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Admin
Guess none of the 'don't need a degree to code' guys is from Google?
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No, after that I woke up.
(Srsly, it did happen like that, but the rank and file didn't find out about it until she'd already left. No-one had any idea what she was like before she came for the interview, and it would have been a bit inappropriate to broadcast an announcement during the interview, resulting in a bunch of geeks with their noses pressed against the windows of the conference room).
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I've worked in Sweden for a time and found there that while it's an extremely 'progressive' society with women performing many traditionally male roles, the large company I was in had essentially the same gender balance as everywhere else. I wish it wasn't so as a more balanced group has a better dynamic. But I can only say that women seem less inclined to IT than guys.
I think that nobody should ever be discouraged from a role by sexism, that's just a waste of talent, but it is naive to think that all roles are equally attractive to the genders (or even that they would be in the absence of all social conditioning).
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Yes it is, actually. And you know it is.
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I think I might have a universal solution to all three of the problems:
Problem 1: Degree vs. No Degree Problem 2: There are no women in IT Problem 3: I think these arguments are all about trolling.
Universal Solution: People that play with computers and haunt these forums are universally immature. I can not tell you why this is the case, but I can tell you how it has caused the above problems.
Problem 1: Degree vs. No Degree Most of the kids I went to school with had no respect for what they were learning and thus did as little as possible. The most clever of them went on to do work that required their degree--video games (as unfortunate and under-compensated as work in that field is), the FSA, and other academic disciplines. The ones who thought they were clever and spent time giggling, enamored with their own intelligence, discussing minutia with colleagues, doomed themselves to careers in business software--that which requires very few reasoning skills: just follow the patterns that have always been in place. Those who don't follow the patterns create the epic VB and J2EE WTFs that cross my eyes and are far more idiotic than anything I've seen displayed here. Immaturity kept them from REAL education, and they are several thousand dollars poorer, gaining no skills whatsoever.
Problem 2: No women in IT Women ARE (obviously in general) more mature--eager to learn and to please the ones in authority over them. They will generally go the college path of the career. Then they encounter the immaturity of their colleagues and generally choose a different brainy discipline. Those that persist are generally the stand-offish ones. In college, the good-looking ones are worshiped (but never talked to, immaturity remember) or ignored. In both cases, the 5th-grade maturity level divides the sexes. The few that "make it" to the working world are typically very hostile from their experience. They are then seen as "overly-defensive" and avoided.
Problem 3: Most of the folks in the above categories have too much time on their hands and spend their time trolling these forums. I am one of the damned. I was good in school. I was also immature. Now I'm stuck in b*$%ness software. But I pass the time (generally logged in as Nagesh or boog) by chumping all of you knuckleheads.
This is my confession. This is my future.
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Looks like algebra to me.
I learned programming long before I ever encountered algebra and found that while other students struggled with the idea of adding letters together, I found it completely natural.
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Fortunately, the course was not evaluated, otherwise I might have had problems because I was the only one able to complete more than the first task.
I'm not claiming to be brilliant, but I sometimes find that the expectations of course designers are depressingly low.
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I was trained on the job in a major Swiss bank that was willing to invest money in training.
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Glad to know I'm not the only one.
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Probably because there are a lot of people with that story who have taught us all that self-taught programmers who started at eleven years old typically come in two flavors: rare, and lousy. You might be the rare sort, but is the guy doing the hiring going to want to risk having to sit through another interview with a boring braggart who knows far less than he thinks he knows and bathes far less than he ought to bathe? He doesn't care whether he hires you or not, he just wants to hire someone who can do the job well, with minimal pain in the hiring process. If that means filtering out people whose resume looks like yours, there's not a shit in the world that he gives about that.
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Oh, don't get me wrong: I understand that.
I didn't complete a degree because I got a job. A job that's rewarded (and not only monetarily) me well for the last 11 years. So far, my employers don't seem to think I've a problem with not completing things.
Admin
Um... they didn't do CS degrees in 1996? On which planet was this? For reference, Stanford started offering CS degrees in 1965...
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Yes, they're called temp agencies.
