formerroomate99
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Post by formerroomate99 on Dec 28, 2016 4:28:49 GMT -5
like biology and chemistry, computer science is a pretty broad field. In some niches you can find a well paying family friendly job anywhere. In other areas, you probably will end up working an insane number of hours in a boys club. I've had jobs where I spent half the day in meetings with the business. I've had other jobs where I could go a week without speaking to any of my coworkers. But overall, programming does pay well, and since women have babies and fathers often walk away, there's something to be said for steering your daughter towards careers that pay decently.
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skubikky
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Post by skubikky on Dec 28, 2016 7:38:57 GMT -5
while I would not discourage a natural interest, I would not either try to encourage it where none existed given the increased incident of sexual harassment in this field. I applaud any who feel up to weathering this and changing it from the inside, but I wouldn't push on my daughter without a strong interest on her part.
I've been in engineering/software development for 35 years.
Have worked in California, NY, Denmark, Illinois, Colorado, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ontario, so believe that I've seen some differing locations as well as cultures.
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skubikky
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Post by skubikky on Dec 28, 2016 7:42:34 GMT -5
There are a few programs through the public schools that encourage "girls to code". It's difficult to convince any teenagers to do something that seems bland to them. We keep pushing though.
One of my daughters is actually interested in engineering. However, she doesn't have the perseverance for the upper level math. We're annoyed with her on that front. She's going to look into interior/exterior design and landscape architecture for the next term. It's always good to provide exposure and encouragement to any kid. But, unless there's some natural interest, ability or curiosity, you'd be forcing something that probably isn't what they want to do. Not every kid is going to have the ability in math, logic and the understanding of algorithm development and other skills that make a good developer or designer. Software development like any of the other engineering careers is based on the ability to problem solve. Most anyone who can read can learn to code, but coding is not software architecture or development. It gets one familiar with the tools but to actually learn the science is something separate. Also, not every kid is going to be successful tethered to a desk for the majority of their professional life. |
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skubikky
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Post by skubikky on Dec 28, 2016 7:45:44 GMT -5
We have a Google campus in Council bluffs. I should check out what jobs they got. Forget Google, go and take a look at the small companies that do embedded systems and other specific application development(i.e, data management, metro logy, diagnostic s/w....and a plethora of other things). The majority of s/w development teams in this country exist in the small companies that have to develop software(often platform architecture that drives machines) that is very specific to their product. |
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skubikky
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Post by skubikky on Dec 28, 2016 7:55:06 GMT -5
while I would not discourage a natural interest, I would not either try to encourage it where none existed given the increased incident of sexual harassment in this field. I applaud any who feel up to weathering this and changing it from the inside, but I wouldn't push on my daughter without a strong interest on her part. A friend and I were talking about that same issue the other day, but instead of the field being programming, it was in regards to the military. He's about the same age as I am - late 40s - and was talking about how unfortunate it was in the military programs he'd been in (he'd gone to a military college and gotten an engineering degree and then served 10 years in one of the branches) the female candidates weren't usually as qualified as the male candidates and ended up flunking out even though the military wanted them there. I told him that a big part of the problem was that until the public perception about how women are treated in the military changes, the military isn't always going to attract the best female candidates and in return, the female candidates aren't going to perform as well because you're not starting out with the cream of the crop. I remember having all sorts of great options for college since I was a National Merit Scholar, so yes, I could have gone to one of the prestigious military academies and probably done just fine in the engineering program. But then what? If I didn't like the service or was being harassed, I'd be stuck. It really wasn't much of a choice when I thought about how I could earn six figures in private industry and be able to change jobs if I didn't like one vs. trying not to be raped in my barracks and being stuck maybe working for the same guys who didn't want me there and were the ones harrassing me in the service... Unfortunately for the military, it's a self-perpetuating cycle. Women who have a lot of options don't want or need to put up with the BS they hear about, so the only female candidates the military get are the less qualified or the (few) that have a burning desire to serve for other reasons. Since the female candidate pool isn't as qualified, they perform poorly overall, which then reinforces the bias of the men who don't want women there which keeps the discrimination cycle intact. This might be true for those that sign up for the military out of high school. The exception are those that complete their engineering or other STEM degrees and then enter the military. Entering OCS is the path. I would agree that if there is the perception of grave sexual danger in the military that many from the pool of STEM educated women might not see it as an attractive option. In my experience, and I realize that I was in college in the late 70's, those women that I knew who were strong in math and science, went to medical school. Engineering wasn't seen as much as a popular choice. Class of 215 engineers that I graduated with. 5 women. 1 went to MIT for grad school, 1 took a Naval commission, and 3 of us went into industry. |
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skubikky
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Post by skubikky on Dec 28, 2016 8:00:44 GMT -5
First off, I was a little disappointed in the implication that computer science is better for females than chemistry, as I'm a female with a chemistry PhD and I'm doing better with my career than a lot of people in computer programming. But other than that, there's a lot that goes into career choice, and a smart female will look into all of that. Programmers tend to work odd hours with little social interaction- how appealing is that for the typical high school female?
