Learning to Code as a Woman Changed My Life
glamour.com
glamour.com
I absolutely abhor this line of reasoning. The solution to the author's problem quite literally DID lie within herself, and the self-actualization was something she was entirely in control of. The article is literally about how her own perception of what it meant to be an engineer prior to learning to code was what was ultimately holding her back, and not any actual external variables. What is even more insane is if you give consideration to the resources/events she explicitly mentions which are set up specifically to encourage women to code, it makes that line of reasoning even more infuriating to me.
EDIT: And on another note: I have worked with exactly 8x more "women of color" than I have with white women, because in India and Pakistan, women are substantially more likely to go into software engineering. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read things like this.
The issue is far beyond becoming informed for one's self - the reality is students higher on a socio-economic scale organically have more support and mentors around them.
Children do not pick the families and environments they are born into. It's true living in a marginalized group you do have to believe in and support yourself a lot more and likely differently than others. Ones hard work also goes towards the basic necessities with a lot more of your attention and effort before pushing towards higher, life transforming goals.
This advice to pursue software development as a way to transform and improve one's life doesn't only apply to women, but a lot of children would benefit from this message.
I knew I was interested in building things that made people's lives better. Maybe it was implicit but I never thought "I've seen white guys on TV coding, so I can do it!" My parents actively discouraged me from spending time on the computer and worked against me to do so. My friends would make fun of me when I'd show them a little thing I made. I had essentially no encouragement until I actually got a job doing it, but I had spent hundreds (if not thousands) of hours on it before that point.
I have no problem with women being programmers, I work with a few on a daily basis. Women in the west have tremendous choice in how they want to live their lives. Your examples of India and Pakistan just illustrates that point. Women are fully capable, but how many would still have gone into programming if it weren't economically necessary for them to do so? The simple truth is, most women simply aren't interested in it. That's okay too, people should stop trying to impose how they would like the world to be. Recognize how it is and work inside those parameters.
All that said, I definitely appreciate the proactive approach with all the linked resources. I see way too many "women in tech" articles that say we should encourage women, and don't do something so basic as helping give women (or anyone for that matter) a starting point. I'll probably bookmark this article and send those links to people when they tell me they are potentially interested in learning.
CLAPCLAPCLAPCLAP! As a woman who got into this career late-ish, this is exactly how I feel. People underestimate the power of expectations, stereotypes, whatever you want to call them - in shaping the types of careers people consider options for them. When I tell other smart, hardworking, technologically-inclined women that they, too, could learn to code, they look at me like I have three heads.
I don't know of anyone's story that is perfect or perfectly told, the attention to the title and relevancy of this article seems a little bikeshedding to me.
This piece was uplifting and inspiring, but maybe not for some of the audience on hn as the demographic is shifting to a group that have had access to technology from an early age and don't know it as a priveledge. It's not their fault either, we're all products to some degree of our environment and upbringing.
I liked that this piece presents software engineering as a possibility for those who may have not known or considered it.
I was lucky to discover computers at a young age, but didn't have one of my own for a long while. Cue the imaginitive use of computer through reading books from the public library, and imagining my time at the computer. Ironically, a delay in getting a computer ended up giving me an unusual ability to step through code and processes mentally.
I can only imagine how my life would have turned out if i wasn't able to make tech accessible through hard work.
A message like this reaching every little boy and girl is not a wasted effort.
While not everyone will be a software engineer, or be one out of passion, some will gladly pursue it to improve the course of their and their family's future.
I read having a career to improve quality of life usually comes a generation before picking one for passion, and all parents who were once young people often gave up their passion, opportunity or education to survive and give their kids a chance.
The article offers a no-bullshit list of resources that could help someone get started in software engineering. Most of the people here won't need it for themselves, but it's helpful to have such a list to give to the people who need it (even PhD scientists often have too little exposure to coding, and need to get started somewhere!).
I really recommend https://www.womenwhocode.com/ https://www.womenwhocode.com/resources
It's more about the idea that resources are available and to heres a starting point to find your own.
I am a gay man who has been in the internet industry since 1996. From my long experience, about 50% of coders are macho, taciturn, unhelpful frat bros who make anyone who is not a member of their boys club most unwelcome.
