5 ms·

How many of them are just doing it for money since salaries are high right now? How many of them actually would do it if it paid 50k instead of a 100k?

mc32 11y ago
I think it's the same with finance, right? Lots of people follow the money --whether it be finance, CS, law, med-school. Personally I think it's BS for people to tell you to "follow your passion" and also am critical of the "we need people who are passionate about x". Most people work as a way to make a living.
josephagoss 11y ago
And the same can be said of many Men... The first thing that came to my mind, is that many girls that are interested in this stuff may now feel more comfortable than ever to enroll in Computer Science, as the issue of sexism is being tackled and talked about a lot.
ngoel36 11y ago
A job at McKinsey or Goldman pays far more (risk-adjusted, 7-10 years out of school) than a CS degree does - you can verify that easily. If you're optimizing for money, CS is not the answer (unless you're leveraging it to get a job on Wall Street).
- this2shallPass 11y ago
  How many McKinsey or Goldman jobs are there? How many of the women that enter the funnel are there in 7-10 years? In addition to money, how flexible are the McKinsey or Goldman jobs with having and raising children?
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Why is this a relevant question? Of course some of them are doing it for money, why wouldn't they? You think it's any different for men?
tomp 11y ago
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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Nerd elitism in programming needs to stop. The first hackers didn't have computers when they were kids, let me remind you.
  - JesperRavn 11y ago
    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.
  - douche 11y ago
    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?
    - zobzu 11y ago
      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.
Chinjut 11y ago
How many of the people pursuing any career would do it if it weren't for the salary? (If it bothers you that salaries play a role in how people choose their majors, advocate for an economic system that allows people to pursue their ideal passions without financial worry, whether those passions are in computer science or poetry or "underwater basket weaving" or what have you. Until such a system is in place, though, it's only reasonable that people, in deciding how they'd like the rest of their life to play out, go where the opportunities are...)
sridca 11y ago
Not to discourage the female of the species from having fun hacking away like the rest of us do ... but you do make a good point. Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? What has always bothered me was that feminists have conveniently painted this lack of interest (prior to the financial incentives of current times) as some evil intent on the men. Sexist industry? Give me a fsck'ing break! All of their perceived sexism is in their own minds. One would do well listening to actual female nerds than wannabe immitator-warriors. https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession. But you're talking about the non-professional setting. Well, that started with the home computer revolution. There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa.
  - thedufer 11y ago
    > Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Every time this comes up, someone points out that "programming" was mostly data entry at that time, and that there is a suspicious correlation between the decline in female programmers and the movement of data entry from programmers to administrators. I can't seem to find hard data either way, though. So make of that what you will.
  - sridca 11y ago
    > Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession. I just glanced at Wikipedia on this topic ... and, apart from the convenient mention of Ada Lovelace at the very beginning of both the articles[1] (makes you curious why they do this), history of programming is evidently a mostly -- no, nearly all -- male profession. Just what kind of "programming" was it that the exclusively female professional partook on, whose profession was to later become a male profession (and what kind of "programming" are the male professionals partaking on)? > There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa. - Marketers will target whatever that can be easily influenced to make a purchase. - 'girl toys' are neither superior nor inferior to 'boy toys,' ... and feminists are the last group of people to acknowledge this distinction. As a generalization, girls learn to manipulate people from a early age (hence playing with barbies)[2], much as boys learn to manipulate tools. Toys merely fulfill this instinctual desire of humans; they are not being enforced by the hypothetical patriarchal parents and society. - Thus, it seems far more likely that despite parents'/peers' encouragement to play more with the tools (such as computers) "teenage girls" continued to opt to play with "girl toys" out of their own instinctual preference. Perhaps because they knew deep down that the real power lies in manipulating people and not computers. [1] Two links: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science [2] Diana Davidson describing this in detail: https://youtu.be/mk_WaTdhyT0?t=1m16s https://youtu.be/mk_WaTdhyT0?t=1m16s
shire 11y ago
What's the starting salary for an entry programmer?
redbluff 11y ago
Actually as an old hand (been in the game since the late 80's) the proportion of women I saw has decreased from when I first started and has only turned around in the last five or so years. Admittedly this is mainly in a corporate environment, but most of the women I started with tended not to come back when they started their family. I think with more family friendly hours and policies such as remote and flex working this may also change. To say that "they are only doing it for the cash" is unlikely, as from what I have seen that drive tends to run in men more so than women. cf: all the "web developers" in the first tech boom who did not know shit from clay and vanished as quickly as they came in the bust.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > Actually as an old hand (been in the game since the late 80's) the proportion of women I saw has decreased from when I first started and has only turned around in the last five or so years. That's backed up by the data. There was an NPR piece [1] with graphs of what proportion of people taking various other degrees and Computer Science were women. They were increasing in lockstep until the 80s, but then after that CS just kept falling and falling, even (to my surprise) into the 2000s. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
ForHackernews 11y ago
Man here. I'm doing it for the money.

