Post: #1

Garbage article as usual, disappointed in the beta chump featured in the main story who eventually submitted to the "ladyboss" cunt:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/tec...m=homepage

Post: #2

I'd like to say that that was the dumbest thing I've ever read, but thanks to feminism, the playing field is pretty open in that category.

Post: #3

This sums up feminists in the tech world

Post: #4

Summary of every article about feminism: Everyone else is responsible, except myself/a woman.

Post: #5

(04-06-2014 06:13 AM)void Wrote:  Summary of every article about feminism: Everyone else is responsible, except myself/a woman.

Another part of that summary:

Whine about things men do, all the while not realizing that men created everything you not get to whine about, including the technology you're whining about it on.

Why does no one but Camille Paglia (and us) notice that this factoid is left out of all these "bro culture" articles? Without that culture, there would be no tech and we wouldn't be communicating this way at all.

Feminism is like kids throwing a tantrum because dessert was late, not realizing without adults you wouldn't have any dessert, much less a house.

Post: #6

This thing really annoyed me. I want to write a real takedown, but honestly, I've got productive things to do, i.e. "work and code and make software". Quick highlights:

1. They talk about work commitment as an anti-woman thing, usually adding in the child care problem (OMG, I couldn't work long hours because I have to pick up my kid). As if men don't have family commitments. As if lawyers or doctors, for example, aren't expected to work long hours.
2. The after work whiskey is cited as being "bro culture". Apparently all women are teetotalers. And computer programming is also a bad profession for recovering alcoholics.
3. They constantly conflate "computer programmer" with "computer programmer at a startup". Startups represent maybe 20% of the actual jobs out there. They quote Larry Page and a consultant with Google, which can afford to hire someone to consult about women. But they couldn't get any women on the record about the harassment that happens at Google, or Microsoft, or Amazon, or Yahoo!, or Intel, or Oracle, or SAP, or Accenture... companies that employ the VAST majority of computer programmers.
4. Ruth Oldenziel is revising history like crazy. Yes, the term "computer" used to mean a person who literally did computations for a living, and that term carried over to the technicians who operated the early computers. No, that wasn't "programming", any more than the clerk at the DMV is programming. It was a data entry job, because before they had punch cards & magnetic tape, you used to literally have to input the bits into memory by hand. You'd have a bank of 8 or 16 switches and a button... set the switches, press enter. On top of that, she's conflating the overall drop in female participation in the workforce following WWII. It wasn't they guys saying "oh, this is a lucrative field, lets kick the women out". It was men returning from war, getting a college degree, and re-entering the workforce. The 1950's and 60's marked when computer programming became an engineering discipline instead of clerical work.
5. The NYT ignores the situation with titstare: this was a presentation given at the TechCrunch conference. The fact that these guys got up and demoed a ludicrous app (they may as well have called it MonkeyStare and substituted pictures of monkeys) represents a failure on the part of TechCrunch to properly vet their presentations. TechCrunch is a journalistic enterprise, they don't make software. So it seems to me that the more appropriate headline would be "journalism's man problem".
6. The line about "alpha male culture" in programming is an outright laugher. Ask 1,000 people about words to describe a computer programmer, and I guarantee "alpha" wouldn't crack the top 1,000 responses.

Oh, the author's a woman. Why doesn't she ask herself why she didn't get a CS degree and become a programmer?

OK, back to doing something useful. I've wasted too much of my life even thinking about this crap.