Women Who Code Closing
womenwhocode.com
womenwhocode.com
Given the implied trend, and companies that the org highlights as partners[2], this outcome doesn't seem very surprising.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/464...
For example, according to her linkedin, the CEO of WWC is also the Strategic Advisor of a banking company, an Advisory Board Member of 3 organizations including a university, and a Principal (?) of some LLC. Simultaneously.
His companies are doing fine and he's still super rich.
It really seems unlikely one human can split themselves between so many projects and keep all of them successful unless they dis-engage from a few and let those they hired run the show (mostly how he's behaved with SpaceX). If the person is like this they likely don't deserve the sort of compensation talked about in this article.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/twitter/marketcap/
> while at the same time tanking the goodwill people had for Tesla
https://companiesmarketcap.com/tesla/marketcap/
Before you reply about the obviously lower valuation over the last few years, take a look at some comparable companies: https://companiesmarketcap.com/
The economic realities of Musk's ventures does not align with what seems to be the zeitgeist opinion of him as a person.
Your second link on Tesla clearly indicates the downward trend, and this is also reflected in Tesla's latest sales. Gonna be a wild earnings call: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-stock-price-elon-musk-ele...
Tesla sales are down a lot , even as they give up margin to lower price in an effort to boost sales.
Twitter is not profitable, heavily indebted, and likely loosing a lot of traffic.
SpaceX is one of the most promising opportunities for him, and even that has huge structural risks due to clients being governments and is barely (rarely) profitable.
The boring company, neurolink, etc are barely real companies, they're just vanity projects for him.
Down from super high is still high. Still profitable company with an incredibly high market cap.
> Twitter is not profitable, heavily indebted, and likely loosing a lot of traffic.
Twitter's market cap hasn't change much. The perception of it losing value and being in trouble has a lot more to do with people's personal feeling (ironically expressed on X), rather than economics. It wasn't profitable when he bought it and it's not profitable now. It's still worth roughly what he bought it for.
> SpaceX is one of the most promising opportunities for him, and even that has huge structural risks due to clients being governments and is barely (rarely) profitable.
By your own admission, profitable and future projects are set to make it more even more profitable. Governments are the least risky clients there are.
> The boring company, neurolink, etc are barely real companies, they're just vanity projects for him.
That he spends relatively little money on, hardly worth mentioning, either positive or negative.
A market cap that has more than halved in the last year. And market cap isn’t everything. Plummeting sales amid higher competition, layoffs, etc don’t paint a great picture.
> Twitter's market cap hasn't change much
Since what time period? Since after he shaved 70% of it off? [1]. It wasn’t and still isn’t profitable, yes, but it now has a far higher debt load and a drop in advertising revenues which make it worth less.
> profitable and future projects are set to make it more even more profitable.
Oh I said rarely and barely profitable. That doesn’t imply much profit, nor potential. It has promise, yes, but clear profits… no. Sorry for the confusion. They turned a profit only for one quarter. The structural risks are due to government subsidies that can (and are) being pulled from SpaceX. Starlink has been a huge boom to its revenue, but those subsidies were part of that. His errant behavior could jeopardize additional contracts (eg his drug use).
> hardly worth mentioning
The trail of headline worthy businesses are worth mentioning because they add to his allure and image. That they have little business potential, amount to trivial cost to him, and are for vanity, makes them meaningless.
1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/since-elon-musks...
Generally, Tesla built its sales on the EV subsidy, Solar City is based on Solar Installation subsidies. Starlink was going to be subsidy-driven. Most of the factories/land for Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity were based on where the government would provide tax credits or other subsidies.
As Elon gets more politically active (and controversial) his ability to attract politicians for publicity will be scrutinized and harder to come by. Especially if he under-delivers on commitments.
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-reaffirms-rejection-nearly-...
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
Looking where I work, the board members get 125k+ salary and 300k stock.