mc32 11y ago

I think it's the same with finance, right? Lots of people follow the money --whether it be finance, CS, law, med-school. Personally I think it's BS for people to tell you to "follow your passion" and also am critical of the "we need people who are passionate about x". Most people work as a way to make a living.

josephagoss 11y ago

And the same can be said of many Men... The first thing that came to my mind, is that many girls that are interested in this stuff may now feel more comfortable than ever to enroll in Computer Science, as the issue of sexism is being tackled and talked about a lot.

ngoel36 11y ago

A job at McKinsey or Goldman pays far more (risk-adjusted, 7-10 years out of school) than a CS degree does - you can verify that easily. If you're optimizing for money, CS is not the answer (unless you're leveraging it to get a job on Wall Street).

this2shallPass 11y ago
How many McKinsey or Goldman jobs are there? How many of the women that enter the funnel are there in 7-10 years? In addition to money, how flexible are the McKinsey or Goldman jobs with having and raising children?

InclinedPlane 11y ago

Why is this a relevant question? Of course some of them are doing it for money, why wouldn't they? You think it's any different for men?

tomp 11y ago

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.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Nerd elitism in programming needs to stop. The first hackers didn't have computers when they were kids, let me remind you.
- JesperRavn 11y ago
  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.
- douche 11y ago
  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?
  - zobzu 11y ago
    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.

Chinjut 11y ago

How many of the people pursuing any career would do it if it weren't for the salary? (If it bothers you that salaries play a role in how people choose their majors, advocate for an economic system that allows people to pursue their ideal passions without financial worry, whether those passions are in computer science or poetry or "underwater basket weaving" or what have you. Until such a system is in place, though, it's only reasonable that people, in deciding how they'd like the rest of their life to play out, go where the opportunities are...)

sridca 11y ago

Not to discourage the female of the species from having fun hacking away like the rest of us do ... but you do make a good point. Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? What has always bothered me was that feminists have conveniently painted this lack of interest (prior to the financial incentives of current times) as some evil intent on the men. Sexist industry? Give me a fsck'ing break! All of their perceived sexism is in their own minds. One would do well listening to actual female nerds than wannabe immitator-warriors. https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession. But you're talking about the non-professional setting. Well, that started with the home computer revolution. There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa.
- thedufer 11y ago
  > Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Every time this comes up, someone points out that "programming" was mostly data entry at that time, and that there is a suspicious correlation between the decline in female programmers and the movement of data entry from programmers to administrators. I can't seem to find hard data either way, though. So make of that what you will.
- sridca 11y ago
  > Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession. I just glanced at Wikipedia on this topic ... and, apart from the convenient mention of Ada Lovelace at the very beginning of both the articles[1] (makes you curious why they do this), history of programming is evidently a mostly -- no, nearly all -- male profession. Just what kind of "programming" was it that the exclusively female professional partook on, whose profession was to later become a male profession (and what kind of "programming" are the male professionals partaking on)? > There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa. - Marketers will target whatever that can be easily influenced to make a purchase. - 'girl toys' are neither superior nor inferior to 'boy toys,' ... and feminists are the last group of people to acknowledge this distinction. As a generalization, girls learn to manipulate people from a early age (hence playing with barbies)[2], much as boys learn to manipulate tools. Toys merely fulfill this instinctual desire of humans; they are not being enforced by the hypothetical patriarchal parents and society. - Thus, it seems far more likely that despite parents'/peers' encouragement to play more with the tools (such as computers) "teenage girls" continued to opt to play with "girl toys" out of their own instinctual preference. Perhaps because they knew deep down that the real power lies in manipulating people and not computers. [1] Two links: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science [2] Diana Davidson describing this in detail: https://youtu.be/mk_WaTdhyT0?t=1m16s https://youtu.be/mk_WaTdhyT0?t=1m16s

shire 11y ago

What's the starting salary for an entry programmer?

redbluff 11y ago

Actually as an old hand (been in the game since the late 80's) the proportion of women I saw has decreased from when I first started and has only turned around in the last five or so years. Admittedly this is mainly in a corporate environment, but most of the women I started with tended not to come back when they started their family. I think with more family friendly hours and policies such as remote and flex working this may also change. To say that "they are only doing it for the cash" is unlikely, as from what I have seen that drive tends to run in men more so than women. cf: all the "web developers" in the first tech boom who did not know shit from clay and vanished as quickly as they came in the bust.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> Actually as an old hand (been in the game since the late 80's) the proportion of women I saw has decreased from when I first started and has only turned around in the last five or so years. That's backed up by the data. There was an NPR piece [1] with graphs of what proportion of people taking various other degrees and Computer Science were women. They were increasing in lockstep until the 80s, but then after that CS just kept falling and falling, even (to my surprise) into the 2000s. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

ForHackernews 11y ago

Man here. I'm doing it for the money.