Hacker News Reader

Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

> That's debatable. CS was overwhelmingly male and wasn't prestigious until recently.

We're talking about the same career that's been known as a money-printing machine for the past 25 years?

> We're talking about the same career that's been known as a money-printing machine for the past 25 years?

20 years ago it was fairly frequently perceived as both very nerdy in an unpopular way and in imminent danger of being outsourced entirely.

It's sad how many people who had to put up with bullying for their interests back then quickly became bullies themselves when they had the opportunity. Of all people, we should know better.

20 years ago i had to show people in a cs course how to turn on their computer. they were only there because of the dotcom bubble.

Brogrammers were a thing back then, and were problematic even then.

My mistake, rounding error. 15-17 years ago, my CS courses after the bubble burst were rather different.

CS in high school even during the dot-com bubble, though... NOT popular.

Man. I went to high school in the late 90s, and we didn't even have a CS course. We did have a "programming" class, and it was taught using Pascal. It wasn't a required class, and only the "nerds" (such as myself) took it. And my high school was a brand-new school that was branded as a "tech magnet" school, in a relatively well-off area.

You certainly can have a career that's lucrative, but not prestigious. I've been coding for over 25 years and in that time, have been referred to as a "nerd", "geek", etc... pretty much the entire time. Not prestigious monikers. Most people that I encounter do not act as though my career is a "money-printing machine", but rather that I do some, strange, arcane, thing that they could never approach (or would want to), that is very difficult, but yes, finally, makes money. They see my title as prestigious, but not programming. The people I see with different attitudes about programming/prestige/gender are much younger (<30). I don't fully understand their attitudes yet.

To be honest though - geek and nerd have become prestigious monikers. I think that management and sales still reign supreme in terms of prestige but skilled individual contributors are being more recognized as cogs that make a company run smoothly... and after the 00's worth of culture we've seen a shift where technical aptitude has become more praiseworthy.

I guess that depends on where you are. I still don't think of geek and nerd as conferring prestige. IMO they just aren't (as) stigmatized anymore, and are mostly neutral descriptors.

And fifty years ago it was incredibly female dominated - the "male shift" in CS is easy to observe and pretty handily defeats any of those false claims you'll see about "men's brains being wired" for programming. It's important to remember that men muscled women out of programming initially once the field became seen as something more than a secretarial position.

As you pointed out CS was once secretarial work. But what constituted CS also underwent a transformation during that time period. No one was muscled out so much as barriers to entry broke down thanks to market forces.

Here's a comment I wrote in response to a similar point addressing the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26767280

I am a programmer like my mother before me - but while I've had it easy working in high level language like C++ and PHP she worked in binary and, only toward the end of her career assembler. She made banks work using nothing but low level machine instructions which far exceeds the rudimentary stuff I'm doing today. Eventually she graduated up to management and project planning, but this was back in the day where individual contributors never made much money directly - if you wanted to keep getting raises you had to career track switch to management.

I don't disagree that programming itself did significantly shift, but it's been perpetually getting easier, not more difficult, to work professionally at.

This is patently untrue. Men started to dominate when it turned from a "secretarial" position into an engineering job, as they did in ... wait for it ... actual engineering.

https://developers.hp.com/sites/default/files/Intl%20Womens%...

> once the field became seen as something more than a secretarial position.

It's not just perception; "Computers" used to refer to employees performing calculations manually for numerical methods. Then "Computer Operators" were secretaries translating assembly instructions written on paper into the correct octal code to punch on cards to feed the machine. They got the instructions from engineers. The teletype made their work obsolete, but you can still see the demographic shift in "Computer Related Occupations" as aggregated on government data.

I think you have to go to the 1940s and 1950s for programming being a “secretarial position”. That was 70 and 80 years ago.

It’s not even a valid comparison at that point, it’s too different. CS back then was completely different than today or even the recent past. As one example, computational complexity wasn’t even a thing until the 1960s with Hartmanis and Stearns.

There was a lot more time spent on inputting programs and data than today.

Were the bulk of these programmers solving problems with engineering and logical reasoning as they might today?

Yes. More so.

That doesn't align with most accounts of how computing was performed in the 50's and 60's.

For instance, Knuth was seen as an anomaly because he would operate the keypunch as fast as the secretaries and would keypunch his own programs.

Programmers aren't and weren't keypunch operators. Or secretaries.

No, they would have been known as "computer operators" and still been counted in the "computer related occupations" bucket.

I recommend Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing for more tips on how to deny women's presence.

And not just more so - but more so with worse tools to do it with. There are really hard problems in development these days that we all deal with - and we only deal with them because we're standing on the shoulders of giants - most of whom were women.

Revisionist history

It's money-printing but definitely not prestigious in most cultures when compared to doctor, lawyer, professor (even when it makes more money)

Domestically, certainly not post dotcom crash.

Common wisdom was that going to be completely outsourced in "the next decade". Then Google, Facebook and the rise of SV proved all of them wrong.

Internationally? No. In a lot of countries there's no track for ICs, no staff engineers and you are supposed to go into management. Programming is seen as brick-laying. Ironically, that's one of the reasons outsourcing failed so bad...

It was prestigious to be a computer-adjacent business person for the past 30 or 40 years. But there wasn't much prestige involved in the actual work of building, or programming, computers (unless you became rich and turned into a business person).

In my experience prestige has been a lot more about which company I worked at than the role. If anything my being a programmer detracted somewhat from prestige outside the company, while adding to it only within.

Its a bit more recent than 25 years, probably 2003-2005 maybe.

When I was a young "computer nerd" who went off to college we had a pretty decent CS program but it was awfully dusty to those not into it. I think there were maybe 5-10 "great" CS programs in the US, now major cities have 2-5 real "learn to code" programs outside of colleges.

In 96, a "programmer" could make decent money but it was defo not a money printing machine.

It paid significantly less than other engineering fields, and much, much less than specializations in finance, medicine and law (which artificially constrain supply through various gatekeeping mechanisms) up until recently, when the wage-fixing and anti-poaching policies were quashed.

There were also two periods in the past 25 years where it was very difficult to find work, especially for entry-level, without there being an especially large glut of engineers. Dot-com bust and the 2007 recession.

known by whom? I got halfway through my CS degree before I realized software paid significantly better than other STEM work, and I'm in my twenties. my parents weren't convinced it wasn't all a waste of time until I showed them my first offer letter.

Oh, I got an earful at home when I dropped out of engineering in around 1991 to go into CS.

It's still not prestigious.

Joe Average envies Bill Gates.

Joe Average does not envy MS programmer #7413 who does device driver maintenance.

Not entirely true, the "tax them to death" crowd in SF are very envious of "Tech Workers" who are largely programmers.

If they could create value, they would. But instead they whine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com