (by which I mean the use parentheses/'S-expressions' vs. using other 'strange code-like' symbols such as curly braces or semicolons) was a part of why they didn't realise they were actually programming?
Of course, this will not work today because editing/writing text in anything other than a WYSIWYG word processor interface is too unfamiliar to the average general purpose computer user, and therefore Emacs would too easily 'scare' off most users. But your comment reminded me of this and I thought it would be interesting to mention.
You can see the same thing today with stuff like VBA macros in Excel. I've seen some amazingly complex business logic implemented that way by people who absolutely did not think of themselves as programmers, and indeed tended to respond with bafflement to the suggestion that what they'd done could be described as programming.
Microsoft could, if they port it to a sensible language and structure, drag in millions of young programmers.
The first thing I would like them to do is include some form of programming tools with Windows. On a Mac[1], you have Python, Perl, and Ruby available on a default installation, and you get XCode for free from the App Store. A fresh installation of Windows, OTOH, is a barren wasteland in comparison, and the effort it takes to change that is significantly higher.
[1] On GNU/Linux, *BSD you have at least Perl installed, and on most Linux distros Python is part of the base system, too.
It would be the perfect place to put something with built in programming hooks into Minecraft.
And... there is already too many people putting too much garbage on devices that people don't need... last thing we need is being loaded down with crap - whether Python, perl or Visual Studios - on a default install of Windows.
(Why the F* is Candy Crap included with Windows 10 now? Much less Note and other crap that should be opt-in... not clean install > remove, remove, remove... /rant)
Free but closed-source. Kids should also learn the value and power of Freedom.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/securedownloads/?#F...
Color and movement don't bother me since I use a menu replacement ( https://ninite.com/classicstart/ ). I find it less cluttered and, for some strange reason, I have less issues with search.
They were a novelty when you were growing up, but they are a utility now. What that means is that people who deal with computers are going to be professionals ranging from the spectrum of architect to plumber: there are more plumbers than architects.
Do you think your plumber had an innate desire to be a plumber? No. They looked at their options, picked one and executed.
That's what the future looks like for computing. So, if your child was always going to be the type to be an architect, they'll be one. Or they'll be a plumber.
I didn't push it on her at all - she asked me one night what I did for a job, so I showed her a bit of code I'd been doing and she was hooked.
I've also done an after-school club in Scratch for the kids at her school (9 out of the 10 were girls), and they really enjoyed it as well .
Clearly just an anecdote, but the interest is still out there somewhere.
And going back to my childhood in the early 80s, there were a group of us who were into coding. But we were very much the nerdy group - it wasn't as if everyone was a budding programmer back then either.
If you are still keen on getting her interested, have you ever tried something like Scratch? It's very easy to learn and the kids that I've taught it to really seemed to enjoy making silly animations or very simple games with it.
I am also aware that I am just one more adult voice competing for any child's attention, a noise among a chorus of people all with their opinions about what's important. Boys and girls alike question the immediate value of these subjects. They see them as work forced upon them by adults.
Like you, I have also noticed that the boys and girls of today, at least in middle class areas, often have touch-screen devices as their first device. Those are just game machines with tons of advertisements. I am sure those companies know that they are advertising to kids. The kids love the ads because viewing it means an in-game reward. But that's an aside. The main point is that these devices aren't an obvious portal to software or technical interest.
I have noticed that many schools have a small cadre of children who, by some combination of successful grooming by parents or personal inclination, do enjoy technical subjects and technical mastery. I think at some point, the social reinforcement by that small cadre of children overtakes the importance of parental grooming.
I think kids often operate on simple social heuristics. Guess what it means when somebody tells you ad nausem that something is important to you while his tone, body language and whatnot consistently shows that he cares about you learning this infinitely more than you do? Yes, exactly, this is the smell of bullshit. If science really was that important and if you understood science enough to be worth learning from, obviously you'd be using science to improve their lives all the time and they'd immediately start to monkey you. That's how it works.