They could just hire people to give them a TLDR before each meeting
It's common for members of the board to serve in similar capacities in other organizations, but not very common for the C-suite to do it, though of course it does happen.
That just means the owner of a single-member LLC, or sometimes the largest stakeholder for a multi-member LLC. It's not an unusual title for an LLC.
From reading her LinkedIn, it sounds like she's doing consulting and advising under an LLC instead of as an unincorporated sole proprietor. Again, really nothing unusual there, especially for the leader of a nonprofit.
As another person commented this may be a case of spreading the org too thin. Couldn't they have pivoted with just a focus on the US rather than 147 countries and not shut the whole thing down?
Maybe things aren't excessive compared to others. But a better question might be what should comp look like for non-profits?
I've looked into this a bit. The true answer is extremely unclear.
General public has a mentality that if you work at a non-profit you should give everything to the cause including your salary.
This only gets the most loyal people to the cause, but just because you're loyal and willing to work a lot doesn't mean you're effective. What about those people who are actually effective but demand a higher salary? And honestly speaking, they deserve it.
So if you're unwilling to compensate at a level even close to industry your talent pool shrinks really fast, and many times, smaller than those who are effective.
I get the talent pool shrinks. I still believe that you should be able to find an intersection between the subsets.
I don't think giving up salary entirely is the right move, but it does seem a bit hypocritical for almost your entire org to be volunteers then shut down the entire org because you don't have options but still collect your salary. I don't have any details on the specifics but I find it hard to believe that the org can't make some adjustments (unless leadership dug a deep hole) and that none of the volunteers already in the org couldn't be trained to fill the role. We're talking about a non-profit, not a Fortune 500 company. It's like selling girl scout cookies rather than used cars - it's much easier to get donations than real selling.
“What will my $1M go towards?” The answer won’t be “a million dollars more programming [what the charity is setup to do]” but instead “a million more dollars for the executive team”.
Compensation for charity execs is necessary and proper. What matters is how much funding can go to the charitable program work in the end.
Coding is a trade. We don't have plumbing bootcamps. I understand the tech literacy angle, but placing people in $200k developer jobs is very far away from tech literacy.
The issues with bootcamps in our industry was that there's not really a mature apprenticeship program to follow them up. Eight-week bootcampers who'd never seen a for loop before starting learn a few leetcode solutions and are invited into interviews alongside people with much more training and much more experience. And many parties, not the least of which being the leetcode-focused interviewers, are responsible for that dubious process taking shape.
Dismissing the work it takes is harmful. We relegate practice problems (advent of code, toy projects) into some silly side thing that you would only do for fun. But it’s only through practice that we build expertise. And we systematically dismiss people who are really skilled, and burn the bridge to get that good ourselves. Nobody seems interested in the answer of how Jeff Dean or Carmack gained their skill. When we devalue expertise, we burn the ladder we would need to climb to get there ourselves.
I think we need to take seriously how hard it is to do good programming work. Algorithms, data structures, math, performance optimisation, distributed systems, graphics & shaders, large system design - any one of these skills takes years to properly master. Learning can be incredibly rewarding. But it doesn’t happen without work. We should talk about that work.
Some of the music I listened to growing up, that I still listen to, was made by people who were complete neophytes with their instruments.
So I reject your premise, and I reject your attempt at gatekeeping.
>> I think we need to take seriously how hard it is to do good programming work. Algorithms, data structures, math, performance optimisation, distributed systems, graphics & shaders, large system design - any one of these skills takes years to properly master
If there are any programmer kids out there, don't listen to this stuff. I mean that seriously. This is just gatekeeping.
If you're a smart kid who wants to learn to code, you can do that, and you can be writing code in no time. If you're a smart kid who wants to play music, you can do that in no time.
Don't listen to the gatekeepers. They are compromised. They have conflicts of interest.
I was one of those kids you're calling out to and I'm glad I had the opportunity to just dig in, but I'm far better at what I do after decades of practice.
