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Admin
I did wonder how long it would take for this thread to descend into the "why chicks can't code" debate. Presumably, it's for the same reason that men make better doctors and women make better nurses and vets. Or why it's wrong for women to act on the stage, or for a man to bring up children.</sarcasm>
Seriously, science, especially comp sci, is a male dominated field. Girls are less likely to want to get into what is seen as a nerdy, guy type profession, for the same reason most guys don't want to be nurses. This has nothing to do with ability, it's a PR problem. There is a big push in academia at the moment to make maths, science etc more attractive to female undergraduates, but I'm not sure how much success it's meeting with.
Interesting historical factoid: Back in days of yore, things like ballistics tables requiring lots of differential calculus were calculated by teams of female mathematicians, doing boring number crunching. These women were known as "computors", and when the ENIAC and similar came on the scene, lots of them got jobs as the first programmers, while the men were busy building the hardware. Hence Grace Hopper inventing the compiler [c.f. Electronic Brains by Mile Hally]
I'm going to bed now, so flame away, I won't hear you
Admin
IAWTC - with the addendum that it's actually that the outliers are the ones who are willing to put up with the bullshit sexist attitudes that one still encounters in this profession. Obviously.
As for the comment about the majority of anecdotes being about men who stuff up, and that basically women aren't being picked on especially, true. However, where are the stories about women who do the whistleblowing or who save the day? Maybe some of the women who read this need to start submitting their own stories of idiot behaviour/process. (I'm a sysadmin, so I'm not quite in the demographic for this site). Although given the evident quality of some of the readers here, maybe it's not worth bothering.
Admin
No certain people, unlike you, understand that correlation does not imply causation. Just because woman aren't programmers doesn't mean they're worse at programming. It just means that for various reasons, social and genetic, they do not become programmers. Many probably realize, unlike idiotic males, that they can make more money and work less in many other professions so they avoid anything IT like the plague. More importantly they won't have to (possibly) deal with nerds every day who have the social skills of a dead cockroach. Also this means that fewer woman go into CS and says nothing about the quality of those who DO go into it.
Admin
Exactly. So what if, for instance, 20% of male candidates are competent but only 10% of female candidates? In both cases, you have to filter out at least 80% so considering the candidate's sex won't do you much good. On the contrary, it may cause you to miss out on a significant minority of competent candidates. You might even miss out on a woman who can program like Judit Polgár can play chess.
And if your competence testing is adequate, the risk of letting an inept female candidate slip through are no greater than that of letting an inept male candidate do so.
Of course, there is some controversy about what types of competence tests are the most useful but that's a different story.
Admin
Those who can't manage those who can.
Admin
Its also possible she wasn't incompetent at other parts of her job (like project management, or understanding how the product was used), and her new job allowed her to use those skills without touching code. Remember, there is one good thing from this story, she was at least competent enough to ask for help. There are developers out there who not only can't code, but also refuse to admit that and get help. They are much worse than Megan here.
Really, this whole story isn't all that surprising to me.
Admin
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It's scary, but not surprising. I've spent days making sure certain pieces of stats are recorded properly, and then recorded them properly for years, and then discovered that nobody ever wrote reports to read the data and.....
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There's no way this is true. Parts of it, maybe, but its pretty obvious the author started getting a little carried away towards the end.
Admin
I blame that guy that sells PC training CDs on infomercials. Now anyone that can get a computer to respond in a correct fashion more than once considers themselves qualified as computer-literate. Captcha: Sanitarium (Oh the Humanity!)
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yeah. wtf have they been doing for two months?? seems that they should all get fired, or promoted - as the case may be.
captcha: sanitarium (it sure is)
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hey dude same captcha! wicked!!
Admin
If a woman gets promoted for this degree of incompetence, it's not because she's a cunt, it's because she has one.
If a man gets promoted for this degree of incompetence, it's not because he has a prick, it's because he is one.
