Commenter “Thos” posted a link to a recent Huffington Post essay about sexist pronoun abuse in the tech industry. Not sure what the stock photo of male models had to do with the essay, but one expects this from femsites. Frankly, I can no longer endure ladie’s web sites. Trying to wade through too
many popups (yeah, I know you can turn off “popups”), flashing animations, come-ons for other items of interest, links From Around the Web, and links You Might Also Like just to get to the comment box and excrete some devastating wit only to have it lost into the abyss of the internet is really a complete waste of time. They are a gold mine of feminist parody though.
Anyway, I had just gotten back from the dentist where I endured the ubiquitous Chorus of Screaming Black Chicks while he drilled me, and still drooling on myself, scanned the commentary.
Some lady named “Women 2.0″ shilled her software training institute for girls :
Hackbright Academy is churning out women software engineers, the next class graduates May 7, 2013. Recruit from Hackbright!
So I checked out their website, which offers a 10-week intensive programming course for women only, with tantalizing promises of employment possibilities through their extensive “high-tech” business network. (The “Learn More” button didn’t work though, but maybe it’s just me)
Their business model appears to be : churn out women “software engineers”, and rely on federal and corporate mandates for female technocrat quotas to provide the graduate employment pipeline. Otherwise, why “for women only”? They have an answer :
Why Women Only?
In short, we hate the Dave-to-Girl Ratio in software development. We want to do our part to equalize this imbalance, and we felt that a program exclusively for women was a good place to start.
All right, that pisses me off. Apparently there is an HR metric called the “Dave Ratio” that is applied to prospective applicants. I am going to “out” myself here as I can no longer remain silent. My first name is “Dave”. Elmer is my middle name, having been named after my real “Uncle Elmer”. I was nonplussed as a kid to have “Elmer” as my middle name, but in adulthood think it’s awesome, like “Angus” or “Vern”, and other masculine given-names. But now in addition to being a middle-aged white man, apparently I can add “Dave” as a reason not to get hired. Yes there were five Davids in my kindergarten class but that does not confer upon us any special advantages that should now be redressed through discriminatory labor practices.
But seriously, their graduates are not engineers. Attaining the title engineer involves more than a 10-week programming boot camp. In some places (Texas for example), you cannot be called an engineer unless you have a 4-year degree and pass some certification. There’s a good reason for this : public safety. The design, testing, and implementation of embedded and real-time systems require a detailed understanding of electrical or mechanical components and their behavior. These systems often appear in transportation, power generation, and medical devices to name a few applications. To truly understand these domains requires years of study in mathematics, physics, electrical, and mechanical engineering, and in tough competition with other well-prepared students. Now I realize there are a lot of guys out there with solid programming skills and no university background who could make a decent living in the consulting market, but they can’t legally call themselves engineers.
No matter though, Silicon Valley is apparently eager to correct the scandalous gender imbalance in the high-tech industries, and ready to put these newly-minted engineer gals to work alongside of the usual riff-raff of males who didn’t earn their White Privilege.
The curriculum description reads :
Here is what you will learn. Some words you may not understand when you start, but will when you finish:
Python and its associated web frameworks
Pair programming
Git and source control
Interview skills
SQL and ORMs, and NoSQL
HTML, CSS, JS, Ajax, and WebSockets
Deploying into EC2 and GAE
Terminal shells, grep, netcat, and other *nix command-line fu
Message queues, batch processing, distributed processing
Why some nerds really love lisp, vim, and emacs
Well, one can learn about these topics in 10 weeks, perhaps enough to continue developing one’s interests and maybe just enough to get an entry level job if you carried some enthusiasm with it. But programming skill takes years to acquire, just like anything else that’s worth decent compensation in the labor market.
The real challenge these females will encounter after settling in at their new Encorpera cubicles will come from other women, specifically the ones who clawed their way through an engineering program and will chafe at the idea of strip-mall finishing-school alumni competing against their own career aspirations. For the biggest threat to women who actually work in tech are the Womyn Who Work in Tech.
As for you guys, if you have an interest in tech work and the full-blown engineering degree is not a realistic option right now, you can take advantage of your local community college for training in software development as well as many other trades. Continued education and certification can be attained once you get a toehold in the technical employment market through employer-sponsored educational benefits. Online options from many schools can provide “glue” to put together an accredited degree or get a Masters.
There are a couple of finer points for understanding how to succeed in tech. You have to develop a “domain skill” such as aviation, accounting, or biomedics in addition to computer skills. Straight-up programming skills are great but you need to stand out by having a strong theme in your work. Lastly, develop salesmanship skills, because you are going to need them to compete against the hordes of career women who will be increasingly taking up space and consuming resources in the once pellucid technical eco-system.