If you don't have time to hire someone, you need to hire someone to take care of that for you. Wait, what? If you're actually trying to hire someone, it takes just as much work to do it through a recruiter - it's just that you end up spreading the work over a few years of semi-performing losers, some of whom attach themselves to your company like barnacles and never produce anything, and can't even be used to manage the job search to find the person you originally wanted to hire because they don't know shit from a donut without a taste test.
Recruiters are great, though - the companies that use them end up with the employees they deserve, and they get the useless gits out of the job market so people trying to hire someone useful have fewer gits to get through. And besides, idiots should be employed too, it's good for the economy.
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Many of them leave when they find out that their career counselor didn't tell them that they'd be in classes with the guys who spent their entire lives from the age of 11 in their room playing with their computers, only leaving for brief periods to go over to their buddy's house and play with their computers. This is actually not a wisecrack - your question is the subject of serious research, and this is actually what happens. Studies of female CS attrition typically cite the terrible social skills and grinding work-focus of their classmates, combined with the typical 5 to seven year head start that those classmates have on them. They end up in other degree programs. True story.
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TRWTF is that this should surely be a Tales From The Interview?
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Its surface splintered into sorry hemispheres.
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It depends. If I need someone skilled in blowing up buildings, yes.
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This is the real WTF:
"This was the last stop for the well-dressed fellow, as the company insisted on a degree"
If you are hiring based on managing to answer hypothetical questions in a fashion suitable to someone in an educational environment, rather than hiring based on experience, you will get a random selection of people, the only non-random element being that they all have the same piece of paper.
Having a degree doesn't mean you are a good employee, and it doesn't even give an indication that you MIGHT be a good employee. Having a good work history, that DOES show you MIGHT be a good employee.
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[quote user="trtrwtfIf you don't have time to hire someone, you need to hire someone to take care of that for you. Wait, what?[/quote]
Well, technically, you don't "hire" a recruiter. You just contract with one. When I go to the auto mechanic, I don't "hire a mechanic" in the sense of taking him on as a full-time employee. I just contract with him to do this one job.
But more to the point: You really can't comprehend the idea of paying someone else to do a job that you don't have the time and/or skill to do yourself?
I'm terrible at carpentry. So when I need woodwork done, I pay a carpenter.
I don't know anything about medicene. So when I'm sick, I go to a doctor.
I now a little about auto mechanics, but some jobs are bigger than I am willing to take on, so I go to a mechanic.
Etc.
Is it really that bizarre to say that if you don't have the time to deal with the whole hiring process, or are not particularly good at doing it, that you would hire a recruiter to do most of the work for you?
In my experience what companies mostly hire recruiters for is to screen out the most unqualified candidates. You know, the ones who don't have college degrees. More seriously, if you put a want ad in the newspaper or on Craigs List or some such, you get hordes of applicants who have no idea how to do the job. A recruiter is supposed to filter all those people out and only send you a handful of candidates who meet some minimal level of qualification.
That's not to say that all recruiters do their jobs well or perform a useful service. I'm sure many are a worthless waste of time. I've met several of them. But the same could be said about, say, programmers.
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Hmmm, one other thing regarding degrees being required for jobs. Since most governments pay quite a bit towards universities for students taking courses, it seems only fair that companies that require a degree for a reason other than it being required by law (eg: Engineering degree to build a bridge) should be taxed directly for requiring that degree.
Since they are the ones creating the unnecessary demand (University was once somewhere you went for higher education, for that exact purpose. Not somewhere that trains you for a job.) they should be the ones paying for it. Not me.
I have a feeling if it became a requirement, companies would suddenly care more about your ability to do a job than your ability to pass exams.
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Heh, don't say that too loud - the president of Harvard got canned for speculating on the subject. Seems the feminists don't want much examination of the matter - they just want to scream oppression.
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Not too loud - lucidfox will come after you for speculating about the differences between men and women.
Admin
That's not speculating, that's asserting. And, I might add, the assertion is idiotic. It's also a pretty imbecilic leap from the observations it was posted in response to.
