"Men have different distribution of extremes, more dumbasses but also more brilliance, eg. autistic savants, which explains more CEOs and Nobel Prize winners, and therefore systemic sexism is a myth to deny biologically determined outcomes."
it's a very important shibboleth for modern sexists
Why would it be important to a sexist? There's nothing about the hypothesis that lends itself to predicting the performance of any individual on the basis of sex. Indeed, it explicitly predicts equality on average. It only threatens the sexist position and supports the egalitarian position (it seems likely that people who are threatened by this hypothesis are actually sexists masquerading as egalitarians).
It's funny how you guys take some kind of pride in maneuvering what to an outsider obviously sounds like a dystopian-style bureaucratic nightmare of unevenly applied laws and insider-connections.
Rather than fight to change or improve this system, you gloat about knowing how to survive in it. So strange.
This is how you fight to change systems when you're ultimately powerless to do so directly, by subverting the system. The only real power we have is to collectively agree to make the data/system useless.
I interned for SNC Lavalin Construction in my undergraduate, and a finance guy gave a presentation where he literally laughed out loud in this evil way about how much money SNC was going to make out of it and what a stupid deal it was for the public.
Literal quote: "They think they're getting a Cadillac, but they're getting a Toyota." Now the CEO-at-the-time has been charged with corruption and the Prime Minister is involved.
As a newcomer to the field, parent post is far more welcoming than the bevy of trash Ninja flavor-of-the-week bullshit that makes it seem impossible to catch up.
I only actually got my bearings and self-confidence as a programmer when I realized that most of the people pushing blogs with subscriptions about "cutting-edge" tech were literally snake-oil salesmen and shovel merchants.
That coding wasn't actually different from anything else I had learned in my life, and that there were some fundamentals I could latch onto, and grow from there upwards. All this nonsense about the field experiencing a revolution that upends all existing knowledge year-after-year is far more mentally taxing.
This is really why we need to form a professional association of some sort - it'll allow for some level of responsibility in what developers produce, as well as help guarantee a certain standard of product.
It will also ensure that the we don't have to worry about the market being flooded with cheap labour that every big business and government entity seems interested in creating.
I understand that doesn't sound great right now given that software development is a comparative goldmine to a lot of other jobs, but compared to other professions we could stand to become more formalized.
That can't happen because there's no formal qualifications to calling yourself a software engineer. I've worked with people hired as software engineers who just took an X week online course, and it shows.
Now, if you're talking about solving the above first, I'm enthusiastically all ears..
In Canada most software devs don't call ourselves engineers - we legally can't - engineer is a protected title.
And yes, that's what I'm suggesting - there needs to be a formalization of terms for software. I'm not saying exclude the X week course individuals, but in Accounting there are "tiers" of accountant, based upon education, focus, and experience, and that may need to be instituted, allowing people to see at a glance what designation you've achieved, even if that means the bootcamp grad has to write a 50 question test at the end of their X weeks.
Though from what I understand they frown on it because they want complete ownership of the term (but their critique really has no teeth unless you make like you are indeed licensed by a central regulatory body such as PEO):
edit: Just some further information on the subject in Canada—Software Engineer (among others) is a nationally recognized and distinct title (can overlap, but doesn't necessitate a P.Eng certification):
It looks like if you want to call yourself an engineer nationally you need to be a P.Eng, and it's up to the provincial bodies to regulate the usage in each province.
> Experience as a computer programmer is usually required.
That's amazing, you need to be an engineer, but don't need to know how to program to be a Software Engineer.
I took a different interpretation than your first conclusion there.
It sounds like you can call yourself an engineer all you like—particularly with relation to software. There appear to be no hard requirements.
However if you want to bill yourself as a Software Engineer and work as a Professional Engineer (the protected title in Canada) then you must have your P.Eng.
Similarly: A Software or IT Architect isn't required to be certified by the CACB. Nor does a Web Designer need to be a member of the GDC.
So— all Professional Engineers could bill themselves as Software Engineers (situation providing), but not all Software Engineers can work as Professional Engineers.
Ah, ok. Good point. It's really down again to the provincial regulatory bodies to decide how uppity they want to be, but in Canada Federally there's no restriction unless you're trying to act as a Professional Engineer.
> That's amazing, you need to be an engineer, but don't need to know how to program to be a Software Engineer
This isn't actually that non-sensical when you consider how being a PE works in other disciplines. You're legally responsible for reviewing and approving design documents, but you won't be doing all the work by yourself. You'll have a team reporting to you, and you sign off on their work. In the case of software, you don't necessarily need to be a programmer to review the design and high-level aspects of a program.
The first step to getting a protected title is forming a trade association. You can't call yourself a lawyer without approval of the Bar Association. You can't call yourself a doctor without approval from the Medical Board. The first step to getting "engineer" as a protected title is forming a society of engineers who can petition the government to legally protect the title.
Well, there's a difference between "doctor" and putting "MD" after your name just like there's a different between "engineer" and a "PE".
I'd question if anybody really gives a damn if a software developer is certified with some feel-good namesake. Most software just isn't as serious as needing legal counsel or medical expertise.
Also, many of the roads I can think of where we do arrive at a place where people care about some certification are pretty terrifying. Like needing years of schooling before you can legally make a Twitter app for somebody, or needing re-certification to make tiny lateral moves like you need in the medical industry.
