Barbie Gets to be a Computer Engineer | Hacker News Reader

Barbie Gets to be a Computer Engineer

barbiemedia.com

89 pointstiffani53 comments

For the ﬁrst time ever, Barbie® asked the world to help her select her next career.

Actually, Barbie® asked the internet. And it chose a computer career, which is about as surprising as moot winning the Time 100 poll.

(Edit: See the original Reddit thread for the call to action as well as various vote stuffing attempts. Apparently, this poll was more resistant than the Time one. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/aobsa/vote_for_... )

Barbie used to think that "Math is hard," now she's a master of recursion and lambdas.

Monads are hard, let's go shopping!

See http://www.barbiemedia.com/admin/uploads/ComputerEngineerBar... [PDF] for a photo.

Not that I could come up with anything better, but is anyone else a little disappointed in what they've come up with? We need better accessorization to appeal to little girls, I guess.

Couldn't they have at least put some code on her laptop instead of 0's and 1's?

Agreed! Maybe we could lobby them to replace it with a DeCSS snippet.Or just be subversive and have some stickers printed up and leave them on shelves next to the Barbies.

At least, but the code in a terminal window, with a another window showing a bit torrent client or something.

I thought the most interesting part about this was the binary code on the computer she's holding spells out "BarBie" repeatedly.

perl -e 'print map(pack("B*", $_), qw(01000010 01100001 01110010 01100010 01101001 01100101)), "\n"'

"To create an authentic look, Barbie® designers worked closely with the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering to develop the wardrobe and accessories for Computer Engineer Barbie®. Wearing a binary code patterned tee and equipped with all the latest gadgets including a smart phone, Bluetooth headset, and laptop travel bag, Computer Engineer Barbie® is geek chic."

A swing, and a miss.

A wild off-balance swing and a stumbling miss, I agree.

Of course, real-life business casual isn't going to work ("Hey, its J.Crew Barbie!") but they could have gone for:

- An edgy all-black mod look ala The Matrix.

- Slim-fitting jeans, and fitted t-shirt with 8-bit graphics motif; accessorized with a super-slick looking laptop running Gentoo.

- A cute Unix hippy look, with BSD or Linux t-shirt, and a bus analyzer/logic analyzer as the accessory.

- An edgy all-black mod look ala The Matrix.

haha, hopefully you're not referring to Trinity in that. Though I'd love to see Ken decked out like Neo when they stormed the building, guns and all.

It's only a matter of time until Barbie loses her job to a Chinese-made equivalent.

Are you sure she's not already made in China?

When I was a kid my dad didn't let me play with Dolls. He ended up getting rid of all of my sister's Barbies so I would play with other toys instead.

Ever since I never play with or thought about buying a Barbie until now.

I will for sure be getting this one.

He didn't want to reinforce gender stereotypes?

As a father of two daughters I'm both intrigued and repelled by this.

Why repelled?

Pink explosion.

Non-standard navigation... To scroll you have to click the up/down arrows in the bottom right.

Hopefully that's the first thing Barbie will fix in her new occupation.

I believe we'll still need designer Barbie to fix the crime that is black text on a hot pink background.

I never willingly played with Barbies as a kid (I sold my last 6 at a yard sale my mom had when I was like 8 or 9), but I do believe I'll be buying this one--even if she just stays in the box.

Does anyone else find the crazy amount of copyright symbols in that press release funny?

Most computer engineers would

Those are registered trademark symbols.

Bluetooth headset?! Come on!

Might as well call it Taxicab Barbie

She's making deals and writing binary.

And she still has a wristwatch.

What is a wristwatch?

It's an accessory design to increase profit for design firms and jewellers.

Yeah looks less like an engineer and more like a generic technophile, which I guess is still a step in the right direction?

No way.

- Her notebook should never be pink

- There should be some stickers on the notebook stating her favourite OS and programming language

- And mocking all others

- The notebook should not run Windows. Neither OSX nor Linux. It should run some experimental OS she is busy writing

- Her t-shirt should be from Think Geek.

- Better: her t-shirt should have a haiku written in Haskell

Seriously, couldn't someone from the Barbie team wandered over to IT for more than 30 seconds? ... Stupid question. Of course they couldn't, you only talk to IT when your magic typing box doesn't work. -_-

Perhaps they wondered over but couldn't find a size zero tall blonde in IT to ask about dress sense?

Maybe they didn't think that grey-brown trousers, rolled up shirt sleeves and a pocket protector were going to clinch the market.

When I saw the headset on the doll, I immediately jumped to thinking it was some kind of "tech support Barbie", i.e. a demeaning job, not requiring a degree, barely above janitor at most IT firms, often staffed by people who found out they couldn't hack it in higher education.

As a computer engineer, I might have to buy one and stash it away for any future daughters.

However, we don't wear "binary code patterned t-shirts". I guess maybe conference shirts aren't as recognizably geeky.

Yeah, I thought it was a bit silly myself, but I realize it's a difficult thing to design for - we don't really have any instantly recognizable uniform they could use. I'm not sure what I could come up with that someone could guess what she is supposed to be just by looking at her and not be somewhat ridiculous.

Khaki cargo pants and a black t-shirt with "Got Root?" written on it.

I was hoping for a FreeBSD daemon tshirt, but "Got Root" would work, too.

Or Rush

Maybe the cargo pants. As for Thinkgeek t-shirts, they have sorta fallen from favor here in the engineering department--to start with, we've observed that the approach of such a shirt frequently proceeds the arrival of generally unpleasant body odors. They're still pretty big (XXXL in some cases) in the CS dept.

Oh? http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/generic/6c49...

"Both News Anchor Barbie® and Computer Engineer Barbie® are currently available for pre-order exclusively at www.MattelShop.com."

Could anybody actually find it on their site?

Nope, I couldn't either

Oy, Computer Engineer Barbie gets a bluetooth headset and bad taste in clothing. Shouldn't she be selling the industry, not mocking it?

I couldn't look at the site, it hurt my eyes.

Don't worry, I've heard a rumor that her next profession is a web designer.

That should come in handy:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

I read it, turned away, and found my eyes were honest to god burning.

(Not flames, just burning pain...)

I think this is my favorite thread of all time.

Are those binary semaphores, or are you just happy to see me?

I wonder what this implies for "tail-end recursion" o_ô

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