So what is it about your fragile ego that leads you to construct these imaginary ball-busting feminists, so you can defy them? Is it the not getting laid, or the creeping fear that you're actually not as smart as you'd like to be?
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Lots of typos on this one...
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It's not my ego that's fragile, it's the people that ride a man out on a rail for not spouting the correct dogma vis a vis women in CS. They've successfully broken the debate by making dissent impossible, so the solution will at best happen by accident.
Hell, I got called a troll for stating that men and women approach dating differently. It's one thing to assume that the gender balance in CS is wholly a sexism thing, but it's entirely different when you start denying biological facts in the dating world.
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My new signature...
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And tying this back to the other subthread, this self-reinforcing culture -- not genetics, acquired, transmitted culture -- is a great deal of the reason women are underrepresented in many professions: the culture says "women don't do that", the professions so tagged become insular boys-clubs, the few women who do brave the storm are roundly subjected to the absolute worst behavior in order to keep them on the outs as much as possible, and the cycle repeats as it remains accepted wisdom that "women don't do well in those professions".
Whereas if a group makes an effort not to be total prats and be accepting of the idea that women just might do as well as men at whatever, and changes their behavior to match, they often find that to also become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This pattern repeats everywhere from business, to free-software culture, to various fandoms (there was a really awesome piece by someone a few years back basically saying "the toleration of Comic-Book Guy types in actual comic fandom is a huge reason women avoid comic book culture -- we have no one to blame but ourselves"). The danger is in thinking that a stable equilibrium is the only one possible or desirable -- these anti-women equilibria are very stable, but they can (and I think, should) be given a swift kick into the other valley on the graph, the one where women are just as welcome and productive as men.
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You are joking, right? I mean, come on, it can't be that bad.
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Exactly. Anyone who's tried to teach, and actually teach well, realizes that it is significantly harder to teach well than to do well.
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Having a degree myself, I don't understand why anyone insists on a degree. It was fun and all, but spending that time working would have made me better suited for most jobs than the degree did.
FTFY
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Those who can, teach. Those who can't, do.
Akismet stop saying my message's a spammmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
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Of course, what most people seem to miss about that quote, is that it doesn't say "those who teach, can't"
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Your assertion about his getting laid or not, is built of just as much straw as his ball-busting feminist, though.
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What's WTF about that? It's been common knowledge for decades. If it still inspires a "WTF?" now, you've been living under a rock.
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Unless you're Doing It Wrong, most programming jobs consist of a lot of social interaction anyway.
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True. Your point?
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Well, it doesn't exactly say "Those who can, do, or else they teach. Those who can't, teach, unless they do. Or they do both. Or they do neither, and they do something other than whatever it is they can't do."
The implication is pretty clear, in other words.
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That straw-on-straw wars are even more futile than the regular kind.
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Oh, sure, if he's stupid enough to take it up. But of course it's just a rhetorical maneuver designed to weaken his position by forcing him to either accept an implication of his lack of virility or to grant my ridiculous premise some legitimacy by engaging with it enough to deny it. In either case, I get to wave by virtual penis around, which helps me make my point.
I've learned how arguments are carried on here, you see.
The point that is being made, let's not forget, is that he's an imbecile for a) confusing, or pretending to confuse an assertion with a "speculation" (classic moron maneuver, similar to saying some stupid idiotic thing you say was "satire") b) missing the point of the studies showing that women don't stay in CS programs because they find their classmates repellent, and also because they find that there's an implicit expectation that students will have done 5-7 years of intense preparation, and also because their repellent classmates adopt a patronizing attitude towards them because they come into the program without having previously written any code c) and, as was pointed out elsewhere, believing that "work" doesn't involve social interaction, and that social interaction is not in fact a critical skill for a programmer
So, given all of that, I can well believe that he's not got his dick wet in a long while or ever. I just don't think he'd get the time of day from any woman I know. That's irrelevant, of course, just a side note. The point is, the guy's about as sharp as a bag of wet mice, and it's fun to make fun of stupid sexist twits. And hitting them where it hurts is even more fun - this guy cringes every time his on-line persona's penile superiority is challenged, because he actually cares! Try it some time, it's great fun...
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