Hacker News Reader

Comment by solutionyogi | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or the visualization is very hard to follow?

E.g. if you highlight the 'Dancers and Choreographers' section, it's not at all clear that more female dancers marry male welders.

View on HN

You're not wrong, this is incredibly hard to parse.

As far as I can tell most groups seem to marry Elementary school teachers

This

I think that's a class thing. Auditors, teachers and RNs are all solid middle class, female heavy gigs. Teachers and RNs have the added bonus of an awesome schedule.

All the RNs I know have terrible schedules where they work 12 hour days 4 days in a row with three off, or something similar. Plus lots of on call time.

The standard RN schedule is 12-hr shifts, but 3 days on and 4 off.. So they work 36-hours per week. Often times they can build their own schedules, so they can work something like, Th - F - S - S - M - W then have a week off without PTO. On-Call is typically voluntary, but typically pays very well past 36-hrs per week.

My wife's a nurse and it's an amazing schedule if you like to travel. Especially in California since they are actually well compensated for their time, and can afford to do so.

Your mileage may vary by state though, we came to California from Michigan where they treated nurses like shit and it was extremely dangerous for patients too (1 ICU nurse taking care of upwards 5 or 6 critically ill patients etc.) but the schedule was pretty much the same.

Go on a dating site like Match.com, and it seems like 75% of the women are nurses or teachers. Fewer natural dating opportunities in such heavily female professions, I suppose.

Anecdotal, but I have to think really hard to remember a male teacher that wasn't married to one of the other teachers in my school district.

Part of the problem is that each profession isn't scaled to how many people are in it. "47-5031 Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters" had a total employment of 7,970 in 2012, but there were 1,353,020 people employed as "25-2021 Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education"

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes475031.htm http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252021.htm

Yeah, that makes the whole thing meaningless if you ask me. Well, maybe not meaningless... I supposed I can say... as an X, I'm most likely to marry an elementary school teacher. But if I meet an explosive worker, this will not tell me how likely I am to marry them... which I think is more interesting.

Yeah it says male software developers are most likely to marry female teachers or administrative assistants, like practically every other majority-male profession. Would be more interesting to show trends relative to males in others professions rather than in absolute numbers.

(edit: replace 'male' with 'majority-male' as I didn't mean to sound 1950s, just meant the left side of the chart)

Of all the lines starting at 'Dancers and Choreographers' which are initially red, the thickest one is by far the one that is blue at the other end and ends at 'Welding, Soldering, and Brazing Workers'. I think that's the intended way of drawing that conclusion from the graph.

Overall I'm satisfied with the visualization itself, but it would be nice to have more sorting options.

This is one of the interesting connections on the chart. My theory (being an ex-welder as well as a dancer) is that both of these are strongly one-gender dominated professions - almost all my welding friends were male and almost all my dancing friends were female (in three different states no less). And for the majority of marriages up to this point in largely heterosexual historical data, you don't meet many people of the opposite gender to marry in your regular day. The one exception is when set workers (male welders) are around a stage all day where the performers (female dancers) are doing the show. So you get these relatively few places to meet a potential mate that turn up in funny combos.

ha! You are the guy who introduced all these female dancers to the male welders!

Or perhaps they were just inspired by Flashdance?

Thank you, I was wondering why this was such a thick line.

Depending on the definition of dancer, this could be less surprising.

So how are software developers supposed to meet women?

Take up dancing?

Dancers are more likely to be girly girls and welders are more likely to be blokey blokes, making the two more likely to be compatible?

It's not entirely you, but I think that the fundamental problem is less with the visualization than with shortcomings of the implementation. With regards to the implementation, I have trouble reading the unselected text. With regards to the visualization itself, the switchboard-style network view is really neat, and the line coloration idea was clever, but thickness of lines is really hard to infer proportional information from. There really needs to be supplementary information appearing dynamically alongside the grid.

Yeah, def not my cup of UX tea

There also seems to a disproportionate amount of male-male lines, weighted just as heavily as male-female lines. I don't think gay marriage is that prevalent to show up with equal weighting, but my cursory googling didn't turn up the number of gay couples in the US.

FTFA: "Same-sex occupation/relationship matchups weren’t common enough to reach the top five in any occupation. So the chart also highlights the top male-male and female-female job matchups for each occupation."

It's rather hard to take seriously..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com