What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?

NY Times ^ | November 16, 2008 | RANDALL STROSS

[Starwolf]

As a fellow Comp Sci prof (occasional adjunct, I can not afford the paycut to teach full time) and the father of a recent Magna Comp Sci graduate daughter, I see much of what you do. 100% placement, especially of US citizens, some even get hiring bonuses.

My daughter had already decided that she wanted to work in testing vice development and is currently pursuing a MS in Systems Engineering (at employer cost). She is making a scary amount of money, owns her own home and car, and has no education debt. She is not unusual among her peers.

[Starwolf]

Computer science changes drastically every few years . For women who plan to eventually marry and raise children it’s not really practical to study this because once you step out of the field to raise your children everything you learned no longer applies .

Patently false. Comp Sci actually is not evovling at any where near that rate. Languages and programming tools are. Major difference. If a programmer leaves the industry and does not stay current, they will be obsolete by and large. However, keeping up is not all that hard. For example, the migration to .NET was a change in tools that was fairly painful to lean for many. Knuth Volume 3 is yet to substantively revised and had broken more mid level CS students that any other text out there.

[Starwolf]

My daughter wanted to go into computer programming. She got her bachelor’s degree 5 years ago. After 2 years working in the field, she decided that she hated it. She was also disappointed at the low pay for someone with a 4 year degree. The field is saturated in the States and most of the work is contracted out to India. She’s got 13 months left now until she gets her nursing degree. With any luck she’ll be happy as an RN.

I have a daughter in each field. The younger one is about to receive her BSN and is applying for MSN programs. One of her current pet peeves with nursing is the heavy infiltration of unions. She hates them with a passion and is going directly to the MSN program so she can easily get to the supervisor ranks sooner and get away from having to be a union member. CNA and SEIU have already been visiting her campus. The other daughter is a Comp Sci grad and is secure from the lethal disease of forced unions.

[Starwolf]

There are always exceptions, and if you don't know who this woman is, you shouldn't be in computer science.

I still have my nanosecond she gave me a long long time ago

[Starwolf]

The "dot com" bubble was a time when any asshat who could write HTML for a website was getting paid astronomical rates. When that demand died, there was plenty of work for real computer science types. The barely skilled HTML hackers were no longer in demand. That grunt work was easily outsourced to India.

add marginal Visual Basic programmers to your list. Scary lot them. Think they actually unstand concepts and such. I spend more time teaching them *real* programming and the concepts behind it that they are almost negative added value to many projects.

[Starwolf]

It is obvious that YOU are not in the field. Ten years ago, there were 5,000 jobs advertised in Atlanta alone for "hard core" software. (Not web related.) Today there are precisely four advertised. Book stores used to have large sections brimming with CS books, now there are only a couple of shelves with "ho hum" computer books. (No demand.) Ten years ago the software trade journals were plentiful and very thick. Now most of them don't exist and the surviving rags are but a few pages and mostly content-less.

I entered this career in 1972, graduating with top honors. It was easy to find a job. Now, it is nearly impossible.

I am in the field and we are always looking for talent. One of our main requirements that the people we hire are adults, not primadonnas, divas, or other anti social personality. Introverts are fine as long as they can play well with others. Teamwork is the prime determinant of success.

[Starwolf]

I've been in software development for more than 35 years, and I am good at mathematics. But it is my experience that very few programming professionals have an eighth grade math capability. Unless you are programming for an engineering firm, 5th grade arithmetic suffices.

That depends heavily on what kind of programming you are doing. We do things that fly, go bang, or both. Math really matters to us.

[murphE]

Maybe because women can get dates.

I think you are right. I think woman are naturally more social than men are and they would tend not to choose a field that is socially isolating.

[ClayinVA]

Trust me I know the difference, I am just talking about the support side of the house ie Information Systems. The same things apply, just look at a picture of any co-ed school’s graduating CS degree. Very defined mix of Asian and White males with maybe 1 or 2 females at most.

