These reactions to the screed are sound, but they risk missing a larger problem: The kind of computing systems that get made and used by people outside the industry, and with serious consequences, are a direct byproduct of the gross machismo of computing writ large. More women and minorities are needed in computing because the world would be better for their contributions—and because it might be much worse without them.
If there’s no difference between men and women then this doesn’t matter. If there is a difference between men and women then we’ve an explanation for the different representation in the industry.
Sigh.
That’s what I’ve been missing – I’ve been playing games & using apps because they improve my life in some way, when what I should have been doing was playing games and using apps to ‘celebrate the contributions of women and ninorities’! Now it all makes sense…
Personally I don’t care who has written the code for the software tools I use during the normal course of my business. When I come across bugs or bits of the application(s) that make no sense then I want to give the coder(s) a verbal kicking regardless of gender. In particular the various knowledgebases and wikis appear to be written in such mangled English that I need at least a half hour to decipher it. Perhaps the technical writing could be handed over to the wimminz so it reads more like Cosmopolitan.
Well, if there’s no difference between men and women it does matter because the workforce makeup is then pretty blatant evidence for sexism.
The point made was that if there is no difference, the workforce makeup does not affect the company’s competitiveness.
Mostly moot since we know there are differences. However, we still do not know the various contributions of the hardwired differences, socially conditioned differences, and “don’t hire girls” sexism to the makeup of the workforce.
and yet, there isn’t someone out there exploiting the gaps he imagines despite the opportunity.
Computing really is one of the easiest fields to enter. You don’t need a certificate, you don’t need to spend much money on it. Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook in a dorm room. Google started in a garage.
“For example, advocating for more women entrepreneurs (about 17 percent of start-ups have a woman founder) or venture-capital partners (about 7 percent are women) seems like a terrific path toward diversity and equity. ”
Every freelancer I know in software is a man. Women could do that, but they don’t. You can’t get women to join small startups. They don’t want to know. They get jobs in comfortable places with fountains and HR departments. They won’t risk salary for share capital.
“When I come across bugs or bits of the application(s) that make no sense then I want to give the coder(s) a verbal kicking regardless of gender.”
Quite. Whoever wrote the Yuku forum platform should be first up against the wall come the revolution.
I’d just about got my head around the wierd logic of the last version, then there’s an update and it’s worse so I visit that forum less and less as a result. E.g. every time you cut and paste text (even from the page itself) into the editor it reduces the font size. What incompetent moron programmed that, and why was it not discovered and fixed in testing?
abacab….don’t get me started on testing!!!
@Henry Crun
I have this naive idea that Stuff Should Work. Kinda the “You had one task” principle. I appreciate that complex systems might fail occasionally, but something simple like a text editor or a forum interface shouldn’t be beyond the wit of professionals.
Law of diminishing returns, I’m afraid. Making it work at all is cheap, making it work well is expensive and making it perfect is eye watering.
Quite. And this is the age of the Internet – move quickly and break stuff. Don’t worry someone else will fix it …
abacab
+1.
Anyone that has used SAP will know this. None of the individual module drop-down menus are consistent across the piece. Patently obvious that the modules were developed separately and no thought was given or possibly nobody thought to check that the menus were consistent across all modules. Either laziness or complete lack of quality control.
abacab,
You’re obviously a dinosaur and not up to speed with the very latest in change management processes.
“and why was it not discovered and fixed in testing?”
You’re assuming it wasn’t discovered.
I think you’re also assuming a process in which errors – especially the trivial – are fixed on discovery.
That is so last century.
I don’t see how software written by Aspergy females would necessarily be better than that written by Aspergy males.
Jesus H Christ
The article’s author might have a great chance of a role at City University if this is the quality of his output. Easily the worst thing I have read probably this Calendar year – to take it apart paragraph by paragraph would require about a month. Just mindblowing.
the gross machismo of computing
The WHAT? Genuine lol.
I had a mental image of Latin looking men with huge moustaches, swaggering into the office, patting the female secretary on the bum and saying “alright, darlin’?”.
Fucks sake.
You’re assuming it wasn’t discovered.
I worked for a company once where if a developer found a bug they were responsible for fixing it, including all the shit raising tickets, organising testing, the lot.
Not many bugs were ‘discovered’ after that.
Rob: “the gross machismo of computing”
Quite. The cognitive skills required correlate fairly strongly with a certain testosterone level which is low for men and high for women. Above and below this, the occurence of the skill drops off.
Which is why most* men doing it are skinny geeks, and most* women doing it are not hyperfeminine glamour models.
I’m trying to think back to my university days – I can’t think of a single case of male BEEFCAKE on my course.
(*obviously there are exceptions – the bell curve has its tail of course).
“the gross machismo of computing”
That’ll be why computer nerds are the ones that have blonde models hanging off their arms all the time then? Rather than tattooed bikers who wouldn’t know a computer chip from the potato version?
I mean, what world do these people live in? There’s plenty of business sectors that could described as being grossly macho, but computers ain’t one of them. But of course as we all know, the SJW mode of argument is to grab anything to hand at the given point and throw that, regardless of relevance or even truth.
All of which explains India’s failure to produce a decent rugby team.
Rugby and computing compete for the same sort of people, and computing pays better.
Tim,
“If there’s no difference between men and women then this doesn’t matter.”
You are muddling up nature and nurture.
Identical twins have no innate differences but if you shoot one of them in the kneecaps, their interests and abilities start to rapidly diverge.