My career (and surely the career of the article writer and anyone else who is not a bro) came as a result of the other 50%, talented, generous men and women whose shared their expertise and encouraged me. I certainly did not pull myself up by my own bootstraps; without that assistance I would not be where I am today, which is team lead.
So for those who "abhor" the argument laid out in this article, for once, for just once, SHUT UP, LISTEN to what is being said, and consider how it you might be a carrier of the "racist, sexist and classist" attitudes being called out.
I guess the difference is that some people don't need the encouragement of others in order to succeed. Many great programmers are self taught and self motivated. How has being gay made it harder to learn to program? Did people tell you gays weren't allowed? Did they tell you to quit because gays aren't good at coding? Did they ask you, "Wait, you're a programmer, and you're GAY!?" Did other programmers make fun of you for being gay? Was the encouragement you got specifically about being gay? Is it because you are gay that you needed the extra encouragement? Just trying to understand...
Maybe it was when you grew up and were encouraged by any given authority figure to do something, maybe it was finding common ground talking about your wife instead of your husband, maybe it was when you didn't need to wonder whether you were turned down for skill or skin color, maybe it was when you knew someone was interested in you not your tits, but you were encouraged.
Personally, I'm going to encourage you to actually listen to other people's perspectives instead of challenging them to justify their life experiences.
And maybe I am a self-taught gay Puerto Rican who disagrees that gay people need special encouragement in order to succeed.
I'm in the camp that at some point, everyone needs help. The unfortunate fact is, a lot of people aren't going to get the same amount of help, or even help at the right time, and they're going to fail as a result. Worse, they're not going to realize they could have done better.
When we're talking about continuing to try, and being positive and always working towards a solution, part of the conversation should ideally be that getting to that place involves something different for different people. Fair?
If you're just looking at "work hard", you're not seeing other people need to work harder, and overcome a terrifying amount of uncertainty, to get to the same place.
Since 1996 programming has been about 50% frat bros? Really? The quintessential "nerd" job? I couldn't disagree with you more. While I haven't been in the industry that long, how I got into programming was through online forums, where I found incredibly helpful and nice people who didn't know anything about me. Even when they did find out I was pretty young (13ish), they didn't treat me much differently. While I didn't usually get explicit encouragement, I did get help, for no other reason than I wanted to learn and showed that by asking as little as possible to be able to get by.
That's a beautiful thing about the internet, the anonymity allows anyone to be anything and to cut through other people's (potential) biases.
I'll be honest, I have had a good life. I have good parents and friends. I'm immensely grateful for them giving me as good of a start as one could ask for. However, as I said in another post, I was swimming against the stream. My parents thought I was wasting my time, my friends would (and still do) poke fun at me for being a "nerd". So yes, I was lucky that I was born into a stable home with parents who cared about me. It wasn't "all me", I had strangers help me learn, I happened to stumble across the right communities. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
What do you do with the hand you were given? Do you think "Oh well, all is lost, I was born black and gay. I can only do something with my life if people encourage me"? Utterly ridiculous, a toxic and disgusting worldview. The soft bigotry of low expectations. You cannot control anyone other than yourself. There are plenty of genuinely unfortunate/discriminated against people, the question becomes, how do you respond? Do you give up? Or do you persevere?
Why would women want to join such a horrible and sexist place if that's their impression? Especially since it isn't the reality. I've come across a few assholes, but they were assholes to everyone. If you have a chip on your shoulder constantly to think "Someone may not like me because I'm x" you're handicapping yourself. Instead seek out the good people, who are the vast majority. Stop with the identity politics and who is the most discriminated or offended and get to coding.
I think the chorus of opinions from female regular programmers all the way to the highest echelons of the tech hierarchy (a la Marissa Mayer) expressing their concern that tech is a 'boy's club' and that the environment is not accepting of diversity is a pretty clear sign that something is up.
Telling people to stop their whining and get to work is easy to say when you have not been on the receiving end of discrimination.
https://medium.com/@marlene.jaeckel/the-empress-has-no-cloth...
She definitely agrees with you.
Women who actually code and are revered in their community like Sandi Metz definitely are outspoken about it.
Women I work with definitely seem to feel disrespected and let down by me.
