arandr0x

This is interesting to me, because I'm an avid reader in real life and usually lucid dream (though I don't train myself to). Most dreams to a degree feel like fiction to me and they're enjoyable in the same way reading a good book is, except better, since they're about me. I have never linked this to my reading before.

You don't need equality of outcomes -- you just need neither group, and in fact, no person (even if they do not fit the group norm) to have objectively bad outcomes. For example, in an hypothetical world where women have a massive preference for raising children, and men have a massive preference for looking at spreadsheets entering boring numbers into them, you would want women to look after children, and men to look after spreadsheets, and neither to be more likely than the other to live in poverty, not have enough to eat, commit suicide, be killed by an intimate partner, or die at 50 of alcohol abuse. (I intentionally chose a variety of gender-linked outcomes in our world -- they're not all cases where women have the bad outcome.)

Yes, in order to not get some people to be massively likelier to live in poverty or suffer from depression than some others, you need to treat people unequally. I don't think that's a bad thing.

If (and I reckon that's a big if) the main reason women are more likely to live in poverty is them making less money than men, and the main reason they make less money is they choose different careers, then it follows that the moral thing to do is to get them to choose masculine careers, by essentially any means possible. I think there's a lot of room for debate at all points of that argument, though. (On the reasons for the inequality -- but also on what the best way to address those reasons is)

But, in some other cases where something is most likely a biological difference, but changing the culture could meaningfully change the outcome for a sub-population, we do tend to choose to resolve the biology part. For example, we medicate for ADHD and back pain, when we could presumably build a society where people don't have to work as information traders while sitting at a desk all day if they want good money.

Regardless of whether the differences are biological or not, the real question is are the outcomes they lead to meaningfully bad or debilitating; are women more vulnerable as a result of them (I think they are but I suppose it's debatable). And if they are, should we change the value society assigns these choices so that people who make them have better outcomes, or should we change the people who make the choices (either through force or education or medication). If we are choosing to change the people (I guess we are), then if we find out or even guess that the root cause may be biological, our responsibility is not to shrug and go "well, guess 50% of the population can keep being depressed and poor, it's their choice", it's to find a biological solution people could choose to take to make themselves more suited to society's reward system. Isn't it?

(Obviously the women who already do like programming don't need anything special except for their work environment to stop being more terrible than men's through e.g. harassment by their VPs.)

The idea is to have a conversation with someone who's read as much of the same things you have as possible? What do you learn from this?

It looks to me like your hire messed up something about this guy's plans and he set out to minimize damage as fast as possible. Since he had contacts and you didn't, he won (they usually do). Look, when you start at a new place, especially as a manager but even for ICs, it's because someone high up thought they needed an extra person (or a different person). And it's quite likely not everybody agreed with them. It's not really personal (although sometimes these people are OK with the hire but had a dream of a different skillset and don't think yours matches), but it's dangerous.

In those situations you have two options -- find someone he is close to who's more positive about you that you can leverage into brokering a truce, or try to use him for information. (You can straight up ask braggarts what they would do in your place, which usually makes it obvious why they aren't in your place already, in addition to giving you future bones to throw him to keep the hostility in check)

I moved to programming from biomedical R&D. It wasn't a decision based on economic concerns. I don't actually agree that "we could be further along in biotech if there were already a good number of us working on it", there are a bunch of people working on it and they are very intelligent, but the way projects are managed, communicated and evaluated is not conducive to great and immediate impact and doing research on humans actually has some issues.

Am very interested in talking about the field w/ pretty much anyone though. It has remained quite near to my heart.

This is one thing I thought was nice about the US healthcare system, that it aligns the economic incentives of companies with having healthier employees relative to other companies. Maybe countries that have a more efficient single payer system should nevertheless add a "Healthy Workforce Tax Credit" of some sort?

Does it matter who's diversity? If the argument is that a company with a non-diverse workforce can't deal with users from different walks of life, they don't have a diversity problem, they have an empathy problem. (Arguably most programmers have an empathy problem.)

While I'm sure hiring 2 women and 0.2 black people for every scrum team may help fix the empathy issue, so would hiring white guys who don't think they're the center of the universe. Of course to do that we'd need to stop (as an industry) rewarding and recognizing people who think they're the elite for doing a perfectly normal white-collar job that occasionally involves high school math.