I think my parents understood this to some degree and didn't try to shove down my throat things I didn't care about, except maybe for religion. Care to guess how far this one went?
I think religion is an even worse example. I'm pretty sure that religious views are better explained by parents than by a child's personal inclination. I doubt the Christian children of America were Christian because of personal investigation.
I think, as others have said, your parents and everyone else help teach you, in one way or another. I wasn't brought up in a religious house, but we went to church every Sunday through high school, and I personally believe in God. I really became a Christian in high school when I decided for myself it was right for me, though. I went through a long period after that where I fell away from God, but then I came back to Christianity again. After I came back, even when my father and others had doubts, my belief in God has still been intact, and it is one of the things that essentially drives me even when I've had feelings numerous times that life was not worth living or that I was a failure.
I say all of this, because I don't think some of the people here have any Christians actually tell them this sort of thing. Many in the world just think it is some sort of cult full of irrational people that if they only just came to their senses, they'd stop annoying others and waging war. The fact is that religions are not evil, bad, or wrong. It is people that do bad things, not religions. Some religions may call for bad things, in which case, I'd suggest not doing them. That is a personal decision.
I'm on the older edge or in the early middle of the Millennial generation, depending who defines the generation. As such I grew up and grew into technology just as we were getting really immersive operating system UI/UX. I remember fondly the green screen, text-based, 5.25" floppy games we had in elementary school, as well as the immersive film-like experiences today.
Chemistry sets were kinda boring, Couldn't have cared less about my Dad's Erector sets, much to his disappointment. I built a few model cars and a F-14 over a span of 6 months, then those lived in a box never to be heard from again.
And even in the computer... hacking around in the depths of my parents' computers was never the fun thing. But getting into web development was super cool, because it was raw, new, etc. Even as I look around, the companies I find exciting are more often web software vice native OS. I'm learning to appreciate embedded systems and very low level machine management, but it still doesn't have that spark like hacking about in GeoCities did...
What's the raw, new, interesting tech today? I don't wonder if part of it is figuring out what might be the new version of playing with hobby boards or experimenting in system drivers. Even for me, getting a diode wired up to light up as a kid was super boring. But wiring up an iOS app might be super interesting now.
Or, maybe your girls would rather be lawyers or vets or oil rig mechanics. I hear that's part of the fun of parenting :)
newsflash: parents live vicariously through their kids and project all sorts of desires onto them, and it almost never turns out well (i went through a real trouble period that i attribute to their parenting style). seems like a lot of people just forget this once they have children.
it must be biological because you can't explain it otherwise - these are smart people that do this. my parents are both highly educated with graduate degrees. (or.. maybe that explains it)
Anyway. If you mix the two together you get people who insist that their children must be exactly like them because otherwise their children would be doomed and that would be unthinkable.
More intelligence (and/or forceful personality / competence) may make the problem worse because clearly you know what you're doing (after all you can describe the thing with such great an articulate words) the problem must be this ungrateful child that doesn't know you're paving a golden path.
Even values, like "learning is important" may work like this. Bet they'll study better if they see you learning new things, watching you struggle and gradually gain understanding and skills.
"Reading is super important!" says parent who only reads instruction manuals, Facebook, and (maybe) garbage fiction. "You will practice the piano!" says parent who hasn't played a note on an instrument since high school. "Get your ass out of bed and to tennis practice!" says parent who wheezes going up a flight of stairs. "Math is vital to your future success!" says parent who can count the times they've used anything past 8th grade math as an adult on one hand.
Show, don't tell, I guess.
[1] Nearly of people I've encountered who were serious amateur or part-time pro musicians came from families that played music, not families that played no music but insisted their kids take piano lessons, for example.
On the other hand, when they do show an interest in something - and you will have to be very patient about figuring out what that is - there is probably an angle to it that involves automation, and thus computing.
Nothing I tried worked.
