Why do so few women work in Software?

fergalr

ejmaztec wrote: »

................and then there are those who jump on the bandwagon:p

Ah, in fariness, she's a bit of a game design legend, and designing games from 1983/84 to 1998 is hardly the video game industry bandwagon! Can't say I was playing games in 1984 :-)

jill_valentine

I'm studying computer science, with a mind to go into games/ software development in the future. There are about six other girls on my course.

I don't really know why there are so few, but I do think it's a self-perpetuating thing. There aren't many women in the industry, so women are less inclined to go into the industry because it's not a woman's industry, and so on and on...

I also know that at least one of my lecturers is openly insulting to female programmers and singles us out at every given opportunity. Doesn't help.

Abi

jill_valentine wrote: »

I also know that at least one of my lecturers is openly insulting to female programmers and singles us out at every given opportunity. Doesn't help.

I'd bulldoze through any ****er that tried to belittle me in any class. Tell whoever your friend is to speak to a course co-ordinator or someone if he/she doesnt feel comfortable approaching the lecturer they have trouble with . A bad foundation = a bad finish.


I'd hang the fcuker up by their bits and fkin pieces.

fergalr

jill_valentine wrote: »

I'm studying computer science, with a mind to go into games/ software development in the future. There are about six other girls on my course.

I don't really know why there are so few, but I do think it's a self-perpetuating thing. There aren't many women in the industry, so women are less inclined to go into the industry because it's not a woman's industry, and so on and on...

I also know that at least one of my lecturers is openly insulting to female programmers and singles us out at every given opportunity. Doesn't help.

Its one thing if a lecturer doesn't think a particular subset of a class is good, and that subset just happens to be female; its another if the lecturer is expressing a poor view of programmers in your class just on the basis that they happen to be female. Tbh, if it was the latter, and that was me, I'd find it very hard to just let it slide.

Have to say, I'm really surprised to hear about that sort of behaviour in a lecturer, most lecturers are pretty smart, and hopefully wouldn't be stupid enough to think like that. But even if they did, surely they would be concerned about the damage to their career something like that could do, and would keep it to themselves?
EDIT - If, for example, they ran into someone like the previous poster

orourkeda

All the women who are independent
Throw your hands up at me

ElaElaElano

There are no women on the internet.

Creamy Goodness

jill_valentine wrote: »

I also know that at least one of my lecturers is openly insulting to female programmers and singles us out at every given opportunity. Doesn't help.

first or second year programming lecturer?

994

Corkfeen wrote: »

Most irish schools haven't gone further than Word but now they do show how to insert images.

Ha! Most Irish schools haven't even got computers. They'd rather teach us the sort of accountancy that was out of date in Jim Cratchit's day.

veryangryman

jill_valentine wrote: »

I'm studying computer science, with a mind to go into games/ software development in the future. There are about six other girls on my course.

I don't really know why there are so few, but I do think it's a self-perpetuating thing. There aren't many women in the industry, so women are less inclined to go into the industry because it's not a woman's industry, and so on and on...

I also know that at least one of my lecturers is openly insulting to female programmers and singles us out at every given opportunity. Doesn't help.

Got to say that i never seen anything like that for the few chicks in the class in college (and i went to 2) so i think you may have been unlucky there. Lecturers on the whole dont single people out that way.

Dravokivich

CreepingDeath wrote: »

Women competing against women for men don't normally use career/knowledge as the playing field.

boobies...

Kipperhell

[quote=[Deleted User];62609679] I've always been interested in computers since I got an Amstrad when I was 6 and I used to come home from school and work on my websites all night. [/QUOTE]

Websites on an Amstrad?? Was that even possible?

Woman are prevalent in the area of software testing which is a key component of software development. I am surprised that so many people only associate software development with wanting to make computer games. That is like an architect thinking they would only ever design stadiums.

Software development is not a very male environment compared to construction and it is not old boy network stuff either. When I was in college there was 1 year course for woman to get into engineering college courses. They didn't need the same levels on their leaving cert once they completed the course. Grossly unfair and also a failure. More than half the class failed their exams and the remainder didn't really go on to complete any engineering courses. I know of 1 from two classes of 40.

Their are differences in the sexes and equality means respecting that nature.

