I just inserted myself into all the depictions of the future building and then hung around the construction site enough that everyone assumed I was a building feature.
Or possibly ever again on that campus. You know, depending on how badly she murdered that kid. ‘Cause if she murdered him a lot, not looking good for her.
He *did* come at her with a knife and there was at least one witness to this. A self-defence defence would likely save Amber’s bacon. In several states, you don’t even have to have a duty to retreat in order for the self-defence law to activate. I know here in Colorado, you don’t have to retreat and we don’t even have a “stand your ground” law, unlike Indiana.
However, if that rapist tried to retreat and she attacked anyway, the self-defence argument starts to get diluted. But that didn’t seem to stop Zimmerman from walking away from outright murder scot-free.
TL;DR: If the rapist attempted to retreat, Amber might be pretty F’d in the A. If not, she’ll walk.
thejeff
Since Amber isn’t going to written out of the cast (or kept isolated off campus) for the rest of the comic or even for years of real time, whatever happened isn’t going to lead to those consequences.
Emperor Daniel
I dunno, it’s already been over a month since we last saw her . . . I could see it being a real-time year before things get somewhat settled.
I went through engineering some years ago. It was swinging even then, but there was a, hmn, continuum. Mech was actually majority women, if I recall right, but electrical was one in three or so. Comp. sci. actually had more women than EE did even.
Christine
I was shocked to discover that, to my parents, “fem eng” was a name for the Women in Engineering group, and not a nickname reflecting the fact that chemical (i.e. chem) engineering was 50+% women. Software engineering (a joint programme between the faculty of engineering and faculty of math which is home to computer science) my year, however, had no women at all.
Schol-R-LEA
Heh, funny thing is, I have been guessing for years that this is about to change dramatically, with the balance shifting quickly to almost all women sometime around 2025. Why? Because the primary skill in serious software development is interpersonal communication, the very thing the that the stereotypical hacker types (hacker in the classic sense, not cracker sense) were fleeing into the Net to get away from. Wanna know why software is such a mess? That’s it in a nutshell – people who had communicating with other human beings working in a field where communicating with other human beings is 80% of the job. However, if the rolls for CS – especially outside of the US – are any indication, the shift from Nerd Ghetto to Pink Ghetto is already beginning.
Schol-R-LEA
‘hate’, not ‘had’.
‘CS student rolls’.
And no, I am no saying it will be better; sadly, it will lead to precisely the same sort of degradation of the field in prestige and pay, in part because “women’s work” is never properly respected, but mostly because the main reason it is so in demand now is because we are all so bad at it. if people – regardless of sex or gender – started coming into CS as something other than an escape from socialization, a way to get paid for intellectual play, or to make a quick buck (the primary motives of different CS majors today), people who actually have the skills the job really needs, the ‘software crisis’ that has plagued us since the 1960s will simply evaporate.
Seriously, it is really hard to get through the thick skulls of most IT people – including myself at times – that writing code is the easy part of the job. The hard part is talking to people to know what they think needs to be done, using that to figure out what actually needs to be done, and keeping those line of communication open so that there is enough feedback to detect problems and keep the whole thing going. Writing code is probably less than 10% of the job in programming; debugging it is maybe another 10%; but to do the job right, then 80% has got to be talking to people, otherwise its going to be a mess and remain a mess.
me
No.
Talking to people about specs is easy… well, it’s easy provided the programmer is talking to a coworker, someone they know, work with every day. Someone in sales or support not the customer themselves. That’s how it is really likely to happen in a company of > 5 people so…
Writing code.. not terribly challenging.
The real challenge in computer programming is reading the shitty code the last guy wrote when you are tasked with revisiting it for new features or bug fixes.
People don’t respect that about programming. Sure.. anybody can read a tutorial on app development or php or something and bash out a working program. You don’t just put out a project and hang up the keyboard though. You have to continuously improve your product in order to stay relevant. Structuring things in such a way that it can easily be modified by the next programmer or even by yourself a few weeks later when you have forgotten exactly what was on your mind that day… That takes knowledge, experience and talent! Otherwise you end up with crappy code that every time you try to change anything takes 10 times longer than it should plus introduces bugs.
Anyway.. communication IS a valid skill but so is programming. You really should have people who specialize in each, it is worth it.