More often than not, software developers work on teams that have a high amount of interaction as many projects, architectures and platforms are comprised of a tremendous number of interdependent parts.
If anything, software is, IMHO, one of the more evolved professions with regard to presence of men and women working as equal team members.
As I've said, I've been at this a very long time so feel that I have a reasonable experienced opinion to offer up.
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skubikky
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Post by skubikky on Dec 28, 2016 8:08:53 GMT -5
Rutgers has a coding boot camp program that can apparently have you coding in all these languages in 6 months. It costs like $10k I think. I was really tempted but I don't know if I am as meticulous as I'd need to be to be a good coder. I make stupid reading/math mistakes from time to time - one stupid little mistake can have you searching through hundreds of lines of code to find where you went wrong. Actually that's not how coding and debugging works  Well, to a certain extent maybe but not exactly. There are debuggers available that help you figure out problematic code very quickly. Most servers and modern development environments have built in profilers that tell you exactly which area the issues are in. There are a variety of professional tools available that help programmers test their own code. There are frameworks and methodologies that help programmers make lower number of mistakes as it is. Programming is not a brute force activity. It's a science of writing software. It's not hard but it needs focus and attention, and the will to go past your own mistakes. Women tend to think that it's hard, that they need to be hyper focused to do it, that making mistakes in programming is a BIG NO. Nothing is far from the truth. In fact software development IS the place where fixing of mistakes is a part of the game. Because QA is such a part of software development lifecycle. Yup Today's IDEs(integrated development environments) do so very much for the developer to the point where often errors, bugs(particularly syntax) and mistakes are caught as the code is being written. "stepping" through code with breakpoints and many other debugging tools makes it much easier to catch problems early in the development cycle. Advances have been epic in this field. And continue to be so. |
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Rukh O'Rorke
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Post by Rukh O'Rorke on Dec 28, 2016 11:07:58 GMT -5
while I would not discourage a natural interest, I would not either try to encourage it where none existed given the increased incident of sexual harassment in this field. I applaud any who feel up to weathering this and changing it from the inside, but I wouldn't push on my daughter without a strong interest on her part.
I've been in engineering/software development for 35 years.
Have worked in California, NY, Denmark, Illinois, Colorado, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ontario, so believe that I've seen some differing locations as well as cultures.
I've posted already - if its not the case as many articles have alluded - fine. Personal anecdotes are not very compelling data. No one has posted non-anecdotal info that refutes it either, however. I did not readily find a finely differentiated comparison across fields. |
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formerroomate99
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Post by formerroomate99 on Dec 28, 2016 14:43:32 GMT -5
All my jobs have been at decent sized companies with an evolved HR and legal departments. In 20 years, I've never experienced or even heard of anybody getting physically or verbally harassed. Male programmers at corporate jobs seem like the last guys you'd expect to be bullies.
I have to wonder if the harassment you're talking about is limited to those high intensity Silicon Valley startups who work in hyper competitive niches. Long hours and too much stress can make some people become unbalanced, and a guy with predatory inclinations would prefer a company without a HR department.
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