The same is true in each of the numerous other skills and crafts I've pursued in that time.
You can write code in no time, but you really are going to only become continually better at it if you embrace organized, reflective, and regular practice of some kind.
Regular, yeah, I'll give you that. Any skill gets better with practice.
I think it depends on the instrument, the type of music, and the ensemble.
Punk band? Sure. Symphony orchestra? Probably not.
Which isn't to say that one is objectively better or worse than the other. Lots of people enjoy both.
I view this thing as a "skill-reward" ratio. If you're a mediocre guitarist and your band has sold platinum records, you're a complete champion. You translated X mechanical skill to Y real-world impact and success.
If you're a superb technical guitarist and nobody listens to your music, you have nothing to contribute.
People over focus on the minutiae and lose sight of the thing itself. Musicianship over music.
I was one of those kids you’re talking about, who learned programming on my own from about the age of 9. That was 30 years ago, and I’ve gotten a lot better at it since then. Sometimes I talk to people who have less experience than I do, and I’ve seen the life go out of peoples eyes when they think they aren’t as “talented” as I am. Hah! You see me now, but you don’t see the 30 years of work I’ve put in to get here!
I think this whole “neophytes can do anything” philosophy of yours is toxic, because people assume that if you’re good at programming, you were born good at programming. If they weren’t born like that, they feel inadequate and attack themselves.
You’re wrong. That’s not how it works. It’s great that someone can throw together a website in your first week of a bootcamp. Welcome to the starting line. Maybe that’s enough to start a successful business. But that’s not a sign you’re an expert yet. And thank goodness for that! As piano is teaching me all over again, watching yourself improve slowly over years of practice is a truly wonderful experience.
An expert at programming can make a website - sure. Or they can edit the code in their web browser. Or write their own webpack, or react. Or invent a new programming language and compile it to webassembly. Or write an http2 proxy to make their page go faster. Or 1000 other weird things. How cool is that!
Why on earth would you make expertise into a dirty word? Seriously - what’s wrong with people.
that may be true. but it doesn't take years before you can write code. sure, you don't know everything at the beginning, but you can apply what you learned as soon as you learned it, and you don't have to practice it over a long period before you can use it.
learning a music instrument takes comparatively more practice before you sound good. (unless it's a rhythm instrument. you can play a simple drum rhythm after your first lesson. you may take years to master drumming, just like to may take years to master programming, but you can be productive very early.
... or a drone instrument, or an electronic instrument with a rich timbre and an accessible interface, or most idiophones, or a harmonica, (I could go on for a while)
:)
I think the OP's point was that you can't do cool things when you first start coding or even that you might have employable value early on in your journey, but that practice and experience do pay real dividends and that the field as a whole has lost some appreciation for the transformation that comes from it
please do, i am curious.
i read OP more as you can't do anything until you practiced a certain amount, which i think is more like you won't likely get a job until then but not that you can't build something for yourself.
music does not get interesting until you can play in front of or with other people.
Firstly, you can be productive -very- quickly on other instruments too. Guitar and piano are both "good enough" even if you can only play 3 chords. You can then learn more as you go.
Secondly, being productive in coding from very early should be qualified with "for some definition of productive". Yes, you can write code, yes it meets the spec, but usually there's also an element of feedback in code review. Sometimes a lot of feedback.
I concur with the grand parent, we get -better- at coding with practice and experience. As long as you are getting feedback in some way.
The "practice" part might be in challenging your own solution. Rewrite it to go twice as fast. Or in half the code. Or not using that convenient language-provided data structure, or whatever.
For the record I'd describe myself as an "excellent" coder (in my field) but my drumming as "enthusiastic". Competent amateur maybe, but far from "professional".
Firstly, playing with others is great fun, and a great way to learn and improve. Not to mention a good motivator. Like you, most of my improvement has been in that context.