Schol-R-LEA
Writing comprehensible code and and usable documentation is part of the communication issue I was talking about actually. Not the main part – I was mostly talking about speaking to non-IT stakeholders – but a part nonetheless.
THIS IS SO TRUE. I have never commented before but I have got to chime in on this.
Nobody freaking documents anything in my office and our supervisors didn’t see the merit in giving us any time or even a repository to keep technical specs. Then we had a reorg and our branch inherited a ton of applications none of us had ever worked on before.
I’ve looked at the code of the app I inherited production support and it makes me twitch uncontrollably. I pray that we don’t actually get any production tickets for it…
At least when I write code I try to comment the heck out of it in the hopes that whatever sucker has to update it when I’m gone has a chance of understanding it. Still, considering some of the ridiculous crap I’ve had to code to make something work without being allowed to upgrade to something that could do it easily, I’m not sure that’s going to be enough.
(Also, where I work, the customer sometimes sees fit to bypass project managers, team leads and the chain of command to contact the lead programmer directly. I have to be VERY CAREFUL with my words when I steer them back to the PM to make sure I don’t even imply that we can or can’t implement their latest brainstorm by the already-tight release date.)
Me
@Mandolin – Documentation? Comments? I dare not even dream of such things. I just want to see fewer ‘magic’ globals and no more variables named ‘hoohah’ and the like!
I don’t know if ‘self documenting code’ can actually be realized in reality but if people just tried the result would be a whole lot more readable then a lot of the stuff I see now!
Schol-R-LEA
Sorry to correct myself again, but: ‘the sort of… that CGG says that older CS educators were trying to avoid’.
Anyway, such a shift will be hard for some people, especially – surprise, surprise – the trans community. One thing that most people don’t realize is that IT – especially academic CS, electronic engineering, and games development – has been something of a safe haven for trans folk for decades. I have seen statistics that say that as much as 2% of IT people identify as non-cis, which is roughly an order of magnitude found in the general population. Figures like Dani Berry, Sophie Wilson, and Alexia Massalin have been able to make solid careers for themselves, despite a severely homophobic and transphobic undercurrent throughout the field, because they can use the isolation of the community as a buffer. If that goes away, that’s a problem.
Schol-R-LEA
Still messing up: ‘order of magnitude higher than’.
Also, if correct, then that figure is staggering – it would mean that am overwhelming majority of trans folk are in some area of IT, and no one has noticed.
thejeff
Writing good, large scale code is not quite so trivial as you make it sound.
Beyond that, the tasks aren’t necessarily the same. System design, requirements gathering, requirements writing and actual coding are all different specialties and different skills.
I’ve worked in software development for ten years, and the majority of bad code I’ve encountered was bad because written either under an unreasonable deadline, with too few people, or by people trying to do things they only barely have the skill to handle, or they’re just bad at it.
And then there’s managers who don’t think maintainability is important. Which is why I’ve learned to refuse to rush on new projects. If they’re not gonna give you time to do things right the first time, you’ll never get time to go back and clean things up once it’s mostly working. That’s how you get horrifying nightmare spaghetti code.
Many programmers might be social awkward and/or shy, but I’ve rarely encountered one who couldn’t even communicate about code with other programmers. Especially by the time they’ve finished college and entered the workforce
(That women will rise to prominence in CS because of communication skillz) seems very plausible given interactions I’ve had with developers. I must add that it isn’t just communicating with others inside the project. Communicating with non-technical people – users and decision-makers – is front and center of the issue. Yes, you have to “speak the user’s language” but it is a language you can only learn by listening a lot more than you speak.
Halpful
no, it’s not all about communication. communication is a big part of it, but you also need people who can do precise thinking all day – if their brains tend to turn 96 into 69 when they’re not looking, they’re gonna have a bad time. Being able to glance at code and effortlessly notice things like “wait, that if statement will always be false, wtf?” is a pretty useful skill when debugging, and debugging was waaay more than 10% of my time (probably more like 70% at my last job, despite having a new project every few months) .
