Stop telling women they just need to know how to code
finance.fortune.cnn.com
finance.fortune.cnn.com
Men supporting the notion that their female significant other can contribute as an equal partner financially or be the bread-winner of the household....leaving the choice of taking care of elderly parents up to women.
Ok, sounds good. No one owes anyone anything, you can do as you like with your life. No social obligations.
Having supportive social and economic practices for those who do chose to have children and take care of aging family members, which will need to be reinforced by some body such as companies or governments.
Wait what? So non-mothers owe mothers "support", socially and economically?
I'd love to know the philosophical underpinnings of this odd combination of individualism and collectivism. I do hope it's something more interesting than simply "the universe should make my chosen lifestyle easier!"
(Incidentally, it's incoherent articles like this one which have convinced me that more people should learn philosophy. I describe it as incoherent simply because it has a gaping philosophical hole, and no attempt whatsoever is made to explain it.)
That's all it is, as long as that lifestyle is staying home and having kids. Otherwise you're a selfish bitch and looked down upon.
Just because it includes collective reasoning and is not libertarian doesn't make it self-contradicting.
For example: Free k-12 school. That's a $3-10k/year subsidy right there (taxpayers spend $11,073 on this $3k-$10k subsidy - what a deal!).
Another example: Many states require paid maternity leave (is this Federal now?). That's a pretty massive subsidy!
Another example: We do have super high rates of child support in the Anglosphere, you know. Look to France & others for more sane approaches to this subject and more sane rates. (France & sane? I'm serious!).
Where does this all end? What level of subsidization is sufficient?
I bet someone even responds to me with a 'for the children' comment. You watch.
How is free K-12 a subsidy to mothers? If anything, public education is a huge subsidy to employers.
Also, child support mandates in the U.S. are not high and in many cases don't come close to covering half the costs of child rearing.
Say the father makes $45,000/year (far above the national median individual income). His net income is Illinois is around $2,700 per month. His child support obligation is $540/month. That's $6,500 per year, or about half the annual average cost of raising a child in the urban midwest according to this calculator: http://money.cnn.com/interactive/pf/cost-of-children/?iid=EL.
That level is already a huge subsidy from the mother to the father. The mother and father pay half the expenses of raising the child, but on top of that the mother takes on all of the domestic work necessary to raise the kid, and also shoulders the full career hit that comes from having childcare responsibilities. As someone who has tried to outsource a lot of domestic childcare duties, let me say that the market value of the domestic labor provided solely by the mother in this example far outweighs the total income of the median male.
How do those poor French mothers survive?
>If anything, public education is a huge subsidy to employers.
If left to their own devices, I doubt employers would choose to spend $11k/yr/pupil on fingerpainting and remedial math.
1) inexpensive municipal day care
2) tax breaks for families employing in-home child care workers
3) universal free preschool beginning at age 3.
As to your last point I'm assuming you're implying that all women learn in K-12 is painting fingernails and remedial math, in which case, fuck you.
Re: Social safety net:
That's why child support stops after the child turns three? (that's a joke for those who don't know it continues to 18)
Why would child support stop at 3 just because there's free preschool? You still have to provide all the other necessities of life like, you know, food and clothing.
As for employers, finger-painting is pre-K, which isn't universally free in the states. Starting in Kindergarten, education starts with basic literacy. The production of a literate and numerate workforce is a huge subsidy to employers. The crack about remedial math actually undermines your position: its remedial math that creates the huge population of people who have enough basic numeracy to operate a cash register, thus driving the cost of cashiers down to almost nothing. Also, the high supply of literate and numerate labor drives down the wages of each marginal employee, allowing employers to capture a higher percentage of the value generated by the employee. If an employer makes $25 per hour off of someone he pays $10, and public education makes that person employable, then right there the employer benefits mord from education than the employee. Finally, remember that in the states education is funded by property taxes, which are largely paid for by families and not businesses. So families pay most of that $11k per year, not businesses.
And leaving aside the benefit to employers, why do you call K12 a subsidy to mothers, rather than both fathers and mothers equally?
Please start by listing any necessary moral premises. For example, collective guilt, individual freedom, and how to determine which collectives these principles apply to (assuming of course that these principles are what underlies your position). In the US there are 2^{300 million} possible collectives, but you seem to have it narrowed down to 1. How?
