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Comment by dpeck | Hacker News Reader

You’re not wrong, but I’ll say the part about not going into it for the money is becoming less and less true all the time.

For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Their parents, advisors, etc saw how much money was being made and pushed them towards computing as something more like a high ROI trade.

You see the same done for specialized welding for smart, but not academically smart, kids. It’s hard work to get into, but if you get there it can pay very well, regardless of if you care much about the underlying metallurgic properties that you’re dealing with or not.

This is completely fine either way, but it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was.

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Agreed. I spend a lot of time on TikTok (my main interests tech-wise are HCI, digital discovery, and social computing so it's like catnip) and a LOT of younger people are going into tech for the money.

I'm 33 and I started programming in the 90s (I was raised by two geek parents a la Larry Page who were supportive), so I'm sort of in-between the two 'generations'. At age 37 and above, pretty much everybody is either a career switcher (in which case they've considered things that aren't money) or started before developing got big. I say 37 because that was old enough to already be coding and brought INTO the money with job offers in the dot com era. (I had a couple of offers from people who didn't believe I was 11/12, and I knew some people who were 16-19 who were leaving school to take REALLY well paying jobs none of us ever expected.)

After that, it was well known that coding could lead to a lot of money, and as the sector continues to grow and other opportunities to escape poverty shrink, it's pretty inevitable that people end up in coding for the money. Especially since that's how we teach them: All the tech courses are about employment, not playing. Kids don't learn tech as a joy or a tool to make their lives better, it's just another corporate hoop.

I’m 31 and at least in my age bracket most of the people I was in CS with weren’t the money crowd.

I’d believe it’s true now (I don’t really know), but it’s likely more recent than the OP thinks.

Post 2008, I'd say. I was a 2010 graduate, and the change between 'do what you love' and 'College is for MONEY' was like a culture bomb going off.

I think the real calculus should be do something that interests you, but also consider ROI and if education cost is worth it.

Most of the people I know with the worst financial outcomes overpaid to study stuff they didn’t care much about (and isn’t marketable or often even valuable) because they thought it was what they were supposed to do.

Eh, I'd go beyond that and say invest in yourself first and foremost, but I've been VERY SCREWED after trying to make decent financial choices.

1.) I was into computers and programming in the 90s but I was too young for the dot-com boom, so by the time I could work we were in the bust. So computers weren't a 'safe' ROI.

2.) So I went into languages and wanted to be a diplomat: I studied rare languages to be more valuable (Arabic and Chinese), went to the Middle East, and planned. Except that it turns out that basically required either law school or a bunch of unpaid internships I couldn't take since this was post 2008 and everything was hell/the competition was insane, so I dropped that plan and continued library work.

3.) I recovered from losing that dream and went to grad school for Library and Information Sciences. I did a focus on assessment/metrics/KPIs + tech (so databases, HCI, and UX research) with an intent on pursing an academic librarian career and building academic tech tools on the side. My first job out of grad school was at an Ivy. I got what ended up being MS my last semester of grad school and had to quit to see to my health.

4.) I finally managed to find decent employment and get health care (MS drugs cost 300k/yr)... in 2019. Then COVID. Luckily I'm still employed, but it did throw out ALL of my career planning post MS-diagnosis.

At this point, I've just given up on planning. It's worthless. The minute you or someone you love gets sick, or you get a divorce, or a disaster hits your house (which you won't get help for), you're going to lose it all anyway. I'm just picking up as many skills as possible and hoping one basket doesn't break.

Plans are worthless, but planning is a useful exercise.

I can't find any agreement on who first said that, but it appears that several great generals have said something like that.

This is a good point. I should say I've given up on OCCUPATIONAL planning. I'm very big into community and skill building plans.

I think to some extent there are always unknowns and there's a risk you'll choose wrong, but it's worth trying to choose correctly. In hindsight from your example it was a mistake not to do computers, your ROI calculation turned out to be short-sighted because of proximity to 99. Same thing might have happened to me had I been there at the time, it's hard to make the right choice in that kind of environment.

That's ignoring the cost of the research and planning, though. Even if that cost is only time + brain power that could be used on something else, in opting to engage in occupational planning, that time isn't being spent on something else.

> Same thing might have happened to me had I been there at the time, it's hard to make the right choice in that kind of environment.

