11 ms·

Before brogramming, table flipping, and beyond

139 points by kev009 11y ago

banku_brougham 11y ago
Thanks for this, it's a much needed reminder. I'd like more of an experienced programmer's view of table flipping. I only know it from the emoticons.
richard_mcp 11y ago
Can someone explain what she means by "table flipping?"
- indlebe 11y ago
  (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
  - wdmeldon 11y ago
    ┬──┬ノ( º _ ºノ)
    - jethro_tell 11y ago
      There you go. Easy does it, buddy. He won't hurt you any more.
- mooreds 11y ago
  From http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/flipping-tables-%E2%95%AF%E2%96%A1%EF%BC%89%E2%95%AF%EF%B8%B5-%E2%94%BB%E2%94%81%E2%94%BB http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/flipping-tables-%E2%95%AF%E2%9... "Flipping Table emoticon (written as: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻) is a text-based emoticon depicting a person flipping a table out of rage. Primarily used by East Asian internet users to express rage, the emoticon became popular among Western internet users following its introduction through internationally popular online games."
  - draw_down 11y ago
    Huh. I get why brogramming is bad in context but that emoticon is just used to express frustration with computers most of the time, no? I don't understand why she chose that particular cultural marker but it doesn't change her point.
  - flubert 11y ago
    Interesting that the etymology of flipping tables meme apparently comes from East Asia. I'd have thought of the "other" famous table flipping incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple
  - x1798DE 11y ago
    That doesn't sound right in this context: > Where did we make that left turn into experienced, table flipping talent leaving the industry and the culture of brogramming scaring new talent away? That sounds like "table flipping" is a good thing, like "turning the tables" on someone, but I'm honestly a bit puzzled.
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      Maybe they mean, "experienced, completely fed-up talent leaving the industry"
- Zarel 11y ago
  Table flipping is an expression of frustration; it means someone's given up on trying to solve a problem constructively and gotten so angry that they flip the table over. In context, the relevant part of the metaphor is giving up on the problem.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    While I have never known anyone to actually flip a whole table before, I have seen someone flip a game board, scattering pawns, cards, and tokens everywhere. It isn't just walking away, it's walking away while giving everybody the finger--a belligerent surrender.
- smadge 11y ago
  http://tableflip.club/ http://tableflip.club/
- AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
  People who throw a tantrum rather than being professional. E.g., that developer who decides a requirement or dev issue is wrong and slam's his or her fist on the table rather than politely discussing their objection. Also applies to some particularly obnoxious clients in my experience.
  - adevine 11y ago
    However, that is not what the author means in the context of the article. It seems to me that she is using it to refer to experienced developers who are fed up with the change in software toward the "brogramming" culture (though god I hate that word), and are at the stage where they'd rather get out of software then try to change things. That said, the way she uses the phrase seems particularly odd to me, and it took me a while to try to understand what she meant.
noobie 11y ago
I'm on a tangent but as a Third World millennial, this what I envy most about First World millenials, a previous generation of cool people who invented and got to play around with all this cool tech. Everyone I know didn't have parents that got them into programming or messing with hardware. Most of my country's "Gen X" were teachers and technicians at best.
- MattGrommes 11y ago
  My parents were a construction worker and a secretary and I didn't know anybody who owned a computer until I was probably 13. Still, once I learned that programming was a thing I could do, almost nothing could have stopped me from doing it. It could be that the people who getting into cool tech now because they're wired that way are going to be the ones others look up to later.
- pekk 11y ago
  If you aren't in the cool second generation, that just means you are in the even cooler first generation. Actually, that applies to a lot of "first world" people too. We aren't all multigenerational tech dynasties over here. Most of the people who were doing anything genuinely pioneering with computers are retired or dead now. Nowadays it's somehow a big deal to write a Javascript framework or some app which made money.
- morgante 11y ago
  The vast majority of technical people in the US also had no family connections to technology. There are whole memes about the annoyingness of constantly being called on to fix your family computers.
- draw_down 11y ago
  I sort of know what you mean, nobody around me growing up thought computers or programming were cool or even useful. My parents were just straight up worried about how much I liked computers until I got out of school and got jobs. And this was America in the late 90s, post Microsoft success.