(And I definitely don't think we need diversity of political opinions. I don't want to know my coworkers' political opinions, whatever they may be. What would be great would be if I could get coworkers who just don't think their particular ideology is super important in terms of their work life. Any companies that are more on the chill side like this?)

Yes! I thought parent wanted to get into experimental science but this is also a viable approach. There is a lot of data to be mined in biology and chemistry and a dearth of people making good models.

I did drug discovery in grad school -- finding leads is generally not something suitable for small labs, but studying them is. A big source of compounds that actually work isn't high-throughput screening, it's isolating the active ingredient of plants and fungal matter that has the desired properties in nature, which is something that can in theory be done in a home lab (cultivating eukaryotic cells is difficult compared to bacteria but there are protocols and cell lines that aren't too expensive). This was how pretty much all science was done before molecular biology was a thing, and it gave us very useful compounds, including penicillin. (For the sake of the poor critters, please don't do animal research if you have never worked with lab animals before).

Most of figuring out which drugs are promising is biochemistry (and clinical trials) not so much organic chemistry. I wouldn't say organic chemistry is super inaccessible (given people with 0 education seem to be able to pop up kitchen counter meth labs in no time), but doing it with a purpose that isn't "follow this recipe" is difficult because a lot of stuff that looks like it should be biologically active doesn't actually make it into the cell in the first place. But I may be biased and I'm sure there are organic chemists around that have an idea of how amateurs could go around doing some small science in that area.

Yeah I can see the argument. I think this forum in general is too easily weighted towards considering money vs everything else in life though. I wanted to show numbers for a life that (considering the low CoL of the area) was perfectly good and maybe a little less rat-racy.

Also out of pure patriotism we just have way too many Canadians leaving so they can make more money in the US... but there definitely is innovation here also (maybe even more innovation, just less capital) so people who don't need as much money but are anxious about their skills getting outdated can definitely stay in Montreal.

The salary is less of a problem if you're growing old there -- Montreal is a nice balance between the US and major European cities, where there is a pretty big social safety net. You don't need to pay for health insurance, childcare is much less expensive, college if you remain in the province as well, there is paid parental leave, that sort of thing. You do have to deal with winters and traffic which some people especially as they age get very frustrated with.

At this point in my life I would not consider again working in the US though. There's a certain amount of "life" I need in my "work/life balance" and I'm not sure I can get it in a country where it costs two months' salary just to deliver your kid.

They're getting 50-55k. OTOH their rent is 500 to 800 a month (including electricity and sometimes internet), and they can buy a house in the suburbs if they want for about 300 to 400k. (All prices CAD.) Montreal has a ton of startups and companies that offer good stock options/RSUs/bonus packages as well, you can shop around for those.

This is not a bad tradeoff -- consider 5x the rent and 4x the house price in SF, which is a less safe city with much worse suburb to city transit options, and only what, 2.5x the salary?

What is your mathematics curriculum like?

I work with a ton of people from Grandes Ecoles and while I think they're generally great coders, certainly as much so as if they'd spent their whole education madly typing as fast as humanly possible, as juniors they're not much better than the "indent and write lots of comments" level.

I've been to a "regular" university and I'm pretty sure I said some variant of "I write lots of comments" w/r/t my code maintenance approach in a very early interview. I could have written any algorithm you gave me -- but I had no idea what maintaining an application with users entailed.

My experience is you can't really "teach" writing maintainable code beyond just having people fix bugs for 6 months in a million-line codebase that's reasonably well written.

I am interested in the experience of your corner of the world. I'm a millenial who "can't afford a child" (but am making a lot more than a ton of households with children are in my area). Is there an email address I can reach you at? I would like to know your and your community's stance of things like how to have stable families, feelings of loneliness or contentment, and whether your children intend to follow the same path and have the same kind/size of family.

The article's assumption that the core demographics (of men 20-34 let's say) are not foregoing their basic needs is flawed -- not only are most of them living in much smaller spaces than they were before, they are also less likely to have children to support(which is a basic need for most people) for a bunch of reasons most of which have nothing to do with either video games or the preference of young men.

