Yeah I have no instincts in this because my experience has always been so fewer women than men on the engineering team. So this is totally anecdotal. But the few women I’ve worked with have always been in the upper part of the talent scale, while there has been much variance among the men. I.e., I’ve encountered many low talent (and high talent) men but not one low talent woman. Maybe there are enough hurdles for women (even if the only hurdle is that there are so few _other_ women) that you kinda have to be interested & reasonably good at the job to stick around. If this is true the bell curves may be better for women applicants. However amy anecdotal experience could be simply wrong and it somehow is even or worse for women or something other like overlapping curves of different shapes.
From what we understand about the difference in white-collared intelligence in males vs females, there's a higher variance in intelligence among males than in females. So either women really are in general better at coding than men, or the mid-to-low skilled women aren't making it professionally as much as they should, and only the highest-skilled women are being selected. If your anecdote generalizes, that is. (FWIW, that's been my experience as well.)
This logic comes up all the time on HN. I always wonder whether the people repeating it really believe that commercial software development is so intellectually challenging that it is only practiced by people at the very top end of the cognitive spectrum.
No, I was just wondering whether the mean for women is significantly to the right of the mean for men, or whether mid-to-low skilled women aren't being hired for some other reason (hiring bias, self-selection, or whatever). Or maybe my experiences don't generalize, and there actually are a bunch of mid-to-low skilled women whom I've simply never encountered.
My subtext is that commercial software development is so cognitively unremarkable and routinized that you're not going to see any indication of male/female cognitive differences in the demographics of our field.
It's an argument that doesn't play well on message boards, because software developers love to believe that they're part of a cognitive elite "inventing the future" and "eating the world", when in fact really the overwhelming majority of us are performing a bog-standard white collar symbol manipulation job no more challenging than the job done by an accountant or actuary.
Nerds like to pretend that we're all working on the graph isomorphism problem alongside Babai, but really most of our days involve basic wiring of data from one place to another; form fields to database rows to packet fields to page markup. We want to believe we're brain surgeons, but most of the time we're barely even dentists.
I love the deprecation bc I think we sw engineer’s deserve it to a degree.
But I will also say that various software shops I know of large and small are always desperate to find good talent. I’ve hired quite a bit myself and finding capable talent is very difficult. So our work is not as totally deprecatable as you make it out to be.
Believe me, I don't doubt there's a skill to doing this stuff; I've dedicated a big part of my career to finding and assessing that skill. But there's skill and aptitude to all sorts of things, from legal work to baking. We don't often talk about how there are lots of men or women bakers due to the distribution of intelligence.
If there was a difference, are you allowed to note it or will you get fired for it? Programming skill is hard to measure. Chess is an interesting area that is a bit easier to quantify.
