Can women actually write software?

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Cornfed
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Can women actually write software?

Post by Cornfed »

The very idea of women writing original computer code seems crazy given that they are all basket cases who think their own hysterical emotions define reality. When I've posed this question, manginas in the software industry will sometimes claim that women can do useful stuff but generally do so in evasive terms (like claiming the women are "involved" in software development) and can't come up with any specifics. Often the manginas can't even come up with any specifics about what software they themselves have produced, leading me to believe that the reason they regard women as their equals is that they are equally useless. Meanwhile you hear lots of stories of men showing clueless females how to use their e-mail and such only to have the females promoted over them into senior development positions.

My belief is that some women in the industry may be doing quasi-useful secretarial type work, but most female so-called developers are total frauds stealing money from the system, not unlike essentially all women claiming to do non-menial jobs. Can anyone with experience in the industry comment? Also, do most female developers even pretend to be able to do their job? If you asked them to, for example, write a program that takes in a string and writes it out in reverse without using an existing function, would the generally even be able to do that? My suspicion is that they wouldn't in most cases.
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Post by zacb »

I was just talking with an IT student from the Philippines. I don't know how elegant her code is, but it's a start.
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Post by fschmidt »

Women cannot write software. I have hired many programmers. I generally used a programming problem to screen applicants and never once did a woman solve the problem while men from all races have solved the problem. I only hired one woman. In this case, the CEO asked me to interview her which I did together with another guy. I asked her questions and gave her paper to explain her answer, but she wanted to go up to the whiteboard to explain. When she stood up, I could see why. She had a mesmerizing ass in tight jeans that she could put on full display at the whiteboard. After the interview, I told the other guy that I was hypnotized by her ass, so I couldn't give an honest evaluation of the interview. He said that he thought she was good, so we hired her. She was terrible. I have never met a good woman programmer.
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Post by fschmidt »

Cornfed wrote:Would it be possible to post a sample programming problem just for interest's sake?
http://algorithmicdiversions.blogspot.c ... uzzle.html

I made up this problem and we publicly posted it at Nextag so applicants could do it at home and send in the answer. But this problem became popular and is now posted all over the internet. So now I have to make up new problems when I hire people. It is actually harder to make up problems like this than to solve them.
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Re: Can women actually write software?

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Cornfed wrote:The very idea of women writing original computer code seems crazy given that they are all basket cases who think their own hysterical emotions define reality. When I've posed this question, manginas in the software industry will sometimes claim that women can do useful stuff but generally do so in evasive terms (like claiming the women are "involved" in software development) and can't come up with any specifics. Often the manginas can't even come up with any specifics about what software they themselves have produced, leading me to believe that the reason they regard women as their equals is that they are equally useless. Meanwhile you hear lots of stories of men showing clueless females how to use their e-mail and such only to have the females promoted over them into senior development positions.

My belief is that some women in the industry may be doing quasi-useful secretarial type work, but most female so-called developers are total frauds stealing money from the system, not unlike essentially all women claiming to do non-menial jobs. Can anyone with experience in the industry comment? Also, do most female developers even pretend to be able to do their job? If you asked them to, for example, write a program that takes in a string and writes it out in reverse without using an existing function, would the generally even be able to do that? My suspicion is that they wouldn't in most cases.
Peter, firstly: what's the point of telling Winston that you were leaving for good when your "superior trolling quality" alter ego is still around? Have you reached peaks of psychotic dissociation where your accounts start to post independently of your will? :)

Anyhoo, here's another one of your usual rants, going down the same tired pattern:
1) women are all nutcases and absolutely useless at [x]
2) all men who believe women to be somewhat useful at [x] are manginas and as useless as the women who can't do [x]
3) women who purport to be doing [x] are just a waste of money and the reason they occupy those roles is because of a rotting political/social/economical/judicial system. It's clearly a conspiracy.

So, let me understand. In your shiny international career as a BI and IT pro, at IBM or wherever else, you never stumbled upon a woman programmer? You never discussed specs, methodologies, never did or received a code review, you never had as little as a meeting, even a 5-min Scrum with a woman developer? Either you stopped working in the 80s when virtually everyone remotely involved in computers was a bearded geek with a penchant for sci-fi, or you do 99% of your work from home. Or perhaps you're left in your cubicle for too long. The latter not being surprising, knowing what an incredibly friendly and accommodating persona you come across as down here.