I talked one daughter into taking the AP Comp Sci class in high school this year because I assured her that I would be able to coach her through any problems. The summer before the class, I did my best to start going over basic concepts that she would cover in class - just so she could hit the ground running... she adamantly refused to waste her summer on that subject.
Meanwhile, a neighbor of mine called me because his son had taken up programming their home computer on his own and wanted some advice on languages and projects to pursue.
From there I made a personal website, then eventually started tinkering around with Wordpress which helped with publishing. All the while picking up little tidbits along the way to help make the sites look better. (And of course it was important to customize your myspace page)
Eventually I decided to start officesnapshots.com because it was quite natural to start a website for fun and 8 years later it is my full-time job.
All that said, having a reason to create a website was what got me started.
MSFT is pushing it down the coding/education path as well - they recently launched a Minecraft/Code.org collab - https://code.org/mc - which I'm assuming is slightly more fun than programming a spreadsheet or rules in an email app.
We specifically put that the kids must have programming experience in a Java-like language before beginning, but all the affluent parents saw was, "Get your kids out of the house for 9 hours a day for an entire week!"
Don't get me wrong: the kids were stoked. They even had some incredible ideas for mods. One kid's idea was that an entire building would generate based on the location of placed bricks, the type of brick, and how high you stacked the bricks. We liked it so much that we built it and gave it to the students to play with. Problem is that only 2 of 30 had any programming experience at all, and Minecraft development (at least back then) was not exactly beginner friendly. I just wasn't possible to teach Java development and Minecraft's library in a week.
I guess my point in all this is to say that I'm glad that they're taking the initiative to make programming more kid-friendly with Minecraft. I hope that they can expand the foundation built by Scratch (loops, conditionals, etc.) to allow kids to see their crazy ideas come to fruition.
After the 2nd day of getting no where, we pretty much just asked for ideas. If they were simple enough, we made and distributed them. There were a couple of enterprising young minds that were doing their damnedest to make their own mods. We helped them as much as we could. Other than that, the kids basically just played Minecraft for a week.
At least one kid did come out of the camp wanting to learn to program. I ran into him and his family one evening a month or so later. They sat next to us in a restaurant, and after excitedly bring up the camp, he told me that he's trying to learn programming on his own.
My middle daughter is wicked smart extrovert with zero patience an excess of confidence and absolutely loves robotics, electronics, Goldiblocks, etc... I'd hate to work with her on a software project because she's so agressive but chances are she'll wind up in STEM.
So that takes care of intrinisic motivation, as for extrinsic, both thought programming was something only nerdy anti-social boys do. In fact boys and girls chastised my middle daughter for liking so called "boy" things like building a trebuchet or going to the comic book store.
If we assume that only a small percentage of children will have both proclivity and potential and that we then also have to play peer-pressure Russian-roulette until they get to college then it's no wonder so few girls are still getting into STEM.
Summation: It reintroduces the physical world back into the physical and makes DIY learning really fun for kids and parents. It was so compelling, I reached out to the CEO Mark (http://bit.ly/MarkPavlyukovskyy)to see how I could help them and is why I am making this post today. Mark has an amazing story and reason behind why he created Piper and the team is ingenious. Proof in point, I met with one of the Alpha tester families last week and this is what they had to say:
“Engaging, interactive and fun… It's not like most gaming systems,the whole family can learn how things are processing while playing and having fun.
I would much rather have my son playing Piper vs all of the other consoles we have in our home, anytime!”
Find out more @ playpiper.com, reach out to me if there are further questions too elesemoran@gmail.com
Summation: It reintroduces the physical world back into the virtual and makes DIY learning really fun for kids and parents (even moms raved). It was so compelling, I reached out to the CEO Mark (http://bit.ly/MarkPavlyukovskyy)to see how I could help them make a difference. Mark has an amazing story and reason behind why he created Piper and the team is an ingenious group of savvy hackers. Proof in point, I met with one of the Alpha tester families last week and this is what they had to say:
“Engaging, interactive and fun… It's not like most gaming systems,the whole family can learn how things are processing while playing and having fun.
