This is exactly what I think every time someone says "We need to encourage more women/people to study CS." If you're only doing it for the money, you're probably doing it wrong. Studying CS for 3 years does not a programmer/hacker make; staying up coding all night or while other kids are playing outside, for years, is what it takes.
Do we say this kind of crap to Lawyers? Doctors? Engineers? (scratch the last one i'm sure we do say this kind of crap to them)
Why must programming be such a soul sucking life encompassing thing? It doesn't matter if you're a woman or man, this stupid mindset that somehow the only way to be a programmer is to be a stereotype needs to be launched into the sun and forevermore forgotten.
Just today I met a girl that was in her last year for aerospace engineering. She didn't look like any nerd you might think. She just looked normal. Great fun to talk to as well.
Maybe when us nerds stop thinking of ourselves as some sort of promised race of super humans we can move past some of this nonsense.
Tomp, the person you responded to, wrote two sentences. You responded to their second sentence, but the first sentence provides the whole context.
Tomp said they think this way every time someone says "We need to encourage more women/people to study CS". This relates to the whole "the tech industry is sexist" non-sense some radical feminist spew out ... speaking of which, out of the following two which do you think is vital to address (psychologically) first?
- stop attributing the "promised race of super humans" self-perception
- stop attributing the "successful tech men are sexists" projection
Which is causing more strife than the other? Lookup 'github horvath', donglegate ... why even elevatorgate.
> She didn't look like any nerd you might think. She just looked normal. Great fun to talk to as well.
Looks like you're projecting your own ideas and complexes to what I said. Guess what - I look normal as well! But still, my interest in computing goes deeper than finishing class assignments and longer than 3 years.
Most lawyers and doctors don't build stuff. Those that do (do new medical research, or write new laws), I sincerely hope and expect that their knowledge and understanding of their profession goes way beyond an average coprofessional's.
Bad code causes real harm to everyone else on your team, so coders have more incentive to worry about the skill of their coworkers than other professions do. You don't need to be nerdy for that, just good, but the two are correlated because you gain skill if you willingly spend all of your free time on technical stuff.
As for workload, lawyers and doctors tend to be overworked and honestly that's really not okay for doctors, as it leads to dangerous mistakes. My cousin is a lawyer and she always seems to be working, but she's also great at what she does. Another cousin of mine is becoming a doctor and residency is quite a gauntlet for her to run. But those are other issues.
> Bad code causes real harm to everyone else on your team, so coders have more incentive to worry about the skill of their coworkers than other professions do.
There isn't anything unique that bad code inflicts on your co-workers that isn't analogous to the problems faced by most people who have to deal with incompetent coworkers.
You can miss your deadlines due to dealing with it. When you're on call and you get pulled in to clean up someone else's problem. Bad design patterns cause lots of unnecessary duplication of work.
Yes, you can find other jobs where a mistake brings down the whole team, but it's rarely the kind of mistake that can persist in the codebase for years on end simply because there's no budget to refactor.
Now, you might point out that managers can, in fact, cause even more problems than that, but I don't think you'll find many people who want to work for a bad boss, either and I bet you or someone you know knows people who have left otherwise good jobs because of their boss.
Medicine and big-firm law are life encompassing things. Less true of engineering. But for the future doctors, usually pre-med and definitely medical school and being a doctor forces this on you, and for the big firm lawyers, the same.
Right but we're not telling people you can't be a doctor because you didn't sleep and breathe medicine before you went to college.
Least the doctors I have met all seemed to think of it as a job not a lifestyle.
It is that fundamental point I'm slightly annoyed with. Big firm law is also a bit of a clique, a lawyer friend of mine and the lawyers I know of all seem to love law, but aren't of this weird mindset that only the self chosen few are worthy of the endeavor.
I would like to see nerd elitism and nerd bashing both stop.
Some people claim that to be a programmer you need to have a certain personality or hobbies, and this is wrong.
But nerd elitism is also a reaction to having been excluded, ridiculed and sometimes bullied. That doesn't make it right, but it also means that bashing nerds and nerd culture, as is all to common amongst progressives, is both unfair and counterproductive.
What I would like to see more people saying is that it's ok that many people in tech have certain hobbies or personality traits in common, but that a person doesn't have to have these things to work in tech.
They were tinkerers, though. You've got the MIT model railroad kids, all the people that fooled around with scrap electronics, the radioheads, some gearheads.
I have no references to back this up, but I think it would make an interesting longitudinal study, or if you were somewhat cruel, a twin study: are children that spend most of their play time building with Legos or Kinex or erector sets significantly more likely to end up as engineers and computer programmers?
These things don't pay though. People care about diversity only where it pays.
If comp sci. was still seen as a thing for nerds with skin issues that don't get a lot of money you can bet there would be no "diversity" thing going on.
There should be no such thing. Instead of trying to bend ethics I'd rather make sure any one, from any skin color, gender, place of birth, etc. can do anything they want. THAT would be diversity.
The truth is that today what you can do with your life depends a LOT more on your place of birth than your skin color or gender.