I'd say for most people (but not most people at HN because the tech community is pretty unique in terms of labor relations), occupational planning is more akin the tech career planning in 99 where there are numerous big unknowns hitting people constantly (COVID, 08, etc.). Our informational environment is TERRIBLE to build a decent ROI model. Doing so would take the average person so much time to research and build that I think right now it's better to spend the time either:

a.) Planning outside of the current systems and their incentives. For example, I'm supplementing my conventional retirement savings by handing out a LOT of free money locally. Even if the stock market crashes in my 60s and I lose everything (which, based on my lifetime, will probably happen bc it always does...), hopefully there will be at least a few people/families/organizations around that view me kindly and will help (if 2000 people give me a dollar a month, I can make rent). This is also likely to be true even if society completely collapses, provided I'm alive.

b.) Focus on building better heuristics for reacting to sudden change and pivoting. Our culture and society doesn't care about being stable and will always change to chase the latest profit/dopamine hit, so instead of making plans that require and assume stability is possible and that the past is predictive, it's better to accept the future is NOT predictable and spend one's energy on building a great skill set to be flexible. Bending instead of breaking.

You did not consider TLA's with that language background ?

I did! I couldn't force myself to go through with it, honestly, plus I needed a little more experience with the languages which I couldn't afford; I couldn't travel or hire tutors; I was trying to live on 800/mo with no external support. I was sleeping on a mattress I dragged home off the street. I had no office clothes, no non-library work experience, nobody in my family who had a college degree to help me with the cultural expectations. I didn't even have a way to move to DC and back then you pretty much had to do that. I almost did a Master's just for the funding to move/live in DC but I researched that and was like 'that would be financially stupid'. So I didn't even though WITH MY SKILL SET it would have worked, because I read too much generic advice and had nobody to guide me.

That CIA signing bonus was REALLY tempting, though, I'm not going to lie.

Yeah graduating at a time where even a "useful" degree couldnt get you a job will do that.

Yup. I even planned out my debt at the age of 17. When I selected a college in 2005, I would have graduated with 8k in debt. Quite reasonable.

The crash my junior year and the resulting divorce of two of my parents means over half my undergrad debt was from my senior year. I had to choose between doubling my debt and dropping out with a year left.

And I also effed myself by working my way through school to try to keep costs down/take out less debt. It meant I had no money when I graduated so I couldn't even afford things like interview clothes for basic office jobs and I had to take the first thing I could get. In retrospect, working on tech projects in my spare time would have been a better FINANCIAL option than working a job for 7.25/hr, especially since this was '06-'10 and I was interested in things like NLP.

I just don't care anymore. I tried to be responsible, it didn't work, and now I just don't care.

I had a very similar path to you. I felt like I had been responsible and made it all the way through college. Then I had $75k in debt and I was going into $8/hour interviews with 40-60 other applicants.

One time I stopped at kinkos to print out some portfolio designs for an interview, and the cost was 6 dollars. I had to leave because I only had 3 dollars.

Things are much, much better now that I transitioned into tech. I kinda did it for money but I'm lucky because I do genuinely love it - I wish I had started it sooner in life.

I'm curious - where did you end up? If you're on here, I assume you're in a STEM field of some sort?

I'm actually in political communications; I leaned heavily into the rise of identity politics. (I'm a gay disabled female. Not great in early 00s tech, especially as a teenaged girl, but VERY good in certain spaces). I do tech stuff for non-techies, and it works pretty well, especially as there's more crossover between politics and tech. (I had to explain rms to a bunch of policy wonks the other day, that was weird).

I just missed talking about tech and was sick of getting blank looks when I rambled about how Page Rank is a mistake.

Oh, and regarding HN, I've been here on and off lurking since it was founded in 2005, I just thought I was too stupid to contribute. Now I'm old, jaded, and realize we're all stupid.

Yep, exactly. I graduated in 2008. The market crashed, I had a useless degree, and by then knew that a very significant portion of my money went to administrative positions at my college.

It definitely left me, and likely most other people, wondering why on earth we shot ourselves in the foot with the monetary equivalent of a mortgage at the dawn of our professional lives.