- jeremy_k 11y ago
such_a_casual 11y ago
What really irks me is that these sorts of statements on gender never so much as acknowledge the flip side. There are probably blog posts somewhere about how we don't have enough boys going into fashion, elementary school education, communications, nutrition, nursing, or human resources. To escape naivety, we need to start looking at the big picture where an individuals choice is not, "Yes Tech!" or "No Tech!" but more accurately a wide variety of options, and try to understand why women are so drawn to other fields. Women are doing better in school than boys. Women do better across all subjects, including STEM. They are choosing other fields, why? Is the presumption being made here that every woman thinks programming is the best field of all time, but they're just scared away by men? That seems very self-centric and dishonest. I'm sure that men face the same amount of stigma and social barriers in female dominated landscapes. Maybe things like fashion, teaching kids, and helping others (both physically and psychologically) come across as much more fulfilling than doing math on a computer all day. When I lay out the two options: men are scaring women away from technology || most women identify more with a plethora of other subjects. Well, the first makes for a good drama, but the latter is obvious.
- cuckcuckspruce 11y ago
  Not only that, but where is the fight for gender parity in coal mining or logging? I'm not saying that gender parity in tech is not a worthy goal. Just pointing out that there are a lot of fields with skewed gender parity that there's not a push for equality in.
  - mhurron 11y ago
    > Just pointing out that there are a lot of fields with skewed gender parity that there's not a push for equality in. So? Other than to attempt to muddy the conversation, what benefit is there to mentioning it? Unless everyone at once gets up to right the world, no one should?
    - cuckcuckspruce 11y ago
      >Other than to attempt to muddy the conversation Thank you for your charitable interpretation of my statement. I look forward to you having an open mind when entering a discussion of gender equality in the future./s Unsarcastically, I think it's disingenuous that you would presume to know the intent of my statement and therefore can project whatever intent you wish into it. >what benefit is there to mentioning it? The point of mentioning it is that there are some fields that there is a push for gender parity into and others that are not. If we want gender parity in some fields but not others then we need to understand what makes the fields where parity is sought different from fields where parity is not sought. Perhaps we can learn something about these fields that would make achieving gender equality easier. > Unless everyone at once gets up to right the world, no one should? Again, this is what happens when you assume intent and project malice into that intent.
zzalpha 11y ago
Dang, a woman and not in her 20s... I'm amazed she's employed in today's industry.
deleted 11y ago
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mikestew 11y ago
Not that I have any desire to go back to collared shirts, ties, and dresses, but the author caused me to wonder if it wouldn't do something to dial the "frat house" dial back a notch. Because, gawd, does it get old. I gather that I'm about the same age as the author. And she's right, there was a time that we worked side-by-side with the wimmin folk and didn't think a thing of it. Hey, it was a brave new world of software, and in that brave new world gender didn't matter anymore. I remember it as a time of software being a good place for women to go because it paid well and it didn't matter as much as other fields if you were "a girl". It worked out well for my Mom around that era. But I don't know when it changed and why it changed, so I don't have good answers for the current situation. But things have changed for sure.
- anarazel 11y ago
  > Not that I have any desire to go back to collared shirts, ties, and dresses, but the author caused me to wonder if it wouldn't do something to dial the "frat house" dial back a notch. Because, gawd, does it get old. > I gather that I'm about the same age as the author. Fwiw, and I'm not sure that's much, I'm probably a lot younger and male to boot, and I think the same when visiting the offices of some companies that are popular these days.
  - mikestew 11y ago
    Fwiw, and I'm not sure that's much Well, it's worth something to me because I sometimes wonder if it's just me being "the old guy" rather than just having a work ethic that causes me to want to go to work to work, not play foosball (not that I haven't kicked some 20-something ass at the foosball table from time to time during work hours).
- matt_wulfeck 11y ago
  I'm in my early 30s and wish there was a better middle ground. I feel like there is a dichotomy: work for a highly brogrammer company building a fun product from scratch as a slave laborer, or work for boring XYZ.net as a steady Eddie. I want a personal life but I also want to build something new with respectful people in an inclusive environment. The do-or-die environments of most startups just pushes everyone but the bros out.