I didn't claim that it was self contradicting because it was non-libertarian. I claimed that it seemed contradictory without further explanation because early on she appeals to individualism (when it benefits women making her particular life choices) but later on appeals to collective responsibility (when it benefits women making her particular life choices).
There might be some consistent underlying principle and it might not be contradictory. I just can't figure out what it is, which is why I asked the question.
...supportive social and economic practices for those who do chose to have children...need to be reinforced by some body such as companies or governments.
So why did women start becoming doctors? Is it because we went out of our way to create special programs, incentives, interest, and reverse discrimination for them?
No.
Women became doctors because they wanted to, and now sexism is at a point where it is kind of pathetic to not become a doctor because you are afraid of any sexist reactions you might encounter. I'd say the same applies for computer science. Women will come into the discipline over time (especially since now there are more software engineers than there are farmers in the US), no need artificially manipulate the evolution of the job market.
Interesting point, though I consider things like "stop being sexist assholes" not to be an artificial manipulation of the evolution market but just basic civilized behavior which benefits men and women alike.
It's one thing to fight against inequality. Its another to demand that the scales be tipped in your favor.
If you really need examples of actions that do qualify as sexist assholery, let me know and I'll dig some up. They aren't exactly hard to find.
That's interesting.
Say you've got a ship. If you perturb the ship by tilting it slightly starboard or port, and then remove the perturbation, it will return to sitting upright. Most ships are designed to have a stable equilibrium along the axis of the keel. Simply removing any perturbation will return the ship to the upright equilibrium.
Now, say you perturb the ship by applying a deflection to the rudder, tending to turn the ship to a new heading. When you remove the perturbation, the ship will straighten itself out, and stop turning, but will not return to its original heading. While most ships are designed to self-equillibriate to traveling straight, each possible heading is itself a stable equilibrium.
The "equality is treating people as equals" viewpoint assumes that the world behaves like the first case. You remove the discriminatory force, and you can assume that society will return itself to an upright equilibrium. But that's just an assumption. The world could very well behave like the second case. Even if you remove the discriminatory force, you can still be headed in the wrong direction!
The experience of at least two professions suggests that the world behaves more like the second case. In the 1950's and 1960's, there was extreme discrimination against women in medicine and law. In the 1970's through 1990's, both medical schools and law schools took affirmative measures to increase enrollment of women. And it was a smashing success: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/assets_c....
The key takeaway, though, is that the affirmative action moved the society to a new stable equilibrium. Today, there is no real advantage to being a woman when applying to medical school or law school. But the enrollment is stable because the new situation is self-perpetuating.
It has never been about teaching women to code, except at the bare minimum "I can get a job at a giant company where I'll write 2000 lines of code in a year."
It's about right clicking with your mouse to see if there are any other options available. Googling for your answer before you ask someone else. Asking questions on stackoverflow. Hacking and reading at night to figure out something that may or may not be for work. Recompiling the source code to make it bend to your will.
There is a price to be paid, and it doesn't have to do with money. As was said thousands of years ago, "There is no royal road to Geometry." It is the same today. All these solutions that don't involve paying that price are destined to fail. College age is too late. Middle school may be the last opportunity for any real percentage of women to be affected. It's not about completing classes.
That's me on the AUTHORS list for Google Chrome's v8 engine [0] (I ported it, and Node.js, to Solaris if your curious), so I'm at least competent enough to do that.
Anyway, that's proof that it can be done, and at a level that make a difference somewhere. :)
That said, I don't like to code, so maybe that has something to do with why I started late. I was into computers from pre-school onwards, though.
[0] https://code.google.com/p/v8/source/browse/branches/bleeding...
edit - I mean for large numbers. The exceptions are always wonderful to see.
another edit - I also don't think that most programming is about programming, it's about figuring out how things work. Just learning to program doesn't help with programming very much. "Figuring out how things work" needs a name, and that's what needs to be taught.
I'm not sure I agree... many people discover things in college that they've never heard of and subsequently major in. But it's at least debatable.
Anyone can get a job doing coding from learning it at any age.
I don't think that we see a huge number of failed programmers ending up as insurance salesmen or financial advisors because they blew out a knee.