What you're seeing is really the same pattern as the late 90's dotcom boom-bust. Then, too, TONS of people (and their sisters and mothers) went into the "Information Superhighway" to become "WebMasters" and develop "Web Sites" for businesses large and small as more and more money plowed into those companies and a rush for talent, including not-very-much talent was drawn into the field because of the $. When the dotcom bust happened, and believe me, there will be another (even if different) correction again in the future, many of those same people will exit the field from layoffs or finding another job in tech again becoming hard. They'll migrate to another field that pays OK that they can find their thing.

And then, rinse-and-repeat, we'll probably see the same cycle again in the 2020s thru the 2030s.

Yes and no. I remember the dotcom boom-bust a bit, although I was a child at the time. I think a lot of crypto and web3 stuff is where the dotcoms were in the 90s: A lot of people chasing the money and who are aware that this is a Big Deal but we haven't figured out the specifics so everybody's rushing in because of first-mover advantage.

FAANG and dev positions in general, though, I think people are treating like they used to treat being a doctor/lawyer/accountant: It's a good, steady living and it will always be around. That's very different from the dot-com boom, which was way more a gold rush, even at the entry level. ("They're willing to pay HOW MUCH for the stuff I was playing around with?") Somebody who started at Google in 1999 (or Amazon, or even FB in 2006) is very different than most people entering those companies now. The dotcom was high risk high reward like modern web3/crypto, whereas modern swe positions are low risk medium high reward, which makes them great for people who are more risk averse for whatever reason.

These two points, yours and the parent, should probably be #0; many of the other "uncomfortable truths" follow from them.

That's true, but they also often leave.

I've taught three[0] people a little younger than me software that all wanted to do it for the freedom and financial security and two of the three transferred out of software to something else in tech like product management. It really bummed me out too, because it was the two women out of the three. Their lives are still markedly better than before, but I want more women in actual software.

[0] Well, more than that, but the others gave up on the first week or two.

I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from entering the field, and everyone should be equally encouraged and provided the same opportunities, but more and more I see these pushes for trying to pump the numbers of specific demographics. If someone wants to join the industry, great. If not, also great. I think that to an extent these movements do more harm than good. Women should absolutely be made aware that tech is a viable career path for them as much as anyone else - yet it seems that as of late there's a sort of societal coercion that mimics that historically seen in gender dominated industries like welding for men or nursing for women.

It’s hard to know if an environment is hostile to you or not if there are no examples of safety. For example I would hesitate to join a magic the gathering group if I didn’t first check that they’re friendly to newbies. Especially because I know magic the gathering can vary in experience and that a group that isn’t friendly is not an outlier. If I think about it this way I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect, and won’t be pushed to something like management or product, if there are no examples to go off of? It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path.

I don't disagree at all with making programming welcoming to newbies, but if Magic the Gathering were something you were really interested in picking up, wouldn't you look around for a newbie-friendly group to join instead of just giving up on the game altogether?

How many of us started tinkering with programming at a young age out of pure curiosity or interest in how cool it is, without any regards for how viable of a career path it is later in life? It seems most of us who did just that were boys. At some point you have to consider that there's perhaps an innate aggregate imbalance in how interested each gender is in programming, or in how much each gender responds to financial incentives -- which would explaian both why countries that are more gender equal and more prosperous tend to have a greater degree of gender imbalance in STEM.

> I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other > women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect

Hate to say it, but 0 female engineers _is_ evidence...

The assumption going in changes from "this is going to be ok" to "what is wrong with this workplace?"

(Of course this depends on team size, etc., but this is my own personal read going in.)

> It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path.

This was why I didn't get into STEM initially. It's not that I thought that engineering culture was toxic per se, but rather because the women I knew growing up didn't have careers, much less careers in technology.

I think the general perception is that women often get turned off not by the work, but by the male-dominated environments. This can be due to subtle issues and sometimes due to non-subtle issues. You want to go out of your way to make it a friendly environment in those cases. Basically, do you want women to have the same shitty experience when they were breaking through various male-dominated fields in the past (e.g. medicine, law, business, etc) or do you want to be a welcoming host? It seems like as a profession we're still in the shitty part of the spectrum based on the horror stories I hear from my female friends in tech.