DisasterIRL

In ITB doing computing and the ratio is 100 to 6 or 7, last year it was 70 to 4

I also do think that it is quite a valid point that computing isn't a subject that you really think of when finishing up your leaving as computers are rarely touched in most secondary schools and thought of as the devil in some.

I also find it ridiculous that some schools get brought to universities such as DCU to do week or two long web design courses, especially since the people that I have seen teach it have been piss pour at it. Like what do you need to write some HTML code?

Bob_Harris

I think the simple answer is that women have less intelligence than men.

stovelid

Bob_Harris wrote: »

I think the simple answer is that women have less intelligence than men.

In fairness, Bob, that's quite a controversial stance to be adopting.

StopNotWorking

I've been repeating my second year of CS and in either of my classes there's been no wimminz, the latest first year class has 6 of them! :eek: Unheard of for me and my friends.

One of my lecturers used to work in intel and so did one of my co workers. One as a software engineer working code and the my coworker has an EE degree and worked on the floor fabbing chips. Aside from them I've seen none, and only my lecturer is still interested in computers.(The only person I know who got the 9 layer OSI model with political+military joke)

mandysmithers

I'm a woman (obvious from my username probably!), and I'm a software engineer. I love it, I love working out logic. Although, I'm totally in the minority where I work.

Kipperhell

Kipperhell wrote: »

Websites on an Amstrad?? Was that even possible?

Of course not! I meant I had the Amstrad in about 1990 and messed around on it and I started doing websites around 1998.

Bill-e

If Woman.Profession = "Programmer" Then
Woman.GoodLooking = False
End If

Only kidding! :rolleyes:

Procasinator

Bill-e wrote: »

If Woman.Profession = "Programmer" Then
Woman.GoodLooking = False
End If

Only kidding! :rolleyes:

Basic... eeeww.

veryangryman

while (stereotypical comments in otherwise productive thread)
{
Sleep
}

StopNotWorking

String burd,massive;

burd=JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Are you a burd?");
massive=JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Are you deadly looking?");

if(burd="yes" && massive="yes")
{//Start of IF
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog("Deadly buzz");
}//End if

else
{//Start ELSE
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(":(");

Bill-e

veryangryman wrote: »

while (stereotypical comments in otherwise productive thread)
{
Sleep
}

Productive? :eek:

Less of that!

Procasinator

StopNotWorking wrote: »

String burd,massive;

burd=JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Are you a burd?");
massive=JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Are you deadly looking?");

if(burd="yes" && massive="yes")
{//Start of IF
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog("Deadly buzz");
}//End if

else
{//Start ELSE
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(":(");

That won't work, you conditions are all wrong. For starters, the compare operator is == not =. Secondly, this will compare the Object reference rather than the actual contents (bad for strings).

Use burd.equals("yes"), or maybe more appropriately equalsIgnoreCase.

And variable naming: massive? As in large?

You would have been better commenting these variables rather than the start/end of the if and else statements - we can figure out how the language works, thanks.

If it wasn't for the content of the program, the quality would suggest that you were a girl. (I joke, I joke) :P

StopNotWorking

Procasinator wrote: »

That won't work, you conditions are all wrong. For starters, the compare operator is == not =. Secondly, this will compare the Object reference rather than the actual contents (bad for strings).

Use burd.equals("yes"), or maybe more appropriately equalsIgnoreCase.

And variable naming: massive? As in large?

You would have been better commenting these variables rather than the start/end of the if and else statements - we can figure out how the language works, thanks.

If it wasn't for the content of the program, the quality would suggest that you were a girl. (I joke, I joke) :P

I'm in work at the moment(not a programmihng job obviously) so I had to rush that :rolleyes:. Massive is disgusting slang for good looking and TUT TUT I didn't end my while loop you someone didn't notice:p... Well two people didn't notice

Procasinator

StopNotWorking wrote: »

I'm in work at the moment(not a programmihng job obviously) so I had to rush that :rolleyes:. Massive is disgusting slang for good looking and TUT TUT I didn't end my while loop you someone didn't notice:p... Well two people didn't notice

Well, you didn't have a while loop. But yes, you didn't close your else.

And don't worry, I'm messing.

StopNotWorking

Procasinator wrote: »

Well, you didn't have a while loop. But yes, you didn't close your else.

And don't worry, I'm messing.