Wait, what? 2000 lines of code per year? Having never worked in a "giant" company, is that typical? I do that in about 10 days at a normal pace, and can do it in five if I'm really pushing it to meet a deadline or whatever.
Anyway, I thought 4K LOC/month was pretty standard for programmers of all stripes, or ~50K LOC/year. Is it really just 2K?
/shocked
About the only time you could link LOC to productivity is in the very early stages of a project - where some type of visible progress is needed to plan for a possible feature set for the release.
Sarcastic statements are considered to be negative blaming statements. They don't help the conversation.
> It's about right clicking with your mouse to see if there are any other options available. Googling for your answer before you ask someone else. Asking questions on stackoverflow. Hacking and reading at night to figure out something that may or may not be for work. Recompiling the source code to make it bend to your will.
These are things people can be trained to do.
The real problem here is that software engineering is still in the dark ages. We overvalue people who have been "hacking since middle school" because we can't systematically articulate the skills a good programmer should have and how we can train people in those skills. But this is purely a function of the immaturity of the field. There is nothing magic about software development that requires it to be perpetually stuck in the dark ages of ad-hoc craft.
Nothing specifically Dark Ages about this. I think that's true with many fields. It's the theme of the child prodigy. A painter, a violinist, an athelete would all be given special notice if the excelled at these skills at a young age. One would expect an excellent engineer to grow up playing with legos or building toy bridges.
Perhaps this is a practice that doesn't do us any good, and should be done away with, but it is not at all limited to programming.
What's "dark ages" is grouping programmers together with painters or violinists or athletes rather than other engineers. It's the result of not having a systematic theory of the skills necessary for the profession, and not having a way of taking people with the requisite mathematical aptitude and instilling those skills in a formal way.
There's a reason why most top professional athletes started their sports at a very young age. It isn't coincidence or societal convention.
I would expect that all levels of athletic performers would benefit likewise - although they won't end up in the top 0.01%.
We like to flatter ourselves and think that programming isn't a skill like athletic performance, but that's just because it makes us feel better since it's harder to measure.
Violinists, painters (presumably the artist type, not the outside-of-my-house type), and athletes are in career paths vastly different from engineers, doctors, or lawyers. There are very few people who actually support themselves with careers in the former.
Even though I have been coding since 2nd grade, I'd hate for that to become some kind of career filter to keep people out.
And much like the artist or actor, but probably unlike the lawyer or doctor, I'd probably pursue my technical passions (at least as a hobby) even if there was very little money in it.
The point is, if you want to understand how computers work, you'll put in the time and effort and experimentation that's required to learn that. And you'll be better for the experience. If you aren't comfortable experimenting with your computer, you won't have the experience of doing something really cool with it. You won't have the experience needed to understand at an innate level what is going on. I couldn't explain half of what I know about computers. It's just simple familiarity. It can't easily be taught except through trial and error and experience.
Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish, or give a man a fishing pole and let the man figure out how to fish on his own. Which one embodies the hacker spirit more?
I'm just saying you're missing the point. The point is, passion can't be taught, only encouraged. People hacking since middle school are probably passionate about it. That doesn't make them better than someone who became passionate in college, minus the decade head-start. It's not about teaching people to become programmers, it's about getting people interested in experimenting and learning on their own.
And if that takes a degree of well-meaning but mostly awkward affirmative action until the majority of brogrammers have either retired or drank/snorted/driven themselves to destruction, that's just the price of changing the status quo IMO.
I used to think otherwise, and all of these heavy-handed efforts to pull women into Computer Science once made me roll my eyes at their ineffectiveness, but all I had to do was listen to how a lot of my younger co-workers still judge women. Same $h!+ new decade alas...
You did a great job of explaining the unease I'm starting to feel around the whole "hacking since middle school" ideal. Besides the gender and class bias that result, it's just lazy thinking.
I say this, of course, as a straight white male who has been hacking since elementary school.
I know this is probably not going to go over well on HN given the connections to VC's but a major part of the problem is that "tech founders" means businesses caught in the VC exit strategy. But I think a lot of the really disruptive businesses of tomorrow are going to be lifestyle businesses, and if you want to attract women to coding, I think that lifestyle businesses are a better deal for most people. The potential payoffs are lower, it is true, but the freedom is higher, and the security is better in many cases. And with a lifestyle business, the freedom to have a family, and to integrate family and work time, makes the challenges that face child-rearing men and women (but they affect women at a younger age) easier to handle.
