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This isn't gender specific. As a guy I have worked in teams where asking for help is terrifying. To the point I stared at code for hours lest I ask how the uber

This isn't gender specific. As a guy I have worked in teams where asking for help is terrifying. To the point I stared at code for hours lest I ask how the uber-abstraction and hack soup worked.

oh_sigh 11y ago
Would you have thought it was gender specific if the title was "Being a 'dumb' guy in..."?
- Archio 11y ago
  I absolutely would, if it included a line like "...the continued and constant emphasis in taking pride in failure is EXACTLY what men need to be exposed to in order to let down their walls..."
- Zyst 11y ago
  Yeah the title and the article expressly talk about gender.
  - vacri 11y ago
    The gender part of the article is about the author leveraging her knowledge to help her peers, but the bulk of the article is about how asking honest questions is not just okay, but highly desirable.
- Maken 11y ago
  I don't think the title matters as much as the actual content. The writer seems to think her issues were quite gender specific, when they are actually what have happened to pretty much every student who cares more about what she/he actually learns than how the other people see her/him.
cookiecaper 11y ago
Gender and race are hot-button topics because those who claim to be victims of discrimination always fall back to an impossible-to-falsify assumption of impure intentions, if not in the individual specifically, in the amorphous "institution" behind "institutional bigotry". Every time someone brings it up, the discussion is one person saying "I bet that wouldn't have happened if the victim were [white/male]!", another person saying "Uh, I think it would've happened", and the original person saying "Well you're just ignorant", and then a cacophony of voices supporting or opposing the side they're more inclined to agree with, seemingly never calling out the absurdity or futility of it. This happened with me in real life when I expressed some questions about the veracity of the clock kid case to an associate. "You think that [being charged with possessing a hoax explosive device] would've happened to a white kid?!" - "Uh, yeah. I was almost arrested for installing VNC on the school computers..." - "That's such an ignorant white thing to say!" No way to win. Maybe we can stop allowing these conversations here, because this is an infinite loop that I don't see us escaping any time soon.
- natrius 11y ago
  There are plenty of things worth discussing that aren't falsifiable. There's also plenty of actual data related to those unfalsifiable anecdotes. Individual instances of biased decision-making are impossible to prove, but that doesn't mean we should stop bringing up the possibility. I'm sure you check yourself against common biases when you think they might be relevant. Prejudice is a common bias, and we should keep talking about it.
  - belorn 11y ago
    We should keep talking about it, but there isn't much of an point when the discussion is limited to fit existing biases. A while back I read a study that found that work culture inside a company is primarily made from gender culture if a single gender become dominant. The minority gender, be that male or female, then has to choose between assimilate or leave. Both men and women tend to chose the later option, which result in profession becoming more homogenic in regards to gender. Only work in professional environments where there is a fairly equal amount of both genders do unique work cultures become dominant. But that model does not fit common biases. It models both women and men as pushing each other out and discriminate against each other. As such, we don't see such models being discussed, and we don't talk about it. The only model that fits in our existing biases is men as the eternal aggressor and women as the eternal victim, and there isn't much worth to discuss within that limited space that hasn't been discussed to death already.
    - natrius 11y ago
      This seems to be a case of the "all lives matter" fallacy. It's true that the men-bad-women-good bias is harmful. It just doesn't strike me as worth spending much effort on compared to the biases that are making our industry significantly harder for people to succeed in. I'll start paying attention to other issues when I can't remember the last time I worked on a ten person, single gender team of engineers.
      - belorn 11y ago
parennoob 11y ago
From my experience, it isn't subject-specific either. It's a more general thing along the lines of, "It can be terrifying to admit that I don't understand the basics of something where the class and teacher seem to be making rapid progress." I have been in Chemistry classes where the teacher was solving problems with something like Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures, and I was too petrified to admit that I hadn't understood what a partial pressure was, let alone some law involving it -- i.e., I was a "dumb" guy in a chemistry class. In my opinion, the one thing that can be done to stop this is stop demonizing people who don't know things and fully internalize the simple truth that everyone starts free of knowledge in this world.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  It's really about providing the appropriate forums and helping people identify them. It's not really appropriate to waste class time repeatedly explaining concepts that 95% of the class already understands. If a student is struggling with this, they need remedial help, which can be obtained by contacting the professor directly during office hours/after class/however it works at your school, contacting a tutor, finding a study group or downgrading to a lower-level course, among other options. A stray "Wait, what does that mean again?" is no problem and actually probably helps a lot of people in the class who are too shy to speak up, but you can't let class time be monopolized by slow students. The slow students shouldn't be ashamed and should go get the help they need, they just need to be directed to the appropriate venue. The same is true in programming generally. We need to make it easy to identify the appropriate forum for the issue one is having and then we need to encourage them to seek resolution there. A way to improve SO would be to make it more obvious that the only questions that should be asked should be questions that are not Googleable, give a link to a "how to Google for programming help" guide, and when questions that violate this rule get added, include a direction to a helpful beginner's chat room or something along with the closure message.
endgame 11y ago
Yep, more people should Dare To Be Stupid: http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1754.html http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1754.html
- adwn 11y ago
  Are you sure you linked the right comic? Because it doesn't seem to have any connection to the topic at hand, or to what you wrote ("more people should Dare To Be Stupid"). Or maybe I just don't get it...
  - tene 11y ago
    The relevant content is in the essay after the comic. "That student is daring to be stupid. By calling attention to himself, he runs the risk that his fellow students will think him an idiot. But you know what? That student is the smartest student in the class. Because he doesn't want to be left behind, he doesn't want to misunderstand something, and he wants to know if that mistake is a mistake in the teacher's writing or in his understanding. That student, by daring to be stupid, assures that he doesn't end up actually stupid."
  - 14113 11y ago
    Read the essay under the comic.

