> Except the gender ratio in science/engineering is anything but universal across cultures. 70% of science/engineering students in Iran are women: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-ta.... Indeed, in many parts of the world that are not known for being "liberal" with regard to gender equality, women make up a significantly higher percentage of the scientific workforce than in the U.S.: http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-science-technology-e.... (44% in Latin America, 40% in Eastern Europe, 37% in the Arab states).
Later in the document he goes on to point out that gender disparities are greater in more liberal countries (e.g. great disparity in US than Iran, greater disparity in Finland than in the US). Interpreting this as our culture being somehow more oppressive (and then Finland's even more so) requires an "impressive level of intellectual contortion" - if anything it seems to be evidence that there are differences in preferences, and therefore greater freedom -> greater divergence.
Grrr. If you adjust for population of course the top places in the list will be dominated by small populations who've had a particularly bad time recently.
When I can, I try to just not have a computer at home for this reason. I have an e reader and a shitty cellphone that can is hard enough to use that I don't waste much time with it.
The trick is trying to find things that you can only use productively.
Terrible WiFi can also work if you can set it up. Something with 300ms lag is enough to stop me playing games. If you live with other people making sure your workstation is in the living room and not your bedroom also helps.
Huh... approaching this from the opposite side, when my boss has suggestions I always take it as an opportunity to let them feel some ownership of the work, even on occasions where the suggestions don't turn out to be that useful in practice ("I implemented your suggestion of X, which led me to come up with Y").
Trying to game professional relationships goes both ways I guess :)
That's dodging the issue though... the issue was that relentless is apparently masculine. What if they say the same thing about dauntless?
I don't think relentless has to be as mindless as you say. Someone who gets in the zone and attacks a hard problem 20 different ways until they solve it is relentless in my books.
Relentlessness and fearlessness are inherently masculine words?
So if I want to find candidates with the qualities of relentlessness and fearlessness, I need gender neutral synonyms for these now... Bloomberg I think this is getting out of hand.
> Depression is an illness
Well, not really. Depression is a "disorder". You can be more biologically predisposed to depression, but that isn't the same thing.
I understand the feeling of needing to "catch up" to fit in. For the first three years after I started programming I kept my work almost completely private, I felt so far behind. I wrote several hundred projects that I never showed to anybody, and didn't even keep. I still feel the gap a little bit today (five years in), but it seems mostly gone.
I fit the programmer archetype exactly, and it took me three years of near constant engagement before I felt I could even begin to fit in (culturally) with experienced programmers. I can easily imagine the task is considerably harder if you don't fit the archetype.
On the flip-side - the desire to "catch up", and the solitary nature of the challenge lent me considerably more motivation and creativity than I seem to have now that I have "acclimatized".
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I'm very interested to see how it is going to turn out for my sister. She's a very talented programmer, but she doesn't try to immerse herself in the culture of it at all, rather she is treating it as an auxiliary skill to her studies in GIS. I feel some smug satisfaction knowing she is coding circles around most of the guys in her classes, despite not taking on the identity of "I am a programmer".
People get offended by the idea that "if you find first year COSC courses difficult, then programming is probably not for you" - but in my experience that's completely how it turns out.
All the programmers I know who started at university with no prior experience and went on to happy and successful* have this in common - they found first year COSC courses an absolute breeze, and went way ahead of the coursework in their own time just for the fun of it.
> That's precisely the problem with race in America: race is a decent first-order approximation of class, with all the bad that entails.
Not really. I mean in my state (WA), 48% of people below the poverty line are white, 18% are hispanic, 14% are asian, 14% are black. Sure some approximations of some classes are heavily involved with race, but if you're discussing class dynamics in general race isn't a necessary distinction.
> If we could address that head-on, if people didn't automatically assume that others of the same race are 'like them' and others of a different race are 'unlike them,' and not have those things be true, then racism would be a thing of the past...
Except that humans can't ignore race. The feel-good stories we tell each other about how we are naturally colorblind and taught to be racist, about how racism is an unnatural malignant artifact in our culture, are just that; stories. In reality children will show a strong preference for members of their own race by age 3, and it's not something we can just disappear.
Winners and losers from my perspective:
- Linux CLI beats Windows CLI - hopefully I can go the rest of my life without learning to use Powershell or cmd.exe. If anything this cements rather than undermines my preference to use Linux on embedded devices and webservers.
- Windows desktop environment beats Linux environments. I'm now less likely to use Unity/GNOME/KDE in my desktop OS, because, while they are ok, they were never one of the reasons I used Linux for my desktop.
I'm not sure which OS this helps/hurts more in the long run, but I know I'm happy.
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft
(double disclaimer: but I'm almost fresh out of university)