I personally know women who work as software engineer or any other satellite activity, like business analysis, project management down to UX design (not just web, but also a .NET toolkit called Microsoft Expression). I know women who work for Microsoft, IBM, Logica, Accenture, as well as any major investment bank and hedge fund I have worked at. They are from Britain and Ukraine, Poland and India, Spain and mainland China. I even met one (in Singapore) from Cebu, an ASP.NET developer and quite a cutie, if you ask me.

For the umpteenth time: where's your statistical basis to ground your statement that women cannot write code, and even less so because their reality is defined by "their hysterical emotions"? Even if their behaviour is indeed subject to hormone swings, what has this got to do with their ability to write, test and deliver good code? And more in general, what has this got to do with their ability to do any job that was (or is) in a traditionally male-dominated industry? And if the industry is not enough, just walk through any computer science department of a reputable university: you will see at least a third of students being young, female and just as fine as researchers and/or practitioners as their male counterparts.

You know, what I will never discount on you and people like you is the caustic mix of ignorance and arrogance uses to substantiate racist and/or sexist claims that are only meant to soothe your pain, dignify your desperate isolation and justify your complete disconnect from the rest of society. You're no better than those doctors in 50s America who turned up to KKK meetings and wrote erudite papers on brain or skull morphology explaining why black people were intellectually inferior to whites. Then more and more of those black people worked hard enough to get out of poverty and started to get college degrees and PhDs and the same jobs as the whites, battling against prejudices and social handicaps of all sorts, performing just as fine. And by then those "experts" were either dead or couldn't be bothered to rectify.
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Post by publicduende »

Cornfed wrote:I suppose the obvious followup question is with all the incompetent c**ts, wogs and manginas pretending to be programmers, how does any real programming get done? Or does it even? Is it possible that the industry is now mostly a scam, and that the little real work done is done by a few small outsourcers?
LOL never thought about that. That might explain why I sometimes leave Visual Studio open before going to sleep, only to find plenty of shiny new classes and test cases written to perfection when I wake up. The only problem I have, all that pixie dust is starting to make my keyboard sticky. Gotta make that phonecall to India, or Lapland...
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Post by publicduende »

fschmidt wrote:Women cannot write software. I have hired many programmers. I generally used a programming problem to screen applicants and never once did a woman solve the problem while men from all races have solved the problem. I only hired one woman. In this case, the CEO asked me to interview her which I did together with another guy. I asked her questions and gave her paper to explain her answer, but she wanted to go up to the whiteboard to explain. When she stood up, I could see why. She had a mesmerizing ass in tight jeans that she could put on full display at the whiteboard. After the interview, I told the other guy that I was hypnotized by her ass, so I couldn't give an honest evaluation of the interview. He said that he thought she was good, so we hired her. She was terrible. I have never met a good woman programmer.
What industry do you work in, fschmidt? I have personally met a lot more terrible male developers than terrible women developers. I too interviewed women on a few occasions and they didn't seem to be any smarter, or any dumber, than men. The fact some of them were passable or attractive is good for a joke, but try hinting at that to HR and it could well be your job that's on the line...
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Post by momopi »

I've worked in IT industry for over 15 years and have meet both good women software developers and completely useless women software developers. Back when Anderson Consulting was still around, they were famous for sending fresh college grad girls to Fortune 500 clients to work, and in reality they had no experience and were there to get on-the-job training at their client's expense. After the newbie gets trained, they become senior programmers and charge even more money. So we paid a lot of money to basically run a school for them. After a few years of playing suckers, we got rid of them. On the plus side, the girls were usually young and pretty.

Recently, I've worked at 2 companies that provide online products and services. The girls that we hire out of college tend to be much higher caliber in webdev or iOS/Android development. In order to pass the interview process they have to do the whiteboard test (like Google). No computers, just a white board and marker -- show us you can code on the whiteboard, then draw SDLC, waterfall, agile, etc.