The issue is the same in reverse. I've heard horrible anecdotes by male friends in female dominated industries such as teaching, nursing, etc. Why is the same societal push not happening in those industries? I never said we shouldn't strive to be welcoming and to cultivate a friendly environment for all, just that the intentional push for more of any specific demographic seems strange to me. Shitty people are going to exist everywhere regardless. A twitter campaign shouting about the injustices of the industry and pushing for more women in technology isn't going to change that. The people that need to hear the message being conveyed there aren't going to listen, and the people who are listening don't need to hear the message because they likely aren't already shitty people.

Are you sure the current campaigns aren't effective? The demographics are indeed changing. I know causation correlation blah blah, but we're just speculating in this thread, supplying no data anyway.

I'm sure they're effective to some degree in terms of recruitment numbers. What I was alluding to in that comment was that the current campaigns likely won't dramatically reduce the number of "horror stories" we hear - which is the crux of the entire issue. The people that are the antagonist in those horror stories tend not to change their way's based on social media movements. Whereas, the people who are interacting with and encouraging those movements would likely never find themselves in the antagonist shoes anyway. It's a very small subset of the population that would actually see those movements and decide to change as a result, and that's better than none, but it's certainly not what I think most people supporting those movements wish to see as a result.

Edit: grammar

> The demographics are indeed changing.

The gender ratio isn't changing though. If anything it is becoming worse, it was decades ago that less women went into software engineering today.

The only thin that changed is that now every company tries to put their women software engineers front and center, in their marketing material, to go speak at conferences etc. So it looks like there are more women, but there aren't. Tech companies also tries to improve these statistics by bundling non programmers into this category, like product and project managers.

This page suggests otherwise (although the effect is slight): https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/ Do you have other data?

That page suggests the number of women got lower, yes. The data points with 5 year gaps:

> 2008 Male: 72.33% Female: 27.67%

> 2013 Male: 73.44% Female: 26.56%

> 2018 Male: 73.82%. Female: 26.18%

The year by year numbers are too noisy to really mean much. 2018 being 0.3% percentage points higher than 2016 doesn't say much.

Anyway, the main point is that the gender ratio isn't really improving. At best you can say that it has stagnated, rather than getting worse as it did a decade ago.

The gender ratio is changing for the worse. In 1984, women made up something like 37% of CS students. Now it's under 20%.

Reference: https://jaxenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/women-in-com...

Interesting. Thanks for the data. I wonder how that effects jobs.

(Rereading, I'm not actually sure we disagree, but the tone of the parent post seems to be that I can't change things because people won't change, ...?)

I'm in tech, I work on fixing tech.

> the intentional push for more of any specific demographic seems strange to me I believe the skewed demographics is a reflection of actions and pressures I don't agree with. I think there is pretty-open discrimination and steering of qualified candidates away from the field. (Read the news, sadly.) I'm morally against that. The demographics are an imperfect measure of our progress, but in my opinion it's a useful indicator.

> Shitty people are going to exist everywhere regardless Yeah, and in my workplace I'm against shitty behavior.

Without speaking to whether this is true or not, the parent's argument seems to me to be a kind of "whataboutism".

I don't choose to spend my time working to improve the work environment in other fields, not because I don't care but because I can't do everything.

I'm unsure what you're trying to express in this reply. It seems we do agree in general viewpoint, just perhaps we have different ways of expressing that view. Discrimination definitely happens, but I have yet to see one example of "pretty open discrimination" that hasn't resulted in an all out PR disaster for the org involved ,your "Read the news" statement supports that. If discrimination were a common occurrence it wouldn't be news worthy. If anything it seems that discrimination is beginning to become more frequent in the other direction, where certain demographics who are less qualified are hired over other, more competent, candidates simply for the sake of "diversity". Not to say that's very common either, both are IME exceedingly rare. Glad that you're against shitty behavior, I am as well. Most people are. That doesn't have much to do with my comment though.

My close friend interned at a small embedded devices company and was the only woman besides a part time HR employee. People made comments about the HR employee when she wasn't around.

Is this "pretty open discrimination"? It certainly doesn't make the cut for news. But yes it's very uncomfortable to be the only woman in that situation, people wok look at you for approval for their comments.

People talk about other people all the time - regardless of gender. I would guarantee they talked about male employees as well but your friend likely didn't mentally catalogue those discussions because they weren't relevant to her. Confirmation bias is very real. Maybe this one specific anecdote you're providing really was an example of rampant discrimination - I don't know - either way it certainly isn't indicative of the entirety of the industry. I could share many anecdotes of my own that I could interpret as people discriminating against me specifically - but I doubt that's the case. Instead it's people just being people. This is another issue, I think that these movement often make women and minorities attribute "normal" negative behavior to be explicitly driven by discrimination or x-ism rather than it just being par for the course.

