Can women actually write software?

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xiongmao
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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by xiongmao »

In my 20 years as a developer...

No they can't write good software.
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publicduende
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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by publicduende »

Cornfed wrote:
June 27th, 2018, 1:55 am
^ So we're basically committing suicide as a society. Yes, we know.
It surely wasn't suicide Britain was committing, when it let a few women program the computer that, basically, made them win WW2.
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publicduende
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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by publicduende »

xiongmao wrote:
June 27th, 2018, 7:04 am
In my 20 years as a developer...

No they can't write good software.
No offense but...that is true for men as well. Only a minority of software developers can write good software.
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publicduende
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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by publicduende »

Cornfed wrote:
June 27th, 2018, 1:51 pm
publicduende wrote:
June 27th, 2018, 10:59 am
Cornfed wrote:
June 27th, 2018, 1:55 am
^ So we're basically committing suicide as a society. Yes, we know.
It surely wasn't suicide Britain was committing, when it let a few women program the computer that, basically, made them win WW2.
Hiring some girls to stick vacuum tubes in the right place does not demonstrate that females are good programmers. (Of course, fighting on the Jewish side in WWII was societal suicide). Getting females into STEM is surely societal suicide. Either they suck in which case we are squandering our only comparative advantage. If they don’t suck it is likely that our best females and the talented men they are displacing are not having children, so we are bringing about Idiocracy. Suicide either way.
They weren't "sticking vacuum tubes", they were doing all the logical programming that allowed those tubes to spit out meaningful results. Back in the days programming languages didn't exists, logical units had to be programmed one by one based on the way they were connected together...some sort of primitive assembly language. Very serious math, logic and electronics were needed to even come close to one of those metal beasts.

Whatever men say, getting girls into STEM is producing better graduates. Full stop. Statistics prove it. I know it by experience. Female students are usually (relatively!) more disciplined and more studious than their male counterparts. While it is true that girls are benefiting from a school/college culture that constantly encourages and empowers them, often at the detriment of male students, this is enough evidence that women are just as intellectually capable as men and - with the right spurs and incentives - they can outrace them.

Lastly, you should stop thinking that having a (STEM) career is the opposite of being a mother. There are plenty of examples of jobless women who could have all the time in their hands to bring up their children in the best possible way, yet they end up being terrible mothers. And women who manage to juggle between their jobs and their motherly roles with good results.
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Amalagama
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Re: Can women actually write software?

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Cornfed wrote:
October 15th, 2012, 4:02 pm
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.
That's the most bizarre thing I've ever heard! :cry:
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xiongmao
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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by xiongmao »

My 20 year IT career is over. I can't think of any women I worked with who were really good. Maybe one or two.

Now I'm teaching students doing IT and other majors. I have to say I would rather employ the English majors and teach them programming than employ the IT majors and teach them social skills.

Well none of the best programmers I worked with actually studied IT so I should have known this already.
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Re: Can women actually write software?

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Shemp
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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by Shemp »

There's a huge number of specialties in software. In my experience, women programmers did fine in large corporations where the programming amounted to coding of mathematical algorithms the mathematician and physicists had come up with. That's what those women in WW2 Britain were doing. 8-5 job with benefits, etc. Women tended to avoid real-time equipment control (software to control airplanes, for example) which was my initial specialty and which involves all sorts of tricky error handling and timing and synchronization issues. Later, I swtched to app development for Winblows, which almost always ends up as a horrifying mess of sphagetti code to control the GUI. That was working for myself and how I got rich. As far as I know, few Winblows/MacOs/Android/iOS apps are written by women, even though there are zero barriers to entry in this extremely competitive area. Development teams are often just one person, as with my company, so discrimination not an issue. Just start your own company.

Whether or not women lack the innate ability of men at software, I suspect they definitely lack the ambition to compete with the best men programmers. Much easier for women to stick with a comfy 8-5 corporate job with benefits. I was forced to go out on my own because those 8-5 jobs become increasingly uncomfortable for men like me as we get older and can no longer tolerate corporate bullshit. The only older men who thrive in corporations are those at the very top of the hierarchy.
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Cornfed
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Re: Can women actually write software?

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Shemp wrote:
August 5th, 2019, 8:16 am
There's a huge number of specialties in software. In my experience, women programmers did fine in large corporations where the programming amounted to coding of mathematical algorithms the mathematician and physicists had come up with.
Isn't that bordering on a secretarial task? Once you were familiar with the basic structure of some procedural language, it seems like that would be reasonably simple. I guess you might need a triple digit IQ. No doubt they were paid a king's ransom for it.
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Shemp
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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by Shemp »

That was the only programming back then. No it's not purely secretarial, especially if programming in assembler language, as they did then. They would have needed an undergraduate degree in math, though not a doctorate. I did similar work myself occasionally at the corporation where I worked because the physicists didn't understand the language some program was written in so they asked me to translate. Not at all trivial, though not difficult.

Nowadays, women (and most men) probably focus on business programming, such as automating hospital procedures. Huge amounts of back and forth with end users to get user interface right, lots of reworking and maintenance, lots of politics. Probably women can do that sort of programming as well as men and no it certainly isn't trivial work, but it also isn't as difficult as writing a modern web browser like Chrome or Safari (assuming you had to start from scratch), or writing an operating system from scratch. Most programming is big team projects where ability to work as part of a team is most important, and women do that well. Only a small amount of programming is sole person or small team efforts, but this is the most competitive part (such as mass market games).
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Cornfed
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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by Cornfed »

Shemp wrote:
August 5th, 2019, 9:30 pm
Most programming is big team projects where ability to work as part of a team is most important, and women do that well.
You mean they can get men to do the difficult stuff for them because they have a vagina.
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Shemp
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Re: Can women actually write software?

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You (Cornfed) would be a liability to any team because you are an unpleasant loser.
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Cornfed
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Re: Can women actually write software?

Post by Cornfed »

Shemp wrote:
August 5th, 2019, 11:31 pm
You (Cornfed) would be a liability to any team because you are an unpleasant loser.
Or I'm just stating the obvious and trying to help society. But then you are a selfish boomer who doesn't care about the society you drained and abandoned, so of course anyone who does care about that society is going to seem unpleasant to you.
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