(now that I think about it, communication was a part of debugging too, though. sometimes it’s hard enough just figuring out whose code is causing the problem, and if it’s someone outside the company that adds a whole extra political layer…)
anyways, I’m really skeptical that any of those skills are significantly gendered – I suspect it’s more about how boys and girls are socialised. I was barely able to communicate facts in high school, let alone anything ambiguous, but being The Girl there were always opportunities to practice talking (once I had spaces I felt safe to), and I’m kinda surprised how much my brain’s improved on that front.
Schol-R-LEA
I agree that it isn’t a gender issue, per se. My real point is the opposite, really, – that if it became clear to more people that communication skills were significant in programming, the dominant group in the field now (which includes myself, as I am terrible at interpersonal communication) will drop away, while the men who now shun it as ‘geeky’ such as Joe would then shun it as ‘touchy-feely’, meaning that it would indeed be ghettoized again as “women’s work”.
I will admit that I have oversold the point, but then again, isn’t expressing an algorithm, logical analysis, or data structure (whether to the compiler or to another person) in a clear manner still communication?
Schol-R-LEA
Oh, never mind, I was really stretching there.
Halpful
yeah, it’s the “almost all women” and “that’s it in a nutshell” that’s being objected to, I think 🙂 you saw a trend and then projected it a wee bit far 🙂
there’s also things like the halting problem that guarantee, mathematically, complex systems like software has become will always be something of a mess. (look at me using absolutes here right after discouraging them… but, like, there is actual hard math behind this. improvements are possible, perfection is not.)
and now you’ve got me thinking about the parallels between programming and translation… like, if you have a magical perfect spec it’s mostly a matter of translating that into some language a computer will understand as it’s intended (and working around the limitations of that language)… but the design side is more about translating people’s *thoughts* into a spec, and in the process you discover just how ambiguous, vague and contradictory thoughts (and human languages) can be. 🙂
The reason there aren’t more women in tech is even sadder: in the 70s and 80s, male comp sci faculty realized that wages for a job go down when women enter the field (something that has been illustrated in sociological studies for decades), so if they wanted their field to be respected and well-paid, the key was to push all the women out of it.
They created personality tests for “programming aptitude” that were biased against women. Then the answers to those tests were circulated to fraternities, but not to organizations that admitted women. The current gender ratios in tech were deliberately designed.
Wow. I went to an especially feminist (well, as feminist as anything *can* be in the patriarchy) school with plenty of feminist programs, some of which I participated in, and my favorite teacher happened to be one of the main faculty pushing for more women in the field, and yet I never knew about this part of Comp Sci history. This really sucks.
Before the invention of the compiler by Grace Hopper, hardware was considered to be the important, prestigious concern of computing, and software & programing was considered to be less important busywork relegated to women, including even black women in the united states, and this was during and even just before the civil rights era, so if a job was considered appropriate for black women that should tell you something about the lack of social prestige associated with it. The gender role stereotype in particular goes all the way back to Babbage and Lovelace.
With the invention of the compiler (again, by Grace Hopper, a woman, and one of the most important figures in computer science history, even if for some mysterious reaso , you rarely see her mentioned alongside Babbage, Turing, and the like), allowing instruction sets to be written in universal languages that can then run on any machine, instead of having to be written in the specific machine code of each individual computer, software engineering and algorithm design became the most important subfields of computer science practically overnight, and the push to rebrand programming as “(white) men’s work” was swift, deliberate, and utterly shameless.
me
Nope.. having been through the education system already, when I think about Babbage I don’t immediately think about Grace Hopper. I do immediately think about Ada Lovelace though so what is your point?!?
I wouldn’t expect to talk about Grace Hopper when talking about Babbage because a conversation about Babbage is a conversation about mechanical computers and the steam punk world that might have been.
Turing does come closer to Hopper but still not quite. It’s hard to think about Turing and not think about WWII, code breaking and espionage. That wasn’t Grace Hopper’s thing.
We certainly did talk about Grace Hopper in my classes though! She was instrumental in creating the first compilers. That’s huge! She also invented the word ‘bug’ or so the story goes. I bet that one lives on long after Babbage and Turing are both forgotten.
strictly speaking
Crediting Grace Hopper is a general symptom of great man history and crediting the top manager for the result of a team effort though. She wrote what we would now consider a linker and coined the word compiler, and she ended up leading the team that developed compilers for the FLOW-MATIC/COBOL family.
