The whole of Stack Overflow – one of the top 50 websites in the world, and we built it – is predicated on the programmer chest pounding of “my brain is bigger than your brain”. And that’s one million percent specific to exactly the demographic you described.
Granted we tried like hell to channel it into something productive and constructive, e.g.
teaching your peers is, in fact, the best way to learn something yourself
“pay it forward” really works if you care about the swath of destruction that bad software engineers leave behind for everyone to clean up, not just you.
(To be fair there are several levels to play the game at, from completely “do my jerb for me” selfish to benefit-extends-beyond-your-death, and players at all levels make the game work, it’s a pyramid with a big selfish base at the bottom as you’d expect, but we try to gently and sometimes not-so-gently nudge people up that pyramid as much as we can.)
I would be completely totally lying if I told you it wasn’t all built from the ground up on this exact dynamic and that exact demographic, which is absolutely true of every programmer I’ve ever met:
Why should I complain? I’m set for life and beyond, way beyond, all because I was simply building a website to channel competitive behaviors I already knew worked into more positive behaviors that worked for the greater programming community and the future of programming in general. And all Creative Commons, too.
Let me give you another example. My 6 (now 7) year old son met some other boy of similar age on the playground a few months ago and the first things they say to each other are this:
H: Look what I can do.
O: Look what I can do.
H: But can you do this?
O: I can do that and this too.
I mean it was comical. I didn’t tell him to do any of that crap. I don’t compete with my son every day. And our twin girls don’t immediately jump to competing with every other kid they meet.
It’s hilarious how some engineer dude who started 5 companies pops up and you launch into basically exactly what your son did with that other kid… comedy gold right here!!!
(Plus, yes, what you did is super awesome and I use it every day… But can you sift billions of medical claims in under 30 seconds and build a cohort of people with 1 year lookback of continuous enrollment, selective on a list of 5000 comorbidities then track their exposures to another list of hundreds of drugs, calculate a series of adjusted hazard ratios and summarize everything into a portfolio of Kaplan Meier curves and 1 nice table? haha. This is such a fun game!
The people I’ve worked with are 90% male software engineers
… is my “home” demographic, and I know it better than most people on the planet. I have the website to prove it
I’m not super fond of the demographic, believe me. As I’ve said before, you work with assholes enough, you become an asshole yourself. And the computer is the ultimate pedantic asshole. So it is a very real occupational hazard. Too real.
That’s why I have a difficult time with the “everyone must learn to code” message since it’s a) not true in the same way that you don’t need to be an auto mechanic to drive a car and b) hooo boy I hope you like working with an asshole all day long, because that’s what the computer is.
I like my computer because it’s an asshole? Yeah, I think I do. How twisted is that.
The other elephant in the room is charisma. I’ve had a couple bosses/managers in younger years who rolled a natural 20 on Charisma. Total self-inflated arsewypes. But everybody loved them. They could talk over, belittle, poke, banter, tell crap racist/sexist jokes and everybody still sucked up. It made me sick how much shit these jerks could get away with and how much they could bend other people to their will. Never again. Because you could never say anything against them, even to co-workers since everybody was brainwashed. Give me a straight-up low-charisma turd anyday over a natural 20. I hate working with those guys.
Another possibility that occurs to me is that perhaps there’s someone who’s more fed up with the shitshow than anyone else, who might be prepared to take the boss aside and risk their position by trying to point out how much potential is wasted when the boss spends so much valuable time jizzing over everyone; if that fails then maybe it’s time for mutiny of the sort I described.
Competition versus cooperation is a pretty fundamental dynamic… Seems to me, the trick is to foster a culture where folks compete to see who can be most cooperative. Easier said than done of course, but if enough peeps start making a point of giving credit where it’s due, pretty soon the benefits of a healthier set of incentives should become apparent.
This is what I mean by systems that encourage sociopathy. Some are more collaborative and resist this kind of personality from coming out on top, but some school, business and political environments seem to actively encourage them. Donald Trump seems to be a classic example of someone who can carry along large numbers of people without actually knowing what he’s talking about or offering anything beneficial to his followers.