Largely, young men need less money even for their basic everyday consumption (and so they have more time to spend on leisure). This is to a lesser extent true of young women (which are not discussed in the article even though their participation is also lowered -- are they playing video games too? Maybe those mobile games? Are there Facebook games still today?).

What do you recommend to the younger or ambitious devs who want to grow in their career -- do you send them to training or let them have a side project of some kind so that they still have a somewhat valuable resume, or is it more a question of trying not to get junior devs (who need the resume building badly) in the first place?

I'm curious because I work at a big company but not in a maintenance or operational role so I'm not sure what an "ideal" resume or career track looks like for such people.

What if feeding hungry people today is what it takes for them to feed themselves tomorrow? Africa currently has millions of entrepreneurs, and half the rare earth minerals in your computer's chips and a plurality of the beans for the daily cup of Starbucks you need to do your vastly more lucrative job with it come from there. Not only is the people of Africa not dying (or dying less fast) something that can pay dividends in the future, you directly benefit from it. (Most of the aid we send to Africa is not even remotely altruism, effective or not, although most of it is also not very effective.)

I think the goals of NGOs working in that space are generally in the right place. It's true that they seldom do anything scalable in the sense of transformational research or marked improvement in processes, but the structure (of funding) somewhat prevents them to. I think the most scalable thing we can do for poor countries right now is make information, education and food and essential medication as available and as cheap as possible for as much of their population as possible, and let these children's children save themselves.

It's so regulated as to be effectively impossible for individuals to get into unless they have serious connections. I've seen the stocks on the TSX too. I was going by the meaning of the previous posters, which seemed to be saying that all the previously illegal players in the food chain could now step into the limelight and/or that new players could easily get in the industry -- it couldn't be farther from the truth.

It's true that those businesses who benefitted from the regulation stand to be making serious money, and I suppose that is different from the situation in the Netherlands in a major way.

Production is also largely illegal in Canada, with the exception in some of the province of very limited growing for personal use. Legalization is, of course, legalizing consumption, there will be a government monopoly on the parts of the chains that actually generate money.

You'll have to wait a while for the case study -- maybe until the US itself legalizes.

I tend to use "bored states" to do all my planning tasks. In "deep work" or even deep work-adjacent states I am usually too focused on a problem to go back and find things that should be getting done, or to consider the more systemic roadblocks, or to wonder what is going on with other teams or new technologies. I am glad for the moments where I am not in a meeting or doing deep work, in a way, because they give space to ponder what should come next.

That said, the study is pretty flawed, because it asked individuals to self-select at two points (whether they found the task boring, and whether they daydreamed during it). I can find plenty of boring tasks I would daydream while doing over the course of an 8h workday, but finding a time-limited 15min task with zero difficulty so boring that you are daydreaming during it seems to me indicative of some kind of attention issue. I worry that it may be selecting for a personality type that is already more creative, because participants in the control conditions were not asked how often they daydreamed, and participants in the boredom condition were not tested on creativity before the boredom test.

I'm starting to think maybe we should collectively subject the men who are using the correct wording/behavior to positive reinforcement. Such as if someone tells you "The intern is really hot, but I would never ask out an intern" you would smile and go "Great guy, Bart! I also would never ask out an intern, nor would any other guy I know.". A number of men on the intellectual side of things seem to have what comes across as out-of-proportion anxiety that everything they think, do, or are is somehow sexually harassing, even when they don't even smile at women. Maybe the men that have the anxiety issue had inadequate reinforcement as children or something.

My understanding is sexual harassment is aggressive, in a way that goes beyond confidence or assertiveness. I suppose it feels like being in a fight in a way. Most fights don't have lasting consequences, most fights occur in environments or cultures where they're almost excused in a way, but if somebody wants to fight you, and even if somebody wants to fight you in an environment that's normally very sober, such as your office, you tend to know it. (And depending on your relative sizes and prior levels of acquaintance, it will make you uneasy).

What kind of job would you and the parent poster recommend jack-of-all-trades people who just want to get things done apply to? Sales in some environments is ideal for this but for introverts?

I like the concept but I don't believe the diploma it grants "counts" in France for applying to e.g. master's and PhD programmes and most French smart people I knew had little interest in stopping with undergrad. In French culture "number of years of schooling" is actually a pretty important metric so I feel like a university that does not leave you a chance to go beyond the 3 years is going to only get the people who are really committed to the formula as well as those who don't have good alternatives.