Aaah my heads all over the place!!

ciagr297

first off - only girl on a team of 8 guys working in IT

reasons vary for the lack of females but it depends on what area of sftware dev you are talking about. i know quite a few girls on the QA side of things but very few in the mainframe/coding side

however, all that said i got on a conf call with a bunch of guys a few weeks back and attempted to outline why something won't work and my suggestions for fixing. i got talked over and basically ignored

and believe me, it was not for lack of trying to be heard.

so, as an experiment, i got one of my male colleagues to voice my suggestions and hey presto, they listened

normally i enjoy being right but in this case i would have liked to have been wrong

Procasinator

ciagr297 wrote: »

first off - only girl on a team of 8 guys working in IT

reasons vary for the lack of females but it depends on what area of sftware dev you are talking about. i know quite a few girls on the QA side of things but very few in the mainframe/coding side

however, all that said i got on a conf call with a bunch of guys a few weeks back and attempted to outline why something won't work and my suggestions for fixing. i got talked over and basically ignored

and believe me, it was not for lack of trying to be heard.

so, as an experiment, i got one of my male colleagues to voice my suggestions and hey presto, they listened

normally i enjoy being right but in this case i would have liked to have been wrong

That is anecdotal evidence at best. Correlation != causation.

There is no doubt the attention someone is given is based off a lot of characteristics: the persons experience, how they express themselves, how much previous success they have with the team, how much others like them, how other view them, and of course, gender could play a role (or could taint other people perception of the personal amplitude in other characteristics unfairly).

You assume gender was the most significant out all the other possible reasons. So when you sent a male colleague to voice your suggestions, you deemed his success made your conclusions correct. Hardly rigorous.

Not to say you are wrong (I don't know your team, and it doesn't sound out of the realms of possibility), but it is barely a convincing example.

ciagr297

Procasinator wrote: »

That is anecdotal evidence at best. Correlation != causation.

There is no doubt the attention someone is given is based off a lot of characteristics: the persons experience, how they express themselves, how much previous success they have with the team, how much others like them, how other view them, and of course, gender could play a role (or could taint other people perception of the personal amplitude in other characteristics unfairly).

You assume gender was the most significant out all the other possible reasons. So when you sent a male colleague to voice your suggestions, you deemed his success made your conclusions correct. Hardly rigorous.

all true, its not comprehensive analysis by any means and i fully agree with your points.

i know that in some cases and cultures gender does play more of a role than we'd like to admit.

i think its incorrect to assume that gender does not play a role in the reason for generally few females in IT.
there were very few in my course at college as well

i can say that in the IT environments i've worked it exhibits alot of the sterotypes which i would say are inclined to put some females off IT as a career. on the flip side, i've had a couple of female bosses who were the sterotype for females in IT and got themselves reputations for being difficult to work with.

but for me, i like working in IT cause its logical....simply logical:D

Mark200

Wompa1 wrote: »

I work in Software and there's actually quite a few women where I work...some of the hottest women I've ever seen too!!

And the place doesn't seem to be full of nerds either because the people working there in their early 30's and late 20's got into it because their guidance counsellors pushed it when the IT times were better. Only problem is that I think it brings the standard of technical know how down because it's full of phoneys. My 2 cents!

Where do you work? I want in. I'm in 2nd year in Computer Science. Last year there was 1 girl, this year she's gone and now it's just a class of about 30 - 40 guys... not including 2 girls who take some of our CompSci subjects as part of another subject

Davidius

Hello World!

Procasinator

ciagr297 wrote: »

i can say that in the IT environments i've worked it exhibits alot of the sterotypes which i would say are inclined to put some females off IT as a career.

Is this stereotypes that cause discrimination to girls (like they are not respected), or simply, stereotypes that girls typically don't like (dorky guys with allergies, anti-social behaviour, etc).

ciagr297

Procasinator wrote: »

Is this stereotypes that cause discrimination to girls (like they are not respected), or simply, stereotypes that girls typically don't like (dorky guys with allergies, anti-social behaviour, etc).

imo the first

and tbh, i hope its not the second set of sterotypes.
know it wasn't part of my requirements when i started my course that my future career be filled with only a certain type of individual/personality

one of my main ones was to make some money.....<sigh> not much chance of that though it seems:D

Procasinator

ciagr297 wrote: »

imo the first

and tbh, i hope its not the second set of sterotypes.
know it wasn't part of my requirements when i started my course that my future career be filled with only a certain type of individual/personality

one of my main ones was to make some money.....<sigh> not much chance of that though it seems:D

Seems weird to me. There are plenty of career paths that many would argue women are disadvantaged in, but none so show such a disparity as IT.