deleted 11y ago
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_greim_ 11y ago
My daughter once remarked about something STEM-related: "he can do that <technical thing> because he's a BOY." We tried so hard to not raise her that way, and I'm sad the "meme" still managed to slip through and take root, and at such an early age. What role did I inadvertently play? No idea :(
- striking 11y ago
  The media, et al. You don't control the entire environment. Now it's your turn to change her mind.
- dopamean 11y ago
  This is why it's so important to have examples available for children that demonstrate someone outside of the "norm" taking part in an activity. My brother is 14 and to him it is reasonable to expect that the president could be a black man (not quite there on women yet unfortunately). My family has gay friends who are married with children and these are regular facts of life to him. I don't think either of my parents have spoken to him very directly about these issues and he has managed to evolve into a pretty open minded and cool teenager.
- drewrv 11y ago
  I would be devastated to hear my daughter say that but I'm also bracing for the inevitability of it. May I ask how old she was when she said that?
  - _greim_ 11y ago
    Probably around age eight. We corrected her immediately of course and have been continuing to do so, but yeah culture runs deep and kids pick things up fast!
- js8 11y ago
  You should also consider that humans are naturally lazy, and our brains can make up excuses for that. Maybe she just said that because she wants her brother to do it for her, instead of doing it herself.
auvrw 11y ago
i really appreciated this writeup.. silly things like 'you're not architecture material', 'you did surprisingly well on the programming test', and being openly berated for not wanting to 'step up' to a non-technical role are silly. coding for 30 years then still being like, "what next? o right, ruby." is awesome.
coderdude 11y ago
Is "Revenge of the Nerds" (1984) a symptom of many women avoiding tech or is it one of the causes? The characters were nerdy, into tech, and generally despised by their peers (most notably women and athletes). The only girls who would associate with them were Omega Mu, who were a lot like the Tri-Lams. I don't think anyone would want to be a Tri-Lam or an Omega Mu in real life[1] (they are, after all, comically nerdy). I don't find it impossible that a generation of women thought "You know, I'd rather have an Alpha Beta, not a Tri-Lam. How do I avoid getting a Tri-Lam? Don't be an Omega Mu." I don't think it's possible to know one way or the other. It's much more likely that RotN and things like it caused or were caused by deeply rooted stigmas against tech that made women shy away from it before even getting to the point of being exposed to 'frat-like' conditions in the workplace. 1: http://i.imgur.com/Pf35A0D.png http://i.imgur.com/Pf35A0D.png
- _greim_ 11y ago
  WRT the tie-in to the "nerd" phenomenon. Lots of things compete for kids' finite mental resources. It becomes a variation of do I invest in Social Status, or Subject Matter X? Those investments happen in a small way at first, but end up having an outsize impact on the rest of a kid's life. Such choices are strongly influenced by cultural expectations for gender. Those cultural expectations are, in turn, cartoonishly amplified in the typical lord-of-the-flies high school environment. Actually all of the above is just me—some random HN puke—speculating and repeating things I've heard elsewhere. But it definitely sounds plausible!
  - coderdude 11y ago
    It sounds reasonable to me.
  - mason240 11y ago
    One Paul Graham's more well known essays talks about how, in general, being cool and being a nerd both take a significant time investment, and to be good at one you have to forgo the other. http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
- nikdaheratik 11y ago
hackaflocka 11y ago
Really insightful essay. For men (speaking as a man myself), threatened by competition, criticism is often a competitive sport. This essay made me think of my own blind spots, and I hope I'm better for having read it.
ianamartin 11y ago
Quick anecdote from an earlier time. My mother's college roommate (Marilyn) studied Math and Physics in undergrad in the late '50s/early '60s. She went on to do a Masters at MIT and worked on the Apollo project there, which by that time was being run by another woman: Margaret Hamilton. If I remember the story correctly, Marilyn started a PhD, but never finished due to marriage and kids. She went on to have a very happy career at NASA and retired from there eventually, around 1995. She worked in code for almost all of her career. She worked on the Apollo Guidance Computer for at least a couple of years. Her telling of how things were is that there were a lot of women working in what would eventually become the field of computer science. It was a flipped version of what we think of now but with some similarities. It was flipped because