Admin
As a female in mans field(developer/sysadmin) I tell to men with chauvinist attitudes to go f*** themselves. The fact that most women aren't suited and/or interested to do technical stuff is no cause to generalize it to all women. Yes, there are incompetent women around just like there are incompetent men. The fact that they are in positions they are not qualified for is the fault of the hiring system. Theres something wrong in a system that hires a person that cannot declare a separate variable to hold a value or does not know what a WHERE clause is for as a developer or if this is done intentionally, then where is the training to MAKE people competent to do their jobs?
As to promotion, I don't know what is it that a Lead Developer does in that company. Perhaps it is just a person who relays work orders, fills in the paperwork and solves conflicts between people and perhaps that is what this person is qualified to do? And if she isn't, that is an excuse to fire her or making her leave fixing a mistake made in hiring process.
Every company has these people. They are the people moved into middle management because they cause problems else where and annoy everybody to no end with their incompetence but never screw up big enough to be fired (often because the position is set up so) leaving everybody having to deal with them quietly dreaming of the day that person quits. And yes, the one I know is male. And probably will stick around until pension age(+30 years).
Admin
I used to work at a place where the CEO basically hired girls based on their looks. Man I miss that place.
These days there is one female developer where I work. Amusingly, she is the sister of our (ex) Technical Director. Sadly, she is a brilliant coder and could run rings around me (in Java, at least).
Admin
I am afraid by doing so you would become the most incompetent one because your boss believes in her more than you.
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I didn't know you could do that!!!
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That is so untrue ... I mean every form of generalising is inherently false, but what you are saying is pure idiocy ...
Can you at least try to list some of the "personality attributes" needed for a productive programmer ?
Admin
"So with all the screwups and bad data, the company responded appropriately. By promoting Megan to the Lead Developer for the whole department."
Huh! I didn't know you could do that!
Admin
Pretty sure not knowing that you can use more than one variable is called "not knowing how to program".
I'm kind of skeptical of this story.
Admin
All I want to know is: At what point did Sebastian tell his boss that she wasn't up to the job?
I hate stories like this, not because of the idiocy of the person being ridiculed, or the management for keeping them employed, but the self righteous idiot who's sent the article in without any kind of 'I tried to tell them' part to the story.
Admin
Good catch! GWB demonstrates that you can turn right 3 times without actually turning left, thus refuting gawdless Euclidean geometry.
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4a)She had a really nice pair of boobs. 4b)A short skirt 4c)A low cut top... 4d)Carefully asvoided Eye contact so manager could oggle.
Or maybe she was related to dubya (captcha)
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I'm glad we got that straightened out, aren't you?
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Sounds more like the Dilbert principle
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The Paula-Exclusion Principle?
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Oddly enough, just about every male pseudonym he uses is also attached to an inept idiot, and there's quite a bit more of them. Have you noticed yet you're on "worse than failure".com instead of "competent programmer stories".com?
As fun as it is to blame the anonymization for every aspect of the WTF you don't believe or dislike, he's said he actually changes very little - which means female pseudonyms, presumably, only get attached to stories where the person was actually female - but you can't believe that any woman could POSSIBLY be incompetent morons, right - not even the three or so that he's posted stuff about, right? Only men (like the literally hundreds of male pseudonyms used on this site over the years) can do that.
Admin
I don't see how not binding the form to the datasource is "fucking dangerous". Fucking retarded maybe, but it's not dangerous. No one is hurt and no data is lost. The other one, writing over all the tables OK, I see that as fucking dangerous. However, not the binding issue. Minor point, just thought I'd make it.
Admin
Well, if crucial data is being input, and the inputter assumes their data has been safely stored in a database, then throws away the hard copy original (or whatever), then not binding could be "fucking dangerous". Although perhaps "dangerous" is the right word only if this data is a cure for cancer, or equations for nuclear fission, or 999/911/112 call records or something, which seems a little unlikely.
