for coders only?

"First, two guys at a programming conference made some jokes about big dongles and wanting to fork some other guy’s repo, and the woman sitting in front of them took offense. Then she snapped their photo, shuttled it onto Twitter, and told her 11,000 followers what the two coders had said. Then one of the coders was fired by his company. Then someone launched an online attack against the woman’s company. And then she was fired too.

The widely reported incident shined a harsh light on just about everyone involved: the coders, the woman with the camera, the companies who fired them, and the larger programming community — a traditionally male-dominated culture that’s still struggling to provide women with the same level of comfort it affords men. In the end, no one came out looking too good.

Well, no one but GitHub.".................


http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... gle+Reader

I'm a coder. Our office is about 50/50 men and women, and there's more female supervisors than there are male.

Computers USED to be a male dominated field. It's not anymore.

I started programming back in the late 60's, was a systems engineer for many years both for a major corporation and for state government until I started my own business, and there were a lot of women in the business then.....still are. Where ever did the idea that it is a male dominated business come from? In many businesses women were preferred because of their attention to detail and ability to provide accurate documentation, not just good code.

archer wrote: I started programming back in the late 60's, was a systems engineer for many years both for a major corporation and for state government until I started my own business, and there were a lot of women in the business then.....still are. Where ever did the idea that it is a male dominated business come from? In many businesses women were preferred because of their attention to detail and ability to provide accurate documentation, not just good code.

I got the idea it was male dominated from my wife's and my experience in the '80s and '90's doing contract coding work in the Denver area. There were a considerable number of women doing the same work, but sometimes they still ran into "the good ol boy's" club. I'm glad your experience was different.

I think you're right about the attention to detail and providing accurate documentation being important, but I don't see that as either a male or female specific strength. Accurate and understandable documentation doesn't involve hormones - it involves alcohol lol

Nobody that matters wrote:

archer wrote: I started programming back in the late 60's, was a systems engineer for many years both for a major corporation and for state government until I started my own business, and there were a lot of women in the business then.....still are. Where ever did the idea that it is a male dominated business come from? In many businesses women were preferred because of their attention to detail and ability to provide accurate documentation, not just good code.

I got the idea it was male dominated from my wife's and my experience in the '80s and '90's doing contract coding work in the Denver area. There were a considerable number of women doing the same work, but sometimes they still ran into "the good ol boy's" club. I'm glad your experience was different.

I think you're right about the attention to detail and providing accurate documentation being important, but I don't see that as either a male or female specific strength. Accurate and understandable documentation doesn't involve hormones - it involves alcohol lol

What I found interesting was a study IBM did back in the 60's....at that time there were precious few programming courses available in colleges....most were in the engineering departments and to some degree in Math departments. Many companies, IBM included, hired people and then trained them themselves. The study showed that the most creative and solution oriented programmers held degrees in Music and Art, with a strong peripheral interest in math. Engineers became mediocre programmers, and straight Math majors were almost as bad. What I loved about programming, and still do, is the creativity and the search for the elegant solution. I bucked the trend by being horrible at documentation.

archer wrote: What I found interesting was a study IBM did back in the 60's....at that time there were precious few programming courses available in colleges....most were in the engineering departments and to some degree in Math departments. Many companies, IBM included, hired people and then trained them themselves. The study showed that the most creative and solution oriented programmers held degrees in Music and Art, with a strong peripheral interest in math. Engineers became mediocre programmers, and straight Math majors were almost as bad. What I loved about programming, and still do, is the creativity and the search for the elegant solution. I bucked the trend by being horrible at documentation.

I could see that... most of the really good programmers I know have really beautiful doodles on the white space of their listings.

Coding is quite a bit of art along with hard science.

Good programmers do not use the computer to solve a problem, but instead solve the problem with the help of the computer.....a minor difference, maybe, but that difference determined which programmers I would hire.

archer wrote: [ and the search for the elegant solution.

Question for you coding guys and gals. I am not a coder but I remember my instructor talking about "elegant solutions" in a programing class I took circa Dos 1.2.

In retrospect I think that when memory was very expensive and processing speeds were orders of magnitude less than today, elegance was a necessity.

As speeds and prices have come down and I seem to hear more about patches and fixes I have surmised that elegant solutions have become less important and the skill set for coders is not what it once was.

So, does my surmise have any basis in reality or is it just one more thing I am wrong about?

(BTW,is coding what we used to call programing?)

To a good coder/programmer (yeah, pretty much one in the same, I think "coder" is a more recent term)), finding an elegant solution to the problem is more about pride in one's work than it is about available resources. There will always be patches and fixes no matter how well done the original program, it's impossible to to anticipate all the crazy combinations and permutations it may be subject to in the real world.......although in today's world of instant gratification, I don't think any software gets the kind of testing in the real world that it needs before a general release...

Then again......I'm not in the business anymore, so maybe there is some truth in the idea that today's programmers don't have as many resource restrictions on what they do, so they can afford to go with the fastest solution, not the most "elegant".

My experience with programmer/coders is you pretty much have to wrestle the code away from them in a usable state. They are never really done making it more "elegant". Read - tweaking it. lol