But overall the development of the first compilers was the work of fairly large teams which developed what we would now consider a compiler independently from each other. There were at least four independent efforts that led to the fortran, algol, lisp, and cobol families. Cobol ended up being fairly widespread, but it had a number of issues due to being “what the customer wanted” (verbose and reliant on goto & global variables in order to supposedly make programs readable for managers, with the end result of leading to spaghetti code unreadable to programmers) instead of “what the customer needed” which, in hindsight, was structured programming. Hence, Cobol ended up being the least influential of the four in the long run even though it was the most widespread over the first few decades.
Me
“Crediting Grace Hopper is a general symptom of great man history and crediting the top manager for the result of a team effort ”
Yes, that too!
“instead of “what the customer needed” which, in hindsight, was structured programming. Hence, Cobol ended up being the least influential of the four”
Are you sure? I still get stuck having to maintain spaghetti code all the time!
Social reality isn’t monocausal in that way. Male overrepresentation in tech subjects is an international phenomenon, whereas you are describing something that took place in America specifically.
So.. were they so blatant about it that they only gave the tests to women? I’m a man but I didn’t have to take some personality test to prove my masculinity before I could get my computer science degree.
Or.. you mentioned frats… were the tests only applied to frat/sorority members? What percentage of college grads are in a frat/sorority anyway? I graduated just fine without ever rushing!
How many schools did this happen at? It would take the faculties of quite a lot of schools to have the very same idea or else a really big conspiracy to explain the numbers industry wide don’t you think?!?
Yes, she is. Whether Joe accepts that she a woman is another story – and I say that not just because Alex is a transwoman, but because Joe is the sort to assume that any older women in CS is a guy in drag (that is, not a transgender person, but a male-identifying crossdresser).
Disturbimgly, the assumption wouldn’t even be mean-spirited (in Joe’s own mind, that is), nor even wholly a matter of being clueless, but as a way of him to accept it without stepping out of his intellectual comfort zone.
He really needs a good push out of said comfort zone, though. Again. I suspect that this is going to be something of a cyclical thing for him.
So everyone across campus has seen Danny walking alongside Joe to reassure him. Those who were thinking that just being around him would result in taint by association might soon see whether or not they’re right.
Fun fact: My dad (who teaches IT security online at a couple different universities) once received a textbook for a class whose publication date hadn’t happened yet.
317 thoughts on “Curse”
Ana Chronistic
I would say there’s also a custodial closet but he prolly pissed off the cleaning crew, too
Passchendaele
that and he can’t fit himself and Danny in it. :p
StClair
Joe fits inside just fine, but Danny can’t… quite… seem to get the door to close and latch. No matter how he tries.
zoelogical
butterfingers baby
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Surely the one safe place from all the ladies on campus won’t be in the guy’s bathroom? lool Ô_o
Bagge
Slipshine spoiler: That has already been… used.
Briny
Well, they probably don’t like their ratings.
Yumi
I’m the person in the last panel who’s not here for Joe and his bullshit.
Emperor Norton II
Man, that’s a sweet gig! How’d you get Willis to put you in the comic?
Yumi
I just inserted myself into all the depictions of the future building and then hung around the construction site enough that everyone assumed I was a building feature.
Pat
Be more specific.
Yumi
The one with the hat
Wait
PumpkinWhat
We must be twins then, Yumi! I was just about to make this comment myself. That person definitely has my style. And my disdain for people like Joe.
Raen
…isn’t Amber a CS major…?
Reltzik
Yeah, but it’s not like Joe needs to hide from HER, right? She’s not scary at aaaalllll….
Ivanka the Terrible
She already knows about the list and has decided it doesn’t bother her.
How do I know? She’s interacted with Joe for longer than 30 seconds.
Emperor Daniel
Eyup.
Beef
I have a feeling she’s not attending class today
otusasio451
Or possibly ever again on that campus. You know, depending on how badly she murdered that kid. ‘Cause if she murdered him a lot, not looking good for her.
Véronique Bellamy
He *did* come at her with a knife and there was at least one witness to this. A self-defence defence would likely save Amber’s bacon. In several states, you don’t even have to have a duty to retreat in order for the self-defence law to activate. I know here in Colorado, you don’t have to retreat and we don’t even have a “stand your ground” law, unlike Indiana.
