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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Don't women in tech already struggle with unwanted sexual advances? It's hard to imagine them voluntarily signing up for a service to be surrounded by even more tech bros... (sorry, guys...)

It's hard for me to even imagine "coder" as a dating persona; why would anyone care? Income bracket, maybe, but there are already matchmaking services/filters for that. Passion for technology? Maybe, but there are already communities for that where you can meet others without the overbearing expectation of romance.

In general I think dating and social loneliness is already heavily lopsided against hetero men; women don't need a "find me a dev who wants to date me" app, their existence is constantly bombarded with that. Why would they ever sign up for something like this?

I don't know how this would play out for queer devs, so I won't speculate there.

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What if this is an app for women to find a relatively well off (replace with intelligent, etc) partner given that this app is, essentially, a filter that dictates level of income/job bracket (location dependent, but you get the idea).

But you can find smart people with acceptable incomes on any ol' dating app. People already allude to their professions all the time, and you can pretty easily suss out intelligence -- all that without narrowing your dating pool to "devs who for some reason aren't on the bigger dating sites".

And if you're a hetero woman dev, chances are your network is already filled with hordes of eligible bachelors a degree or two away -- if you even want to date in that pool.

I think that's the biggest "if" here... "devs" are not really a sexy stereotype in the way that date-an-athlete or date-a-doctor or date-a-rapper would be, I don't think. If anything, it probably hurts your chances. I certainly wouldn't go around throwing, "Hey babe, ever been with a dev?" Lol.

Normally I’d agree, but there’s a market for everything and everyone, and timing is key. There exists a market for this, especially for people coming from abroad who have preconceptions around what kind of a person they want to be with. Engineers, in this case, are a category that is filtered - in good and bad ways.

Are you saying it's more like a sugar-daddy/mail-order bride arrangement?

No, but there are websites for that, since that is a real market, shocking and funny though it may be.

Having talked with several hetero female friends, they have dating difficulties as well. They’re different, but not obviously lesser, than those of hetero males.

I'm sure they do. What are some examples they mention?

Unsolicited (and often specifically anti-solicited [which I’d have thought wasn’t a necessary step, but…]) dick pics.

Straight up “hey hottie, wanna bang?” (75% of the time asked more crudely).

Asking for nudes before a first date.

It made the dudes who merely ignored her profile seem like Prince Charming.

I can’t tell if “maybe it works 2% of the time, so I’ll just fire off 100 ultra-low effort contacts and hope for a nibble” or if these guys are hopelessly clueless.

Then, though it might seem like a luxury, but if she left her profile up for a week, she’d have high double digits of new contacts on any of the larger sites every week. Finding the 2 or 3 good matches in the deluge of contacts, propositions, and dick pics was overwhelming.

I can see women wanting to “show me only a tiny sliver of the overall population, since the full firehose is far too much anyway”. Whether SWE is the right slice I can’t say, but it seems like there’s plenty of desire on both sides and plenty of disposable income from both sides.

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