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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

While it's tremendously fun to go through and learn, I question whether she would be a better programmer.

For the first half, the boy is making all the right decisions. He's not taking changes and using little compiler tricks to do things. He's not being clever. (For the second half, they appear to deliberately make him stupid. I'm not sure why.)

She, on the other hand, has a lot more tools in her toolbox. At the very least, she'll be tempted to use them. And if anyone else is working on the code, they'd better know those tools as well as she does. That's a dangerous situation.

Of course, it depends on what they're working on. If they're working with Carmack on his new 3D engine, she's the obvious choice. He would never keep up to Carmack.

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Having a deep understanding of the environment in which your program runs (be it the language runtime, or the machine itself) is always an advantage.

It doesn't necessarily follow that you will use that knowledge to be "clever". It helps you avoid pitfalls and debug strange behavior more easily. It helps you know when to use them, and when NOT to use them.

Someone who only knows how to program in practice is ignorant, and someone who only knows the "deep stuff" and can't program effectively and cleanly is just a "language lawyer".

You're essentially saying since you're doing simple things you'd prefer to hire an ignorant programmer who doesn't understand anything more than what you think the job requires.

Well heaven help you if your application gets more complicated and you need to figure out something more difficult.

A truly good programmer knows all the tricks and knows when to not use them.

And pay will scale accordingly. Software development is a balancing act.

If all pay were equal, yes, I'd want her, with the ability to keep her code simple and never be tempted to use complicated things where they don't belong. I'd also want her to understand everything down to the logic gates, and be able to write her own operating system and VM from scratch. If she could also make the perfect waffle, that would be desirable, too.

But pay isn't equal, and I'd be a fool to pay for more than I really need. (Assuming I'm paying fairly.) If the project gets more complicated, I'll educate or hire accordingly. In fact, by that time, he may have educated himself up to the level I need.

The level of the inequality in pay is at most a factor of 2. I am so, so confident that the woman in those slides will be more than twice as productive, on a range of metrics, than the man. There's a big difference between being competent and being an expert. (In addition, her knowledge about the details of C is good evidence that she's probably going to be more knowledgeable about other things related to the job, too.)

Actually, I believe the oft-quoted factor is 10x productivity when dealing with someone at this skill level (and from what I've seen in the field, I'd believe it). But that implies good architectural sense, which I'd test for before making a final decision.

Barring any serious deficiencies, she'd be a steal at 2x pay.

I think the 10x number is inflated, but one thing I realized more recently is it doesn't matter! If you can get a programmer that is 50% (1.5x) as productive for 2x as much, it's almost certainly worth it, since you are unlikely to get even 50% more productivity by hiring twice as many people (which is the alternative).

Not trying to do anything more than make a side comment, but:

> If she could also make the perfect waffle, that would be desirable, too.

is the sort of casual sexism that I'd love to see less of.

Meta comment: it's funny that a pink haired girl in ponytails is correcting a boy on hardcore C details. Sure, a few of these women exist in real life. But we really need to resist these Orwellian psyops as the depiction is not really reflective of reality.

tl;dr: Nerdy guys don't have much in life. Let them have C.

Oh, I'm sure it was done on purpose. There's no legit reason it can't be a girl, but all too often it's a guy. And if they'd put the girl in the 'dumb' position, the PC people would have jumped up and down on it for furthering a stereotype.

So I don't mind a bit that they chose the roles as they did.

To put it more charitably, having a girl as the smart one will do more to encourage both the typical guy and girl to work hard than the reverse.

There's actually a certain female forums poster I know who just must be the basis for this character.

Offhand, I would trust that all of the women that graduated from my CS program would trounce me in low-level C programming.

But that's because there were only a handful of them of them, and if you want to make it as a woman in CS, you have to want it bad, or you won't put up with being the one woman in a class of 20.

Your comment is kind of insulting to female programmers maybe

I know it was a tongue in cheek comment but imagine if the roles were reversed in this presentation.. It's an easier life to put the male in any sort of negative or dumb role, for sure. Though I'd prefer robots.

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