Samuel,
Actually, I was being too soft. Read this good, well funded history:
I actually met Grace Hopper, the COBOL lady. When she was invited by Microfocus on the event they organised to present the COBOL compiler written in .. COBOL. which made her point about programming in general. (i can write about this, but not to the point right now)
I have a 15-years old daughter. I am teaching her programming (she is interested in math / science). She graduates also in photography and video, but wants to be an engineer. So i teach her programming. Not the usual stuff, but starting with euhh.. assembler. She liked it, but wants to move more rapidly. So i teach her C language, and she sees the relation in that ‘evolution’ of language. She plays around with Unity, making stuff with Autocad 360. Fascinating how that works. But i see this as a duty of a father to hand over his experience. But also the fear that she will invest time that will be wasted once she would eventually enter the male world of software development, and got excluded because some colleagues make it difficult to enter their world.
I have been a developer all my life. But i created also the opportunity for myself to create software companies. Some where failures, most of them successful. I hired a lot of people, most of them men. (availability, not choice) And they had a few things in common:
- writing cryptic code. The more unreadable, the better. It reinforced their status.
- Using a stack of tools / libraries to go faster. Which is good, but always ended up in focusing more on those things then the core problem, the distribution or the client.
- Trying to obtain “guru” status: the more of the above, the better, and always trying to give you the feeling that you cannot do business without them.
- Because of the short term views of management and / or investors, their salary goes up, but their productivity goes below zero. From this point onward, girls get excluded because they can break up the world they have build for themselves (because we let them)
- once that status reached, they maintain the status of being “unmanageable”. with a high degree of testosterone, an environment which was virtually inaccessible for women to enter (or, if you did, you get the story that you have to evaluate a piece of code to see if you can sort it out, with comments written in greek or latin)
When i could control it, those people where sacked. Because they are not economically viable. They make good impression in the short term, when products need to be released the sooner the better. In the long run, their code is useless. This industry needs a long term view. We need the women in our teams. Teams with less testosterone. With more education (the theories behind software). Frankly, this industry needs more fathers to introduce their daughters in REAL software development.