Personally, I've an old fan of Roberta Williams. She's the women on the far right side in this pic:

Image

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta_Williams
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Post by fschmidt »

publicduende wrote:What industry do you work in, fschmidt? I have personally met a lot more terrible male developers than terrible women developers. I too interviewed women on a few occasions and they didn't seem to be any smarter, or any dumber, than men. The fact some of them were passable or attractive is good for a joke, but try hinting at that to HR and it could well be your job that's on the line...
I am a programmer and I have worked in many areas in my 30 years of programming. I worked at Commodore, Microsoft, Atari, as a consultant for banks and insurance companies, and at various internet companies. I am sure there are plenty of bad male programmers but all the really good programmers are men, not women. As for HR, I could never give a shit what HR thought which is why I mostly worked for small companies. In the case I described, I was a founder of the company and I ran engineering, so HR wasn't an issue at all.
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Post by OutWest »

fschmidt wrote:
publicduende wrote:What industry do you work in, fschmidt? I have personally met a lot more terrible male developers than terrible women developers. I too interviewed women on a few occasions and they didn't seem to be any smarter, or any dumber, than men. The fact some of them were passable or attractive is good for a joke, but try hinting at that to HR and it could well be your job that's on the line...
I am a programmer and I have worked in many areas in my 30 years of programming. I worked at Commodore, Microsoft, Atari, as a consultant for banks and insurance companies, and at various internet companies. I am sure there are plenty of bad male programmers but all the really good programmers are men, not women. As for HR, I could never give a shit what HR thought which is why I mostly worked for small companies. In the case I described, I was a founder of the company and I ran engineering, so HR wasn't an issue at all.
There are exceptions...however they might prove the rule. I am personally acquainted with a woman who just retired from Sandia National Laboratories...very advanced programming work with nuclear weapons development...but frankly, she really does think like a man about her work LOL...


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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by Cornfed »

publicduende wrote:Peter, firstly: what's the point of telling Winston that you were leaving for good when your "superior trolling quality" alter ego is still around?
Obviously I'm not Peter, you moron. I don't work in the software industry and Peter seems to think Indian developers are good.
I personally know women who work as software engineer or any other satellite activity, like business analysis, project management down to UX design (not just web, but also a .NET toolkit called Microsoft Expression). I know women who work for Microsoft, IBM, Logica, Accenture, as well as any major investment bank and hedge fund I have worked at. They are from Britain and Ukraine, Poland and India, Spain and mainland China. I even met one (in Singapore) from Cebu, an ASP.NET developer and quite a cutie, if you ask me.
Yes they tend to congregate in peripheral sectors where they can get paid for talking shit while other people do the actual work. As to the supposed programmers, what would be some examples of great stuff they have ACTUALLY DONE, as opposed to their titles and salaries?
Even if their behaviour is indeed subject to hormone swings, what has this got to do with their ability to write, test and deliver good code? And more in general, what has this got to do with their ability to do any job that was (or is) in a traditionally male-dominated industry?
Women lack any kind of belief in objective reality and simply act out whatever fantasy those they regard as being in authority put in front of them. Since different fantasies are presented by different authorities, it is perfectly possible for them to be acting on contradictory propositions at the same time. Such a mentality is not conducive to creative thought that fits in with the rest of the universe.
You're no better than those doctors in 50s America who turned up to KKK meetings and wrote erudite papers on brain or skull morphology explaining why black people were intellectually inferior to whites. Then more and more of those black people worked hard enough to get out of poverty and started to get college degrees and PhDs and the same jobs as the whites, battling against prejudices and social handicaps of all sorts, performing just as fine.
Such doctors have been proven right. Sixty years after Brown vs. the School Board, black people remain a standard deviation below white people in every measure of intellectual performance and are only included in professions requiring such performance in any numbers because of ongoing open-ended forced integration, and their inclusion is why many services in Amerika are ridiculously expensive and suck. The situation is similar for women. But of course that actual facts of the situation don't matter to you because you just believe whatever Oprah tells you like any common female.
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Post by publicduende »

fschmidt wrote:
publicduende wrote:What industry do you work in, fschmidt? I have personally met a lot more terrible male developers than terrible women developers. I too interviewed women on a few occasions and they didn't seem to be any smarter, or any dumber, than men. The fact some of them were passable or attractive is good for a joke, but try hinting at that to HR and it could well be your job that's on the line...
I am a programmer and I have worked in many areas in my 30 years of programming. I worked at Commodore, Microsoft, Atari, as a consultant for banks and insurance companies, and at various internet companies. I am sure there are plenty of bad male programmers but all the really good programmers are men, not women. As for HR, I could never give a shit what HR thought which is why I mostly worked for small companies. In the case I described, I was a founder of the company and I ran engineering, so HR wasn't an issue at all.
That's an impressive curriculum. Wow, even Commodore, my childhood/teenage computer (C64 and Amiga)! If it weren't completely off-topic I would be trying to extract your memoirs via a constant stream of PMs :)
Sweet past aside, it kind of surprises me that you have never found a woman developer who you didn't deem at least sufficient, say, a 6/10. If you are using the across the board knowledge, ingenuity and passion of the programmers of yesteryear (those who could write a OS kernel or a DBMS from scratch) as your benchmark, I would be with you saying that not even 5% of the current generation of software engineers comes close to that level.

