Comment by pifflesnort | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pifflesnort | Hacker News Reader

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Software has apparently become some sort of social cause, instead of an engineering discipline, and my patience with this constant caterwauling about it is at its end.

I too am dealing with death by a thousand cuts of unprofessionalism:

- People swearing in presentations, and then people whining about swearing in presentations.

- Presentations that aren't backed by research or papers or anything of particular engineering note, but instead are a platform for social butterfly developers to build a larger popularity platform.

- Conferences named after beer drinking.

- Constant whining about some sort of offense that someone dealt you, or some social situation that you were unable to handle like an adult.

- Constant wheel re-invention of 1990s engineering dressed up in fancy websites with funny names like "unicorn" or 'nyan rainbow cat daemon'.

- Conference blow-ups about things that SHOULD NOT MATTER. Like dongles. Multiple people losing their jobs and articles in CNN.

- Drama-fests about workplace behavior, cancelled talks, "triggers", t-shirts that make people cry.

I'm sick of this. THIS is what a real conference with real papers look(ed|s) like:

http://static.usenix.org/events/usenix01/technical.html

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/tech-schedule/atc12_proc...

Maybe this is just what happens when a fringe group like technology is re-integrated into the mainstream, but I would like to go just one day without hearing about some other act of stupidity, sexism, tweets, or social anxiety, and instead focus on what actually matters, which is real, hard, respectful, careful, and attentive ENGINEERING.

Software has apparently become some sort of social cause, instead of an engineering discipline

I liked this.

My patience with this constant caterwauling about it is at its end.

I didn't like this, because it implies that the problem is the caterwauling. You then go on to make it clear that the problem is that people can't handle the industry or the culture, not the industry or the culture.

Well, the correct way forward is for everyone to suck it fucking up and start acting like adults, including respecting each other. Some of that includes being less dramatic about problems, but there is also a HUGE responsibility to eliminate those problems in the first place.

Absolutely nobody should be losing jobs over dongle jokes, but then again, nobody should be making dongle jokes. This isn't an either-or blame situation, just an observation that everybody wins if we don't make dongle jokes.

Let's start with a base assertion: Human beings are wired and programmed to reproduce.

Yes? Everybody agree? Assuming I didn't lose anybody there.

Onward: tricky business about sex, particularly from men (who I think are programmed in a much more culturally-unfriendly way when it comes to sex; multiple partners, ogling, and so forth), is unfortunately going to happen. Kind of like farting. It's noble that most of us can keep it under control in the workplace. Guarantee that even the quietest, most reserved, shy, never-an-HR-issue male employee, even ones who openly fight for feminist causes here, has occasionally looked at cleavage and thought, "boy, those are great tits." Equally so if the man is gay, just the opposite gender that produces that reaction. It happens. Everybody does it. Women do it too. You are programmed to admire the reproductive and aesthetic traits of the gender(s) that arouse(s) you. You shouldn't be ashamed of it.

Nothing so far has been controversial, I hope. I might have lost a certain group at the end of the last paragraph. Let me finish quickly while they start typing:

It's unreasonable to expect both men and women, biologically, to completely suppress sex in any form whatsoever. That culture expects us to is, I think, a bug in culture(+). There is something broken here on both sides of the gender divide, and I don't know that we understand as a culture how to fix it. Through some horrible perfect storm of social issues among the average programmer, I think we just see this problem amplified to the moon and back. I've been to construction sites. Visit one sometime. Talk to the workers.

I feel like for countless years culture has been at war with humanity. We shame sex across the board, we shame farting and burping, we shame natural odors, we shame hair in certain places for certain genders, we shame vulgarity, we shame picking our noses... the list goes on and on and on. Where's the culture that understands its members are human beings with flaws?

Maybe, just maybe, I feel like political correctness and attempting to 'fix' human beings has done more harm than good. Maybe we're acting appropriately and reacting inappropriately. Fair point?

(+) The source of this bug is a patch committed by a religious working group, and that patch should be reverted, but that's an argument for another time.

