That's weird, because I've been programming for decades now professionally for many different companies, and I've yet to meet ONE good female programmers.
Oh, there were some competent ones (as good as the worse male programmers at the company), and a lot of really bad ones (that would never have been hired if they weren't women), but not ONE good programmer. Not ONE programmer you could say had passion, wrote inspiring code, was excited to see some new form of data structure or programming idea.
In decades of professional programming, and decades of (private tutoring) teaching, seeing many many both male and female programmers (admittedly, mostly male), not a single good female programmer. But many many good male programmers and a lot of excellent programmers.
Same here in the 20 years I have been programming, I have met only one female programmer, and she was just average. One time she spent two days trying to debug a piece of code before asking me for help, and I found the problem in literally 5 minutes.
Yeah she was our dba and after she left i ended up becoming the DBA. Her means of fixing things was to just stick a bandaid on. After like 6 years with the company she was spending 90% of her time just maintaining all the terrible bandaids she had put in place and making manual data changes to fix issues... it was pathetic.
Yeah it was pretty ridiculous when i took over her position and realized why she was always so busy. Because she had put temporary fixes all over the place and was constantly manually making our system work. In about 6 months i got things back in a normal working order.
I've been working in the software industry for twenty years as well and hired hundreds of programmers. Not once have I seen a woman programmer who is above average on man scale.
In my experience, it's not necessarily an intelligence problem but rather a passion one. I have never met a woman who had had spent their teen years alone at home coding. But plenty of men who have.
my experience, it's not necessarily an intelligence problem but rather a passion one.
Yes! Exactly!
I remember when C++11 just came - I was so excited! I send all my free time (at home!) playing around with the new language features. I was reading about it for years before - when it was still C++0x - almost getting a boner about the auto and new for feature, and trying to wrap my head around promises and futures. And I wasn't alone - for months, all we talked about at work was this new thing or that new thing in C++11, and how we would write things differently, and how SFINAE works, and what we could use it for, and how we would change the codebase to take advantage of the new features and... and... and we were legitimately excited. Like the hype you get before a new video game / movie / whatever comes out.
Female programmers? No. They just "OK, this is a new thing I need to learn. Hopefully I can just continue to work as normal". Not one looked like she would spend her free time excitedly reading anything she could find about the new features. They work, they go home, and at home they don't think or care about programming.
I'd never considered that, but it makes sense. I did spend my teen years programming on my own. Reading everything I could find, taking any classes I could. I loved it.
In my experience, it's not necessarily an intelligence problem but rather a passion one. I have never met a woman who had had spent their teen years alone at home coding. But plenty of men who have.
Yeah this is what insults me about the whole thing. It is part of the male condition that some of us spend our coming of age years doing geeky things instead of working on how to get laid.
When I first heard that any woman thought that there were social structures that discouraged women from programming, I thought back to how my parents let me have the old family computer in my bedroom, while my sister got nothing. I thought for a second "Huh, maybe it was unfair ... maybe she would have benefited from having the computer." And then I quickly realized, -- "Oh-- she would have just gotten herself into all kinds of trouble."
My sister is incredibly smart, but of course she couldn't resist the life of a normal young woman. She was always a bit jealous of my skills, of my talent when it came to playing guitar and writing music, and being funny. But I was always a bit jealous of the fact that she dated way more successfully and so on. It is just the condition of being the genders that we are.
It is that way in most technical fields, there are some exceptions when there is repetitive lab work and things that anyone can find interesting (robotics, BME, medical, cutting edge), but a female EE, or ME, doing normal engineering work? forgetaboutit.
Or, one willing to work enough hours. We do "Seattle hundreds" most weeks which is 16 hours a day Mon-Thu and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun. Most girls we hire are too lazy to even work 2/3 of that before quitting.
I had the honor to work with 2 actually very good coders back in the day... the funny thing? They hated to work with other women in the same team specially each other.
Oh, we had one (the only) female in my class. Professors literally said: "we'll let her pass, because we don't get much girls". We were doing Pascal the first year. Code, the only code in that whole year that she submitted was Program Hello; and she did not just passed, she passed with a good grade. I don't know what happened the next year, because I was gone.