Admin
maybe it's because i'm just an intern who's still wet behind his ears, but if i was sebastian, i would casually offer to look over all of Megan's code. then i would learn what she was supposed to do, and if it was within my power, come up with my own improvements, and then show someone megan's incompetence versus my awesomeness.
maybe i'm thinking too positive, but if i could fix those simple errors, even if i was just a lowly network admin intern, i would just buy a book on what Megan was working on and then do it myself. can it be done? heck, i'm already an intern, why not offer to do it at half of megan's pay? especially since it seems she was being grossly overpaid!
Admin
It is apparently being fairly succesful in causing males to leave maths, science etc in droves. There's something of a crisis at the moment apparently.
Aim to encourage the best and brightest might be a plan. As long as there are no artificial obstructions, the rest will sort itself out.
Rich
Admin
You're assuming he has nuts. He's probably been castrated by some "chick" he talked to before this moronic post.
Probably works really well on the sheep he keeps out back of that trailer.
Admin
Has nothing to do with PC, asswipe. It has to do with generalizations and stereotypes. You know, like saying that anybody that uses "GrandmasterB" in a forum has the intelligence of Bud Bundy. Of course, you post like you fit that stereotype.
Most of the men with any intelligence have outgrown being Neanderthal; apparently there are a few (like you) that haven't.
Just FYI, one of the very best programmers I've worked with (in 27 years of programming, mind you) was a woman. She had an extreme talent, and a knack for picking up new languages like it was by osmosis. She obviously was considerably more intelligent than you.
Once again, you've confused PC with Neanderthal thinking. And name calling is appropriate sometimes, especially when it fits. Dickhead.
Admin
How many dicks did she suck to get to the top?
Admin
That's because men don't get by on their looks, men get by on the good ol' boy network. Play golf with the right people and it doesn't matter how incompetent you are.
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Note: Sebastian says "them". Obviously this company does not know about its own resources; like for instance, Sebastian "The Bug Slayer"!
Admin
ok, Not being sexist or PC here.
I've always seen programming styles split between the genders in an interesting fashion. Mind you this isn't a hard and fast rule, but there is a male and female style. I have defined them in my own head and no one fits these exactly but has a bit of each, it matters which one predominates.
The male style: Detail oriented, back end, brick and mortar stuff. This style tends to sit in the core process. The male style also gets bogged down in the details and can be sidetracked while working on one issues to the exclusion of all others.
The female style: More big picture, design savvy, front end work. This style tends to be concerned with things like did the data get saved, rather then how it got saved. The female style can get sidetracked when major components fail to interact properly at a low level.
These styles I have seen from years of working with competent developers of both genders. Never have I seen someone that was all one and none of the other, but females tend to have more of the big picture attitude than males. The thing is, you need both of these types of developers in order to have a truly successful project.
Oh and I have to say, there have been a few female developers I have worked with that were far to distracting to sit next to. But I have always maintained my professionalism at the workplace.
Admin
I too have been in a similar situation, though fortunately the "Megan" in my experience wasn't promoted to Lead Developer.
I wonder if this Megan was attractive. I know this sounds terribly sexist, but I have seen sensible managers swayed in ridiculous ways by attractive females in their employ.
I also wonder if perhaps this Megan wasn't already fast-tracked for management. The fact that she happened to obtain a development job while having little knowledge of programming suggests that she was never subjected to a technical interview. I suppose this can happen anywhere (though not to an ugly old man like me), but I would imagine that it happens primarily in situations where the job candidate is highly favored by management for some social or family reason.
Or perhaps Megan just told outrageous lies about her qualifications, and management was so impressed that it didn't look any further. I've seen this happen as well.
Admin
First of all, this is not the Peter Principle. If anything, it is the reverse Peter Principle. If she had been a great programmer, and a lousy manager then that would be the Peter Principle (get promoted to your level of incompetence).