'suck it fucking up and start acting like adults, including respecting each other.'

Agreed.

'nobody should be making dongle jokes'

What have we come to where I can't sit with a friend and shoot the shit about dongles? I can tell you that some of my best 'that's what she said' moments were in the midst of another woman, who had some of the best of all.

'What have we come to where I can't sit with a friend and shoot the shit about dongles?'

Well, it sounds to me like you've come to a professional environment, such as a workplace, or a technical conference.

Before computing, I worked in motion pictures as a lighting director. I'm credited, and my name is in IMDB. You've very likely seen some of my work if you're a fan of the indie circuit. I pivoted to computing after six films because I found it a more interesting line of work and it's something I've done since I was a kid (I trained on lighting later in life).

That gives me the perspective of two careers: one full of primadonnas, constant whining, arguing over trivialities, pampering, and bizarre celebrity status, and the other one being motion pictures.

(Cheap joke aside, I found film a more calming career. I certainly came home angry less.)

At least from my perspective (of watching internet fallout of bad thing said at 'con), it seems Open Source is worse than Closed Source about chauvinistic comments. Does that jive with your assessment?

I narrow it down to the "typical Web startup" community, whatever that means. I won't call that Silicon Valley, because Silicon Valley is a little more amorphous than that.

I've heard from traditional game developers that it's worse over there (is it, folks?), but I have a feeling if you step far enough away from "typical Web startup", you find branches of engineering where bros can't study PHP for a weekend and become a CTO, then rage about tits after their third Red Bull.

You've got a good point there. Engineering is about making stuff, exploiting physics principles to make completely new stuff, and making stuff "faster better cheaper". Nowhere does it say "Make it better if you're a Man". Nowhere does it say an engineer _has_ to be male.

In cases like this, I think a bit of the hacker manifesto, and some of the things it alludes to.

" "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all..."

And we enter the world of IRC, email, and text based chat of all sorts. I do not see your sexuality when I talk here via HN. Nor do I see your income level, social status, gender status, religion, political bent, or anything else, unless you tell us. What I know, is: You speak English, you have a computer in front of you, and you're on the Internet.

This is probably the best comment I've ever read on HN, and it sums up my feelings about a vast majority of complaint threads on this forum. Especially this:

"Software has apparently become some sort of social cause, instead of an engineering discipline."

Nascent awareness of sexism and corresponding initiatives to deal with it aren't something that's limited to software at all. Science, academia, and the skeptic/atheist community are all in the midst of similar changes right now as well.

People make software for other people. We do it in the context of a society of people. That is our industry.

There are times when you can ignore the people and focus on the machines. But only for a little while, and only if you do a lot of careful work before and after.

You know, Microsoft may not be "cool," but heck if I'm not thrilled to be in a work place concerned with

1) Engineering

2) Business

And that's about it.

It's interesting, that being the case as you say, that the industry has turned so hard on Microsoft in most aspects. I might even upgrade from "interesting" to "telling" or, more bravely, "damning" for that observation.

It's pretty simple, honestly. For an entire day, just make things. I've found that the noise in our industry is pretty easy to ignore with minimal loss to signal by merely choosing when to partake. If you want to avoid all those things you list, it basically means detaching from the social components of the industry ... one example of which is HN.

I think we may have lost that battle. People are interested in 'rockstars' and 'ninjas' that can make shiny things and contribute to a hype cycle long enough to get acquired.

It's hard to tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but you know what? I kind of agree with you.

Conferences has become more about getting a free trip, blowing off steam and asserting yourself in a group than making good software. A bunch of people with similar skill-sets meet and agree that their particular technology choice is great or not so great. That's not how you build great software. We figured this out 20 years ago in the demo scene and it's still true today. Some people are starting to realize this and are calling not only for more women, but for more diversity overall.

This talk really says it better than I can and it should be 'required reading' for anyone in the community: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAOxGjNbp_Y

Oh. I thought conferences were a way of networking yourself a better job at your current employer's expense.

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