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Over the last several months, I’ve witnessed many controversial discussions among my friends, in my San Francisco community, and on online forums about James Demore’s memorandum. People of both genders are wrestling with the fact that fewer women go into computer science and trying to find explanations that balance their experience, empathy, and ethical aspirations. I’ve heard lots of good-intentioned people consider discouraging theories of biological superiority because they can’t find any other compelling explanation (like this post on HackerNews, for example). As a woman who studied computer science, worked at some of the top tech firms, and has founded a software startup, I’d like to share my take on why fewer women go into CS and my opinion on how to address the issue.
[...] I graduated from Stanford with a BS in Mathematical & Computational Sciences in 2015, interned at Apple as a software engineer, and worked as an Associate Product Manager at Google 2015-2017. In October, I founded a video editing website called Kapwing and am working on the startup full-time. Although I’m only 25, I’ve already seen many of my female friends choose majors/careers outside of STEM and have been inside of many predominately-male classes, organizations, and teams.
This article is one person’s humble perspective, and I do not speak for every woman in tech. But hopefully having the view of someone who has “been there” can help people trying to understand why there are fewer women in tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday May 12 2018, @02:21AM (8 children)
That's actually not an unusual path for both software and hardware specialists. (And probably more common for those that deal with both software and hardware - such as embedded systems, etc).
The idea that you have to be a CS or math major is true for a small cadre of corner cases in the computing industry.
Encryption and some types of AI research are the hot areas these days, it use to be databases and such.
Almost all the elite programmers I've worked with did not have CS degrees, and the ones that did were hard to keep on task. Bored perhaps (or so they acted), but more likely completely out of their depth when it came to getting real production grade systems operational without even once finding a place for this-weeks-buzz-algorithm.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday May 12 2018, @02:32AM (7 children)
Yup. It's the old Engineer vs. Scientist thing all over again. The scientist may very well have a greater depth of knowledge on theory but the engineer will pretty much always get the project done faster, better, and cheaper than the scientist because his job is not computers, it's getting shit done.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday May 12 2018, @04:55PM (6 children)
It still surprises me the extent of the lying and political considerations that go into hiring decisions. It's like employers hire people without degrees more to embarrass proponents of higher education, stick it to colleges and professors, and they rate that sort of thing even higher than competence and honesty, which is what should be the first considerations. Point to someone like Bill Gates and say, "See? He didn't need a degree!" They also put a lot of weight on a particular mindset that is perhaps best described as being a willing fascist slave, or at least putting on a convincing pretense of that. Be a "company man". With the EEOC breathing down their necks, they all say they want to best skill match, and often a "self-starter", but many really don't want either.
Then there's the too heavy weight they place on experience. They seem not to grasp that star programmers don't need experience in a particular technology, can't believe anyone can pick up such a complicated thing as a new to them programming language in a matter of days or just hours. So what star code monkeys have had to do is play the game, claim years of experience in whatever tech is supposedly wanted, knowing that they'll be able to cram for the tech interview and probably pass it.
Ideally, a degree in CS ought to be good enough to show that a candidate is a competent programmer. Then too, job requirements are often hugely inflated, to winnow out would be candidates. They may well ask for a degree for a job that doesn't need one.
As to your contention that scientists tend to be impractical, while engineers "get shit done", you ought to be a little more cautious and less arrogant about that presumption. Ever heard the expression "a couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library"? An engineer getting shit done is going to be looking real ignorant if the glorious engineering work of months solves a problem that a scientist already knew had been solved and could simply copy any of several better solutions and apply it in one day. One of the worst cases of reinventing the wheel I heard of was an engineer who upon promotion to a management position, insisted on hiring a team to design and build a device the company already had. He was advised that they already had it, but wouldn't even look at it and pushed ahead. Maybe he thought the existing device was such poor quality it wasn't worth a look, but how would he know if he didn't at least look? As I recall, they produced a working device but it was inferior to the existing one. About half a year later, they demoted him to junior engineer.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday May 12 2018, @09:21PM (5 children)
Need, no. A mildly desirable trait that will save you a day or five worth of man hours over the length of their employment. Not a need though.
You think engineers can't or don't look into the best way to solve a problem? You have an exceedingly odd idea of what an engineer is then. That aside, unless you're performing rocket surgery, nobody cares about having the best solution. They want a good one that doesn't cost them a lot of money or time in upkeep. That is where the scientists fail. Shiny and new is never a good answer unless old and reliable will not get the job done.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday May 12 2018, @10:18PM (1 child)
> You think engineers can't or don't look into the best way to solve a problem?
No, I'm saying engineers can get arrogant and misunderstand the nature and difficulty of a problem. It doesn't help much to look into the best way to solve a problem if you are solving the wrong problem. I've encountered many EEs who think CS is trivially easy, and they will be able to figure out any CS problem, quickly, if they need to.
As an example of less bright engineers making a mountain out of a molehill, the company's product had 5 interchangeable parts. For each part, there could be 100 choices. Well, many of them had a penchant for monolithic diagrams. They wanted one diagram for each combination. But that meant they'd have to draw 100^5 = 10 billion different diagrams. They got a bit panicky about it, and started scrambling around. Proposed hiring some programmers to create programs to generate all 10 billion possible diagrams. Of course, they never sold all 10 billion combos, for the simple reason that they didn't have that quantity of sales. And further, some combinations were used for many customers. So they were thinking they could generate the diagrams on an as needed basis. What do you suppose they did?
>That is where the scientists fail. Shiny and new is never a good answer
Wow, whatever my opinion of engineers, your opinion of scientists looks pretty poor. Fail? Scientists don't fall for "shiny and new". They evaluate the merits. Maybe a shiny and new way is best, or maybe an old classic way is best.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday May 12 2018, @11:16PM
Oh, sure. That's everyone though.
Works in theory, not in practice. Much like engineering vs. science in general. An engineer worth the name isn't going to want to put anything into service that doesn't have a solid track record doing what it's being asked to do. A scientist will just think that if it's been proven copacetic in lab conditions that it'll work fine in the real world as well. The scientist could possibly be correct but it's a very foolish choice to use their opinion over that of the person who is going to have to make it work and keep it working, even though outside lab conditions it falls to shit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Demena on Sunday May 13 2018, @02:49AM (2 children)
One thing you are both missing. Of those scientists and engineers, just how many of them can write a UI that makes a product usable? It can take a number of different mindsets to produce something usable.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 13 2018, @02:57AM (1 child)
From what I've seen? Nobody at any significant tech company. They all make the same mistake. See, a UI doesn't have to be fantastic. It only needs to be pretty good and to never, ever change. Change from a mediocre UI to an amazing new UI with important shit moved all around where it's frustrating as hell to find is a net loss in usability.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by hemocyanin on Sunday May 13 2018, @03:42AM
Yes. For example, in some recent revision of Libre/open/whatever Office, the spreadsheet function to fill down/left/right/up got moved from the "edit" menu item to the "sheet" menu item. How do I know? Every fucking time I want to do that action I start by opening the "edit" menu -- think "you fucking bastards" then hit several other menu headings to find it.
I've been using this software since it was a commercial product Sun published (Star Office) -- definitely was using it prior to 2003 at home, and after 2003 when I opened my own business, I have used it heavily and constantly since. I'd like to find the asshole who did that and make sure every menu he or she ever sees for the rest of his/her life, has all the alpha characters changed to "*".