Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

>I don’t like those 48 hour coding hackathons without sleep or shower. They are useless and detrimental to health.

These are almost exclusively for kids in school or just out of school. Like camping - those that hate them, really hate them, and for others it's a lot fun. If you hate them, don't do them, they aren't necessary. You can be a perfectly good engineer without them.

>I don’t like the representation of female engineers on TV, always nerdy, unattractive, and without much of a social life.

Female engineers? Oh man. She must have missed the generic Scientist-guy and Engineer-guy of the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Rick Moranis made a career playing those guys. The engineer bro-culture and a certain social status that is assigned to software or computer engineers and geekdom in general is a new phenomena. It was not cool to want to be a computer engineer or a geek for the vast majority of the last half century. It sort of reminds me of the praise the Wonder Woman movie got for being a breakthrough moment for women. I couldn't help but think, where were all these people in the 80s when nerds and geeks were made fun of for reading Wonder Woman and other comic books. My sister and her friends made fun of me and my friends for that! Nobody hid or put up walls to these comics from anybody.

>I’ve read Megan McArdle’s essay and relate with her feeling of isolation as I’m often the only woman in an environment dominated by men.

That wasn't quite the point of the essay though it is an interesting interpretation.

>What we need to do is to make it easier for women to stay in tech...I don’t know how we can make it more fun to women in tech.

That's kind of the crux of the problem. Nobody knows how to fix the undetectable, secret societal pressures that steer women away from STEM and into Humanities.

Also, it's a job. It won't be fun for the vast majority of people. Why do jobs have to be fun? My father worked on the line at a factory all his life - it wasn't fun.

> These are almost exclusively for kids in school or just out of school.

They are not. One of the places I've worked, they were part of the culture, once or twice a year. Reports suggest this is true many other places, as well. These are real, professional, grown-up workplaces, or so at least they style themselves as being. They are not schools.

> If you hate them, don't do them, they aren't necessary.

They can be. I had no desire whatsoever to waste a weekend working without pay in exchange for pizza. It was made clear to me that, while my participation would not be explicitly required as a condition of employment, it certainly would constitute a substantive part of my next performance evaluation. The subtext was: everybody else is doing it, so if you don't, you're clearly not committed enough to work here. Again, reports suggest this is far from unique to the organization I describe.

> The engineer bro-culture and a certain social status that is assigned to software or computer engineers and geekdom in general is a new [phenomenon].

Honestly, this is 110% a startup culture thing, just like the kegerator and the "hackathon" example of Mandatory Fun. I've never seen it anywhere else. No idea why it is the way it is, but not gonna lie, if I'd known 25 years ago that the field around which I intended to build my working life was going to go the way it has in terms of culture, I'd have had to sit down and study a while on whether I shouldn't change my plans somewhat.

The good news is that it is just startup culture that's gone this way. For all the contempt that culture likes to aim at the "enterprise" world, and for all that enterprise engineering culture does tend to lack somewhat by comparison, it is a world in which the need for work-life balance is generally well respected.

It also, perhaps to the surprise of some, tends much more diverse than startups do, which may suggest that the monoculture problem isn't so much one of tech in general, but rather perhaps of a piece with the drawbacks of startup culture specifically - that perhaps a desire for "culture fit", so called, has even more negative dimensions than are generally acknowledged. After all, when your hiring process explicitly considers whether a candidate is enough like everyone already there to satisfy some nebulous standard of personal comfort...

> Also, it's a job. It won't be fun for the vast majority of people. Why do jobs have to be fun? My father worked on the line at a factory all his life - it wasn't fun.

Thank you. I thought I was the only one exasperated by this (relatively new, as far as I can tell) idea. I don't know anyone of my parents' age who thought jobs were fun.

My father also didn't have fun at his job. Back in his days, people said that automation would have us all working 2 hours a day by 2000. That didn't happen.

However, there are now an increasing amount of people who have the luxury to be able to choose their career, choose a job they'll enjoy and not have to slave their life away to be allowed to pay for their food and shelter.

So, mdpopescu, is that so god damn wrong?

> The engineer bro-culture and a certain social status that is assigned to software or computer engineers and geekdom in general is a new phenomena.

And it's restricted to the US (maybe Canada and the UK, too?). In Europe, software developers are nerds, period.

Nope. At least not to the same extent as in the 90s. Yes, they often have nerdy hobbies or interests but outside of e.g. free software and Linux, there's a fairly wide representation of the same culture as in the US. I'd argue Ruby and JS are almost entirely filled by them (which makes sense considering their popularity is quite recent compared to C, Perl or Python).

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