When I was just starting out we had "bands" of beginners (guitar, piano, bass etc) and there was a sense of progress learning just one chord or riff etc.
So -how- you learn matters. Equally "starting young" is a common wisdom, but most of the people I play with now "started old". They started because -they- wanted to play, not because someone else wanted to play.
I think method also matters. In school we "learnt" recorder, but it started with "reading music". That's like explaining virtual methods in object orientated design to someone who can't write a for loop.
For both activities we learn better when it's fun.
I never said it did. I mean, where do you think years of expertise comes from? It’s built one day of programming at a time.
There are apprenticeships and accredited training programs. Just because they're not called "bootcamps" doesn't mean they aren't the same thing.
Maybe plumbing just has the advantage of time. Its lost any sexiness it once had, if ever. And plumbers make good money!
Apprentice plumbers (1) get paid and (2) typically spend years as an apprentice, not weeks or months. This is for a career averaging $60-80k.
Contrast that with tech bootcamps that often approximate the cost of computer science degrees and promise (or intimate) that students will jump into six figure salaries.
It's not the same at all.
Also important to note that if you get paid (a proper wage) while apprenticing, you're quite lucky already.
There are plenty of occupations with apprenticeships where you do not get paid until you've got your foot firmly in the hallway past the door. For example, anything related to becoming a chef: You're going to start by washing dishes for months if not years and no you will not get paid beyond maybe minimum wage.
washing dishes is a minimum wage job for people without any training, and they are not learning to cook while washing dishes either.
>There are plenty of occupations with apprenticeships where you do not get paid until you've got your foot firmly in the hallway past the door. For example, anything related
A good friend of mine was an apprentice union welder when we were younger. His hourly wage was quite good at that time, easily comparable to my tech wage with around the same experience. However, because of the union seniority, whenever there were work shortages, he was the first one cut. He'd regularly spend 1/4 to 1/3 of the year unemployed.
The reason why coding pays so well is because it's IQ-gated in a way that plumbing isn't. An 80 IQ person can be a competent plumber but couldn't do well in most coding jobs.
Uh, what? I was with you until that part. Coding pays so well because the operating costs are low and the returns/profits are enormous for companies. Tech companies are "cheap" in a way other companies can't be. IQ doesn't really have much to do with it. I know plumbers who are technically brilliant and I know very well paid coders who regularly say things that make me question their intelligence.
Unrelated. Coding pays well because of the tight labor supply compared to the demand. Companies NEVER direct excess value to labor. Extracting surplus value from labor is sorta the whole deal with capitalism.
> I know plumbers who are technically brilliant
Also not relevant. The argument is that it isn't necessary to be brilliant in order to be a competent plumber, not that it would actually preclude you.
> I know very well paid coders who regularly say things that make me question their intelligence.
Do you think that's actually a good measure of intelligence? How are you normalizing it against the population, people you don't work with, and/or plumbers generally?
The question to ask is, "taking a random sample of persons having 80 IQ, half of whom intend to pursue a career in software and half who intend to pursue a career in plumbing, what is the relative success rate (for some reasonable measure of 'success')?"
The plumber who works on my house is easily as smart as I am. A successful software engineering career has brought me financial independence but I'm not particularly brilliant. Most of the folks I've worked with in FAANG aren't either. We're just normal people making a living during a very lucky period for a specific type of nerd.
There are figures starting on page 80 in this document that support this claim: https://gwern.net/doc/iq/ses/2002-hauser.pdf
2. a job doesn’t necessarily pay well just because it does require a high IQ. Scientists in a research lab, professorships, academic research all likely have more intelligent people on average yet don’t pay as well as software engineering.
3. The study still shows a routine and reliable difference in average IQ between those who work in manual jobs/trades and those who work in science/engineering
Software engineering in the US is well paid, yes, partially due to economic effects and impact of software in and of itself, but it is, especially in FAANG, a profession with a very high concentration of people near the higher end of normal and above in the IQ spectrum, which leads to implicit selection criteria regarding intellectual capacities in employment.
