I recommended Coders to a couple of male coder friends hoping that the book would show them how the world views them and how some of what they do without putting a second thought to it, could have consequences for society. Finally finished the book and was left think about these lines:
..when women move into an area of coding, it gets devalued. The men leave that area, looking for new cutting-edge areas where they can reestablish artificial scarcity and a tacit no-girls-allowed culture, or at least one where girls are regarded as foreign interlopers. These days, that appears to be Bitcoin—or blockchain tech in general—and AI, where, whenever I go to events, it’s a sea of men, far more than most other fields of coding. What is actually going on, Posner argues, is the creation of a “pink-collar ghetto” in coding.
Thompson talks about the idea that some parts of programming are seen as easy, fuzzy, artsy and not the real, hard stuff men do. Along those lines is the tirade about BASIC from an some important guy in the world of programming
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
My programming days ended very early in my career. I got the sense that "good" in this business was defined by rules that tended to favor the way men tend to think. A solution that did not conform to that standard was inherently suspect - it would need to be evaluated and interrogated closely for flaws and many would doubtless be found. Over time, this type of scrutiny of my work and the requirement to twist my mind in ways it was not naturally inclined to got aggravating. I moved on to things I find a lot more interesting and rewarding.
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