Links: Unexpected results

[sonia]

The looming demise of the 10x developer by Justin Searls. I was braced for this blog post to be terrible, but it acknowledges the unfair advantages of white men right up front, and discusses some interesting ideas about generational differences in programmers.

Justin Searls mentions something that I often talk about when people bemoan the problems with the "pipeline" for women programmers. I started college in 1985.

"I remember asking a computer science professor in 2003 about our school’s gender disparity (we only had a single woman in my class, and she later switched majors). He recounted that before 1990 and the advent of hacker and gamer subcultures, my college touted robust majorities of women in computer science. (Nationally, women’s enrollment in CS doubled in a decade, peaking at 37.1% nationally in 1984 before dropping precipitously.)"

The myth that men hunt while women stay at home is entirely wrong by Michael Le Page.

The idea that men hunt while women stay at home is almost completely wrong, a review of foraging societies around the world has found. In fact, women hunt in 80 per cent of the societies looked at, and in a third of these societies women were found to hunt big game – animals heavier than 30 kilograms – as well as smaller animals.

These findings are likely to be representative of all foraging societies past and present, says Cara Wall-Scheffler at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We have nearly 150 years of ethnographic studies sampled, we have every continent and more than one culture from every continent, and so I feel like we did get a pretty good swathe of what people do around the world,” she says.

‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power by Ned Carter Miles.

In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. It’s a claim that will probably raise a few eyebrows, and when the team made the discovery that inspired this new research in 2018, it did.

“To be frank, it was an accident,” says the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao. “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.”

And a bonus for future reference: Advanced macOS Command-Line Tools by Saurabh S.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Re: pipeline, when I hung out with the undergrad CS student group as someone only dating a CS major, I chatted a little with many people; most were male. With the proviso that CS major && socializing at least a bit with other CS majors excludes some of the former group (limited time, limited interest, working side jobs, living too far from campus, etc. etc.), I remember fewer than a dozen women. Of the half dozen I can still name, two were also dating CS majors, and unlike me they weren't interested firsthand in coding (looking them up to see what they've done since then shows no coding subsequently either). Only anecdotal, but.

[sonia]

I agree, there were never a lot of women. A lot of people don't realize it has gotten worse, not better, and that a lot more needs fixing than just getting more women CS students at the beginning of the pipeline.

[thistleingrey]

I think silos have worsened things, partly--in the 1990s "front end" was not an automatic dismissal of competence amongst folks who set up artificial gates. (At the same time, no one is really truly full stack.) I think there are more employed women who code, by percentage of the active workforce, but we don't necessarily retain them well, versus feeding a bunch of excited young folks in and then burning them out in early employment instead of (for my era) in high school or college. bah. I dunno.

[sonia]

Good point about silos and “front end.” Yes, retention, exactly.

My current workplace manages to be welcoming and not have that extra friction of fighting for respect, and I am profoundly grateful.

[thistleingrey]

be welcoming and not have that extra friction of fighting for respect

I am glad, both on your behalf and to know that they exist in the world!

[altamira16]

I followed you on Dreamwidth because you seem interesting.

[thistleingrey]

Hello, good to meet you.

[altamira16]

Right now, I am reading a bit about how modern computers are designed to interfere with our thinking, and some of the skills of the earlier generation that Searls is talking about like "tireless" and "tenacious" could easily be the same as the hyperfocus of people with attention deficit issues. What is it going to look like when those folks are properly medicated?

The original drive for money in the industry was all the start-up nonsense. Did you feel like women were leaving before that? To me, it felt like that was when folks started looking for rockstars and ninjas. The folks involved were not necessarily good at programming, even though they like to create programming related origin stories. They just had to be good at sweet talking venture capitalists.

I graduated in the dot com boom to bust, so I did not know of a time before it.

[sonia]

Modern computers, or modern software? I wasn’t aware of hardware changes that interfere with our thinking.

Oof, graduating into the dot com bust! I graduated into an earlier recession, and ended up getting a job through someone I knew. It was a startup, so I can’t comment on a pre-startup era.

[altamira16]

I was being sloppy with language. Software changes are interfering with our thinking.

It was so weird. It went from people having multiple job offers on graduation to seeing layoffs every three months once we entered industry.

[silveradept]

Power generation from humidity seems like something that will complement solar power in dry, hot areas, assuming it can be scaled up sufficiently.

I do like that the myth of men going out and women staying at home is getting examined and discarded through studies.

As for the change in programmers, I think the part in there about having come of age in the sweet spot between computers being large and inscrutable and computers being small and inscrutable has had significant effects. I think a large amount of my comfort and tolerance and working with machines and reading their errors and trying to make them work properly is from that same experience of having had to learn about computers so as to achieve tasks with them, like playing games. I also think that, even in the era of abundant computing, there's a significant lack of machines that are hackable, borkable, and fixable, and inexpensive enough that they can be used as the spare and learning machines, instead of as the work machine that has to remain controlled and pristine.

[sonia]

Good points! I love the phrase sweet spot between computers being large and inscrutable and computers being small and inscrutable.