My statement above was based on male and female programmers of the current generation only - max 10 years seniority - and based on my opinion (almost 20 years of experience, from bedroom programming to working for investment banks). Sure, women tend to be more captivated by abstract computer science problems and, again my opinion, I have seen more smart female programmers in the academia than in a commercial environment, say, a software house or a financial IT team. Those who do choose to work in the industry, though, don't seem to fare too bad compared to their male counterparts. The fact that the sample is so small doesn't help giving women the reputation of great software people: one only needs to meet one specimen of mediocre or bad female programmer and start reasoning by induction immediately thereafter.

As for my mention about HR, it was an ironic remark about the fact that HR in large corporations who have, or want to have, a distinctive "social responsibility" profile, such as investment banks, usually pay an obsessive amount of attention to the formalism of politeness and unbiased, equal treatment when recruiting. Referring to a female candidate to a dev role as a "mediocre software engineer, but a nice piece of arse/pair of tits, thus worth hiring" may spell professional suicide in the utterer :)
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Post by publicduende »

momopi wrote:I've worked in IT industry for over 15 years and have meet both good women software developers and completely useless women software developers. Back when Anderson Consulting was still around, they were famous for sending fresh college grad girls to Fortune 500 clients to work, and in reality they had no experience and were there to get on-the-job training at their client's expense. After the newbie gets trained, they become senior programmers and charge even more money. So we paid a lot of money to basically run a school for them. After a few years of playing suckers, we got rid of them. On the plus side, the girls were usually young and pretty.

Recently, I've worked at 2 companies that provide online products and services. The girls that we hire out of college tend to be much higher caliber in webdev or iOS/Android development. In order to pass the interview process they have to do the whiteboard test (like Google). No computers, just a white board and marker -- show us you can code on the whiteboard, then draw SDLC, waterfall, agile, etc.

Personally, I've an old fan of Roberta Williams. She's the women on the far right side in this pic:

Image

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta_Williams
Ouch, the young consultant syndrome - thanks God companies have learned not to flush their money down the toilet that way a couple of recessions ago. The simple fact of life is though that someone just has to train the young, and that has a cost to be born by one or more of the involved parties: school and academia, service provider, end client. Many corporations usually have a well structured graduate career path, and from what I have seen most of the young men and women who join the ranks do look smart and do their jobs with wit and dedication. Consider that dry-running software and problem solving via design and diagramming on a whiteboard are standard practice in most face to face interviews. Clearly (some) girls may have something nicer to strut around as they wave that marker and address the interviewers. When it comes to technical knowledge and team fit, though, hiring a woman only on the basis of diversity, or worse, looks, and not because she is in the top 10% of the candidate pool, is something very few people want to take the risk of doing. Especially in times like these, where budgets are tight and full-time resources are particularly precious.

LOL Roberta Williams...of Sierra on-line memory! :lol: OK so what about this...not the same kind of graphical impact as RW, a pioneering figure in history of computing nonetheless. Grace Hopper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by publicduende »