I think that as one starts to show that these lifestyle businesses are really viable in technology, that we will see women come (and truth be told, probably become the majority of coders in open source software).
I wouldn't really call this a women's issue, so much as a universal issue for people of all backgrounds.
Having a family simply requires a drastic lifestyle shift no matter what (well, if you intend on being a decent spouse and/or parent, at least), as well as certain sacrifices to one's career.
I like the proposal of lifestyle technology businesses, though I'm not entirely sure how they would work. Unless you're self-sufficient, in which case it's never been a problem.
The point is that you don't have the same kinds of relentless pressure in that environment that you do in a vc-backed start-up. Those are different environments. If you are running one, great. I wish you the best of luck.
Men spend about 33% as much time on house work and about 42% as much time on childcare as women do.
This is true. However two things:
1. Men can delay that shift longer than women and still have families, and
2. The burdens are more flexible for men even at their worst. Men can, for example, reschedule paternity leave shifting it around by a few days in a crisis. Women cannot do the same for maternity leave.
So the burdens are not the same even when you get rid of social questions of family structure and gender impacts of that.
http://pando.com/2014/01/02/from-coding-to-the-catwalk-this-...
You know what someone should make in 2014? A website scrapes/mirrors HN, but only the topics about gender and race that get "disappeared"(made undiscoverable) from HN in under 20mins.
I don't know if there's a certain group of people flagging these types of articles for whatever reason, or if pg/admins actively want to avoid this kind of social discussion (maybe it's too 'controversial' or tends to degenerate too easily?) or something else.
But you're exactly right -- a gender/race article suddenly jumps from the #10 spot, to third-page, effectively completely killing discussion. It does feel an awful lot like censorship, and it seems unfortunate.
And because of it, pretty much nobody except you will probably ever see this comment. Oh well.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885123 - Homeless coder starts app
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6365495 - Africans genetically more corrupt?
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6448409 - Rick Ross's history
4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6857739 - Nelson Mandela dies
5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6035263 - (Most obvious)Resume with black vs white name
6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6902563 - racist+sexist mindset in Harvard
7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6907915 - Homeless coder finishes app
8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6975732 - BlackGirlsCode event
Instead of having a discussion on what is probably the single most important factor affecting gender inequality in tech, PG was forced to defend. For these reasons, gender discussions have become somewhat pointless. There is no place for candidness. Everyone is trying to be politically correct and to say things that people want to hear.
*Most of the arguments against this seemed to rely on exceptions, random examples and personal experience, and not on stats.
The entire premise to this article is based on a misled expectation. The expectation is that there should be a billion dollar startup founded by a woman. Who set that expectation and why is it reasonable?
I'm a man, and I don't aspire to build a billion dollar company. I aspire to be insanely happy, and love what I do for a living. And travel a bit. Given we're entering a new age of humanity, shouldn't we be spending clock cycles on figuring out how to be happier, instead of just wanting more stuff?
BTW, 'more stuff' is not inclusive of 'fair and equal treatment'. We all deserve to be treated equally.
Right, but so maybe the goal shouldn't be that women should be able to do the same... what if it could instead stop being socially acceptable for men to focus wholeheartedly on their career?
Think of all the men who wish they'd spent more time with their kinds, instead of at the office. More time with their wives. Think of all the divorces caused by the long hours and stress of management and C-suite jobs. Even if men want to spend more time with their families, it's often just not socially acceptable, within the culture of their company/industry. Men who take full advantage of "maternity" leave aren't exactly looked at as promotion material, all too often. And think of how much of life they miss out on.
We hold up Steve Jobs as a model of shining corporate success. But it's become public knowledge that he wasn't exactly so shining when it came to being a good dad.
Maybe it's not just necessarily the mindset around women that needs to change -- maybe it's the mindset around men.
Founding is barely about learning how to code. It's more about human relationships and networking. And as long as the image of a female entrepreneur keeps been looked down at, this problem will keep rising. May be it's not as easy to see in USA but I've seen it clearly in my country (Mexico) in small-medium businesses conventions and with clients.
The bit in brackets is referring to compiler bootstrapping.
By this logic, I guess white women are (politically) disadvantaged compared to black (men) today?
It was a question.