However, if that rapist tried to retreat and she attacked anyway, the self-defence argument starts to get diluted. But that didn’t seem to stop Zimmerman from walking away from outright murder scot-free.
TL;DR: If the rapist attempted to retreat, Amber might be pretty F’d in the A. If not, she’ll walk.
thejeff
Since Amber isn’t going to written out of the cast (or kept isolated off campus) for the rest of the comic or even for years of real time, whatever happened isn’t going to lead to those consequences.
Emperor Daniel
I dunno, it’s already been over a month since we last saw her . . . I could see it being a real-time year before things get somewhat settled.
Spencer
Probably because it’s Saturday.
Lingo
Isn’t Danny a CS major?
GreatContagion
Sad AND true.
GreatContagion
Well, at least mostly. So far. But, it’s changing slowly, and that’s good.
foamy
I went through engineering some years ago. It was swinging even then, but there was a, hmn, continuum. Mech was actually majority women, if I recall right, but electrical was one in three or so. Comp. sci. actually had more women than EE did even.
Christine
I was shocked to discover that, to my parents, “fem eng” was a name for the Women in Engineering group, and not a nickname reflecting the fact that chemical (i.e. chem) engineering was 50+% women. Software engineering (a joint programme between the faculty of engineering and faculty of math which is home to computer science) my year, however, had no women at all.
Schol-R-LEA
Heh, funny thing is, I have been guessing for years that this is about to change dramatically, with the balance shifting quickly to almost all women sometime around 2025. Why? Because the primary skill in serious software development is interpersonal communication, the very thing the that the stereotypical hacker types (hacker in the classic sense, not cracker sense) were fleeing into the Net to get away from. Wanna know why software is such a mess? That’s it in a nutshell – people who had communicating with other human beings working in a field where communicating with other human beings is 80% of the job. However, if the rolls for CS – especially outside of the US – are any indication, the shift from Nerd Ghetto to Pink Ghetto is already beginning.
Schol-R-LEA
‘hate’, not ‘had’.
‘CS student rolls’.
And no, I am no saying it will be better; sadly, it will lead to precisely the same sort of degradation of the field in prestige and pay, in part because “women’s work” is never properly respected, but mostly because the main reason it is so in demand now is because we are all so bad at it. if people – regardless of sex or gender – started coming into CS as something other than an escape from socialization, a way to get paid for intellectual play, or to make a quick buck (the primary motives of different CS majors today), people who actually have the skills the job really needs, the ‘software crisis’ that has plagued us since the 1960s will simply evaporate.
Seriously, it is really hard to get through the thick skulls of most IT people – including myself at times – that writing code is the easy part of the job. The hard part is talking to people to know what they think needs to be done, using that to figure out what actually needs to be done, and keeping those line of communication open so that there is enough feedback to detect problems and keep the whole thing going. Writing code is probably less than 10% of the job in programming; debugging it is maybe another 10%; but to do the job right, then 80% has got to be talking to people, otherwise its going to be a mess and remain a mess.
me
No.
Talking to people about specs is easy… well, it’s easy provided the programmer is talking to a coworker, someone they know, work with every day. Someone in sales or support not the customer themselves. That’s how it is really likely to happen in a company of > 5 people so…
Writing code.. not terribly challenging.
The real challenge in computer programming is reading the shitty code the last guy wrote when you are tasked with revisiting it for new features or bug fixes.
People don’t respect that about programming. Sure.. anybody can read a tutorial on app development or php or something and bash out a working program. You don’t just put out a project and hang up the keyboard though. You have to continuously improve your product in order to stay relevant. Structuring things in such a way that it can easily be modified by the next programmer or even by yourself a few weeks later when you have forgotten exactly what was on your mind that day… That takes knowledge, experience and talent! Otherwise you end up with crappy code that every time you try to change anything takes 10 times longer than it should plus introduces bugs.
Anyway.. communication IS a valid skill but so is programming. You really should have people who specialize in each, it is worth it.
Schol-R-LEA
Writing comprehensible code and and usable documentation is part of the communication issue I was talking about actually. Not the main part – I was mostly talking about speaking to non-IT stakeholders – but a part nonetheless.