I would much rather have my son playing Piper vs all of the other consoles we have in our home, anytime!”
Thank you for bringing this to our attention and you can find more info @ playpiper.com
Many early programmers in the 1960s and 1970s were women because it was seen as the equivalent of secretarial work, a sector of the office labor that women were confined to due to overt sexism. The profession was then masculinized in overtly sexist ways. If women fled CS, they were fleeing an overtly sexist niche (which both locked them into submissive, secretarial roles as well as undervalued their technical accomplishments). http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...
That's a pretty bad correlation-is-not-causation slip there. Marketing efforts, especially in new markets tend to take the path of least resistance. If they were marketing to males, it was most likely because males were showing an early interest in those products and likely to be the quickest way to grow marketshare.
My personal experience was that I didn't need anything marketed to me. The K-Mart in my town had a couple of running new computers on an aisle where a friend walked up to them and typed: 10 PRINT "I AM THE GREATEST!" 20 GOTO 10
I was immediately fascinated and wanted one.
My first program on the new family Apple ][e was a flashing, infinitely-scrolling insult directed at my older sister.
You'd be way more reluctant as a young boy to approach computer if everybody knew that computers are what girls play with and all the ads had pink unicorns, stars and sparkle in the background.
I vividly remember times when I was 10 or something and even talking to girls was act of treason against you own boy tribe.
I think the shift probably had more to do with the perception that computer programming was 'important', a lot of the early view on computer programming was driven by the physical interface... women were viewed as suitable for programming because they were historically suitable for typing and secretary work... i think on some level it was being viewed as a form of dictation that was in a bizarre 'shorthand'...
In a country of 220 million people. If we assume about 4 people could access a single computer, then 1,1% of population had access.
So it seems commercials of Apple II and TRS-80 was the thing that compelled women to stay out of the field. Or alternatively getting your hands on dads TRS-80 was incredibly compelling experience to almost every boy out there.
Edit: this stuff then https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05M80HHNB6s
> If we assume about 4 people could access a single
> computer, then 1,1% of population had access.
Just an angle I would pursue.
Let's imagine that the number of female students did not decrease. Now the question is, why the boys increased much faster than girls? You can't "angle" that inequality away.
Besides, I wager that the number of students of any gender increased quite significantly in the last decades. So the fact that one gender stagnated in absolute numbers is less interesting than the fact it decreased in relative terms. Absolute numbers would only be interesting if the total stayed relatively constant.
Really very odd graphs of both male and female students. I haven't seen anything that really explains the peaky total number let alone the ratio profile.
Interestingly the higher degrees seem to be pretty stable in ratio terms. Not sure what they may be indicative of though.
Very strange.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp
http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n134/im_thatoneguy/CSDegr...
Interesting that there was a dip of both males and females around 1984. So I'm not so sure of the statement above anymore. However, around the year 2000 there's this peak where males do outnumber females by a great deal (even if the number of females joining also increased).
If all these graphs are accurate I'd wonder more about the Y2K rather than 1984...
It seems more likely to me that the story starts sooner, there must have been a reason why computers were marketed to boys. Maybe the first home computers were considered part of the electronics hacking scene (radio shack and what not), and that was already more popular with boys? How many women went to the Homebrew computer club were people were trying to create their own computer before you could just buy them off the shelves (people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak)?
Maybe girls saw home computers and didn't like them.
I don't know - but neither do the tellers of the "marketing is at fault" narrative.
Great, another travesty for which we have marketing to thank.
My experience is that, the more you study how marketing works, the more you realize marketing is about what people already want and try to appeal to that. Sure, big companies like Coca Cola have more sophisticated techniques to make their brands appealing, but still, if you look at Coca Cola's marketing, what they sell is "happiness", which is what people want, and they make the association to their beverage.
From this point of view, there is no "travesty" to thank marketing for. The reality was that probably personal computers were more appealing to men, so it made more sense to spend marketing resources towards them.
