On page 10 or thereabouts, it is noted that the line between "coder" and "programmer" was blurred and women often took on the more intellectual aspects of programming, not just data entry.
I am amazed at how little credit has been given women and how easily a male-dominated board like this "pooh-pooh's" the female contribution.
I also think the male majority on this forum does not even realize how knee-jerk their response is to this topic. And this comment will be modded down (or won't be seen).
"the key to how the teachers of Battle School learn about the students is the Fantasy Game. It is designed to secretly map out the psyche of its user, which provides the teachers with valuable data on the motivations behind each student's actions, the point being that it provides psychological information about a student."
I'm always fascinated at the value some people place in " I am almost never late (maybe once a year?)".
Your true value is not in always being there on the clock at the same time every day. You list that one first, and the fact that you never take vacation.
I have to read the rest of your post while trying to separate that distraction. Because in the end, it is about productivity, not the time you don't use for vacation, nor the fact that you walk in the door at 9:00AM on the dot every day.
Misplaced values like these are being used to fire others? I hope not. :)
I don't think the idea is to bring more women into the field. The idea is to make the field less known as an all-male bastion. Do we really want our field to be known as bigoted and closed? Or do we want the best and the brightest to consider it a golden opportunity for those who have the chops for it?
I don't mind the field being mostly male. I do mind it being known as a ghetto of chauvinists.
The best salespeople will view a salary as a cap on their income and a disincentive.
I started in technology in pure software sales, beginning in tele-sales, graduating to direct sales, then to sales engineer. I now work on a complex API using C++ as a software engineer.
I was a different person when I was in sales. My success depended not just on my sales ability, but also on my ability to convince other salespeople to hire me and get the best territories, etc.
Being on commission made me feel anxiety most of the time. By the time I progressed to better sales jobs with livable salaries (plus commission), the game was different. You now have to show a potential employer that you live for the things that the commissions provide, not the salary. You need to have expensive hobbies and tastes in order to be considered one of the best of the best.
I got out of sales because I need to contribute in different ways. Sales as a career was hollow for me. I can't put my finger on exactly why, however.
I think the reason commissions are useful is to get salespeople to do the things they hate, such as building a pipeline (cold calling, mailing, boring stuff) and facing rejection day after day after day.
Part of the reason I think people use throwaway accounts here because Paul Graham uses your user name during the YCombinator application process and your comments as criteria.
Tuition costs to join the middle-class are so high that most kids today end up in a form of indentured servitude in order to pay off the loans. I don't support the notion that universities and colleges are responsible for finding anyone a job, but the price these kids pay should be investigated.
I have my doubts as to whether the current loans for tuition model is sustainable.
I didn't realize I liked math until I worked with computers and programming. That's when I suddenly began to understand the concepts of math and its beauty. The language of computers expresses mathematical ideas much better than traditional mathematical symbols, for my particular brain.
Whenever I see a difficult math equation or proof, I look for its expression in a computer language. Maybe this is poor form (I should be trying to understand the language of math) but I save myself a lot of frustration.
>You can’t always choose your own hours or get to work from home. Business is all about making money, so you have to do whatever it takes to succeed. If that means you have to answer calls in the middle of the night, then so be it.
Not necessarily true. I've known an entrepreneur that left consulting to do a software startup for exactly this reason. Being beholden is a consulting nightmare, not a software product company nightmare, in my experience.
My personal experience is that the best, most imaginative software developers are mostly self-taught.
Passion for the topic is very important because a lot of what we do for a living is un-charted, un-mapped territory. The passion is required to get past mediocre.
I am a self-taught programmer. I tried to learn in school but my mind wasn't quite molded to the way programming teachers taught back then (1985-ish). So years later I re-visited programming on my own after DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1 came out.
I got the bug and eventually became a professional. I now work on a large magnificent software library used by millions of people whether they know it or not (I won't say what it is).
I consider it a privilege and part of the journey to work with passionate, self-taught people who paved the way.
There would be a lot of empty seats without superstars if we only accepted Ivy types or excluded the self-taught.
I just couldn't be in this field if that were the case.
It may be safe to say that a lot of scholarship, regardless of gender, is flawed. That women do not wish to be publicly flogged is, perhaps, a tendency of the gender.
Maybe contacting the author, first, was a better way to handle the situation?
Of course, the article author doesn't try to search her own flaws in her approach.
When we create new software that benefits from lots of networked users, we will be forced to make that software compatible with the people who do not have their own private servers. So users can run their own servers, but there will be those who cannot afford to do so or do not have the expertise. If there are enough of those kinds of users we will then have to bend to the needs of those users who in turn bend to the rules of the companies hosting their software.
On page 10 or thereabouts, it is noted that the line between "coder" and "programmer" was blurred and women often took on the more intellectual aspects of programming, not just data entry.
I am amazed at how little credit has been given women and how easily a male-dominated board like this "pooh-pooh's" the female contribution.
I also think the male majority on this forum does not even realize how knee-jerk their response is to this topic. And this comment will be modded down (or won't be seen).
Sigh.