>Most software just isn't as serious as needing legal counsel or medical expertise.
Most legal counsel and medical expertise isn't that serious either. Ask your family doctor how many patients they have every day who come in only to be diagnosed with the common cold, something anyone's grandma could diagnose over the phone and treat with a microwaved can of soup. But when it is serious, you don't want grandma doing your appendix surgery. You want a licensed and trained doctor.
For every one slippery slope argument, there's five "it's not that slippery" counter arguments. You don't need a medical license to buy over-the-counter painkillers, so why would you need a software license to build your own software? You don't need to be a bar-certified lawyer to write your own contracts, so why would you need to be a certified software developer to make a website?
Heck, take plumbers for an example: there are certified, bonded, and insured plumbers. There are plumbers who are not. You can choose a non-certified plumber, but most people would choose the certified plumber instead. If you don't need a certified software engineer, you're not going to pay the premium they would charge with no guarantee of quality. In this world, networking is king and if you don't know someone, you're screwed. If you need certified software, you'd hire certified software engineers and pay the premium and know you at least got someone who has passed their certifications and if they do poor quality work can have their certification revoked.
Considering poorly built software can bankrupt someone, publicly embarrass someone, and can even kill someone, the fact that anyone willing to lie on their resume can build it is scary. You can be reasonably assured that the surgeon operating on you is quality and there are ramifications if they are not. Are you sure that the person who wrote the code for your car's anti-lock brakes or airbags are held to similar standards?
This is part of what a legally protected engineering title does. When you stamp something as a professional engineer, you are saying that it meets all applicable codes. That is a legal statement, and to do otherwise would be fraudulent. If you have a professional association that dictates this and has restraint of trade in place so only a member of the professional association can do it, then it's not even pushing back. It's a flat statement: "You have to do it this way or you can't have it stamped."
Have you had luck in this endeavour? As it stands most software devs aren't actually engineers and as such are held to no ethical standard, nor have the (professionally certified) credibility behind their words to demand specific design standards.
Software engineers, unless they literally went through a b. eng., are not engineers, despite calling themselves that. Most software/web developers are just wage workers.
"You make them pay", you being who exactly? The employee that gets a list of requirements and a deadline? These places are filled with juniors with relatively low experience. If their bosses tell them to do something, they'll do that thing, and don't have much leverage to argue.
In fact, the thread on Twitter itself is even easier to read than this ThreaderApp link that some people demand.
The incessant bloviating from people who refuse to learn how to use Twitter is far more annoying tbh, it's starting to sound like old people complaining about the music being too loud, and it always derails discussion.
I know how to read Twitter and yeah, this one is really hard to read. It's got all these numbers with slashes behind them scattered throughout. It's got a list of numbers with slashes in the middle. It's got random links. It's got the occasional sentence without punctuation
It's just kind of a mess.
I was a heavy user of Twitter for multiple years. I've pulled back on it lately and it's really amazing how much I don't miss the weird, telegraphic kind of writing it tends to encourage. It really bugs me that one of our major means of communication forces you to filter everything through tiny text boxes that only recently became big enough for a whole sentence, and strongly discourages taking time to actually consider the flow of an idea through multiple paragraphs.
haha, I looked at twitter for 5 min after it launched, I laughed really hard and closed the page. The thought process was something like "Oh, they've maximized unusability! I should now go and learn how to have a normal conversation.... I think not"
Then my life flashed in front of my eyes (by lack of better words) and I recalled a million lengthy conversations that pretty much made me who I am.
There was a funny video with a professor and a twitter "expert" where the professor argued it bad. The twitter fanboy kept interrupting him half way his first sentence until he got angry and asked if he could say something now. The twitter guy then said: But I already know what you were going to say. I laughed so hard. The conditioning clipped up his mind into 10 sec attention bursts then he had to talk to himself out loud again. Nothing of interest was said in the interview. The twitter guy thanked him and said it was a wonderful conversation. The professor frowned silently and looked at him from the corner of his eye. It was the best "what a fucking moron" face I have ever seen.
They need to make the audio available to the user. Their text to speech engine never maages to get a decent transcript figured out. That or people are just yelling gibberish into the phone when I screen them. Until I can review the call audio I'll never know.
It's all about how in Japan there's this tradition of gifting (and never purchasing for oneself) matsutake, as a way of showing appreciation. However, this tradition grew alongside deforestation.
Japan has done a pretty good job conserving forests, but this strange mushroom they like so much only grows in deforested forests out of skinny pines, so now it has to be imported from Oregon, Finland, and China.
The author embeds herself a bit with Laotian refugees that do mushroom hunting in Oregon, and describes the various interesting ways these communities operate. Auctions, forest hunting, how kids get started, etc.
And then she explains how these two intensely social and human concepts (the gift giving and the harvesting) are connected via an impersonal cynical international supply chain that commodifies everything.
I mean, the two scenarios are completely different. Yes, they both suck, but it's almost impossible to compare stealing physical property one owns and "stealing" the potential difference in wage between two individuals.
I can see how you’re jumping to conclusions but I’m sure the original comment is a reference the widely acknowledged fact that women are more inclined to be interested in people rather than things.
it's a very important shibboleth for modern sexists