No, discrimination and x-ism is not neccesary to make an environment that women don't want to work at, only sufficient.

People being regular-shitty, combined with context, like making comments about the appearance and intelligence of the only other woman in the office, can create an inhospitable environment that forces women out. Companies that wish to hire and retain women should proactively create a hospitable environment or situations like above will occur.

The bigger thing is that it seems like you don't see return on investment into creating these better environments. Do you feel that diversity initiatives are wholly unnecessary or just poorly designed/targeted?

As I've said multiple times in this comment section - I'm all for creating an accepting and inclusive environment. Diversity initiatives aren't that. I think that explicit diversity initiatives are indicative of a bad work center that can't attract or keep their desired talent without explicitly targeting specific groups. I don't think that these diversity initiatives do anything to really affect change in an organizations culture and are PR stunts to make people feel good. At worst, they're harmful to everyone - including minorities. At best, they're a waste of time and resources. If your organization has actively promoted a toxic culture from it's inception and just now wishes to change things then it has a lot more work to do than a "diversity initiative".

Regardless, my original stance was more aimed at the societal push of "get x demographic into tech". I'm not going to retype my thoughts on that - go read the other comments of mine in this comments section to get a clearer picture.

The “news” can be considered an iceberg situation. What you see regarding discrimination are just the salacious ones that capture headlines. There’s so much day-to-day discrimination and sexism that doesn’t hit the papers. Consider that it took almost a decade if not more before we started hearing problems with Google execs which is one of the most likely companies where such problems are to grab headlines (executives being invoked being the salacious bit to grab headlines).

While there may not be similar pushes in other industries, there is no reason to dismiss the efforts to encourage participation in software based on a lack of effort in other fields.

Implicit and explicit biases exist everywhere. My wife is in teaching, and would love to move into administration some day. The problem with that? Despite women being the dominant sex in the actual teaching position, men continue to fill administrative (i.e. principals, deans, etc.) roles at far higher rates than women. Why are men filling leadership positions more than women, when they have less experience and participation in the field overall?

I guess my rant/point is, each field will have their own unique battles with inequality and/or lack of participation from various demographics. We can't compare apples to oranges.

My point is that societally we should allow anyone to enter any field they desire with minimal barriers halting their progress so long as they are able to do the work - but we shouldn't try to force it just because we feel like there should be more women or more of whomever. Just because there is a disparity in the demographic make-up of a field doesn't automatically mean that's it's root cause is some negative bias or discrimination. Maybe more men fill administrative roles because more men pursue educations in business administration and leadership whereas a teacher can be an excellent educator, but a not so excellent administrator if they have no relevant experience. Does your wife have any experience in administration or any credentials that would show her to be qualified for the job? If not, maybe that's her issue - not sexism. That's like asking why do great software engineers sometimes never rise to staff/management positions - because they're good at writing software, not managing people and organizations. Is this bad? Why? Because administrative roles are generally better paid and more prestigious and more women should have that opportunity? Why not encourage more women to get into masonry or welding? Where's that movement? Has it maybe not happened because those aren't well-paying, desirable jobs for most people? Do more men occupy those industries because of the nature of the work or because of some insidious rampant sexism? I'd be inclined to say the former. If this were actually about equality, it would be happening all across the labor market and not just in a certain subset of high-paying fields.

Some of these disparities can be traced back to social conditioning and discrimination, but its also in large part just due to inherit differences in the interest and abilities between genders. It's been proven time and time again that the genders are often fundamentally different in terms of abilities and innate interest. Neither gender is better than the other, but we are different and denying that does more harm than good.

> I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech.

Perspective is valuable, and like it or not various demographics have inherently different perspectives due to a variety of factors. We need conscious effort to include more demographics because our industry is dominated by a very small number of them and therefore its culture is heavily biased towards them.

