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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly for young children I wouldn't want any of the girls to become software engineers. Most Software Engineers including myself are friendly but also grumpy, nerdy and annoying, with poor communication skills and an unhealthy lifestyle. For some reason for men its OK because all they do is work, but for women I'd rather my daughters have more human contact and nicer environment - esp one without developers in it. Yeah its sexist when I write it down but that's how I'm sure a lot of parents feel, which is one reason why there aren't so many women at the entry to the pipeline.

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One of the most effective ways to make devs less “grumpy nerdy and annoying” is to inject the dev community with voices that are different. There must be bottom-up pressure for there to be positive change.

I like it being needy and “annoying” (I actually enjoy awkward jokes and general asociality).

I've always said women are too smart to become programmers. I'm pretty sure it is better for the soul to have a job with more people interactions. (Yeah I know there are meetings and you have to communicate with clients - still, you end up staring into a glowing screen most of the time. The general work environment often isn't great either. Why would Software Engineers need a nice environment, they only stare at their computers anyway, seems to be the general thinking).

I get the sentiment, but reread your first sentence. "Women are too ___ to become ___." Doesn't that read as super condescending and prescriptive? I understand it's coming from ostensibly a good place, but it's the same thing as saying "all Asians are smart and good at math." It doesn't matter if the stereotype/prejudice/whatever you call it is "positive", it's still generalization, speaking for a group instead of letting them speak for themselves, and it's the wrong way to approach these things.

You're making assumptions about what "women" are good at or what "women" want or what "they" should do, when the fact is there is no such homogeneous category for you to speak about. Sure, some women are better at/enjoy more face-to-face type work. Some women are better at/enjoy programming/heads-down type work. A comic book artist probably spends as much time doing heads-down work as a programmer, but would you say female comic book artists should try doing some other career instead?

Women (or any other group) can't speak for themselves about properties of the group. Everybody is just an individual. Statements about groups can only be made by using statistics or at least observance of several members of the group.

If that sentence offends people, I don't know. It is obviously a joke (not implying the opposite, but of course smart people go into programming).

Also, I am sorry, but I am entitled to have an opinion on that matter. You are welcome to challenge my opinion, debate me, present alternate facts, whatever. But you (or anybody else) don't get to tell me that I am not allowed to have an opinion. That's a ground rule I am not willing to budge on. Nobody gets to tell me what to think, or to like.

The second reason (apart from being smart) is that women have more choices/options than men. This is actually well documented, but the article chooses to ignore it because it would spoil their pitch.

All these discussions, by the way, imply that women are stupid for not choosing engineering, and need to be convinced to choose it against their own judgement. Is that really better than my quip about them being too smart to choose it?

Edit: I seem to have overlooked the second part of your statement , or you added it later.

As I said, there are studies showing women have more options - they tend to have talent in multiple fields, and many men only in one. (That's for the studies). Women are also shown in studies to be perceived as more agreeable than men. Another reason they have options is that they have less need to make a good income. And the ultimate option is to have kids and drop out of work that is not entirely pleasant. I personally like Math, but even I find it difficult to voluntarily do Math. So I am not surprised if many people don't keep doing it, when they don't have to.

Also I think drawing cartoons is very different from being an engineer in a Software Company. You can work in cafes. You can stroll the city and draw sketches. You can do such things as a programmer, but it is not the norm - actually you can only make cartoons if you can afford that lifestyle, anyway.

And the bias is different. Employers have tried to put me into ugly rooms several times in my career (basements, windowless rooms, open plan offices). I think for creative work like drawing cartoons, people would be more ready to acknowledge that the artists need a nice environment to get inspiration.

Also, there is the prestige. Being an artist vs being a programmer. Or being a doctor vs being a programmer (70% of medicine graduates are women, but conveniently it doesn't count as STEM for some reason). There are glamor TV shows about being a doctor or a lawyer. How many shows are there glamorizing programming? It has only gained some prestige because some people famously got rich doing it.

Seems like you're projecting or even self-hating.

> For some reason for men its OK because all they do is work, but for women I'd rather my daughters have more human contact and nicer environment

Also what does this even mean?

> even self-hating.

Lol yeah, and my team. :)

Counterpoint: If not you, then who? Your daughters could be part of a cultural shift with respect to the tech workplace, so why discourage them?

Because you would sacrifice your kid's wellbeing just to make some arbitrary, meaningless statistic look good.

And do you think women having to work with computers all day would end up being less grumpy than men who have to do it? Why?

You misunderstood my comment. I said "why discourage them?", not "push them to become programmers". The parent I was responding to made it seem like he/she would want to actively steer their daughter away from programming because of the workplace conditions. But what if their daughter really likes software/tech? You don't want to push her to some other career just because of how you feel about it, she can decide for herself. Software work isn't a lost cause either, it just needs some sanity injected into it, it isn't coal mining or fracking after all.

Isn't the whole point of parenting to leverage our significantly larger base of life experience to steer our children away from potentially harmful (or at least sub-optimal) decisions somewhat induced by their own inexperience?

No, that would be helicopter parenting. A parents job is to teach the child how the world works and how to deal with its shortcomings using that bank of experience. Not to make decisions for them or shield them from risk at the expense of their adult life.

You can't "patch the bugs" in the life you lived by telling your child how to live, you just have to try to teach them so that they fully understand the situation and will make the "right" decision when the time comes. Sometimes they will have the information but still make the "wrong" decision, which is frustrating I imagine (no kids, but I've seen people do this). This is normal though because there are some things you can't explain to someone, they just need to experience it. How to love and be loved is the big one, but there are a lot of other smaller ones.

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