women were the higher percentage of the work force in the early '60s and on into the '70s and even '80s. But this was also the same as today because the field itself was really not well-defined, and after people went from punch cards (which is what she started programming with), they went to typing. And for the average Joe, typing was a job for women: it was secretary work. So this seems to me--with the caveat that I'm remembering some conversations I've had with this women from maybe 10 years ago when I first got interested in software and started having jobs that involved it--that there was a brief opening window at the early stages of the field when there were a lot of women practitioners. As the field became more mainstream and more codified and promised rewards and opportunities, it appears that the guys noticed and came in rather slowly. And then pretty suddenly when it became clear that you could make a quick buck without a crapton of advanced knowledge, the brogrammers showed up and pretty much took over. That's obviously only one interpretation, but it's an interesting one to me because Marilyn retired before things seem to have got really bad. She retired when the women were still wearing dresses to work, and the men were wearing suits, and things were mostly professional. There were probably glass ceilings, but she didn't feel one in her work because NASA has an institutional history of women doing big, important things. * Another anecdote. This one much shorter. A second field that seems to be to being opened up by bro-ish types (and with the incompetence and general lack of knowledge and laziness I associate with that type) is healthcare--specifically Nursing. When I was studying Statistics at the University of North Dakota, I was living in a house with 6 other guys. Two of whom were Nursing students. They would have frat-style parties several times a week. Parties where 35-40 of their nursing school guy friends would come over, play Nickelback all night long and drink shitty beer. Basically the opposite of what I would expect from Nursing students. I found this pretty unexpected and asked once WTF was going on here. The answer was pretty consistent: there's a dearth of Nurses. People will pay a lot for them. The barrier to entry is pretty low. Essentially, it's quick easy money. * All this makes me wonder how much of the shift in industry demographics is really driven by institutional sexism and how much it is just that the lowest common denominator will always try to make easy, lazy money. And then the more competent people move elsewhere, or just leave the industry entirely and go do something else. Of course, once you reach a critical mass of bro-ism, the institutional bias does become real. But I wonder if we have a situation in business or IT management that is somewhat akin to the problems we have in U.S. Politics: the only people interested in managing are, by definition, not fit for the job. So smart people give up and walk away to something else. The other thing that it makes me wonder is this: how many other industries are there that started out with one traditional mix of demographics because "that's a job for x type of person. Not someone like me. And was then co-opted by the someones-like-me. Anyway, sorry for a long musing. Just trying to put some puzzle pieces together here to see if there's a larger idea to digest.
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Pxtl 11y ago
...seriously, buddy, take a deep breath and back away from the men's rights blogosphere. That level of persecution complex is not a healthy way to think about life.
- exstudent2 11y ago
  > ...seriously, buddy, take a deep breath and back away from the men's rights blogosphere. That level of persecution complex is not a healthy way to think about life. This type of hostile response is exactly the kind of thing that ruins the gender dynamic you claim to be concerned about. My reply was not intended to be aggressive but merely stating men may have an issue gets me branded a men's rights activist.
- twic 11y ago
  It would be more helpful to me as a reader if your response pointed out the errors in what he'd written, than critiqued the attitude behind it.
  - bjornstjerne 11y ago
    > than critiqued the attitude behind it. That response was more contempt than critique.
- dang 11y ago
  No personal attacks on Hacker News, please. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927789 and marked it off-topic.
twic 11y ago
In Soviet Russia: ┳━┳ ︵╯(.□.╯)
- twic 11y ago
  Leave this sort of rubbish on Reddit where it belongs, please.
  - nvader 11y ago
    Did you just reply to yourself? I'm really confused and curious to know what just happened.
    - twic 11y ago
      I knew someone had to make a reply like that, so i might as well do it myself. Saves other people the effort.
- dang 11y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10926837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10926837 and marked it off-topic.
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    Why detach it?
    - dang 11y ago
      We detach off-topic subthreads because then the ranking algorithm can push them to the bottom of the page.