To act as if people who are activists and speak about these things don't have an agenda, is ridiculous. It is a well paying, cushy job that is becoming more prestigious. Of course it burns activists that other women won't do what they want them to do. Why isn't there a movement to get more women working on oil rigs? That's a pretty male dominated field as well that has a pretty similar salary to programming.
I'm perfectly fine with more women being in programming, I think that's an opinion most men in the industry share. I just don't feel I have an obligation to treat them any differently to anyone else. If someone wants to learn, I'm happy to teach.
I think this is partly because your gay. A lot of gay people have a sort of lisp and effeminate manner that advertises their sexuality and many straight men can notice this. It's not that the straight men are trying to discriminate, but their is a certain level of subconscious discomfort that will make it much harder (not impossible) for you to be one of the boys.
Of course not all men are like this, and it's possible for men who are like this to get over it. Please keep in mind though, I doubt that there's a deliberate action to exclude you... It's similar to how an 80 year old man is excluded from hanging out with teenage high school girls. It's not deliberate, you just don't fit in by your nature.
Honestly, I'm perhaps one of the least "progressive" people in this community, and I think it's pretty uninformed to think your comment is going to be helpful or describes an OK way to behave.
Let's put it this way. What I said is a generalization, and I framed it as a generalization. In no way did I say it applies to all people. But generalizations illustrate fuzzy truths that are as the adjective aptly states: general.
The parent poster also said something very general. He said that, and I quote: "50% of coders are macho, taciturn, unhelpful frat bros who make anyone who is not a member of their boys club most unwelcome."
There are two ways I could interpret what he said. I could say what the typical millennial would say when he/she encounters anything slightly sexist/racist and tell him that just about everything he said is insensitive, over-generalizing, frowned-upon, and kind of just untrue.
Or I can see things from his perspective and realize that although he is stereotyping, he is definitely illustrating a generality that is a fuzzy aspect of the truth. As a straight male myself perhaps I can say something to help him see things from a straight males' perspective. Of course I would be giving him another generality but a fuzzy truth is still a type of truth.
I want to change what it means to be progressive. The reality of this world is that things are rarely ever fair, but the meaning of "progressive" has become twisted in recent decades. Progressive has come to mean not only treating all people equally, but to state that all races, sexes and people are equal in mental and physical ability. This is not true. European people are taller, asians are shorter... what black magic enforces the attribute that while physical qualities may be extremely different for all peoples, intelligence remains identical across racial boundaries?
This is not a pretty picture but to say that all are equal is to deny reality. Can we be progressive without denying reality?
Take the following stereotype, for example: Men are generally physically stronger then women and thus better suited for jobs that require more physical strength.
I've literally met "progressive" people who deny this reality. This is borderline insanity in the name of progressiveness. We've gone too far.
I support progressiveness, I support equality in judgement and treatment, but I cannot deny and I cannot unsee the reality of the unbalanced universe we live in.
I want to mention that I have had one instance in my life, being a straight male where I have become bros with a gay male. From my perspective we were just bros, his perspective was different. But that is besides the point. I just want to say that I am in a good position to sympathize with both the stereotypical "macho straight male" and the gay male, so it is of my opinion that it would be highly unwise for the parent poster to dismiss what I say too quickly.
I wish you had expanded originally, because I totally agree that GP made a similarly unfair generalization.
In fact, I often wonder why it's constantly reiterated that I could never ever understand the experiences of an "out" group, but those groups regularly purport to understand mine.
I don't think you fully understood what I'm saying. I don't believe the GP's generalization was unfair. I believe he made a very accurate generalization. I believe his generalization is just about as accurate as my generalization. I'm just explaining the reasoning behind what he is observing and letting him know that it is not the result of intentional discrimination.
Honestly, I don't bump into the 90s sitcom gay guy much, so that strikes me as inaccurate first, but I also don't have much experience with these infamous bros to know how wrong that is either.
Now I'm wondering if my inability to see these bros makes me likely to be one, like a trout thinking "what fish, dude? all I see are my friends"
To be somewhat fair, the grandparent posting makes it clear that its comments apply to 50%.
Expressing thought on the subject doesn't mean one hasn't listened, so it seems like the only way to pass this test.