Similarly whether or not men and women have innate differences (that matter to coding), we know they are treated differently and have different experiences. We know that because we can simply ask them. And because *gestures at everything*.
No *innate* difference, only makes no difference at the point at which men and women are also *treated* equally.
@Frank O’Dwyer: I think you’re missing Tims point – he’s saying its no difference from the perspective of the company, not the women involved.
The article is saying that employing women and minorities adds something extra to the company, ‘diversity’ has a value, above a male only environment. What Tim is saying is that IF there are no innate difference between men and women (and presumably ethnic groups) then ‘from the company’s perspective’ it makes no difference if they employ all men, all women, all Asians, whatever. They are all innately the same, and thus there can be no value to diversity.
So either men and women are innately the same, in which case you can’t argue a company will gain by employing women, OR they aren’t innately the same, in which case you can’t argue that they are identically able to do everything.
What appears to be the argument at the moment is that women are identical to men in ability in every way, but also bring something different to the table to men. Which is logically nonsense.
The article is saying that employing women and minorities adds something extra to the company, ‘diversity’ has a value, above a male only environment.
It certainly does. All the clever males who created Google’s value are now either bickering about intersectionality or looking over their shoulders and wondering which of their colleagues (all of them?) are self-employed Stasi agents waiting to pounce on the slightest indiscretion, or even about to just make one up as the burden of proof is on the accused, not the accuser.
So, it has certainly added something.
Google’s senior management is insane. This could be the biggest corporate suicide in history. Let’s hope so.
Only about a hundred or so employees of Google actually matter. They are the ones who have the ideas, build the systems, generate the value. Most of them will be males.
Google had a system where these very bright people were focused on what they should be doing. Now that focus is gone. If they aren’t scared/pissed off/demotivated/looking for another job they soon will be. Engineering types, especially the really good ones, are hopeless at this political bollocks. They despise it. It’s gone way beyond the point where they could simply ignore it (the odd email, etc). It now appears to be absolutely entrenched. The working culture there sounds demented.
Rob
Shorting Google – increasingly looks like it’s heading towards that part of the cycle. It’s difficult to see continuing rapid innovative growth alongside evolving snowflakery?
And long on popcorn obvs.
“Shorting Google – increasingly looks like it’s heading towards that part of the cycle. It’s difficult to see continuing rapid innovative growth alongside evolving snowflakery?”
The question is, has it got itself into a dominant enough position to be able to bully the competition despite its self imposed bureaucratic and SJW inspired constraints, or is the tech world still sufficiently competitive that a minnow can take on a giant and eat it for breakfast if they are suitable customer oriented?
Jim
As others have suggested on here, when it comes (for example) to search, there are quite a few perfectly good alternatives. I haven’t personally used Google Search in nearly a decade.
And that might be its most dominant area?
But also, and I haven’t checked re Google specifically, current price tends to include assumptions about future rates of growth. If this is indicative of a likely change of rate (from that currently priced in), that should start to impact on its price?
Jim,
I understand the point, but it is not enough for there to be no *innate* difference in ability. There has to be no difference *at all* (none that matters, anyway).
Not all, maybe not even most, differences in ability are innate. It’s not even true that the only differences that matter are differences in ability.
Saying “They are all innately the same, and thus there can be no value to diversity” is like saying it could make no possible difference to a company if it were to hire a clone (or identical twin) of one of its existing staff, even if the new hire had £100m to invest, 10m followers on twitter, a killer app idea, was bilingual, plus had a full pilots licence and was a qualified plasterer.
So is this a woman who has pointed out that Latinos are more under-represented among programmers than women and doesn’t know what “macho” means? Or is she a sraightforward liar?
Well, she claims that the basis of computing was created by white men (she seemingly hasn’t heard of Ada, Countess Lovelace) and she wants a computer science created, in the name of “diversity” by anyone other than white men. So. yes: it would be different – something like an abacus or a Hollerith machine with Ada’s instructions. You can forget the world-wide-web and internet, precision manufacturing (all your cars will need 3,000 miles running-in before you can risk putting your foot down on the accelerator), satellite technology, Google maps when you’re lost, email, …
The world would be better? YMBJ
Rob,
“Only about a hundred or so employees of Google actually matter. They are the ones who have the ideas, build the systems, generate the value. Most of them will be males.
Google had a system where these very bright people were focused on what they should be doing. Now that focus is gone. If they aren’t scared/pissed off/demotivated/looking for another job they soon will be. Engineering types, especially the really good ones, are hopeless at this political bollocks. They despise it. It’s gone way beyond the point where they could simply ignore it (the odd email, etc). It now appears to be absolutely entrenched. The working culture there sounds demented.”
There’ll be a lot more software people than that, but the “game changers” are probably in that number and yes, they’ll all be male.
This is why I work in small companies. You don’t get this crap in small companies.
John77: Or heard that the first compiler was developed by Grace Hopper…
@Jim, August 9, 2017 at 11:56 am
Good summary. Thank you.
@ TomJ
Good point – I was/am tired and Ada Lovelace is more memorable, but still “mea culpa” for missing that out.
“The kind of computing systems that get made and used by people outside the industry, and with serious consequences, are a direct byproduct of the gross machismo of computing writ large.”
Anyone know what this is actually supposed to mean? Are those “and”s (?) supposed to be AND/&& or “and then”?
@john77, August 9, 2017 at 10:52 pm
iirc Grace Hooper “invented” the term “bug” in computing – it was a moth inside the computer.