139 points by kev009 11y ago

Thanks for this, it's a much needed reminder. I'd like more of an experienced programmer's view of table flipping. I only know it from the emoticons.

richard_mcp 11y ago

Can someone explain what she means by "table flipping?"

indlebe 11y ago
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
- wdmeldon 11y ago
  ┬──┬ノ( º _ ºノ)
  - jethro_tell 11y ago
    There you go. Easy does it, buddy. He won't hurt you any more.
mooreds 11y ago
From http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/flipping-tables-%E2%95%AF%E2%96%A1%EF%BC%89%E2%95%AF%EF%B8%B5-%E2%94%BB%E2%94%81%E2%94%BB http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/flipping-tables-%E2%95%AF%E2%9... "Flipping Table emoticon (written as: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻) is a text-based emoticon depicting a person flipping a table out of rage. Primarily used by East Asian internet users to express rage, the emoticon became popular among Western internet users following its introduction through internationally popular online games."
- draw_down 11y ago
  Huh. I get why brogramming is bad in context but that emoticon is just used to express frustration with computers most of the time, no? I don't understand why she chose that particular cultural marker but it doesn't change her point.
- flubert 11y ago
  Interesting that the etymology of flipping tables meme apparently comes from East Asia. I'd have thought of the "other" famous table flipping incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple
- x1798DE 11y ago
  That doesn't sound right in this context: > Where did we make that left turn into experienced, table flipping talent leaving the industry and the culture of brogramming scaring new talent away? That sounds like "table flipping" is a good thing, like "turning the tables" on someone, but I'm honestly a bit puzzled.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    Maybe they mean, "experienced, completely fed-up talent leaving the industry"
Zarel 11y ago
Table flipping is an expression of frustration; it means someone's given up on trying to solve a problem constructively and gotten so angry that they flip the table over. In context, the relevant part of the metaphor is giving up on the problem.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  While I have never known anyone to actually flip a whole table before, I have seen someone flip a game board, scattering pawns, cards, and tokens everywhere. It isn't just walking away, it's walking away while giving everybody the finger--a belligerent surrender.
smadge 11y ago
http://tableflip.club/ http://tableflip.club/
AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
People who throw a tantrum rather than being professional. E.g., that developer who decides a requirement or dev issue is wrong and slam's his or her fist on the table rather than politely discussing their objection. Also applies to some particularly obnoxious clients in my experience.
- adevine 11y ago
  However, that is not what the author means in the context of the article. It seems to me that she is using it to refer to experienced developers who are fed up with the change in software toward the "brogramming" culture (though god I hate that word), and are at the stage where they'd rather get out of software then try to change things. That said, the way she uses the phrase seems particularly odd to me, and it took me a while to try to understand what she meant.

noobie 11y ago

I'm on a tangent but as a Third World millennial, this what I envy most about First World millenials, a previous generation of cool people who invented and got to play around with all this cool tech. Everyone I know didn't have parents that got them into programming or messing with hardware. Most of my country's "Gen X" were teachers and technicians at best.

MattGrommes 11y ago
My parents were a construction worker and a secretary and I didn't know anybody who owned a computer until I was probably 13. Still, once I learned that programming was a thing I could do, almost nothing could have stopped me from doing it. It could be that the people who getting into cool tech now because they're wired that way are going to be the ones others look up to later.
pekk 11y ago
If you aren't in the cool second generation, that just means you are in the even cooler first generation. Actually, that applies to a lot of "first world" people too. We aren't all multigenerational tech dynasties over here. Most of the people who were doing anything genuinely pioneering with computers are retired or dead now. Nowadays it's somehow a big deal to write a Javascript framework or some app which made money.
morgante 11y ago
The vast majority of technical people in the US also had no family connections to technology. There are whole memes about the annoyingness of constantly being called on to fix your family computers.
draw_down 11y ago
I sort of know what you mean, nobody around me growing up thought computers or programming were cool or even useful. My parents were just straight up worried about how much I liked computers until I got out of school and got jobs. And this was America in the late 90s, post Microsoft success.
jeremy_k 11y ago

