4 ms·

You don't need to be a feminist to want to make a programming community more "diverse". Often the lack of diversity is a sign that there is toxicity in the cult

You don't need to be a feminist to want to make a programming community more "diverse". Often the lack of diversity is a sign that there is toxicity in the culture. Trying to attract more women, or people of color, or LGBTs rather than chasing them off can only make a community more healthy, in my opinion. Also, once you really take a look at "feminist" issues, they are a bit deeper and more complicated than people who say they don't believe in feminism seem to think.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago
In the united states, it is unlawful for employers to discriminate for reasons of age against people over forty. Even so, software engineers become unemployable in their late thirties. I am fifty-one. Also in the united states, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against the mentally ill, as well as those who are simply perceived as mentally ill. I have quite sever bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder. I link to my essays "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" and "My Deepest Fear" at the top of every single page of my website, including my resume: http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/ http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/ http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-police.html http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-... "My Deepest Fear" concerns my vividly paranoid visual hallucinations. The specific reason I work as a coder rather than as a physicist is that I still write good code when I am hallucinating. I first realized that to be the case in 1988, I wrote LwSD in 2003 and now I can't get a job. How often do discussions of diversity include the mentally ill or the middle-aged? Among my deepest concerns is that I see many younger engineers - startup founders are the worst, as well as the people who they employ - making many of the same stupid mistake I did when I was their age, or the mistakes of my young colleagues. My aim these days is to find a job where I can teach the children not to fuck up. Unfortunately I cannot get a job because all the young people think I am incapable of writing code. I did the storage and firewire for a wireless audio recorder that won a technical academy award.
- gaius 11y ago
  One day all the 20-something brogrammers are going to hit their 40s and thing damn, the time to tackle ageism was 20 years ago.
  - bayesianhorse 11y ago
    I really don't think this will even be an issue 20 years from now.
- bayesianhorse 11y ago
  It's probably time to start a "Old Boys&Girls Club" movement in technology.
tucosan 11y ago
This. I find it hard to deal with the new wave feminists as well as the very vocal group of anti-feminists. IMHO the quality of the debate is a function of people on both sides being stuck in their filter bubbles, a phenomenon which can be witnessed in so many important debates. Modern feminists and their counterparts seem to fall prey to their own respective biases, rendering the whole debate an unproductive endeavor. It is difficult to simply proclaim oneself a feminist, since it has become too broad a category to be a meaningful label anyways. Which school of feminism do you mean when you call yourself a feminist? How many people taking part in this debate are even able to distinguish between these different schools? That being said, I personally highly prefer working in a diverse team. Teams constituted solely of (white) men tend to be way less fun to work in, compared to a more diverse team. Diversity in my experience does stimulate more creative approaches to a problem domain due to the heterogenous backgrounds of the team.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  >Teams constituted solely of (white) men tend to be way less fun to work in // If you live in an area and work in a field where more white men are qualified for the work available than other colour-sex groups then you probably act in a racist and sexist manner then. Isn't this just an extension of a reason why (in the UK at least) computing fields are currently skewed, that those who chose those fields were socially dismissed as "nerds". Now, shock horror, other peoples refusal to associate with them due ostensibly to fashion/social mores has lead to homogeneous groups. It seems to be taken as a truism that such homogeneous groups exist because the internal individual morality enforces biases - but the same result appears to be achievable assuming that those external to the group are the ones with the biases. In practice I imagine it's both. Wanting your teams to be fun is fine, find a way to determine how "fun" someone is and use that rather than assuming that position in a colour-sex space is a proper metric for "fun-ness". >Diversity in my experience does stimulate more creative approaches to a problem domain due to the heterogenous backgrounds of the team. // This is interesting to me because colour and sex don't demonstrate anything about the backgrounds of people yet those are the characteristics you've chosen. In my kids primary school (UK) there are families with heritages that are Chinese, Spanish, Pakistani, South African (Afrikaans), Zimbabwean, German, Welsh, Scottish, English, Polish, and probably a few more I don't know or can't recall; but they're not really that diverse, they are on the whole middle-class British born children. There's seemingly more difference between the few that are working class/multiple-generation unemployed (or just poorer) than between those of different geographic heritage. It troubles me that people like you will reject giving my kids, who are relatively poor compared to the society around them, any opportunities because you can't see past their colour and sex (white, male). IMO if you're happy to accept that with everything else being equal you should give a job to my youngest's best friend - a black girl - in preference to him just because her grandparents live in Zimbabwe then you've got to also accept those who chose other arbitrary characteristics too, like giving a job to someone just because they're white. I don't think you can equivocate and say racism is fine how you do it but not how someone else does it.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago

