3 ms·
fwiw there are a few people who dip their toes in at that point, and sometimes it works. In fact in my program I think most of the women in the field got in tha
by ajkjk 5y ago
fwiw there are a few people who dip their toes in at that point, and sometimes it works. In fact in my program I think most of the women in the field got in that way (especially because the department was heavily advertising to women -- and really just to anyone who wasn't already into it). The bigger issue, though, I think is that computer-savviness is such a.. skill ... that it's super hard to get _really_ good at it in a college degree; you need to be heavily computer-literate already to excel.
Not as a rule exactly: these days, anyone reasonable savvy person can learn CS well enough to be employed in tech and any math-savvy person can certainly end up in CS research. But it is, I think, _super_ hard to start learning programming in college and actually end up good at _low_-level computing like Kernel/Systems level stuff, which really requires like total immersion in the space, similar to learning a language by living in the country. In my program this meant that the really technical classes were filled with the students who came in already very computer-literate and into programming, and they tended to be 90+% male.
- ghaff 5y agoI'm willing to bet that a lot of the most senior (i.e. older) engineers in tech today, never touched a computer until university. That said, times are of course different. The idea that you'd teach a super-basic never touched a computer course to (non-CS) engineers using textbook like this at a top school [1] today is pretty much risible. (There are exceptions. I'd characterize Charles Severance's MOOC from UMich as a true beginner class. But, by contrast, I think I'd find MIT's intro class in the CS department (6.001) impossibly difficult if I was having to basically learn to actually learn simple programming on the side.) [1] https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/ColoringBkCover.html https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/Colo...
- ajkjk 5y agoYeah, could be. But in a CS degree program in the 2000s/2010s, the upper classes seemed to be 80% people who started coding on graphics calculators in middle school, or something equivalent.
- ghaff 5y agoI'm really talking about earlier. I didn't have a calculator until I started college :-) The first dip in bachelor's degrees in CS for women started in about 1985. [1] It dipped again beginning in about 2000. [1]https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-declining-female-share-of-computer-science-degrees-from-28-to-18/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-declinin...