This is a valid point, and I don't disagree that perspective is incredibly valuable. I just don't know if we've been going about it the right way. If someone is interested in technology, then we should make sure that it's as accessible to them as it is to anyone else. Yet, along with varying perspectives among varying demographics comes different interests and aspirations. In the process of pushing what we think other demographics should be aspiring to do are we not drowning out their own interests and aspirations? Are we not simultaneously warping the perspective we seek into one that more closely aligns with our own? It's 2021, anyone can google "well paying careers" see "software development" on the list and decide to pursue it. It should happen naturally, we should absolutely facilitate and encourage that natural convergence, but I think the artificial push is just as harmful as it is helpful.

I think it's based on the assumption that if all cultural factors were removed, an equal number of men and women would be in software engineering. And so, by modus tollens, the current gender ratio of the industry is a damning indicator of how much cultural bias still needs to be fought against.

Personally I think that's a flawed assumption. While there are certainly cultural biases at play still, there are also aggregate differences between the genders that most likely means the "natural" gender ratio will still be skewed towards men.

This is unfortunately a taboo topic to make note of, and is absolutely not up for discussion in most workplaces (see the Damore scandal), and so the fetishism you note persists.

It’s definitely a fraught topic, but if you go in using loaded language like “fetishism” to describe a position that many people have rationally arrived at in good faith, then yeah people are going to call you a jerk.

Part of the reason that I don’t think your paragraph 1 assumption is flawed is that there is evidence that men and women were equally interested in programming before the 80’s, but that a combination of cultural and societal factors came into play in that decade that branded computers as a “boy thing” and resulted in women being pressured out of the pipeline from a young age.

But even if you can find some sort of counterargument for that, my overriding reason why I stick with this assumption is as follows: decade after decade, people insisted that women weren’t into $career. And one by one, women have found their way into those careers (factory work in WWII, the executive suite more recently, plenty of other examples in between). In each case, the people saying women weren’t into $career had an argument that seemed to make sense, often relying on some combination of status quo statistics and hand-wavy conclusions drawn from psychology. And they were wrong. So when I see those same arguments brought out again for this career (often with some exhortation that “this time is different”) I generally dismiss them, as the epistemology they’re based on has a bad track record.

With all that being said, when it comes to actions, I’ll be more likely to encourage women to get into programming if I get a sense they might be interested in it. However, when it comes to interviewing candidates, I will not grade people on a curve based on their identity, as it is my belief that men and women can in fact be equally good at programming and should be held to the same standard.

> there is evidence that men and women were equally interested in programming before the 80’s, but that a combination of cultural and societal factors came into play in that decade that branded computers as a "boy thing" and resulted in women being pressured out of the pipeline from a young age.

The nature of "programming" as an activity also changed quite a bit.

You're correct about my language choice, I could (and should) have used more neutral language to describe my position. While I do believe that there are some fundamental differences in the interests and abilities of the genders (neither for better nor worse, they just are) I also agree that's its a slippery slope that has been abused in the past. Societal pressures and conditioning certainly play a role, however I think if you look at the lower-end of the job market the difference is clearer. Women tend to dominate retail work as well as waitress/hostess positions while men tend to dominate more labor intensive positions like construction, welding, modern day factory work etc. Is this due to some rampant discrimination in those fields or is it due to inherit biological/psychological differences in men and women? I'd be inclined to say the later. There are no pushes happening in the bottom end of the job market due lessen the gender disparity because those aren't as desirable positions so no one really cares that more men work in construction and more women are servers at restaurants. However when the position becomes more prestigious with higher pay it's suddenly a huge issue that a disparity exists - and obviously it's due to discrimination and has nothing to due with what each gender is naturally inclined to pursue or enjoy.

You're right in that it's important not to automatically ascribe any demographic disparity to fundamental differences between the genders, but it's equally important to not automatically ascribe that difference to discrimination without considering those fundamental differences.

I disagree about the “equally important” stuff, and here’s why: If I’m wrong and the overwhelming majority of women really don’t like programming, I’ll have wasted some of my time, but no one will have been materially harmed[0]. However, if I am right, then there are currently a large number of people who are being pushed away from a career or hobby that could increase their overall happiness and/or standard of living if they were not being pushed out of it, and I see that as a potential tragedy.

Given how slanted these stakes are and how many times society as a whole has underestimated women as a whole, I think the right answer here is to err on the side of trying to get women and other underrepresented minorities interested into tech.

[0] bear in mind what I said about the particular way I’m putting my belief into practice and that I do not believe in “reverse discrimination” to even the scales.