Still, you have a real point there.
ValdVin
“Any fool can write code. And often they do.”
–Philippe Kahn, one of the founders of Borland
Mandolin
THIS IS SO TRUE. I have never commented before but I have got to chime in on this.
Nobody freaking documents anything in my office and our supervisors didn’t see the merit in giving us any time or even a repository to keep technical specs. Then we had a reorg and our branch inherited a ton of applications none of us had ever worked on before.
I’ve looked at the code of the app I inherited production support and it makes me twitch uncontrollably. I pray that we don’t actually get any production tickets for it…
At least when I write code I try to comment the heck out of it in the hopes that whatever sucker has to update it when I’m gone has a chance of understanding it. Still, considering some of the ridiculous crap I’ve had to code to make something work without being allowed to upgrade to something that could do it easily, I’m not sure that’s going to be enough.
(Also, where I work, the customer sometimes sees fit to bypass project managers, team leads and the chain of command to contact the lead programmer directly. I have to be VERY CAREFUL with my words when I steer them back to the PM to make sure I don’t even imply that we can or can’t implement their latest brainstorm by the already-tight release date.)
Me
@Mandolin – Documentation? Comments? I dare not even dream of such things. I just want to see fewer ‘magic’ globals and no more variables named ‘hoohah’ and the like!
I don’t know if ‘self documenting code’ can actually be realized in reality but if people just tried the result would be a whole lot more readable then a lot of the stuff I see now!
Schol-R-LEA
Sorry to correct myself again, but: ‘the sort of… that CGG says that older CS educators were trying to avoid’.
Anyway, such a shift will be hard for some people, especially – surprise, surprise – the trans community. One thing that most people don’t realize is that IT – especially academic CS, electronic engineering, and games development – has been something of a safe haven for trans folk for decades. I have seen statistics that say that as much as 2% of IT people identify as non-cis, which is roughly an order of magnitude found in the general population. Figures like Dani Berry, Sophie Wilson, and Alexia Massalin have been able to make solid careers for themselves, despite a severely homophobic and transphobic undercurrent throughout the field, because they can use the isolation of the community as a buffer. If that goes away, that’s a problem.
Schol-R-LEA
Still messing up: ‘order of magnitude higher than’.
Also, if correct, then that figure is staggering – it would mean that am overwhelming majority of trans folk are in some area of IT, and no one has noticed.
thejeff
Writing good, large scale code is not quite so trivial as you make it sound.
Beyond that, the tasks aren’t necessarily the same. System design, requirements gathering, requirements writing and actual coding are all different specialties and different skills.
Fart Captor
I’ve worked in software development for ten years, and the majority of bad code I’ve encountered was bad because written either under an unreasonable deadline, with too few people, or by people trying to do things they only barely have the skill to handle, or they’re just bad at it.
And then there’s managers who don’t think maintainability is important. Which is why I’ve learned to refuse to rush on new projects. If they’re not gonna give you time to do things right the first time, you’ll never get time to go back and clean things up once it’s mostly working. That’s how you get horrifying nightmare spaghetti code.
Many programmers might be social awkward and/or shy, but I’ve rarely encountered one who couldn’t even communicate about code with other programmers. Especially by the time they’ve finished college and entered the workforce
Vulcanodon
(That women will rise to prominence in CS because of communication skillz) seems very plausible given interactions I’ve had with developers. I must add that it isn’t just communicating with others inside the project. Communicating with non-technical people – users and decision-makers – is front and center of the issue. Yes, you have to “speak the user’s language” but it is a language you can only learn by listening a lot more than you speak.
Halpful
no, it’s not all about communication. communication is a big part of it, but you also need people who can do precise thinking all day – if their brains tend to turn 96 into 69 when they’re not looking, they’re gonna have a bad time. Being able to glance at code and effortlessly notice things like “wait, that if statement will always be false, wtf?” is a pretty useful skill when debugging, and debugging was waaay more than 10% of my time (probably more like 70% at my last job, despite having a new project every few months) .