[hedgetrimmer]

India and China.

[Myrddin]

I noticed one of our UNIX systems was beating the hell out of the root drive everyday around 1 PM. Upon investigation, I discovered one of the newly assigned admins had a script running out of "cron" at 1 PM. It was a Korn shell that executed "awk" in a loop. Ouch. Twenty minutes of painful banging on the root disk every day. The system performance was in the toilet. After a quick analysis, I determined the job could be done with a 30 line C program. Total execution time of 150 mS. Another performance problem solved.

[r9etb]

Now my question is this: It seems to me that the majority of women in the computer field specialize in database. I have no idea why.

Overall, I'd suggest that "database" stuff is closer to the way women naturally think. I have a couple of theories on this. One is, it's an "organization of data" thing. Of the folks I know, women are far, far more likely to make lists than men are. Second, there's a more "relational" aspect to databases, both in terms of relations between data, and relations between people and their data.

[SunkenCiv]

No action.

[dan1123]

In Silicon Valley, my husband can’t find enough engineers to hire. He said the salaries the engineers are asking are outrageous, even kids straight out of college.

I'm curious what is considered "outrageous" in Silicon Valley especially considering the high cost of living.

[dan1123]

After a quick analysis, I determined the job could be done with a 30 line C program. Total execution time of 150 mS. Another performance problem solved.

Funny, because awk runs circles around perl for similar tasks. I think something seriously needs to change with the focus on scripting. Either we push people back to C, or we need to vastly improve interpreter efficiency.

[Myrddin]

The defect in the design was to call "awk" in a Korn shell loop. awk has looping capability. A single call to "awk" sith the right algorithm could have solved the problem with little observable overhead. PERL would have been a better choice, but it was still in its infancy. I was using Larry Wall's PERL source code to break C compilers running on a 20 MHz 386 Compaq + Xenix at the time. This incident occurred in 1986.

I fixed another piece of code running something known as "RC" aka "Rogan's Compiler" to manipulate the COSMOS database. There was nothing wrong with the tool, but the beginning programmer didn't understand how to design an efficient algorithm. A few small tweaks increased the throughput by 10 times. I used the opportunity as a "teaching moment". The gal who wrote the code was a subject matter expert on the database and transactions. Writing code was a new experience for her.

[wardaddy]

they were never really in it

it’s not where most women’s heads are

mine either

[jamaksin]

My exposure was at SAC long before that, but as we know "legacy code" persists.

As an FYI, January 1961 issue of CACM has Jean Sammet's "Tower of Babel" of programming languages. Jean was also very active in the ACM's SIGPLAN activities.

Languages such as BLISS, L6, SNOBOL, GOTRAN, ..., etc. are all just memories now.

My favorite - SOAP - used on the IBM 650, which Knuth dedicated his first volume to; the world's only bi-quinary electronic computer. Of, course, MIX cannot be forgotten.

[GingisK]

He said the salaries the engineers are asking are outrageous, even kids straight out of college.

I've seen that to be the case as well. I live in Atlanta. I have a 2,700 sq ft home that cost $147,000. That would cost a small fortune in California, wouldn't it?

If I weren't opposed to living on the "left coast", I'd ask what jobs your husband has open.

[GingisK]

Introverts are fine as long as they can play well with others. Teamwork is the prime determinant of success.

I work well in a team, leading a team, or completely solo. I'm also 59 years old. That is a giant killer.

I currently work solo designing loggers, laboratory instrumentation, and machine controls. I write the specs, design the system, draw schematics for the electronics, lay out the PC boards, purchase the components, assemble and test the boards, write the software that runs the instrument, write the companion software for data upload on Windows, build the prototype cases, take the photographs and make the drawings for the user's manual, and then write the user's manual.

My resume starts with Skylab, and contains nothing but hard core developments. Yet, at 59 I never even get a reply.