alaithea

This makes me happy to have just moved here. There seem to be a lot of civic-minded people taking initiative with technology.

I spent some time in Portland, which is supposed to be uber-progressive, but we didn't have as much of this sort of thing even there.

Hmm. Thanks for the tips. I had no idea there were scammers who preyed upon coffee shop patrons. Maybe they're taking advantage of the relative southern friendliness of D.C.? I don't think that sort of thing exists in Portland (my last digs), a friendly, but still very northern, city.

Ooh, that looks awesome. Anybody have any similar suggestions for D.C./Arlington? I'm moving there soon, and while I'm still unemployed, I may as well find a gorgeous place to hang out and work on job apps and programming projects.

This is the main reason I've switched to Python in all my side-projects. I drank the Rails kool-aid for a long time, until I finally realized I couldn't get much done with it, as the libraries I wanted to use were unstable, and I couldn't understand the source, due to all the black magic going on. (Not to mention that you're forced to go to the source more often than not, because for some reason most Ruby projects' documentation sucks.) Sometimes I miss Ruby's expressiveness, but I'll take Python's abundant, stable and well-documented libraries any day.

> Seriously, there the pizza is terrible, doesn't matter if you are in Havana, Santiago, or Gerona.

But do the Cubans know that?

It seems like the study is as of yet unpublished. Google Scholar didn't turn up anything, and the researcher's web page doesn't list it.

http://www.managementmarketing.unimelb.edu.au/who/staff.cfm?...

They didn't mention whether they controlled for individual city/country preferences amongst the study subjects. As evidenced by the comments here, people tend to have very different conscious feelings about cities. What if they had conducted the study at NYU and not Ann Arbor? Likely the students at NYU feel more favorably towards big city life than those in Michigan.

I suppose that despite the relative lack of women studying computer science at universities (I didn't), universities do tend to be ideal places to find kick-ass women doing both the job thing and the family thing. That sounds great to me, and I think I'd much prefer baby talk over the geeky alternatives.

Only one person on our eight-person team has kids. As for the others, I'm not sure if some of them have ever been on a date. Dealing with frustrated young men is... frustrating in and of itself. I'd just like to see some more balance and worldliness from my coworkers.

Despite the lack of other women, I have been lucky to be in a pretty egalitarian workplace. I generally feel respected, and many of our executives are women. That said, I have had less than tactful coworkers take a two minute break near my desk to stare at my chest and stuff snacks in their face, like it was some kind of show. That was fun. (<-sarcasm)

Your point about starting a business is a good one. I initially learned programming while self-employed as a web designer back in the wee days of the web. On my own, I always wore more hats than just "code monkey," and that made a difference. Not to mention that when you're self-employed, you can go take a walk outdoors, etc., anytime you like. I guess a predilection for self-employment is why most of us are here reading Hacker News.

At risk of going off-topic: I, too, suffer from RSI. As a programmer and musician, it is a double whammy for me. I have found many short-term solutions, but have recently experienced some astonishing relief from reading The Mindbody Prescription by Dr. Sarno (I believe someone here on HN mentioned it). If you think you would be open to the idea of RSI as a disorder originating in the brain as a result of buried emotional tension, you should check it out.

I also work on a quasi-agile team. We do pair programming, but we often get assigned to the same pair for weeks or months at a time. It's sort of like being in an arranged marriage. I've told management time and again that this doesn't turn out well, to no avail.

Granted, pair programming does offer interaction. The hours go more quickly while pairing. However, I often prefer to work alone when I can, so that I can have some semblance of privacy and personal space in our bull-pen work environment.

I have to say that the recent financial turmoil and U.S. election have lead the conversation away from D&D, the latest video game, or the plots of Star Trek episodes. It has been a welcome change of pace. We have dumb jokes, too. The puns, ohhh the puns. ;)

I am a woman who has been programming professionally, on and off, for about 9 years, and full-time at a corporate job for two and a half of those. I was the first woman to be hired as a software developer at my workplace in almost 25 years. I hate my job, and next fall, I will enter grad school to go into an allied health profession. My reasons for leaving full-time software development are as follows:

1) The social interaction leaves something to be desired at my job, especially if you are not into gaming or D&D. There are few coworkers with whom I can discuss non-geek topics such as travel or food. This is probably due, at least in part, to having so few women around. The guys constantly revel in their geekitude. It gets old.

2) The work itself is isolating. I love to code, but especially during the long, depressing months of winter, I long for meetings to go to, or phone calls to receive.

3) Similar to the last point: I'd like to have a reason to leave my desk several times a day, for periods longer than it takes to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom. The highly sedentary nature of the job starts to make it feel like a prison.

In contrast to the last couple of points, my male coworkers act as though they would be happy if they never had to leave their desk chair to go to another meeting. Maybe this is just personality, and not a gender difference. Maybe I don't love programming enough to lose myself in it for hours at a time. I think some of these things, however, especially the social issues, may be indicative of basic female needs to have a connection with others, a feeling of being nurtured (and nurturing others), and good (female) role models. It would be interesting to see a workplace in which the majority of developers are women.

I recall reading about a study recently in which they found that men tended to concentrate in the hard sciences (math, physics), where women preferred sciences with a human aspect (psychology, biology). I believe they found that even women who had entered the hard sciences often ended up leaving them for fields with a more human touch.