(now that I think about it, communication was a part of debugging too, though. sometimes it’s hard enough just figuring out whose code is causing the problem, and if it’s someone outside the company that adds a whole extra political layer…)
anyways, I’m really skeptical that any of those skills are significantly gendered – I suspect it’s more about how boys and girls are socialised. I was barely able to communicate facts in high school, let alone anything ambiguous, but being The Girl there were always opportunities to practice talking (once I had spaces I felt safe to), and I’m kinda surprised how much my brain’s improved on that front.
Schol-R-LEA
I agree that it isn’t a gender issue, per se. My real point is the opposite, really, – that if it became clear to more people that communication skills were significant in programming, the dominant group in the field now (which includes myself, as I am terrible at interpersonal communication) will drop away, while the men who now shun it as ‘geeky’ such as Joe would then shun it as ‘touchy-feely’, meaning that it would indeed be ghettoized again as “women’s work”.
I will admit that I have oversold the point, but then again, isn’t expressing an algorithm, logical analysis, or data structure (whether to the compiler or to another person) in a clear manner still communication?
Schol-R-LEA
Oh, never mind, I was really stretching there.
Halpful
yeah, it’s the “almost all women” and “that’s it in a nutshell” that’s being objected to, I think 🙂 you saw a trend and then projected it a wee bit far 🙂
there’s also things like the halting problem that guarantee, mathematically, complex systems like software has become will always be something of a mess. (look at me using absolutes here right after discouraging them… but, like, there is actual hard math behind this. improvements are possible, perfection is not.)
and now you’ve got me thinking about the parallels between programming and translation… like, if you have a magical perfect spec it’s mostly a matter of translating that into some language a computer will understand as it’s intended (and working around the limitations of that language)… but the design side is more about translating people’s *thoughts* into a spec, and in the process you discover just how ambiguous, vague and contradictory thoughts (and human languages) can be. 🙂
CulturalGeekGirl
The reason there aren’t more women in tech is even sadder: in the 70s and 80s, male comp sci faculty realized that wages for a job go down when women enter the field (something that has been illustrated in sociological studies for decades), so if they wanted their field to be respected and well-paid, the key was to push all the women out of it.
They created personality tests for “programming aptitude” that were biased against women. Then the answers to those tests were circulated to fraternities, but not to organizations that admitted women. The current gender ratios in tech were deliberately designed.
https://timeline.com/women-pioneered-computer-programming-then-men-took-their-industry-over-c2959b822523
OnyxIdol
That sucks.
Jimi
Wow. I went to an especially feminist (well, as feminist as anything *can* be in the patriarchy) school with plenty of feminist programs, some of which I participated in, and my favorite teacher happened to be one of the main faculty pushing for more women in the field, and yet I never knew about this part of Comp Sci history. This really sucks.
Malisteen
Before the invention of the compiler by Grace Hopper, hardware was considered to be the important, prestigious concern of computing, and software & programing was considered to be less important busywork relegated to women, including even black women in the united states, and this was during and even just before the civil rights era, so if a job was considered appropriate for black women that should tell you something about the lack of social prestige associated with it. The gender role stereotype in particular goes all the way back to Babbage and Lovelace.
With the invention of the compiler (again, by Grace Hopper, a woman, and one of the most important figures in computer science history, even if for some mysterious reaso , you rarely see her mentioned alongside Babbage, Turing, and the like), allowing instruction sets to be written in universal languages that can then run on any machine, instead of having to be written in the specific machine code of each individual computer, software engineering and algorithm design became the most important subfields of computer science practically overnight, and the push to rebrand programming as “(white) men’s work” was swift, deliberate, and utterly shameless.
me
Nope.. having been through the education system already, when I think about Babbage I don’t immediately think about Grace Hopper. I do immediately think about Ada Lovelace though so what is your point?!?
I wouldn’t expect to talk about Grace Hopper when talking about Babbage because a conversation about Babbage is a conversation about mechanical computers and the steam punk world that might have been.
Turing does come closer to Hopper but still not quite. It’s hard to think about Turing and not think about WWII, code breaking and espionage. That wasn’t Grace Hopper’s thing.
We certainly did talk about Grace Hopper in my classes though! She was instrumental in creating the first compilers. That’s huge! She also invented the word ‘bug’ or so the story goes. I bet that one lives on long after Babbage and Turing are both forgotten.
strictly speaking
Crediting Grace Hopper is a general symptom of great man history and crediting the top manager for the result of a team effort though. She wrote what we would now consider a linker and coined the word compiler, and she ended up leading the team that developed compilers for the FLOW-MATIC/COBOL family.