Cornfed wrote:
publicduende wrote:Peter, firstly: what's the point of telling Winston that you were leaving for good when your "superior trolling quality" alter ego is still around?
Obviously I'm not Peter, you moron. I don't work in the software industry and Peter seems to think Indian developers are good.
Since you have, in the past, entertained the thought that I am a woman, or worse, a collective of women on a forum-disrupting rampage, then I have a right to think you and PAN could be the same person. Mind you, I'm not the only one who believes you're Peter and your sole role as a forum persona is give a shroud of support to his outlandish claims.
Cornfed wrote:
publicduende wrote:I personally know women who work as software engineer or any other satellite activity, like business analysis, project management down to UX design (not just web, but also a .NET toolkit called Microsoft Expression). I know women who work for Microsoft, IBM, Logica, Accenture, as well as any major investment bank and hedge fund I have worked at. They are from Britain and Ukraine, Poland and India, Spain and mainland China. I even met one (in Singapore) from Cebu, an ASP.NET developer and quite a cutie, if you ask me.
Yes they tend to congregate in peripheral sectors where they can get paid for talking shit while other people do the actual work. As to the supposed programmers, what would be some examples of great stuff they have ACTUALLY DONE, as opposed to their titles and salaries?
I judge based on the people I have met at work and often interacted with as team mates or occasional references. I have also met a couple of bad ones, too, but - as usual - that is no basis to state all of them are bad. They don't get paid for talking shit. They get involved with the same kind of work any male programmer does, including communicating their ideas to their peers and managers via meetings, documentation, acceptance tests, white papers etc. This is software engineering, this is the common practice. They haven't invented one for men, and one for women, yet.
Cornfed wrote:
publicduende wrote:Even if their behaviour is indeed subject to hormone swings, what has this got to do with their ability to write, test and deliver good code? And more in general, what has this got to do with their ability to do any job that was (or is) in a traditionally male-dominated industry?
Women lack any kind of belief in objective reality and simply act out whatever fantasy those they regard as being in authority put in front of them. Since different fantasies are presented by different authorities, it is perfectly possible for them to be acting on contradictory propositions at the same time. Such a mentality is not conducive to creative thought that fits in with the rest of the universe.
Where the heck is this coming from? It sounds like a textbook definition of a schizoid personality. Even when true, I don't think the above would only apply to women, but men as well. And after all, it appears to me that the only one who is speaking, hopefully not acting upon, his (paranoid) fantasies is you right now.
Cornfed wrote:
publicduende wrote:You're no better than those doctors in 50s America who turned up to KKK meetings and wrote erudite papers on brain or skull morphology explaining why black people were intellectually inferior to whites. Then more and more of those black people worked hard enough to get out of poverty and started to get college degrees and PhDs and the same jobs as the whites, battling against prejudices and social handicaps of all sorts, performing just as fine.
Such doctors have been proven right. Sixty years after Brown vs. the School Board, black people remain a standard deviation below white people in every measure of intellectual performance and are only included in professions requiring such performance in any numbers because of ongoing open-ended forced integration, and their inclusion is why many services in Amerika are ridiculously expensive and suck. The situation is similar for women. But of course that actual facts of the situation don't matter to you because you just believe whatever Oprah tells you like any common female.
On what basis have they been proved right? Sources (non-Makow, non-extreme rightwing), please? And even if the black community continued to live in segregation, away from expressing their true potential in great numbers, don't you think that continues to be, at least in the US, a social issue, rather than an ethnological or anthropological one? You want a proof of this? Come over to the UK, where no affirmative action or quotas exist across the entire education system. If you look at the stats you will see this kind of deviation from the mean being a function of social and cultural background - for gods' sake even the postcode where the people live - but absolutely not race or ethnical background.

I don't want to sound crude but, ya know...every country has the (black, white, brown, etc.) people they deserve. Cuba and the UK have black doctors, lawyers, bankers and managers. US have hordes of white Caucasian men of "pure" Scandinavian or German ancestry who are underschooled and overweight, hooked on media meth to forget the daily misery of being devoid of a higher purpose.
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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by terminator »

Cornfed wrote:The very idea of women writing original computer code seems crazy given that they are all basket cases who think their own hysterical emotions define reality. When I've posed this question, manginas in the software industry will sometimes claim that women can do useful stuff but generally do so in evasive terms (like claiming the women are "involved" in software development) and can't come up with any specifics. Often the manginas can't even come up with any specifics about what software they themselves have produced, leading me to believe that the reason they regard women as their equals is that they are equally useless. Meanwhile you hear lots of stories of men showing clueless females how to use their e-mail and such only to have the females promoted over them into senior development positions.

My belief is that some women in the industry may be doing quasi-useful secretarial type work, but most female so-called developers are total frauds stealing money from the system, not unlike essentially all women claiming to do non-menial jobs. Can anyone with experience in the industry comment? Also, do most female developers even pretend to be able to do their job? If you asked them to, for example, write a program that takes in a string and writes it out in reverse without using an existing function, would the generally even be able to do that? My suspicion is that they wouldn't in most cases.
I've worked in IT and I've found women to be useless shills. I've also found that US women are worthless employees (and wives) they are desperate to find some sexual harassment or reason to "dob-in" the employer, so women are just hired to do their nails and look pretty all day at the front desk. Expecting more of them is like expecting a baby to draw the Mona Lisa - it's beyond them. No matter how many feminists deny it, it's true!
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