"it is one of the few highly prestigious and well-paid careers that you can teach yourself entirely online and with nearly no financial resources."
Not a great article. I'm a woman. Learning to code is still on my To Do list. I am not feeling all inspired to get cracking on it after reading this unfocused piece of writing.
TL;DR: Arts degree with a CS minor (?) -> Digital content producer -> front-end dev -> now engineering manager at Conde Nast (not coincidentally, the publisher of Glamour).
I will try to list the different themes of the article:
1) The author being a woman
2) The author coming from a background with low exposure to programming, making it an unpopular career choice, and not a relevant subject in school.
3) The author did not pursue a higher education program involving programming.
The article focuses more on 2) and 3) rather than 1), which is the title.
I think the article does an excellent job of communicating why the article should be of interest to the audience Glamour targets.
Which is, after all, the whole point of a headline.
Do titles like this make girls feel empowered or does it make them feel like only super-women can program because if a woman learns to program, it is worthy of magazine article. If I was a young girl and I saw articles like 'I'm a woman, and I learned to program!' I'd probably feel like 'geez, it really takes a lot of work for a woman to be a programmer and it is so rare that whenever it happens they write articles about it.'
Because programming is a stereotypically male field, and Glamour is a publication targetting a female audience, and the headline has a key job of communicating to the target audience (including, as necessary, overcoming common biases that they are likely to hold) that the article is relevant to them and worth reading.
> Do women have a harder time learning? Is it a bigger accomplishment when a woman does it? Are people more fascinated by the fact that a _woman_ was able to code
It's not a news article headlined “Woman learns to code”, which would justify those interpretations. It's an article titled (emphasis added) “Learning to code as a woman changed my life”. That how an experience changes your life is in part a function of the prior situation in your life, and that gender is (whether or not it ideally ought to be) a factor that significantly affects one situation in life are not particularly controversial observations.
> If I was a young girl and I saw articles like 'I'm a woman, and I learned to program!' I'd probably feel
The headline here wasn't like that, and from your phrasing you aren't a young girl which suggest your claim about what you would feel if you were reflects more the biases of your actual life situation as something other than a young girl than what anyone who is a young girl would actually think.
Beyond being focussed on a headline unlike the actual article headline, and being dubious speculation about what young girls might think about that straw man headline, this comment is also misplaced in pretending that an article in a woman's magazine that goes out of its way to point to coding as a pursuit that can be entered at any stage in life is focussed on an audience of “young girls” in the first place.
So the reason that just telling (in this case) women to believe in themselves doesn't make them millionaires (read the rest of the article) is the fault of society, and must mean that society is classist, sexist, racist ?
I mean if that's the reasoning, then yes. Absolutely.
It pains me to read stuff like this, because there is no shortage of immigrants, significant numbers of them women, try their hand at a business in the center of the city. Some succeed, a lot fail. It is hard to read articles like this because unlike the author of this article (and even she is a standout among the people she describes), they spent years trying, with most of that time working for below minimum wage. The author of this article, I get the distinct impression has a level of effort measured in weeks, maybe months.
According to the author, the reason that just starting out and competing with very little effort against people who spend years of, not 9-to-5, but 7am-to-9pm days working at a business, the reason that that fails ... is that society is racist. And when it comes to coding, most people actually worked for 4+ years, something like 6-8 hours per day constantly, with very significant upticks in that during exams. The reason you can't best them after one "self-actualization" seminar, clearly, is racism and sexism.
No.
It isn't.
And yes, there are plenty of locals that "succeed" (to some extent) despite being morons. That's the same everywhere (seen it in at least 9 big cities around the world now, one of which was not first world, the rich being brown skinned (poor too of course) and it was much worse of a rich-poor divide than any western city I've ever seen). And it's not fair that that doesn't apply to you. But it doesn't apply to 90% of people, and probably doesn't apply to 99% of immigrants, and women of color, and ... and that's not fair. Very unfair. Very.
It cannot be fixed by making the world less racist.
Probably there is an audience for it, but probably not particularly either the audience for which the Glamour article is primarily published (who aren't men) or the HN audience (among whom men who already know how learning programming changed their own life are decidedly overrepresented.)