In any event there is more recent data (1992-4) that confirms that the differential is still present. This is maybe unpleasant to confront because it's self-congratulatory and has obvious class implications, but it's also pretty obviously true.
See page 89 / figure 12:
https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~hauser/merit_01_081502_complete....
Most of the work we do is mundane. Lets not be dishonest.
And not be called in the middle of the night to fix broken stuff?
That last item might not apply so well to plumbers specifically ("my shitter broke!"), but it does to most other trades. :)
That is wildly incorrect.
This kind of snobbery toward the skilled trades needs to stop.
Edit:
https://quizlet.com/test/journeymans-plumbing-practice-test-...
A person with an IQ of 80 is not going to pass that test. He might get a job as a gofer, cleaner, general dogsbody, and "dude who has to carry all the heavy shit" for a plumbing contractor, but that doesn't make him a plumber.
Look at the chart on page 85
An IQ of around 80 or a little more is around the 25th percentile for a large portion of trades jobs.
There again, you (and they) are making the mistake of lumping all of "those people" together.
Someone with an IQ of 80 could probably be a decent drywaller or roofer, maybe a mediocre framing carpenter or painter.
A good plumber or good electrician?
Not a chance in hell.
You will be in a world of shit.
The US Army currently rejects applicants who score lower than 31 on the ASVAB (roughly 92 on the IQ scale, about 30th percentile). I’m pretty sure there are Army jobs that can be done with less need for intellect than that needed to be a plumber.
I don’t think that the lowest 10% of the population is generally capable of being a plumber. They are capable of doing some of the work done by plumbing companies, but the plumbing code is lengthy, in large part because people’s lives are literally at stake and the actual plumber (the license-holder) has to keep that straight in their head, apply the relevant parts to the varied job site requirements, turn blueprints into working plumbing systems, etc.
Plumbing is a lot more than remembering “shit flows downhill, don’t lick your fingers, Friday is payday.”
Sample plumber exam: https://www.tests.com/practice/plumbing-practice-test
Pretty rich by someone with a comment history littered with AI delusions:
> AI will largely replace software developers very soon, along with most professions.*
That doesn't strike me as a very intelligent take.
My opinion is also shared by a lot of intelligent researchers (like Hinton). Is he deluded, as you put it?
No, they aren't.
> Is he deluded, as you put it?
I don't know what each for your apostles has said. But anyone who claims that with just a hyped up LLM behind them is.
Low income neighbourhoods used to have a higher use of the Hays manuals for car repair. (this is something I read long ago and and I don't know if the manuals are still being published.)
Very few who learned to change their own oil and filters went on to become car mechanics.
I used to borrow them from the library when I was still working on my own car. I'm sure they were some of the most borrowed items.
If you are at all familiar with The Trades, you know that they have the apprenticeship system, which is a hell of a lot more intense than any bootcamp.
My plumber has a nicer house than I do.
The teach people to code movement, for whatever reason, portrays itself as being something everyone can and should "break into" in 10 weeks.
edit: Just realized the conflation between "get hired as a software developer for six-figures" vs literally "make learning how to code accessible for all". The latter makes way more honest sense.
I'm a big believer in the apprenticeship system, but I have found it to be profoundly unpopular, with software engineers (in the US), as can be noted by the reaction to my comment.
I consider my software engineering to be as much craft, as it is, vocation, and I had some good mentors.
He has his own business. He's a one-man shop, and damn good.
It is why we have chronic shortages of expertise in some software domains even though they are extremely well paid as specialties.
I wouldn't be surprised if actual software developers turned out to be a minority among the people who write code as part of their jobs.
The people that don't enjoy coding can still force themselves to do it... But they will find it lack luster. They are doing something they don't like, aren't too good at, for less money, at a job that took forever to find, etc etc. They won't have the same experience.