What do people in Silicon Valley think of their US version vs coding bootcamps or other private universities? It seems it could gain a bigger following there?

I hope you're actually an American who doesn't like the NFL so you can tell me how well the analogy follows.

The conversational equivalent using the NFL example would go something like this:

"Why are there no Americans at my favorite chess forum?"

"Americans like the NFL. They're just more into brute force and camaraderie, especially American men. Chess can't really appeal to them. I mean, back in the Neolithic, a modern day chess grandmaster, if he managed to not burn in the sun and see an angry cougar 15 meters away, would probably have died. American men are just closer to their nature. I have this cousin who's American, I have attempted for years to get him to play chess and no dice. Not during the season, anyway."

"I mean sure but there are American chess clubs? Some Americans like chess? Surely the cougar thing is not relevant to my original scope?"

Now, you're a chess loving American. You're not at the first poster's forum because you can't be on all the forums in the world, and it's true love of chess is not exactly common in the US. However, how would you feel reading the description of how apparently literally everyone else in America loves the NFL? Would you feel proud to be American? Would you feel like the poster who made the NFL comment is likely to be an American man? Would you be more, or less likely to read his further arguments on different or related topics, for example, his opinion on American politics?

While I'm sure that there are plenty of women who don't mind those arguments being made, and I think to an extent this forum would select for those women anyway, it remains an argument that is, in essence, 1) prone to being misinterpreted and 2) a little blind to your audience. (the subject is chess - you are talking to a chess fan - for all you know the chess fan also loves the NFL)

And those arguments are less effective than other arguments, for example, the kinds that 1) don't make assumptions of their audience and 2) are closely related to the topic.

(I realise this digression itself is totally off-topic and I'm sorry. I'm not interested in monologuing or haranguing the poster or anything. I hope it, and the little NFL parable, showed you and the people who usually make that argument without thinking about who reads it, a slightly different side, and that you may consider it if in the future you should have longer debates on relevant subjects with people whose opinion and background you don't know a priori. And thank you to anyone who read it.)

I'm sorry, I don't follow how your argument (which is valid) is a response to mine. I said people tend to object to being imposed an identity by people who do not share it ("all women hate programming", "all Yankees eat too much"). (And to a lesser extent they also object to the same thing by ingroup members, but are less comfortable expressing it. If my parent was in fact a woman, her viewpoint would most likely still be pretty unpopular.)

Arguments being inflammatory does not make them invalid. It is fine to have conversations that include inflammatory arguments, if they are made politely, which parent did. But ignoring that the argument is inflammatory, and/or that the group the argument refers to are in fact intelligent people involved in the discussion that may have themselves an opinion, is lacking in empathy. Rhetoric is founded in empathy; that is why it is an art, and not merely a technique.

I see this argument a lot but your exposition is less inflammatory than most. Please note this: when you tell a mixed-gender group of people that all women are "wired" to not like programming, you are telling the women who do like programming (which, let's be real, is most of them on Hacker News) that they're in effect not real women (or defective women, in an engineering sense). Or that they don't count.

Since you're presumably not a woman, and they are, they object to your seeming to be taking it upon yourself to tell them what a woman is.

It's not unlikely that most women don't want to be in software. Most men don't want to be in software! But hundreds of thousands of women are, in fact, working as programmers. Whenever tech news talks about hiring women, presumably, they're talking about hiring these women. Why pretend they don't exist?

There is an interesting tangent in this thread where we can wonder what it would reveal if "coding interview" type CS tests were administered along with standard IQ tests (or the application included SAT scores). Do coding tests predict work performance better or worse than an IQ test? If worse, are they merely "culture fit" bias filters meant to retain the ingroup? If better, is it because culture fit actually matters, or because there is in fact some CS-specific skill or set of assumed knowledge that matters in programming that goes beyond logic?

While I understand that using IQ tests as hiring predictors is itself a problem, I'm interested in the interplay in predictive ability between the two classes of tests. I think everyone would agree that any primarily intellectual timed test that was _less_ salient to work performance than an IQ test should be binned. What would happen to our interviews then?