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> The software industry was a far less diverse place then. Every last software engineer at ACD was a white man, most of them younger than 35. QA was much the sa
by eternalban 4y ago
> The software industry was a far less diverse place then. Every last software engineer at ACD was a white man, most of them younger than 35. QA was much the same except for one young woman on the team.
counter point: My 2nd job in the field, 1990, NYC, software development firm, reported to a Chinese-American woman (Cooper Union grad) and the CTO was also Asian American. My ~mentor was a Bell Labs engineer with a luxuriant white beard (so way over "35"). I also had a private office that I shared with another engineer (a young white married guy who commuted from Philly). Q/A iirc had many Indian women.
- mobilene 4y agoI forget that I was in the Midwest, not on the coasts, and things were likely different in this regard on the coasts.
- sammalloy 4y agoIt occurs to me, that the one place you might see parity with the Midwest and the coasts in terms of a loss of diversity was in the composition of the graduating classes for compsci in 1989. I remember peeking in on one class in the Bay Area and there wasn’t a woman in sight. The majority of women I knew who were involved in programming at the time came from a background in business administration. I think it’s true that the workplaces on the coasts were decades ahead of the rest of the country (women, minorities, LGBT), but academia was still far behind in terms of inclusion like the rest of the country.