But, oh my, how dispassionate, even hateful her attitude was. And entitled, and not ashamed of her special treatment at all. I can't imagine why she enrolled at all, perhaps she knew that that school goes easy on girls. Horrifying to imagine she'd finish her education (I mean, that they let her pass all the way to the end), and then seek work in this field, and be hired because of some quotas or something.
I wonder if they are controlling for pull-requests on documentation files or README's.
There is no impartial automatic way to measure the quality of a code commit. It could be an entirely cosmetic change, or it could appear large because of some light refactoring that was easy to perform. Commit size and pull-request acceptance rate won't even begin to tell you what you're seeing.
I want to know what they mean with "better" programmers?
I have been decades being a developer and I have seen million of crappy code written by males when their big ego's claimed that this was superior code. Crap because most of the time it failed to do the job and contained full of bugs, a misery to debug.
It was always big fun to see these superior developers had to debug their code 6 months later and failed to understand their own code.
I've been a professional programmer for 15 years now as well as a published computer security researcher. I've worked extensively in both academia and the corporate world. In that time I've worked with about a dozen of female programmers. Of that pool the vast majority were just as competent as the average male programmer with a very few being exceptional. In my experience the talent distribution among female programmers is very similar to that of male programmers. What has always puzzled me is that the best female programmers I've encountered have always been asian in origin. I've never met an exceptional caucasian female programmer. This is most likely to due with US immigration requirements and cultural factors. Just my two cents.
I think that we will see more people programming and having a passion for it in the coming years. Right now artists are using things like aruduino in their projects, many people are doing web design, etc. and each of these, even though they might not be "real" coding are making people much less apprehensive to seeing monospaced text in an editor. This means that we might get great female programmers at some point.
When I found Slate Star Codex I was beginning to think either I, or the world, had gone mad. Reading Scott's stuff gives me that nice feeling of knowing that there are some people who aren't completely bonkers and some of them aren't afraid to speak up and point out the absurdity. It's the same feeling I used to get from the early Simpsons.
You should see the amount of pure unmitigated hate he gets from all sides, though. He's somehow a basement-dwelling, shot-chugging cuckold gymbro with an Ed Hardy fedora. He laughs it off. I'm not sure I could.
Thanks for posting this article. I had read about the supposed "findings" at Ars but thought that the writer was jumping to conclusions. I'm glad to see my skepticism is shared by others.
I get that Ms. Lovelace was probably a great software engineer and a pioneer as a woman in that field at that time. However a meme can get old and there is a fine line between letting people know something existed and overhyping a social equality meme that everyone has already heard until it just gets old.
Some non-peer reviewed thing with a secret data set measures like a zillion things. Of all of those, one of them has a 2% thing that doesn't favor women. That gets spun as a study that shows that men are sexist, and THAT gets spun as a study showing women are better coders than men.
44 comments
44 u/Crashmarik 13 Feb 2016 15:14
All you need to know about the paper. Should have been published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.
11 u/0x7a69 13 Feb 2016 16:26
Indeed, "peer review link or it didn't happen"
42 u/Men13 13 Feb 2016 15:29
That's weird, because I've been programming for decades now professionally for many different companies, and I've yet to meet ONE good female programmers.
Oh, there were some competent ones (as good as the worse male programmers at the company), and a lot of really bad ones (that would never have been hired if they weren't women), but not ONE good programmer. Not ONE programmer you could say had passion, wrote inspiring code, was excited to see some new form of data structure or programming idea.
In decades of professional programming, and decades of (private tutoring) teaching, seeing many many both male and female programmers (admittedly, mostly male), not a single good female programmer. But many many good male programmers and a lot of excellent programmers.
6 u/markrod420 13 Feb 2016 15:34
Only met one female programmer and she was avg at best.
2 u/elcob32 13 Feb 2016 15:46
Same here in the 20 years I have been programming, I have met only one female programmer, and she was just average. One time she spent two days trying to debug a piece of code before asking me for help, and I found the problem in literally 5 minutes.
0 u/markrod420 13 Feb 2016 15:51
Yeah she was our dba and after she left i ended up becoming the DBA. Her means of fixing things was to just stick a bandaid on. After like 6 years with the company she was spending 90% of her time just maintaining all the terrible bandaids she had put in place and making manual data changes to fix issues... it was pathetic.
0 u/elcob32 13 Feb 2016 15:53
That's not just pathetic, it's also a dangerous security risk. My colleague only had problems with SQL joins, and debugging stored procedures.