This isn't gender specific. As a guy I have worked in teams where asking for help is terrifying. To the point I stared at code for hours lest I ask how the uber-abstraction and hack soup worked.

oh_sigh 11y ago

Would you have thought it was gender specific if the title was "Being a 'dumb' guy in..."?

Archio 11y ago
I absolutely would, if it included a line like "...the continued and constant emphasis in taking pride in failure is EXACTLY what men need to be exposed to in order to let down their walls..."
Zyst 11y ago
Yeah the title and the article expressly talk about gender.
- vacri 11y ago
  The gender part of the article is about the author leveraging her knowledge to help her peers, but the bulk of the article is about how asking honest questions is not just okay, but highly desirable.
Maken 11y ago
I don't think the title matters as much as the actual content. The writer seems to think her issues were quite gender specific, when they are actually what have happened to pretty much every student who cares more about what she/he actually learns than how the other people see her/him.

cookiecaper 11y ago

Gender and race are hot-button topics because those who claim to be victims of discrimination always fall back to an impossible-to-falsify assumption of impure intentions, if not in the individual specifically, in the amorphous "institution" behind "institutional bigotry". Every time someone brings it up, the discussion is one person saying "I bet that wouldn't have happened if the victim were [white/male]!", another person saying "Uh, I think it would've happened", and the original person saying "Well you're just ignorant", and then a cacophony of voices supporting or opposing the side they're more inclined to agree with, seemingly never calling out the absurdity or futility of it. This happened with me in real life when I expressed some questions about the veracity of the clock kid case to an associate. "You think that [being charged with possessing a hoax explosive device] would've happened to a white kid?!" - "Uh, yeah. I was almost arrested for installing VNC on the school computers..." - "That's such an ignorant white thing to say!" No way to win. Maybe we can stop allowing these conversations here, because this is an infinite loop that I don't see us escaping any time soon.

natrius 11y ago
There are plenty of things worth discussing that aren't falsifiable. There's also plenty of actual data related to those unfalsifiable anecdotes. Individual instances of biased decision-making are impossible to prove, but that doesn't mean we should stop bringing up the possibility. I'm sure you check yourself against common biases when you think they might be relevant. Prejudice is a common bias, and we should keep talking about it.
- belorn 11y ago
  We should keep talking about it, but there isn't much of an point when the discussion is limited to fit existing biases. A while back I read a study that found that work culture inside a company is primarily made from gender culture if a single gender become dominant. The minority gender, be that male or female, then has to choose between assimilate or leave. Both men and women tend to chose the later option, which result in profession becoming more homogenic in regards to gender. Only work in professional environments where there is a fairly equal amount of both genders do unique work cultures become dominant. But that model does not fit common biases. It models both women and men as pushing each other out and discriminate against each other. As such, we don't see such models being discussed, and we don't talk about it. The only model that fits in our existing biases is men as the eternal aggressor and women as the eternal victim, and there isn't much worth to discuss within that limited space that hasn't been discussed to death already.
  - natrius 11y ago
    This seems to be a case of the "all lives matter" fallacy. It's true that the men-bad-women-good bias is harmful. It just doesn't strike me as worth spending much effort on compared to the biases that are making our industry significantly harder for people to succeed in. I'll start paying attention to other issues when I can't remember the last time I worked on a ten person, single gender team of engineers.
    - belorn 11y ago

parennoob 11y ago

From my experience, it isn't subject-specific either. It's a more general thing along the lines of, "It can be terrifying to admit that I don't understand the basics of something where the class and teacher seem to be making rapid progress." I have been in Chemistry classes where the teacher was solving problems with something like Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures, and I was too petrified to admit that I hadn't understood what a partial pressure was, let alone some law involving it -- i.e., I was a "dumb" guy in a chemistry class. In my opinion, the one thing that can be done to stop this is stop demonizing people who don't know things and fully internalize the simple truth that everyone starts free of knowledge in this world.

cookiecaper 11y ago
It's really about providing the appropriate forums and helping people identify them. It's not really appropriate to waste class time repeatedly explaining concepts that 95% of the class already understands. If a student is struggling with this, they need remedial help, which can be obtained by contacting the professor directly during office hours/after class/however it works at your school, contacting a tutor, finding a study group or downgrading to a lower-level course, among other options. A stray "Wait, what does that mean again?" is no problem and actually probably helps a lot of people in the class who are too shy to speak up, but you can't let class time be monopolized by slow students. The slow students shouldn't be ashamed and should go get the help they need, they just need to be directed to the appropriate venue. The same is true in programming generally. We need to make it easy to identify the appropriate forum for the issue one is having and then we need to encourage them to seek resolution there. A way to improve SO would be to make it more obvious that the only questions that should be asked should be questions that are not Googleable, give a link to a "how to Google for programming help" guide, and when questions that violate this rule get added, include a direction to a helpful beginner's chat room or something along with the closure message.

endgame 11y ago

Yep, more people should Dare To Be Stupid: http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1754.html http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1754.html

adwn 11y ago
Are you sure you linked the right comic? Because it doesn't seem to have any connection to the topic at hand, or to what you wrote ("more people should Dare To Be Stupid"). Or maybe I just don't get it...
- tene 11y ago
  The relevant content is in the essay after the comic. "That student is daring to be stupid. By calling attention to himself, he runs the risk that his fellow students will think him an idiot. But you know what? That student is the smartest student in the class. Because he doesn't want to be left behind, he doesn't want to misunderstand something, and he wants to know if that mistake is a mistake in the teacher's writing or in his understanding. That student, by daring to be stupid, assures that he doesn't end up actually stupid."
- 14113 11y ago
  Read the essay under the comic.