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Comment by inmygarage | Hacker News Reader

I am a female born in 1983 and have always been deeply interested in computers, but have nonetheless felt inexplicably out of place for it. I was in advanced math classes my entire life and placed out of calculus in college. I took a summer programming class at a different university in 2000 and fell in love with programming. But when I got back to school, I took another CS class that was exactly as described in this article. I can't quite articulate the feelings of isolation and frustration I felt in that class, but they were strong enough to drive me away from CS and engineering for a long time.

I have a History degree.

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>I can't quite articulate the feelings of isolation and frustration I felt in that class

Male nerd here. My god, I couldn't get along with 90% of my class. They all seemed to be disagreeable in a "technically correct is the best kind of correct" way, but also with lots of arbitrary fanboyism and a complete lack of basic social skills or outside interests. Not to mention the petty competitiveness and complete lack of any team player skills, and usually a huge amount of attitude dismissing these types of skills as useless.

Meh, I suffered through it (and through many coworkers of this type) as the price of business.

I'm not sure why women assume its all roses for men in these fields and classes. I dislike jerks as much as you. Heck, when we do hiring, we aim for social and inter-personal skills first and technical skills last. Its easy to find a difficult non-team player misanthrope who knows x, y, z. He's just hell to work with. I'll take the easier to work with the person who knows just x and can eventually learn y and z.

Also, this female dominated computer industry of 1970s and 80s has been shown to be something of a myth. A lot of those degrees and jobs weren't programming heavy and in practice were mere data entry or computer operator jobs, not necessarily coding. As the industry changed and those jobs moved towards administrative categories so did the women with them. IT departments dont have a team of data entry specialists anymore. They're put elsewhere, or have been eliminated altogether. If anything we have more female coders, who actually code, than ever.

> Male nerd here. My god, I couldn't get along with 90% of my class. They all seemed to be disagreeable in a "technically correct is the best kind of correct" way

You got off easy.

I went to a top engineering school out of high school, and can't tell you how many times I was berated, called names, and cursed at for being an "idiot" who didn't know things like the resolution of certain VGA modes by heart (except in that particular case, the other guy was wrong.)

I do understand that this would be more intimidating were I a woman, but still.

I think the responses you're getting here are indicative of the environment. "Oh, you felt uncomfortable? That shows you're weak, because I was uncomfortable and I didn't quit. Not my problem, sucker!"

You're not alone. I've been in those environments. I have not battled on to conquer, although I've continued in math and computers. I have kept my head down, avoided a lot of people, and cultivated only those who I like to work with. Once I have a base of nice people I can deal with in a field, plus some competence, I feel free to roam further. But it's not in my personality to sacrifice my mental health or happiness for the pleasure of hanging around with assholes or people who don't want me around. I've made some peace with that.

Hanging around mostly with people who can work with me respectfully also leaves me the energy to deal with the others now and then.

>I can't quite articulate the feelings of isolation and frustration I felt in that class...

Right. And there's the difference. Many of your classmates were feeling the exact same thing, but for whatever reason they decided to stick with it.

If you really love programming, it does not matter what other people do. You learn more alone in front of a computer, solving things, than in a classroom. Youn do not need a degree to hack.

What jumps to mind, and what few people ever want to discuss, is that one of the possible differences between men and women - that women seek out highly social jobs / career paths at a higher rate than men - might be in play. That is, that women find it harder to suffer through the loneliness that can come with being a hacker.

I spent a lot of years working by myself, entirely alone. It never bothered me, all I wanted to do was learn and build. I've never met a woman in my entire life that would have been ok with that isolation.

Same here, I dropped off of Informatics Engineering (that's CS engineering in Italy) partly for the same reasons, even though I had very good grades and liked it. I ended up working in the field anyway. I ended up getting a BoA while working, though. Plot twist: I'm a male. That's not to say that your examples doesn't apply, far from it. But as someone else commented, the environment on those courses... wow, that's really far from the culturally stimulating CS environment I envisioned before enrolling.

> feelings of isolation and frustration

I am a female born in 1987 and have similarily been interested in programming for a long time.

After reading several comments, I'm getting some sense of resentment that you were driven away from your passion while others were able to stay on course despite similar obsticles. I in no way wish to diminish their accomplishments or claim any secret insight into any hardships they had to overcome or did not have to overcome; however I feel there are some aspects that are unique to the female experience of 'isolation and frustration' in learning how to program that I wanted to clarify:

Starting off, it is not at all unusual to be the only female in the class/room. The reason this is horrible is not because there's no one to talk to or connect with, but because it's completely impossible to shake off the feeling that everyone is watching you, very closely, all the time. Having this constantly on your mind hurts your concentration, your productivity, and your ability to freely explore ideas without judgement - a very important part of learning. This is something that the female needs to come to terms with and learn to be comfortable in her own space regardless.

Second - and this one hurts to type because I can feel the coming backlash - you programming gentlemen can be a bit too... helpful. When a female does need extra help in understanding something, help is appreciated and needed! However, when several people, usually male, come at you at once wanting to help it can be a negative experience. As good intentioned as this is, it is incredibly frustrating for me for three reasons: 1) the more people that want to help only fortifies the pervasive paranoia discussed earlier, 2) the more people that want to help me highlights my knowledge gap and is incredibly discouraging, and 3) gentlemen, when helping a lady in need of something, you tend to get a sense of bravado and in an effort to show us something, you end up just doing it for us. When this happened to me, I not only missed out on an opportunity to do a task myself and learn, it also served to fortify the sense of "move aside, young lady, and let the men take care of this." Furthermore, once a female smarts up to this enough to be brave enough to refute said help, she will often do so in an unappealing way until she learns what gets the best response. I want to point out that I don't blame yall males at all, and this is something a female will need to learn to deal with.

For the record, I stuck with it and got my CS degree. I think this has more to do with stubbornness than fortitude.

All this said, however, I've come to be pretty blind to the gender gap in my day to day and try to shy away from these types of conversations because there is no winner. Starting any field of study will have its own set of unique challenges that every student needs to overcome. Right now, for females as well as males in software, one of those challenges is how to treat the gender gap. I'm pretty much over it.

As someone who has always thrived around computers and programming tools, I wish I also had a History degree. Some of the most interesting stuff I have ever read is history related.

> have always been deeply interested in computers, but have nonetheless felt inexplicably out of place for it

You know what stopped me from becoming a professional programmer? It wasn't the fact that I didn't get to study CS in high-school, nor that I didn't have a PC until I was a university student, nor the lack of Internet access at home until I was 20+ years old, nor the language barrier (English is my third language), nor being limited to free resources by my finances.

Nothing. Nothing stopped me from pursuing my interest.

> I can't quite articulate the feelings of isolation and frustration I felt in that class,

Probably a feeling many nerds have had at some point in their life.

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