There are enough people that enjoy coding to tell everyone else "yeah this fucking rocks", and that certainly draws people in, but a lot of people will be disappointed with it.
There is a significant cohort of professional coders who enjoy the comfortable lifestyle who write very bad code. In fact, I'd venture to say there are far more of those than people who don't much enjoy the work but still do it well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic.
It's amazing how many people in tech can't imagine that the same people that can grind med school or IB or big4 accounting or white-shoe law somehow can't grind the same way in tech. Newsflash: the majority of people in FAANG are grinders not "passion coders".
Personally I hate this job but I'm very good at it and it was either law school with my 98% LSAT or tech. I picked tech because reading and writing briefs all day seemed somehow worse.
Who else would go to bat? Everyone can immediately tell who the grinders are, but you have to hire sometimes anyway.
i work on compilers+hardware so that's the backdrop here.
here's a real hypothetical for you (ie it happened but i'm not going to use specifics): our internal proprietary compiler is spitting out incorrect atomics instructions that deadlock our internal proprietary multi-core DNN accelerator. this incorrect code is downstream of a big, lucrative, customer's (you know which one) LLM model.
now the question: is it the "passion coder" that will solve this or the grinder?
Also in day-to-day work you don't really research the best solution for non-critical systems and instead implement the first solution that comes to mind. It will mostly never be touched once it is in production.
Over time seeing systems you implemented working is the largest reward for me. You have forgotten how they work anyway, so bad code is less of an issue then. And if you do look it up again, you might be angry about your stupid past self. Meh, at least it means you know better now.
IMO this is the natural mood of all industries. We don't seriously expect that accountants love doing tedious work over Excel? Telling people to fall in love with work is not a healthy attitude. Only a small subset of people in any profession can fall in love with work. Everyone else must make their lives outside of work.
I really hope this is true again later this year or next year but every junior developer I know has been unable to find any employment. From my network of people that have lost jobs over the last 6 months:
20+ years experience: found a job the same month 5 to 20 years experience: found a job within 4 months 0 to 5 years experience: have not been able to find an entry level position
Of course, this is anecdotal and my sample size is only my network. But I've also seen a lot of people sharing similar experiences here on HN, Reddit, and Blind.
Seniors' resume-driven-development is (even if unintentionally) making it much harder for any newcomers to break into the field.
I see this sentiment all of the time and it just doesn't register. What new "frameworks" have you had to learn in the past 10 years beyond React, Typescript, and maybe next?
This isn't a moral argument btw, i'm making sure of it because I used to be really into edtech [1]. There's no money in education, only its commercial outcomes. Education for learning is a public good.
bootcamps cannot deliver placement at scale because the premise is flawed. anyone and everyone cannot learn to be a professional coder in 10 weeks.
Anyway, so the coding bootcamps spread like wildfire because they implicitly or otherwise promise high paying careers that anyone can do, all over the internet, in 10 weeks, for a fraction of college tuition.
Not sure if Women who Code made any such promises. There are plenty of lower-paying coding jobs or jobs that involve coding as a useful skill, and a bootcamp can help with that. Or, maybe someone has the CS background but not the practical skills.
- Writing a screen saver on Window NT 4. Starting the screen-saver blue-screens the computer. Rebooting + loading Visual Studio takes several minutes. After several days of this, it turned out I forgot to zero out the structure you pass into every Win32 Create function.
- Was assigned to modify some old Fortran code (never claimed to know Fortran, just got the assignment) a long time ago. Got weird compile errors, couldn't figure it out, finally just started taking things out of the line until it worked. Found out it failed if I had a line of over 70 characters. What?! Turns out some of those old things of Fortran were still around...