That's fair. I do believe that in an ideal world, everyone's barrier to entry into any profession would be equal removing all factors except merit. While that's obviously not possible, I do think it's worthwhile to work towards that. I also think that it can be worthwhile to make it known to women that tech and other career paths are viable and not out of reach for them - as I'm sure some women just have never considered it just as I have never seriously considered becoming a nurse. However, I think that's where it should stop. Make it known that it's an option, make it so that if they choose to pursue it that it's no more difficult for them than it would be if they were a man, and then let it be.

Anything more and it becomes the individual(s) behind the movement projecting their desires onto others and is no different that the societal molding that's taken place for the past several decades.

If you're wrong, surely you'll have materially harmed some people by encouraging them to do something they don't like?

The unstated major premise here is that software engineering work is valuable/fulfilling/high-status, while other work is not---so that pushing someone naturally suited to software engineering away causes harm, while pushing people more naturally suited to a different field into software engineering causes less harm.

I don't think your premise is wrong, but I think it does explain why computer science is particularly focused on broadening participation, compared to other disciplines like nursing, teaching, etc. Computer science is current (for better or ill) a golden ticket to economic mobility.

I'm only interested in why you believe what you believe. How smart are you? What do you value most? How truth-oriented is your epistemology?

I'm glad you don't discriminate (nothing "reverse" about it) against men, but many do, and since [your views are wrong](https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Difference-Female-Brains-Au...) it's tantamount to sex-based theft and redistribution.

What I always tell people thinking about a software engineering career is that, yes, it's great money but I strongly advise only doing it if you actually like working with computers. Otherwise it's going to be a nightmare. Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life.

> Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life.

I disagree. I coded for fun once, as a kid, and have never felt the need to do it again. If I never coded again, I wouldn't even notice because I my passions lie elsewhere. But working as a software developer is still tolerable because I'm just sitting at a desk, typing on a computer. As long as I don't have meetings...

Are you above 35?

Not that poster, but I am over 35, and I hate computers. Fucking around with computers without being paid to do it is just about the last thing I'd want to do. They're miserable time-sinks unless you've got a strong need for something only they can do, or you just like tinkering with them for the sake of it. Which, I did enjoy once upon a time, but not anymore, and I don't have any hobbies that really need computers beyond some light use of existing software, and even those are mostly just nice-to-haves. Everything else I might use a computer for that'd require real work to set up handily fails the XKCD software ROI chart.

I feel lucky that at 44 I still get a thrill when something runs as expected for the first time or when tests go all green. I still enjoy working with software in the general sense and learning new things in my areas of interest. Organizations, however, and the environments that they create (both human and software) are a different story ...

I'm curious to learn how that is relevant to my post and what assumptions you make about people around this topic based on age

The parent topics were talking about those older than 35 getting into the field because they loved it and those under mixed. Wondering where you fit into this worldview.

> doing math homework every day

Sigh... if only there were a way I could get paid for actually doing math homework every day...

become a math teacher and never look in the back of those cheater "teacher's edition" books!

I don’t really agree with this. I don’t love coding but I think I’m pretty good at it (and all the other parts of being a software engineer). I am still very happy I chose this job even though coding is “meh” for me in terms of enjoyment.

I don’t think this is particularly unusual either. Lots of people don’t code outside their day job, even the really good ones, IME. And look at other jobs - I doubt most plumbers, linemen, bricklayers, etc really find their job enjoyable. But they might still be happy with their career because they don’t hate it, they’re good at it, and it pays the bills.

Perhaps this will paradoxically be a good thing. I have for a long time been wondering if or to what extent are the reports of ageism in the industry well founded.

If it turns out that hiring older developers gets you a much higher likelihood of getting someone who cares, this might change matters significantly (assuming of course that there actually is a problem in the first place).

I expect this to change radically as the entry level 6-figure crowd gets older. Speaking for myself, my ability to care about my work is inversely proportional to my retirement account balances, and I want out asap. Software development and the internet in general isn't fun any more and there are things I'd rather do.

I'm in my 40's and my graduating comp sci class was the biggest in history at that time because of the money people were making in the first dot com boom.

There was a bit of a downswing in CS degrees around the first DOTCOM bust, a lot of folks left programs at 2nd tier colleges and moved to adjacent but less “software” and “subject to outsourcing” like industrial engineering, electrical engineering.