2 u/markrod420 13 Feb 2016 15:55
Yeah it was pretty ridiculous when i took over her position and realized why she was always so busy. Because she had put temporary fixes all over the place and was constantly manually making our system work. In about 6 months i got things back in a normal working order.
46 u/JustTruthful 13 Feb 2016 15:52
I've been working in the software industry for twenty years as well and hired hundreds of programmers. Not once have I seen a woman programmer who is above average on man scale.
In my experience, it's not necessarily an intelligence problem but rather a passion one. I have never met a woman who had had spent their teen years alone at home coding. But plenty of men who have.
23 u/Men13 13 Feb 2016 16:02
Yes! Exactly!
I remember when C++11 just came - I was so excited! I send all my free time (at home!) playing around with the new language features. I was reading about it for years before - when it was still C++0x - almost getting a boner about the auto and new for feature, and trying to wrap my head around promises and futures. And I wasn't alone - for months, all we talked about at work was this new thing or that new thing in C++11, and how we would write things differently, and how SFINAE works, and what we could use it for, and how we would change the codebase to take advantage of the new features and... and... and we were legitimately excited. Like the hype you get before a new video game / movie / whatever comes out.
Female programmers? No. They just "OK, this is a new thing I need to learn. Hopefully I can just continue to work as normal". Not one looked like she would spend her free time excitedly reading anything she could find about the new features. They work, they go home, and at home they don't think or care about programming.
That's the difference I see.
7 u/ForgotMyName 13 Feb 2016 16:06
I'd never considered that, but it makes sense. I did spend my teen years programming on my own. Reading everything I could find, taking any classes I could. I loved it.
0 u/onegin 29 Feb 2016 03:16
Yeah this is what insults me about the whole thing. It is part of the male condition that some of us spend our coming of age years doing geeky things instead of working on how to get laid.
When I first heard that any woman thought that there were social structures that discouraged women from programming, I thought back to how my parents let me have the old family computer in my bedroom, while my sister got nothing. I thought for a second "Huh, maybe it was unfair ... maybe she would have benefited from having the computer." And then I quickly realized, -- "Oh-- she would have just gotten herself into all kinds of trouble."
My sister is incredibly smart, but of course she couldn't resist the life of a normal young woman. She was always a bit jealous of my skills, of my talent when it came to playing guitar and writing music, and being funny. But I was always a bit jealous of the fact that she dated way more successfully and so on. It is just the condition of being the genders that we are.
1 u/peacegnome 13 Feb 2016 16:25
It is that way in most technical fields, there are some exceptions when there is repetitive lab work and things that anyone can find interesting (robotics, BME, medical, cutting edge), but a female EE, or ME, doing normal engineering work? forgetaboutit.
-2 u/jen1980 13 Feb 2016 19:52
Or, one willing to work enough hours. We do "Seattle hundreds" most weeks which is 16 hours a day Mon-Thu and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun. Most girls we hire are too lazy to even work 2/3 of that before quitting.
1 u/PotatoFarm 14 Feb 2016 07:46
I had the honor to work with 2 actually very good coders back in the day... the funny thing? They hated to work with other women in the same team specially each other.
2 u/VxMxPx 14 Feb 2016 22:16
Oh, we had one (the only) female in my class. Professors literally said: "we'll let her pass, because we don't get much girls". We were doing Pascal the first year. Code, the only code in that whole year that she submitted was
Program Hello;and she did not just passed, she passed with a good grade. I don't know what happened the next year, because I was gone.But, oh my, how dispassionate, even hateful her attitude was. And entitled, and not ashamed of her special treatment at all. I can't imagine why she enrolled at all, perhaps she knew that that school goes easy on girls. Horrifying to imagine she'd finish her education (I mean, that they let her pass all the way to the end), and then seek work in this field, and be hired because of some quotas or something.
9 u/onegin 13 Feb 2016 16:17
I wonder if they are controlling for pull-requests on documentation files or README's.
There is no impartial automatic way to measure the quality of a code commit. It could be an entirely cosmetic change, or it could appear large because of some light refactoring that was easy to perform. Commit size and pull-request acceptance rate won't even begin to tell you what you're seeing.
7 u/european 13 Feb 2016 22:03
Maybe they were changing problematic variable names.