But overall the development of the first compilers was the work of fairly large teams which developed what we would now consider a compiler independently from each other. There were at least four independent efforts that led to the fortran, algol, lisp, and cobol families. Cobol ended up being fairly widespread, but it had a number of issues due to being “what the customer wanted” (verbose and reliant on goto & global variables in order to supposedly make programs readable for managers, with the end result of leading to spaghetti code unreadable to programmers) instead of “what the customer needed” which, in hindsight, was structured programming. Hence, Cobol ended up being the least influential of the four in the long run even though it was the most widespread over the first few decades.
Me
“Crediting Grace Hopper is a general symptom of great man history and crediting the top manager for the result of a team effort ”
Yes, that too!
“instead of “what the customer needed” which, in hindsight, was structured programming. Hence, Cobol ended up being the least influential of the four”
Are you sure? I still get stuck having to maintain spaghetti code all the time!
Cassidy
Do you need sociological studies to prove that? It’s basic supply and demand…
Kabo
Social reality isn’t monocausal in that way. Male overrepresentation in tech subjects is an international phenomenon, whereas you are describing something that took place in America specifically.
me
@CulturalGeekGirl
Peronality tests to keep girls out of comp sci?
So.. were they so blatant about it that they only gave the tests to women? I’m a man but I didn’t have to take some personality test to prove my masculinity before I could get my computer science degree.
Or.. you mentioned frats… were the tests only applied to frat/sorority members? What percentage of college grads are in a frat/sorority anyway? I graduated just fine without ever rushing!
How many schools did this happen at? It would take the faculties of quite a lot of schools to have the very same idea or else a really big conspiracy to explain the numbers industry wide don’t you think?!?
OnyxIdol
Um, what’s that on your profile pic? I kinda reminds me of some sort of diseased butthole.
Gasp
Isn’t the new professor for the computer science class a woman? And Amber waS in that class too, she can’t be the only girl there
Schol-R-LEA
Yes, she is. Whether Joe accepts that she a woman is another story – and I say that not just because Alex is a transwoman, but because Joe is the sort to assume that any older women in CS is a guy in drag (that is, not a transgender person, but a male-identifying crossdresser).
Disturbimgly, the assumption wouldn’t even be mean-spirited (in Joe’s own mind, that is), nor even wholly a matter of being clueless, but as a way of him to accept it without stepping out of his intellectual comfort zone.
He really needs a good push out of said comfort zone, though. Again. I suspect that this is going to be something of a cyclical thing for him.
SgtWadeyWilson
I love the girl in the last panel foreshadowing Joe’s wrongness here.
Rambling Idiot
Her stinkeye
SgtWadeyWilson
It’s gold.
Aeron
Stinkeye so hard, she dislodged her eyeball.
Bagge
Yup. “Seconds before Joe is proven wrong. One… Tw… wow, that was fast.”
Solenoid
So everyone across campus has seen Danny walking alongside Joe to reassure him. Those who were thinking that just being around him would result in taint by association might soon see whether or not they’re right.
Needfuldoer
But that Danny is supposed to be a good egg…
Pablo360
It’s a building FROM THE FUTURE
Fun fact: My dad (who teaches IT security online at a couple different universities) once received a textbook for a class whose publication date hadn’t happened yet.
Christine
By the time they leave the building it will probably be there.
Maveric1984
This building exists in the far flung future year of 2018!
TheAnonymousGuy
which exactly when we’ll find out what happened to Amber, Ethen, and Ryan.
Sporky
crap i picked the wrong option in the poll because i mixed anna and mindy’s names up
not related to the strip at all but w/e
Bagge
That IS a pretty hilarious reason to ship someone
Emperor Norton II
It is pretty much what happened in the strip too, so as far as I can tell, Sporky is Leslie.
Puckish Rogue
(Looks to get in a positive comment before the avalanche of Joe-hating begins)
In the second panel Joe realises whats he done by saying hes earned the ire which means hes not trying to pass the blame onto someone else
Its improvement I tells ya