I didn’t exactly have a broad view at the time, but it seemed like top ~20 Comp Sci programs were largely unaffected and kept growing the whole time.

Not sure how it is today, but for me in the mid-90s, there was a lot of interest in software and computer degrees, but the curriculum was sufficiently difficult to filter out the posers. I went to a huge state school, and our first year Comp Sci class was, not exaggerating, an auditorium-sized lecture of 1000+ students dreaming about becoming a Microsoft Millionaire. Most of the students didn't make it through hello_world.c. We also had requirements like Linear Algebra, Matrix Theory, MOSFETs, Linear Systems, and Signal Processing. The electives were all very tough, too. By the time we graduated, there were about 30-40 of us. So, there was a lot of interest, but most didn't actually graduate with the major.

I see nothing wrong with this.

Very few people truly have a passion for their work and for most , it's just a means to an end. This has been true for all other "high paying" professions such as law and medicine. One of my best friends is a lawyer and he happened to mention that no one really gets into law because to fulfill some higher purpose..

Further, I don't think it really has an impact on the quality of the work they produce, you don't need a spiritual awakening to build good systems. You just need to be vigilant and gain experience.

As an older engineer (is mid thirties old?..) I've grown out of this and now look elsewhere to nourish my need for numinous in things like philosophy, art, music, relationships, etc. When I was younger, I used to naively think my identity was a "Software Engineer"; now looking back I chuckle at that outlook on life.

On a final note, I would argue that more people joining our profession is a _good_ thing. It will create more jobs, increase demand and we end up with a stronger workforce.

I don't think gatekeeping a field yields to a healthy outcome.

> For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true

I'll come up with one of the few exceptions to the rule, i.e. me. I'm in my very early 40s and I went in it for the money 20+ years ago, I hadn't even played with a computer as a kid or as a teenager for the simple reason that my parents couldn't afford to purchase me one (and I wasn't really thinking of becoming a computer programmer back as a teenager, I found the work boring).

Pretty soon though I discovered that I liked this, I even, in a way, avoided a career path that would have brought me into larger companies so into management (I think it's harder to remain a computer programmer in a larger company once you pass a certain age, I can't explain the reason for why that happens).

Either way, I'm almost 100% sure that no-one can spend 15-20-30 years in this job if they don't like it, i.e. only for the money alone, at times it can be really draining on one's mental condition.

...once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing

That was true 35 years ago, and without the metric butt-ton of money being paid now (though programming has always paid well within my lifetime). I've worked with those folks. The reason you might not see it is because they either left the field they hated, or worse, they stuck around long enough to become managers of what they don't understand.

it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was.

Mmm, I don't know that it ever "was". Ignore the Carmacks, Wozniaks, et. al., of the world and you'll find that most folks holding programming jobs had the standard four year degree (because you were unlikely to get hired in 1985 without one), working on internal LOB apps.

Unlikely to get hired? Not in my experence; not in 1985. A healthy fraction of the folks working in Silicon Valley were musicians! Certainly not many were degreed in computer science because very few were back then.

So what brought them to Silicon Valley? For a great many, love of the machine.

> For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing.

Just to add, during the dot.com boom there was a brief spike of people coming into software purely due to the hype of riches without much interest in software development. Thankfully the dot.com boom was relatively brief and it crashed hard, so from what I saw then most of those people got disenchanted right away (by the time they graduated the crash was happening) and changed careers.

This time the boom has been going on for basically a decade, so it is becoming more common and lasting.

It feels to me like most people no longer find fulfillment in their work, regardless what it is. It really seems like almost everyone is in it for the money and could care less about the lack of craftsmanship.

A lot of that seems like it comes from the company or industries not seeming to care about the worker: bad work environments, precarious jobs, stress, working on something commercially useful but not otherwise meaningful.

It is hard to imagine e.g. Google devs are enthusiastic about manipulative ads or blocking parts of Linux from developers in a software lock-in scheme.

I liked tinkering with computers all the time before I started working as software engineer. But after over one year of working I started wanting everything to just work so I don't need to do anything with it...

And that's great. High wages means the market signals a shortage of workforce. That more people of lower productivity fill the gap means the market works in a healthy manner.

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