There can also be an extreme form of “cooperative domination” where people form cliques and push competing opinions out of the way using exclusion and coercion - if anything, this is the kind of domination I’ve seen where mainly female groups get too concerned about status. This also starts at kindergarten or earlier - my son likes a number of stereotypically female activities, and is very familiar with some girls using friendship as a weapon.
In the example I gave earlier about the ship, women would be accepted by the engine room guys because they showed that they were able to do the work and the ER guys already had a natural enemy - the deck guys, who they considered to be a bunch of cowboys who would break anything more complex than a grinder. (I was a fireman in the deck department and had to maintain the firefighting systems on board, so I was considered an honorary ER guy). After dry dock, the women were the ones complaining that they were sick of being in a single gendered environment and all the politics involved (which I consider to be related to the kind of activities they were doing, not that women are worse at working together).
It’s a little like how every woman on the Walking Dead has shaved pits and legs. They’re allowed to be dirty, get gory, get sweaty, etc. but don’t you let that hair grow in!
The first hospital job was with only men in the IT department and I was not happy there, the working environment in the second hospital with a 50/50 IT team was much more pleasant.
To relate anecdata: This is also true for all-female teams. I experienced this while working in the two hospitals, the few* wards with a single-sex team had a really uncomfortable and stressed atmosphere.
*) fortunately this is rare nowadays, all hospitals I’m aware of try to avert such teams
It’s depressing that there aren’t more real solutions being put forth, and a little surprising considering the number of posts and amount of conversation on this discussion board about gender issues that there needs to be so much education about this subject.
Maybe I just need to assume that the people who are doing it genuinely do not see it and figure out a way to talk to them about it. I like the timing idea. Very data oriented.
What’s been frustrating for me, work-wise, is that I AM a natural leader. Put me in any small group for a class and I’m the one who ends up running the show, who will be designated the group speaker, etc. Let me run a meeting and everyone is clapping that I am doing a great job (for graduate school I had to interview a bunch of people about the meetings I ran and everyone was a big fan - they see me as doing the management work my boss is incapable of doing).
Yet in a bigger group, or one where I am not the designated leader, even if I speak up, my words are diminished. Some of this has to do with the fact that I am not an engineer or a programmer - even though I have worked with R&D for 25 years and know everything about the process - and some of it has to do with me looking a lot younger than my actual age.
I like the world of software development more for women. There are more women in the field. There is a more youthful environment. But for some reason, I personally really dig engineering, which is a much more staid field. Mostly I love my coworkers. It’s just the people who hold the power seem to be people who aren’t aware of women or pushing women up to the top.
I talked to a founder and close friend at a company recently, and pointed out obvious gender bias. What did he tell me? Shut up. When even your friends don’t believe you, it’s gonna be rough.
I’d guess there is. I do think both retail and hospitality have had more women and it’s probably less considered a “male” domain in the same way as a corporate office or an industrial plant.
I don’t know. I am also a yoga teacher, which is a very female dominated field - unless you look at who the top yoga teachers are. A lot of men make it to the top.
Oh, sorry my own experiences are not relevant, but yours are?
I’m glad that you work in an environment, but do you really have to completely dismiss people who are saying they do not have those experiences? At what point is it okay to stand up for ourselves in our current job (when quitting isn’t always an option)? When YOU decide it’s a problem?
Again, I’d suggest you actually listen to the things we are saying here. Yes, leaving a job can be a solution, but we’re likely to continually run into this problem. It’s a system problem. Just because you can’t or don’t want to see it doesn’t mean it isn’t.
Also weird how many men are coming to the conclusion, which is what many women come to, that the answer is to leave their job.
?
?
?
and so we don’t end up advancing, just bouncing around from one job to the next, hoping that the next place doesn’t have a jerk in charge, or a clueless guy who gets beet red when he meets woman.
To me, that sounds a lot like “if you don’t want to be harassed online, either hide the fact that you’re a woman or stay away from the internet.” It’s a solution that doesn’t address the problem.
Of course, making you less desirable as a job candidate in the process, in an already unstable economy, where jobs in your field may not be easy to come by, and how likely are you to find a job without these problems anyway, but yeah, thanks to your vagina, some not insignificant portion of the population WILL NOT TREAT YOU WITH RESPECT, but you know, if you don’t leave your job, that’s on you, lady. /s