such_a_casual 11y ago

What really irks me is that these sorts of statements on gender never so much as acknowledge the flip side. There are probably blog posts somewhere about how we don't have enough boys going into fashion, elementary school education, communications, nutrition, nursing, or human resources. To escape naivety, we need to start looking at the big picture where an individuals choice is not, "Yes Tech!" or "No Tech!" but more accurately a wide variety of options, and try to understand why women are so drawn to other fields. Women are doing better in school than boys. Women do better across all subjects, including STEM. They are choosing other fields, why? Is the presumption being made here that every woman thinks programming is the best field of all time, but they're just scared away by men? That seems very self-centric and dishonest. I'm sure that men face the same amount of stigma and social barriers in female dominated landscapes. Maybe things like fashion, teaching kids, and helping others (both physically and psychologically) come across as much more fulfilling than doing math on a computer all day. When I lay out the two options: men are scaring women away from technology || most women identify more with a plethora of other subjects. Well, the first makes for a good drama, but the latter is obvious.

cuckcuckspruce 11y ago
Not only that, but where is the fight for gender parity in coal mining or logging? I'm not saying that gender parity in tech is not a worthy goal. Just pointing out that there are a lot of fields with skewed gender parity that there's not a push for equality in.
- mhurron 11y ago
  > Just pointing out that there are a lot of fields with skewed gender parity that there's not a push for equality in. So? Other than to attempt to muddy the conversation, what benefit is there to mentioning it? Unless everyone at once gets up to right the world, no one should?
  - cuckcuckspruce 11y ago
    >Other than to attempt to muddy the conversation Thank you for your charitable interpretation of my statement. I look forward to you having an open mind when entering a discussion of gender equality in the future./s Unsarcastically, I think it's disingenuous that you would presume to know the intent of my statement and therefore can project whatever intent you wish into it. >what benefit is there to mentioning it? The point of mentioning it is that there are some fields that there is a push for gender parity into and others that are not. If we want gender parity in some fields but not others then we need to understand what makes the fields where parity is sought different from fields where parity is not sought. Perhaps we can learn something about these fields that would make achieving gender equality easier. > Unless everyone at once gets up to right the world, no one should? Again, this is what happens when you assume intent and project malice into that intent.

zzalpha 11y ago

Dang, a woman and not in her 20s... I'm amazed she's employed in today's industry.

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mikestew 11y ago

Not that I have any desire to go back to collared shirts, ties, and dresses, but the author caused me to wonder if it wouldn't do something to dial the "frat house" dial back a notch. Because, gawd, does it get old. I gather that I'm about the same age as the author. And she's right, there was a time that we worked side-by-side with the wimmin folk and didn't think a thing of it. Hey, it was a brave new world of software, and in that brave new world gender didn't matter anymore. I remember it as a time of software being a good place for women to go because it paid well and it didn't matter as much as other fields if you were "a girl". It worked out well for my Mom around that era. But I don't know when it changed and why it changed, so I don't have good answers for the current situation. But things have changed for sure.

anarazel 11y ago
> Not that I have any desire to go back to collared shirts, ties, and dresses, but the author caused me to wonder if it wouldn't do something to dial the "frat house" dial back a notch. Because, gawd, does it get old. > I gather that I'm about the same age as the author. Fwiw, and I'm not sure that's much, I'm probably a lot younger and male to boot, and I think the same when visiting the offices of some companies that are popular these days.
- mikestew 11y ago
  Fwiw, and I'm not sure that's much Well, it's worth something to me because I sometimes wonder if it's just me being "the old guy" rather than just having a work ethic that causes me to want to go to work to work, not play foosball (not that I haven't kicked some 20-something ass at the foosball table from time to time during work hours).
matt_wulfeck 11y ago
I'm in my early 30s and wish there was a better middle ground. I feel like there is a dichotomy: work for a highly brogrammer company building a fun product from scratch as a slave laborer, or work for boring XYZ.net as a steady Eddie. I want a personal life but I also want to build something new with respectful people in an inclusive environment. The do-or-die environments of most startups just pushes everyone but the bros out.