- Spent a week tracking down why my C++ code was my crashing, due to a variable magically changing values. I was using Curl, and one of the calls requires a pointer to long and I passed a pointer to int, and the compiler didn't complain. Got so frustrated I ended up stepping through the assembly code to see what was happening (which is how I discovered it). Not fun. (Also, the constant recompiling and dockerizing desoldered the nvidia chip on my 2012 MBP, so this bug cost me a lot of money for a new laptop, too.)
- 3D meshing algorithm isn't working. Narrow it down to a small enough mesh to print out vertices before and after in a tractable quantity. Stare at changing outputs long enough to identify the problem.
- Emscripten WASM wants to load async, but exported global function uses the WASM to do work and should not have to know the details of how the WASM gets loaded. Coerce that into working for the browser. Also needs to work on Node 20 (limitation of 3rd party package) which doesn't have fetch(). But webpack for the browser happens to convert modules that use a module with dynamic import to dynamic modules themselves, even if the import is never called due to a platform check, which leads to 'import { func } from "..." resulting in func = undefined. Aargh.
That's not even counting the reverse-engineering of OS function requirements due to incomplete documentation, API functions due to almost no documentation, and problems due to causes you didn't even know existed.
Take an intro course of classroom/lecture, then sign on as a paid apprentice and continue your classroom-style education alongside the practical/on-the-job training until you’re fully licensed.
Other trades have similar structures as well.
Anyone can cobble together more or less working instructions, but doing so correctly, eh.
I was a minor supporter, in honor of my mother, who got started with coding around 1950.
It's weird... when I was growing up, the only coders I knew were women -- my mother and a friend of mine whose mother was also some kind of programmer/data analyst. Later in life I was a little surprised to find the field was overwhelmingly dominated by men. I guess it's not surprising I found this wrong at an intuitive level.
I knew already that there was a huge divide in salary and culture between the highly paid software engineers at coastal startups + FAANG companies and all the folks that run critical infrastructure for state and local governments, health systems, and boring enterprise companies, but I wonder if the people in those roles tend to skew older and female too.
As an aside, I've heard coworkers at my previous coastal tech jobs express sentiments to the effect that the people described above who mostly work on Windows stacks aren't real engineers, or that there are good reasons for the vast pay disparities between these critical infrastructure folks and people working on Uber-but-for-clowns or whatever, and I think it's really silly.
If gender differences in attitudes to risk are true (at least to some extent) then the difference is explainable, e.g. startups are high risk/reward hence attract males; government low risk/reward will attract females.
Engineers like the ones you describe have more positive impact on the world in one day than I have had in the several years that I’ve been doing this.
I often dream about leaving big tech entirely and working solely on legacy software in an overlooked but important domain.
I guess the grass is always greener and all that.
They were almost all women, and they drove nice cars.
As for the community, even though Women Who Code is closing, there are plenty of others.
My experience tells me that this is quite a male way of looking at things. How many times have you heard "we need representation" from women, whether it be in films or board rooms or elsewhere. They're telling us something, role models matter more to them, for whatever reason. (In general, of course.)
If we could find out why some people need role models more then perhaps they could be helped to find that inspiration regardless of there being a role model available or not.
In the workplace? Some men would love to see the normalisation of male nurses, male kindergarten teachers and the like. Perhaps they're not as loud because these jobs don't command six figure salaries?
Perhaps, given that there is a bimodal distribution of masculine and feminine traits across males and females, I could reformulate my statement and make it more precise: those that are of a more feminine expression of being might require or feel they require prior representation in order to give younger people in the same group the confidence to try for such a position. Males (in general, due to masculinity) do not, which is why they do not see the need for any representation (humans tend to think everyone thinks like them).
The real problem is in how both views could be reconciled - that of needing representation versus the more male view of acquiring position through competition (and thus implied competence). Hence, we have the DEI/affirmative action debate.
My own view is that competition should win over representation, but that everyone should be shown how they can compete effectively. Doesn't the history of sport - of competition - show us that every shape or skill can provide a competitive advantage in different contexts, so the key is to get a team to make those contexts arise more often and thus improve one's chances of winning?