Why it was more appealing to them is a good question to ask, and it could be because of many reasons, including culture and society. But marketing probably didn't create that desire, it just used it.
> From this point of view, there is no "travesty" to thank marketing for. The reality was that probably personal computers were more appealing to men, so it made more sense to spend marketing resources towards them. Why it was more appealing to them is a good question to ask, and it could be because of many reasons, including culture and society. But marketing probably didn't create that desire, it just used it.
Marketing is absolutely about the manufacture of desire. Though above you make the connection between Coca-cola and the harmless association of this beverage to "happiness", this is over-simplifying things somewhat. The psychology of the brand, upon which modern consumer society is dependent, and which marketing ruthlessly exploits, is based around the construction of a self solely through conspicuous acts of consumption rather than through human experiences, relationships with friends and family, or other pursuits traditionally considered to be more laudable.
Though arguably it is required in keeping the wheels of capitalism spinning (and by proxy food in our bellies); in reality, marketing is the process of co-opting, subverting, and ultimately extinguishing joy and the human experience.
What marketing actually does is make desires concrete and suggest to the audience how that desire can be fulfilled. If you look at one of the most famous examples of successful marketing, diamond marketing created demand for a specific product, but it was only able to do so because the emotional needs the marketers tied their products to were already there and not being adequately met.
A need (I guess I'm referring here mostly to needs in the context of those defined by Maslow's Hierarchy) is defined as something that is an absolute; an end state. There is a requirement of truth for something to be a need.
A desire is defined as "a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen". A desire is open to suggestion, to invention and misrepresentation.
Taking your example of the diamond industry: The "needs" being targeted here are pretty much the solid base of the pyramid (sex & shelter, family/stability, love & intimacy). Does a tiny, expensive shiny rock from Sierra Leone provide those needs? No; obviously it is the symbolism of giving to/receiving from someone in the hope that they will provide those needs to you. Did humans manage to satisfy those needs before De Beers came along? I'm pretty sure they did.
The desire for diamonds among the general populace was completely manufactured, whereas the aforementioned needs always existed, and (I strongly suspect) were always being filled before the normalisation of diamond rings as intentions of marriage.
I suppose diamonds (at least in the context of use as jewellery), and the whole story of De Beers are a shining example of commodity fetishism.
Like figuring out that people already want not to be talk about behind their backs and ostracized for their flaws, then telling them that they stink (vide halitosis) and appealing to that by selling them unnecessary or potentially harmful fluid to apply orally.
Yes. Well done. Marketing created more than one stupid cultural habit. Why the hate?
I am guessing that the early marketers likely observed the same emergent social behaviors, and decided to market to where the money was. Meeting hundreds of people in the industry, it is vanishingly rare to find a woman who bugged her parents as a young girl for an early-era home computer; that story is so common among men it is a pedestrian trope. I'd dearly like to know from marketers who were involved in that era to chime in on what kind of market research led them to tilt the early marketing towards men and boys.
I see the current generation computer users' behaviors addressing this imbalance in user population, though not the software development business that produces that utility (lots of hygienic factors adversely impact the majority of jobs in our business now, compared to the state of the business 2+ decades ago).
(edit: Off-by-one-century error)
The advent of the Apple II and TRS-80 exposed kids (including myself) to computers, and with these machines, programming was the most accessible aspect. You could try to modify the hardware, but then you risked ruining the most expensive piece of equipment in the home. However, you experiment all you wanted with the BASIC prompt, and that's how I learned to program. There is something different about girls and boys such that this kind of tinkering with gadgets appeals much more to boys than girls.
I remember excitedly showing our new Apple II to my cousin who is 6 years older than me, and who had recently finished her CS degree and was working in "data processing." I expected her to have the same gee-whiz reaction I had, but she was not impressed. To her, the Apple II was a silly and expensive toy.
I think that in a way, when myself and other male "Micro Kids" entered the university and professional CS world, we changed the dynamic from a more professional to a more hacker-like culture. Not only did our numbers heavily tilt the gender distribution, but I think we also made the culture less attractive to women.