deleted 11y ago

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_greim_ 11y ago

My daughter once remarked about something STEM-related: "he can do that <technical thing> because he's a BOY." We tried so hard to not raise her that way, and I'm sad the "meme" still managed to slip through and take root, and at such an early age. What role did I inadvertently play? No idea :(

striking 11y ago
The media, et al. You don't control the entire environment. Now it's your turn to change her mind.
dopamean 11y ago
This is why it's so important to have examples available for children that demonstrate someone outside of the "norm" taking part in an activity. My brother is 14 and to him it is reasonable to expect that the president could be a black man (not quite there on women yet unfortunately). My family has gay friends who are married with children and these are regular facts of life to him. I don't think either of my parents have spoken to him very directly about these issues and he has managed to evolve into a pretty open minded and cool teenager.
drewrv 11y ago
I would be devastated to hear my daughter say that but I'm also bracing for the inevitability of it. May I ask how old she was when she said that?
- _greim_ 11y ago
  Probably around age eight. We corrected her immediately of course and have been continuing to do so, but yeah culture runs deep and kids pick things up fast!
js8 11y ago
You should also consider that humans are naturally lazy, and our brains can make up excuses for that. Maybe she just said that because she wants her brother to do it for her, instead of doing it herself.

auvrw 11y ago

i really appreciated this writeup.. silly things like 'you're not architecture material', 'you did surprisingly well on the programming test', and being openly berated for not wanting to 'step up' to a non-technical role are silly. coding for 30 years then still being like, "what next? o right, ruby." is awesome.

coderdude 11y ago

Is "Revenge of the Nerds" (1984) a symptom of many women avoiding tech or is it one of the causes? The characters were nerdy, into tech, and generally despised by their peers (most notably women and athletes). The only girls who would associate with them were Omega Mu, who were a lot like the Tri-Lams. I don't think anyone would want to be a Tri-Lam or an Omega Mu in real life[1] (they are, after all, comically nerdy). I don't find it impossible that a generation of women thought "You know, I'd rather have an Alpha Beta, not a Tri-Lam. How do I avoid getting a Tri-Lam? Don't be an Omega Mu." I don't think it's possible to know one way or the other. It's much more likely that RotN and things like it caused or were caused by deeply rooted stigmas against tech that made women shy away from it before even getting to the point of being exposed to 'frat-like' conditions in the workplace. 1: http://i.imgur.com/Pf35A0D.png http://i.imgur.com/Pf35A0D.png

_greim_ 11y ago
WRT the tie-in to the "nerd" phenomenon. Lots of things compete for kids' finite mental resources. It becomes a variation of do I invest in Social Status, or Subject Matter X? Those investments happen in a small way at first, but end up having an outsize impact on the rest of a kid's life. Such choices are strongly influenced by cultural expectations for gender. Those cultural expectations are, in turn, cartoonishly amplified in the typical lord-of-the-flies high school environment. Actually all of the above is just me—some random HN puke—speculating and repeating things I've heard elsewhere. But it definitely sounds plausible!
- coderdude 11y ago
  It sounds reasonable to me.
- mason240 11y ago
  One Paul Graham's more well known essays talks about how, in general, being cool and being a nerd both take a significant time investment, and to be good at one you have to forgo the other. http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
nikdaheratik 11y ago

hackaflocka 11y ago

Really insightful essay. For men (speaking as a man myself), threatened by competition, criticism is often a competitive sport. This essay made me think of my own blind spots, and I hope I'm better for having read it.