Secondly, as for the women-in-programming debate, there is science behind it (which got the Harvard president fired a couple of years ago). If you chart ability over all men or all women, it will be a bell curve. For men, there will be more people at the high end and for women more people in the middle. This is because one man can mate with a limitless number of women. So for a man to be a success evolution-wise, he has to be 1 in a million. But women have relatively few children, so they just need to be near the middle. A field like programming may be dominated by men, but that does not mean that all men can program. It is just the small percent of men at the top end of ability that programmers need. At that top end, there will still be some women, but percentage-wise, a lot fewer.
Admin
Yeah, after 10 years of programming, I am thinking hard about law school. I had no idea in college that:
OR
If I can't figure out a way to complete law school, I'm seriously considering working as an auto mechanic. My LSAT score was good, but the logistics / finances are difficult.
Captcha = cognac
Admin
Correct. It's not the Peter Principle; it's the Dilbert Principle, which states that incompetent employees get promoted to the place where they can do the least damage: management.
Of course, that assumes that the people promoting this induhvidual realized that she was incompetent.
Regarding the perspective that there are insufficient stories submitted by females about incompetent males being promoted, this is probably just because of the relatively small number of female nerds. We are certainly few. ;-) But I have seen cases of men who got promoted when they probably should have been fired instead -- and where good engineers got downsized who shouldn't have been. Nothing this egregious, though.
Mind you, I have noticed how folks outside of your area of expertise may have a false impression of your competence. I've noticed that my fast typing and quick mouse-work has gotten people to think I'm a very good engineer -- even if they have seen exactly none of my actual engineering work. All they've seen is my computer-driving skills during meetings. Perhaps the people who kept promoting this woman had a similar perception of her -- they saw her only in a very limited environment in which she was highly competent, and weren't really aware of how insignificant that environment really was in terms of judging her skill set.
Admin
Oh, excuse me. I'll just take my boobs and vajayjay out of your exclusive little swimming pool, along with my calculus, biology, SQL, .NET and Java knowledge just so I can go do websites with my totally retarded colour schemes that look like a monkey on crack put together because "generally women aren't programmers but they're good at colour matching".
Generalizations like that went out of style back in 70s and 80s. The reason women don't like getting into the "OMG hard stuff that men do!" is because of general attitudes like yours.
I graduated with a comp sci degree where half my class was female and were strong programmers with mathematically inclined brains. Genetics and sex-roles be damned.
-- Seejay
Admin
PLEASE tell me this is not true. (Although, it's a perfect example of "Promoted out of harm's way.")
Admin
You know, there was a professor here in Ontario who put together a thesis on racial stereotypes correlating with penis size, intelligence and violent tendencies. It went something like this:
Blacks: low intelligence, large penis, high violence White: medium intelligence, averge penis, average violence Asians: high intelligence, small penis, low violence
So apparently your penis size is directly related to your violent tendencies and inversely propotional to your intelligence.
David Suzuki was supposed to debate him about the results of his study, but wasn't sure how to approach it as it was a lose/lose situation (if he won, it would be attributable to being Asian and of "high intelligence"). This guy's thesis was actually published in a journal (albeit one that was funded by Playboy or Penthouse or something like that).
Last I heard (back in the early 2000's when I was in university) the guy was still employed at a university (tenure FTL), although he did have to give classes and lectures through video conferencing due to death threats for his racist views.
Just because a study is done doesn't necessarily mean there's actual science or validity behind it, as evidenced by the idiocy this guy produced.
(and yes I'm aware that this comes across as an anecdote, but I'm really drawing a blank at the names of the people involved. This information was related to me from my university Anthropology professor on how any idiot can publish in journals and how tenure protects assholes. I'd do some searching but I'm loathe to start typing in search terms that include "penis size" while I'm at work.)
-- Seejay
ETA: and by "any idiot can publish in journals", I should clarify... respectable journals would toss this type of moron out on their ass, but there are many journals out there that have the name "journal" in it that people don't realize aren't peer-reviewed respected books. Without doing some research, "Journal of Underwater Basket Weaving" might mislead some into thinking it's a good resource.