Flutterby™! : Latest Planet Money 2014-10-20 00:30:17.485321+00

Latest Planet Money

2014-10-20 00:30:17.485321+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Latest Planet Money, on women & coding, is fascinating. Suggests some serious education system failings. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...de-576-when-women-stopped-coding

#Comment Re: Latest Planet Money made: 2014-10-20 14:25:36.712213+00 by: battjt

What I got out of the NPR story last week, is that women leave programming for the same reason that lots of men want to leave programming. Women just aren't addicted to the money (like being the primary provider for a family or hooked on expensive hobbies) or they have extra incentives, like taking care of kids.

#Comment Re: Latest Planet Money made: 2014-10-20 14:55:48.484271+00 by: TheSHAD0W

So something happened around 1984 that affected both men and women going into CS - except it affected women more strongly.

#Comment Re: Latest Planet Money made: 2014-10-20 16:17:11.299515+00 by: meuon

The "spark" is missing in a lot of programming. It's more "playing with lego blocks" then deciding what lego blocks need to be built and solving those problems. So it's a job.

Attempting to rebuild some skills in electronics, I just bought a new scope (my old Tektronix no longer works, sigh..) a soldering station and some Arduino's and accessories. I'm hoping to find a "spark" as well as fix/build some things I need. Am hoping it might freshen up my skills and more importantly, interest. What I'm finding at the entry level is a lot of "lego blocks" in the world as well. But I have some problems I want to try to solve, similar to: an Arduino Power Meter, but feeding data back to my servers efficiently. Time to learn something new, play with new toys and maybe find a way to make a buck at it. I'll be happy if I regain some spark.

The women are missing for some of the same reasons many of the skilled men are missing: Other things are more interesting, important or lucrative. The brogrammer and corporate IT culture sucks pretty bad as well. I don't want to work in it either.

#Comment Re: Latest Planet Money made: 2014-10-21 15:16:20.347842+00 by: Dan Lyke

That episode asserts that boys got personal computers at home, girls didn't. So boys got to college already knowing most of the CS curriculum, professors told girls in intro classes "you should know this stuff, everyone else does", girls got discouraged and dropped out.

Which is part of the problem of the one-size fits-all assembly line version of education. Especially since it's not really education, it's mostly just high pass filtering.

Planet Money also goes a little bit into the advertising behind personal computers, how up to about 1994 they were more toy than anything, so were advertised to the male demographic because what were (late '70s, early '80s) women going to do with a more advanced Heathkit?