The willingness to slog though abusive working conditions is one of the most highly-selected-for trait in tech. Mature people are, on average, are less willing to do this than young people of the customarily military age range.
I think this point (the military age thing) is often overlooked in discussions about [age|race|gender|socioeconomic] diversity in tech. Rather than a single problem, I think it's actually two separate, intersecting problems.
The first is a recruitment/sourcing problem. There are many demonstrable factors, such as educational availability or social norms/pressure, that serve primarily to influence entrance rates into tech among different groups.
The second problem is a retention problem. Other social and cultural traits, like the aforementioned willingness to "sacrifice for the cause", place work above family, and so on, are also not evenly distributed among different [age|race|gender|socioeconomic] demographics; I think these traits (or lack thereof) are more strongly correlated with leaving (or being forced out) of tech. To some extent, these might also serve as cooling effects for entrance as well, but I'd hesitate to make any claims about the strength of that effect.
Perhaps by explicitly addressing these two issues independently, rather than by evaluating a "where are we at this current moment statistically" snapshot, this issue can be tackled more effectively?
I think many current approaches fall into the trap of evaluating the snapshot, effectively saying "How has it come to this?!", and then trying to treat the symptom, rather than the cause.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments or flamebait here. What you say isn't remotely plausible, since if it were true, software companies would be filled with non-programmers. Edit: I mean instead of programmers.
I think you read his comment in bad faith and ascribed "flamebait" and unsubstantiveness to it. Specifically, the comment states:
> The willingness to slog though abusive working conditions is one of the most highly-selected-for trait in tech.
The comment claims that "abuse tolerance" is one of the most highly-selected-for traits, not the only thing you need to become a programmer. Further, programming skill isn't even necessarily a "trait" - the colloquial meaning of "trait" is often a personality trait, not any possible characteristic of a person.
I don't see how the comment is substantively different from the many others on this topic.
The comment was edited after I posted that. Originally it said, "is the most highly-selected-for trait in tech".
It always shocks me when people silently do that to undermine someone's reply; it seems so blatantly dishonest. Do we need to make comments non-editable once they have replies?
I was actually just trying to file off the flamebait without changing the meaning - since "the most" was meant as a figure of speech in the first place I missed that someone could have seen it as a key point.
The sibling essentially sees what was going on here, I was thinking of a closely-weighted linear classfier where a small change to the weights could alter their ordering but do little to change the results.
Although it's definitely my responsibility to write clearly, in the future I'll think more carefully about what my replies are actually disagreeing with before I make edits that I think are just phrasing!
(And yes, I also had a few edits here before I found a way to write it clearly.)
Thanks for explaining. It often happens that I assume bad faith in someone on HN and then was completely wrong. Sorry about that! I have to work to follow the site guidelines (which say "assume good faith") as much as anyone.
Hmm, I see, and I agree that it is very subversive to edit your comment without a mention. I think even just a single "edited" marker would be enough to cast doubt on the mismatch between comment and reply. It's also not a big deal to make comments uneditable after a reply, because the edit period is fairly small, and I don't think people actually use HN for "real-time discussion". Maybe it's interesting to see the rate of replies within the editable period of a comment?
Even then, I don't think your reply is correct in dismissing the claim. A charitable interpretation would be that the poster meant personality trait, not including programming skill. Even a very strict interpretation still leaves room for the poster's assertion, via this hypothetical:
- totality of traits used when determining programmer quality is 100%
- abuse tolerance is the most highly selected, at 10%
- programming skill is quantified by 90 different traits at 1% each
This would mean that people without programming skill would not become programmers, but the top trait would still be abuse tolerance.
Anyway, I feel this is getting highly nitpicky at this point, I don't feel the poster was trying to make a statistical claim, but rather just emphasize that they believe "abuse tolerance" is very important for programmers, which I don't find to be facially unsubstantive or "flamebait".
(disclaimer: I made several edits to this post as I was writing it out)
During the first dot com bubble, software companies were sort of filled with non-programmers.
Source: I lived through it and started with almost no experience and was hired and trained on the job. They hired a ton of people to be trained, and many didn't succeed and were transferred to non dev jobs.