2 u/lucifirius 13 Feb 2016 22:18
or bitching about the private twitter account of a highly valued contributor to a repo.
6 u/roznak 13 Feb 2016 16:18
I want to know what they mean with "better" programmers?
I have been decades being a developer and I have seen million of crappy code written by males when their big ego's claimed that this was superior code. Crap because most of the time it failed to do the job and contained full of bugs, a misery to debug.
It was always big fun to see these superior developers had to debug their code 6 months later and failed to understand their own code.
6 u/ipsocannibal 13 Feb 2016 20:20
I've been a professional programmer for 15 years now as well as a published computer security researcher. I've worked extensively in both academia and the corporate world. In that time I've worked with about a dozen of female programmers. Of that pool the vast majority were just as competent as the average male programmer with a very few being exceptional. In my experience the talent distribution among female programmers is very similar to that of male programmers. What has always puzzled me is that the best female programmers I've encountered have always been asian in origin. I've never met an exceptional caucasian female programmer. This is most likely to due with US immigration requirements and cultural factors. Just my two cents.
5 u/goatboy 13 Feb 2016 15:08
100 million Autists screeched in unison that day.
4 u/sec 13 Feb 2016 15:16
That's very scary imagry
3 u/peacegnome 13 Feb 2016 16:29
I think that we will see more people programming and having a passion for it in the coming years. Right now artists are using things like aruduino in their projects, many people are doing web design, etc. and each of these, even though they might not be "real" coding are making people much less apprehensive to seeing monospaced text in an editor. This means that we might get great female programmers at some point.
2 u/Spear1000 13 Feb 2016 16:47
lol, like you can actually measure this in the first place.
2 u/zquad 13 Feb 2016 18:10
Not taking it seriously until its peer reviewed
1 u/http404 13 Feb 2016 23:12
Way to go man!
1 u/ZigZagWanderer 15 Feb 2016 16:39
When I found Slate Star Codex I was beginning to think either I, or the world, had gone mad. Reading Scott's stuff gives me that nice feeling of knowing that there are some people who aren't completely bonkers and some of them aren't afraid to speak up and point out the absurdity. It's the same feeling I used to get from the early Simpsons.
You should see the amount of pure unmitigated hate he gets from all sides, though. He's somehow a basement-dwelling, shot-chugging cuckold gymbro with an Ed Hardy fedora. He laughs it off. I'm not sure I could.
0 u/0x5f3759df 13 Feb 2016 17:53
Did anyone think they were??
-2 u/InfoTeddy 14 Feb 2016 07:58
Well…at least anyone rationally sane didn’t, if that answers your question.
0 u/Kam123 13 Feb 2016 19:59
Thanks for posting this article. I had read about the supposed "findings" at Ars but thought that the writer was jumping to conclusions. I'm glad to see my skepticism is shared by others.
0 u/dickbutt 13 Feb 2016 20:21
i noticed they didn't report on programmers that identify as attack helicopter. just like github, always keeping the minoritykin down.
0 u/Zaqwert 14 Feb 2016 05:48
They aren't supposed to be accurate, they're propaganda.
-1 u/ObscureReference 13 Feb 2016 19:34
I get that Ms. Lovelace was probably a great software engineer and a pioneer as a woman in that field at that time. However a meme can get old and there is a fine line between letting people know something existed and overhyping a social equality meme that everyone has already heard until it just gets old.
-1 u/Datawych 13 Feb 2016 21:24
That's weird, because the 4 women who were in my major of 275 seems to indicate otherwise.
-1 u/Vailx 14 Feb 2016 02:36
I was looking for one that actually claimed women were better programmers than men. I didn't find one, but minutes later it popped up on google news.
Whatever the fuck a bustle dot com is, has this to offer:
https://archive.is/2uoDY
So the chain is:
Some non-peer reviewed thing with a secret data set measures like a zillion things. Of all of those, one of them has a 2% thing that doesn't favor women. That gets spun as a study that shows that men are sexist, and THAT gets spun as a study showing women are better coders than men.
Absolutely ludicrous.
-1 u/binky 14 Feb 2016 13:27
If women get their stuff accepted, it means they're better. If they don't it means there's sexism.
-2 u/Supreme_Authority 14 Feb 2016 05:01
Fuck those articles. Saying 2+2=5 doesn't make it true.