My cousin, now in her late 50s, is still in IT as a higher-level manager in a large oil and gas firm. Right now, she appears to be spending a lot of time dealing with the logistics of some major office relocations. It is probably the kind of work that many on HN would consider boring, but I am sure it is essential to the smooth operation of a large modern corporation. When I hear her talk about her work, she comes across as being more responsible and practical than her younger male peers, and I don't doubt that's the case.
There is something different about what our culture teaches and signals to girls and boys from the moment they are born such that this kind of tinkering with gadgets appeals much more to boys than girls.
I definitely carry his passion and enthusiasm. While growing up, my mother learned about computers with me too. I'm not sure where family fits in the grand scheme of things, but I think it plays an important role.
Those statistics kind of refute those lamenting male culture etc for the lack of more women in computer science.
One would imagine the 1969-1984 that the graph shows, the "male culture", bro attitudes, etc were far more imposing that they are in the milenial, PC environments of today. We're talking about the seventies to early eighties, after all!
And yet, there were more women back then than they are now.
(Always suspected the usual explanations weren't the reason. It's not like medicine, law school, finance, etc have much better male cultures than computer science).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i08CVkBxvBM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_cras...
It seems that there is only one way for normal people to enter programming and it's through games.
I'll cop to the fact that I'm just not going to spend the time, though I'm interested in the conclusion(s).
I wouldn't worry much anyway. We won't be seeing many of those articles once the bubble bursts.
So did the number of men. Bachelor's degrees in CS peaked in the US with 27k men, 15k women in 1985-86. Then they dropped by 1993-94 to 17.5k men, 7k women, and then started going back up. By 2002-04, they both had reached new peaks of 44.5k men, 15.5k women.
There's something going on here that is more complicated than what is captured in that sex ratio graph.
Data from here: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp
But it still doesn't make sense, because if you remove the commas from 1,00,000 and 2,00,00 you end up with 100000 versus 20000. Based on the examples in your link I'm assuming that the last figure should be 2,00,000. In the examples all the high number always end with three zeros.
As sibling poster points out though, there still ought to be an error in the numbers as written, as the second is smaller than the first, but the context of the text implies that it should be larger.
[1] Not sure why the asymmetry between thousand and lakh (when these units were created), though (10^3 vs an additional 10^2).
Another difference: Billion in India used to mean 1 million million (like the British), rather than the American meaning of 1 thousand million.
Linking to this post (mine), since it is somewhat apropos :-)
http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2010/06/bhaskaracharya-and-man-who...
A job in a large company brings visions of a hall full of clerks these days. So more and more men think of starting companies as the new way to get the kick out of this profession.
Start ups is the new programming.
The first programmers were mostly females because men in STEM were probably more interested in physics and hardware. This is entirely a hunch on my part, but even the term "soft-ware" sounds almost derogatory.
Imagine if math was called a soft science? Why, it's all imaginary!
I think the term "soft science" is some derogatory towards fields like social sciences.
I assume it has to do with computers becoming a mass-market commodity and marketing strategies involving "traditional" gender roles.
-> http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...
But perhaps a more causative correlation is that in 1983, C++ was born (after being called "C with classes" a few years before).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...
More likely marketing computer as boy/nerd toy is what caused a shift.
Also ads like these: http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
Wasn't it also the case that at first operating computers was deemed a task for secretaries, and then the perception changed?
I suppose they could have shown ads of secretaries being loved by their bosses because they work so efficiently thanks to their shiny new computers.
Edit: http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/MiscAds/AdamAd.JPG - women should just have used Macs?
Cars are a means of transportation and much more of a requirement to live in urban environment than a computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...
I was interested in computers since early teens, without even seeing one in person, just reading in magazines. I've got a real opportunity to spend some time with them only in university, and the same applies to my classmates. So no one was given computer as a gift/toy, no one saw any ads for them. Guess who got interested in programming and who did not.