In short, show girls how to compete and remove the need to patronise them as women. Maybe that's me being male, but I at once believe in merit and competition, and in women's ability to be effective in most roles (as I believe about men).
I would guess most of that comes from women seemingly really liking stuff like Dateline, murder mystery podcasts, etc.
On the other hand, our high school "girl in CS" poster child got into top colleges playing that angle before it was very common, and she didn't know how to code and didn't go into CS. IIRC her achievement was app GUI mockups, implemented by someone else in our class.
People who are good at a particular skill/craft just do it and call it a day. They don't have time to talk about the craft because all their time is spent doing the craft and making money.
People who are less good, or outright incapable of doing the craft instead try the content creation/influencer angle, where success is defined making it look like you are successful at the craft, regardless of whether you actually do it.
The odds of success in media-related roles such as content creation or "influencing" are so low that any craft will on average pay more, so if you are actually capable of doing a craft it makes more sense to do it than merely talk about it, therefore I highly suspect those who lean towards the talking angle do so because they can't actually succeed at the doing angle.
The craft can be coding/software engineering, AI, or even old-school trades like woodworking, electrical/plumbing/etc. As an example, there's a UK-based electrical contractor with a YouTube channel with quite high production value, expensive top-of-the-line tools, etc that is even selling courses/workshops about running an electrician business, and yet recently it turned out that their actual business was sinking and they had to lay people off - good on them to have the balls to admit it but it shows you the truth behind the whole operation.
I've been jamming on Python & Django, and found that Django Girls has such excellent guides & tutorials - not just about web applications, but computer systems and programming in general.
Browse the site & check them out.
Has anyone experienced their events & workshops (example: "Install parties"). Sounds fun!
Resources are important, but this is a mission that so many people are so passionate about, that I'm very confused about this, especially with how sudden it appears. The WWC chapter organizers I know were blindsided by this.
* https://womenwhocode.com/about shows VMware, The Home Depot, DraftKings, Boeing, SiriusXM currently. Of those VMware is the biggest pure tech/coding company on that list (IMO).
When you inevitably fail because you can't fix everything the activists leave and you're left with a ruin where there used to be a useful civic organization.
It's like when I buy stock in Acme which produces widgets, I don't want them starting up or acquiring a doodad business. If I wanted to invest in a doodad business I would do that directly.
No idea if that's the case with Women Who Code though.
And what are the insurmountable challenges?
The macro environment is not lending itself well to organizations that are not profitable or have a lot of cash on hand (for non-profits). With the overall trend in layoffs in tech combined with the difficulty in hiring - I can 100% see this being a major problem to their overall numbers leading to hard truths about fundraising.
I've been coding since 1983, and have watched the demographics of our industry change from almost exclusively white male, to a pretty diverse lot. Some of my favorite "go to" blogs and whatnot, are run by women. Their gender doesn't matter a whit to me. They are good nerds.
Broadening the base is always an advantage. You have a larger pool of talent, from which to draw, but it's also a lagging indicator. It takes a while for the culture to establish, and the educational system to start delivering qualified candidates.
And by the way I have been coding 20+ years and currently work as a Software Architect. The tech environment can be deeply sexist and organizations dedicated to keeping women in tech help ensure that girls have role models for future jobs.
Even if they could continue doing Y which was what they did years ago before they started doing more things.
But sometimes the organization has gotten too big to reliably downsize again.
A lack of funding that the board does not see a viable avenue to correct in a timeframe relevant to continuing operations is an insurmountable challenge.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=40082114&goto=item?id=...
This is a part of our culture that I'm really sad to see going away.
My point is that I'm surprised that the loss of a single sponsor would make-or-break an organization like this.
I say this as someone that supports their mission, formerly helped run an affiliated club (shoutout EMich WiCS!) and donates annually, or used to anyway.