ianamartin 11y ago

Quick anecdote from an earlier time. My mother's college roommate (Marilyn) studied Math and Physics in undergrad in the late '50s/early '60s. She went on to do a Masters at MIT and worked on the Apollo project there, which by that time was being run by another woman: Margaret Hamilton. If I remember the story correctly, Marilyn started a PhD, but never finished due to marriage and kids. She went on to have a very happy career at NASA and retired from there eventually, around 1995. She worked in code for almost all of her career. She worked on the Apollo Guidance Computer for at least a couple of years. Her telling of how things were is that there were a lot of women working in what would eventually become the field of computer science. It was a flipped version of what we think of now but with some similarities. It was flipped because women were the higher percentage of the work force in the early '60s and on into the '70s and even '80s. But this was also the same as today because the field itself was really not well-defined, and after people went from punch cards (which is what she started programming with), they went to typing. And for the average Joe, typing was a job for women: it was secretary work. So this seems to me--with the caveat that I'm remembering some conversations I've had with this women from maybe 10 years ago when I first got interested in software and started having jobs that involved it--that there was a brief opening window at the early stages of the field when there were a lot of women practitioners. As the field became more mainstream and more codified and promised rewards and opportunities, it appears that the guys noticed and came in rather slowly. And then pretty suddenly when it became clear that you could make a quick buck without a crapton of advanced knowledge, the brogrammers showed up and pretty much took over. That's obviously only one interpretation, but it's an interesting one to me because Marilyn retired before things seem to have got really bad. She retired when the women were still wearing dresses to work, and the men were wearing suits, and things were mostly professional. There were probably glass ceilings, but she didn't feel one in her work because NASA has an institutional history of women doing big, important things. * Another anecdote. This one much shorter. A second field that seems to be to being opened up by bro-ish types (and with the incompetence and general lack of knowledge and laziness I associate with that type) is healthcare--specifically Nursing. When I was studying Statistics at the University of North Dakota, I was living in a house with 6 other guys. Two of whom were Nursing students. They would have frat-style parties several times a week. Parties where 35-40 of their nursing school guy friends would come over, play Nickelback all night long and drink shitty beer. Basically the opposite of what I would expect from Nursing students. I found this pretty unexpected and asked once WTF was going on here. The answer was pretty consistent: there's a dearth of Nurses. People will pay a lot for them. The barrier to entry is pretty low. Essentially, it's quick easy money. * All this makes me wonder how much of the shift in industry demographics is really driven by institutional sexism and how much it is just that the lowest common denominator will always try to make easy, lazy money. And then the more competent people move elsewhere, or just leave the industry entirely and go do something else. Of course, once you reach a critical mass of bro-ism, the institutional bias does become real. But I wonder if we have a situation in business or IT management that is somewhat akin to the problems we have in U.S. Politics: the only people interested in managing are, by definition, not fit for the job. So smart people give up and walk away to something else. The other thing that it makes me wonder is this: how many other industries are there that started out with one traditional mix of demographics because "that's a job for x type of person. Not someone like me. And was then co-opted by the someones-like-me. Anyway, sorry for a long musing. Just trying to put some puzzle pieces together here to see if there's a larger idea to digest.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Pxtl 11y ago

...seriously, buddy, take a deep breath and back away from the men's rights blogosphere. That level of persecution complex is not a healthy way to think about life.

exstudent2 11y ago
> ...seriously, buddy, take a deep breath and back away from the men's rights blogosphere. That level of persecution complex is not a healthy way to think about life. This type of hostile response is exactly the kind of thing that ruins the gender dynamic you claim to be concerned about. My reply was not intended to be aggressive but merely stating men may have an issue gets me branded a men's rights activist.
twic 11y ago
It would be more helpful to me as a reader if your response pointed out the errors in what he'd written, than critiqued the attitude behind it.
- bjornstjerne 11y ago
  > than critiqued the attitude behind it. That response was more contempt than critique.
dang 11y ago
No personal attacks on Hacker News, please. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927789 and marked it off-topic.

twic 11y ago

In Soviet Russia: ┳━┳ ︵╯(.□.╯)

twic 11y ago
Leave this sort of rubbish on Reddit where it belongs, please.
- nvader 11y ago
  Did you just reply to yourself? I'm really confused and curious to know what just happened.
  - twic 11y ago
    I knew someone had to make a reply like that, so i might as well do it myself. Saves other people the effort.
dang 11y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10926837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10926837 and marked it off-topic.
- paulddraper 11y ago
  Why detach it?
  - dang 11y ago
    We detach off-topic subthreads because then the ranking algorithm can push them to the bottom of the page.