In the united states, it is unlawful for employers to discriminate for reasons of age against people over forty. Even so, software engineers become unemployable in their late thirties. I am fifty-one. Also in the united states, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against the mentally ill, as well as those who are simply perceived as mentally ill. I have quite sever bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder. I link to my essays "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" and "My Deepest Fear" at the top of every single page of my website, including my resume: http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/ http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/ http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-police.html http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-... "My Deepest Fear" concerns my vividly paranoid visual hallucinations. The specific reason I work as a coder rather than as a physicist is that I still write good code when I am hallucinating. I first realized that to be the case in 1988, I wrote LwSD in 2003 and now I can't get a job. How often do discussions of diversity include the mentally ill or the middle-aged? Among my deepest concerns is that I see many younger engineers - startup founders are the worst, as well as the people who they employ - making many of the same stupid mistake I did when I was their age, or the mistakes of my young colleagues. My aim these days is to find a job where I can teach the children not to fuck up. Unfortunately I cannot get a job because all the young people think I am incapable of writing code. I did the storage and firewire for a wireless audio recorder that won a technical academy award.

gaius 11y ago
One day all the 20-something brogrammers are going to hit their 40s and thing damn, the time to tackle ageism was 20 years ago.
- bayesianhorse 11y ago
  I really don't think this will even be an issue 20 years from now.
bayesianhorse 11y ago
It's probably time to start a "Old Boys&Girls Club" movement in technology.

tucosan 11y ago

This. I find it hard to deal with the new wave feminists as well as the very vocal group of anti-feminists. IMHO the quality of the debate is a function of people on both sides being stuck in their filter bubbles, a phenomenon which can be witnessed in so many important debates. Modern feminists and their counterparts seem to fall prey to their own respective biases, rendering the whole debate an unproductive endeavor. It is difficult to simply proclaim oneself a feminist, since it has become too broad a category to be a meaningful label anyways. Which school of feminism do you mean when you call yourself a feminist? How many people taking part in this debate are even able to distinguish between these different schools? That being said, I personally highly prefer working in a diverse team. Teams constituted solely of (white) men tend to be way less fun to work in, compared to a more diverse team. Diversity in my experience does stimulate more creative approaches to a problem domain due to the heterogenous backgrounds of the team.

pbhjpbhj 11y ago
>Teams constituted solely of (white) men tend to be way less fun to work in // If you live in an area and work in a field where more white men are qualified for the work available than other colour-sex groups then you probably act in a racist and sexist manner then. Isn't this just an extension of a reason why (in the UK at least) computing fields are currently skewed, that those who chose those fields were socially dismissed as "nerds". Now, shock horror, other peoples refusal to associate with them due ostensibly to fashion/social mores has lead to homogeneous groups. It seems to be taken as a truism that such homogeneous groups exist because the internal individual morality enforces biases - but the same result appears to be achievable assuming that those external to the group are the ones with the biases. In practice I imagine it's both. Wanting your teams to be fun is fine, find a way to determine how "fun" someone is and use that rather than assuming that position in a colour-sex space is a proper metric for "fun-ness". >Diversity in my experience does stimulate more creative approaches to a problem domain due to the heterogenous backgrounds of the team. // This is interesting to me because colour and sex don't demonstrate anything about the backgrounds of people yet those are the characteristics you've chosen. In my kids primary school (UK) there are families with heritages that are Chinese, Spanish, Pakistani, South African (Afrikaans), Zimbabwean, German, Welsh, Scottish, English, Polish, and probably a few more I don't know or can't recall; but they're not really that diverse, they are on the whole middle-class British born children. There's seemingly more difference between the few that are working class/multiple-generation unemployed (or just poorer) than between those of different geographic heritage. It troubles me that people like you will reject giving my kids, who are relatively poor compared to the society around them, any opportunities because you can't see past their colour and sex (white, male). IMO if you're happy to accept that with everything else being equal you should give a job to my youngest's best friend - a black girl - in preference to him just because her grandparents live in Zimbabwe then you've got to also accept those who chose other arbitrary characteristics too, like giving a job to someone just because they're white. I don't think you can equivocate and say racism is fine how you do it but not how someone else does it.