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Comment by redwood | Hacker News Reader

Great post. The HN community is totally biased because most folks here are very comfortable programming. What this biases is the ability for this community to imagine that it's a lot harder for a lot of other people to program than it is for them. If it weren't, you wouldn't be in such high demand at such terrific salaries.

Programming is hard, especially for minds that are not well accustomed to breaking things into linear series of events. I have a visual mind, for example, but have a lot of trouble turning multi-dimensional concepts into linear programming treatment.

Just as we would not suggest everyone would be capable of calculus, we can't expect everyone to program. Now we can expect everyone to have some exposure to calculus, and I think many folks just would like to see the masses have some exposure to programming. And that's great.

But please do recognize that programming is not intuitive for everyone!

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"Programming is hard, especially for minds that are not well accustomed to breaking things into linear series of events."

Or maybe many people are just lazy? As for the linear events, can you cook? Can you give directions to the main station? I think most people serialize things all the time. Like, do you ever create a ToDo list for your day?

I can't imagine that it takes months to learn how to load some images into Excel. Unless you have to learn how to read first. And Excel could be one of the hardest things to program...

"But please do recognize that programming is not intuitive for everyone!"

That's just the thing. Programming is hard even for programmers (hard not as in impossible, but hard as in "lifting 100 pounds of the ground" or whatever - it is work). But they are diligent enough to solve the problems.

It really irks me when (for example) business types say they are not made for programming. In fact I don't really enjoy programming either. I enjoy making things, and programming is just the necessary evil I have to put up with.

This logic of "xyz is not intuitive for me" is just an excuse to never even try to cope with maths or whatever.

>Just as we would not suggest everyone would be capable of calculus

Programming is a broad spectrum. There are parts that are of comparative difficulty to calculus* and there are parts of similar difficulty to prealgebra. No one is saying that everyone should learn Vector calculus but everyone should at least be acquainted with the basic things like ratios and intervals.

*Calculus is actually extremely easy. In fact, programming can make it even more intuitive if the learner has played with streams before, the objects of calculus are kin. Besides, knowing calculus does not make you a mathematician any more than knowing how to write IF X < 10 THEN PRINT makes you a programmer.

This sums it up. Similar assumptions about the human mind are what have led to the current poor state of the US education system. Teaching and learning are not one size fits all.

Please tell this to the crowd that is so desperate getting more women interested in computers....

The problem isn't that women aren't interested, it's that our shitty remarks drive them away. The ones that stay wind up experiencing a death by a thousand pricks. I'm "desperate" to see our field grow up, not conduct some sort of gender-specific marketing campaign.

We don't need more women programmers for the sake of demographics. We need to stop driving away awesome programmers that happen to be women.

What's your rationale behind your reasoning? I'd say we need people in this field who can actually take some heat, no matter shether they are male or female. There are certainly also plenty of guys who get driven away. Just have a look at how quickly some people get shot down on SO for submitting not-that-great answers.

Further, there are surely quite a few women around who are only around because they are women. In other words: their work is sub-par but they keep their job due to their gender. Just like we lower requirements for women in the military, we lower them for women in tech. Yet, there aren't many women signing up for the military. Maybe it's because they just aren't interested in the first place?

I agree that showing maturity as a field will drive fewer people away of both genders. But you've seen the recent scandals: sexism is obviously a problem in our field and that is a problem that should be solved along with the other.

Your second point is outrageous nonsense.

Please elaborate on why my second point is "outrageous nonsense". You just aren't convincing me with shaming language.

If you want to establish that women are being treated with kid gloves in our industry, the burden of proof is on you. If you want me to dig up the four or five high-profile examples of sexism in technology from the last couple months I can certainly supply that, but your ugly claims are the ones which require proof, not mine.

Are you a man or a woman? Further, do you work in tech or don't you? There is certainly something fishy about you and your style of argumentation. Your rhetoric also reminds me of women. Sure, cold hard facts are "ugly". What's next, calling me "mean"?

BTW, isn't it funny how fashions change? Two years ago you read comments like, "(...) another researcher concludes that only "boys" are stupid enough to go into a field that's globally-fungible, where entry-level salaries are declining, and it's common to think that staying up all night for a company-paid pizza is a good deal.'"": http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/12/17/2043254/Not-Enough-W...

Since IT is hot again, and the economy otherwise depressed, suddenly the feminists fire up their PR machine and want to get some of their sisters into cushy (so they think) office jobs. But why aren't there any initiatives to get more women into, say, plumbing, firefighting, or the military?

I smell hypocrisy.

> Your rhetoric also reminds me of women.

Wow.

> Sure, cold hard facts are "ugly".

They can be. But you don't have any. Using the word "fact" doesn't by itself make your argument factual.

> What's next, calling me "mean"?

Sure, but it's just the capstone on "sexist" and "ill-informed."

Do you know about any evidence that other professions with a larger female/male ratio e.g., lawyers, doctors treat women somehow better than IT?

That's kind of a distraction from the real problem, isn't it? We know we are doing this badly. It doesn't matter if other professions are worse; if they are, that just means they have their own problems to improve on.

To paraphrase the rifleman's creed, there are many industries with this problem, but this one is mine.

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