And, further to the point, do a lot of people become aware of this discrimination before choosing to enter the industry? Are girls warned "Don't go in IT, you'll be treated second-class"?

Because while the stereotypes might exist once in the industry, I'm surprised knowledge of this is perpetuating out to girls at leaving cert age when they are choosing there 3rd level education or potential jobs to such a large degree.

To me, personally, I feel that the nature of the work coupled with the low presence of female role models in the industry would cause little girls to enter IT. When I say role models, I mean others they know in the industry (such as relations, family friends, etc), not neccessary well-known people (though that helps too).

doc_17

Men are better problem solvers than women. And that I believe leads to men being better at it. Don't mean to be sexist or anything but imo that's the way it is

stovelid

veryangryman wrote: »

what is stopping the girls from giving it a go?

.

Bill-e wrote: »

If Woman.Profession = "Programmer" Then
Woman.GoodLooking = False
End If

Only kidding! :rolleyes:

Procasinator wrote: »

Basic... eeeww.

veryangryman wrote: »

while (stereotypical comments in otherwise productive thread)
{
Sleep
}

StopNotWorking wrote: »

String burd,massive;

burd=JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Are you a burd?");
massive=JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Are you deadly looking?");

if(burd="yes" && massive="yes")
{//Start of IF
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog("Deadly buzz");
}//End if

else
{//Start ELSE
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(":(");

Procasinator wrote: »

That won't work, you conditions are all wrong. For starters, the compare operator is == not =. Secondly, this will compare the Object reference rather than the actual contents (bad for strings).

Use burd.equals("yes"), or maybe more appropriately equalsIgnoreCase.

And variable naming: massive? As in large?

You would have been better commenting these variables rather than the start/end of the if and else statements - we can figure out how the language works, thanks.

If it wasn't for the content of the program, the quality would suggest that you were a girl. (I joke, I joke) :P

Davidius wrote: »

Hello World!

.

fergalr

Procasinator wrote: »

That won't work, you conditions are all wrong. For starters, the compare operator is == not =. Secondly, this will compare the Object reference rather than the actual contents (bad for strings).

String is about the only type of object that an == equality test is good for - just make sure they are interned.

fergalr

doc_17 wrote: »

Men are better problem solvers than women. And that I believe leads to men being better at it. Don't mean to be sexist or anything but imo that's the way it is

I presume you are just trolling.

But in case you are not... there's no evidence or credible suggestion that men are better at software. If you have any, I'd be curious to see it.

All thats being said (ignoring trolls) is that there are more men in software.

I strongly doubt that men are better than women at it, and even if they were a little better or worse, there's no way this explains the disparity.

fergalr

ciagr297 wrote: »

imo the first

and tbh, i hope its not the second set of sterotypes.
know it wasn't part of my requirements when i started my course that my future career be filled with only a certain type of individual/personality

one of my main ones was to make some money.....<sigh> not much chance of that though it seems:D

Its my experience that as industries go, software and IT have a very low amount of unfair discrimination. There's little room for that sort of BS in good software companies; if you are good at your job it tends to be obvious to your co-workers and superiors, and likewise if you are bad.

It's very hard to BS your way through software - as at the end of the day, your code either compiles and does what its supposed to, or it doesn't; and no amount of 'old-boy network' type influence will change that. Its also pretty easy to give someone a technical interview and see whether they know their stuff, or not, and as a result candidates get seperated more on skill than other factors.

So as a result of all that, and the young age and culture of the industry, merit tends to be quite important.
Whether your teammates have to fix the bugs in your code, and do your work for you to hit the deadline, will tend to matter much more to them than whether you are male or female, what country you are from etc.

citizen_p

because most ppl get into moding files and all that by playing games.....and computer games are about 95% male market....

and really smart girls freak me out a bit.... they tend to be smug.....well the 1 i met was.


:Pbo bo bom cccchhhhh

fergalr

Mousey- wrote: »

because most ppl get into moding files and all that by playing games.....

Do most people get into software from 'moding files'? I would agree that PC gaming builds peoples computer skills, but I'm not sure if thats a significant factor in people eventually doing CS.

Mousey- wrote: »

and computer games are about 95% male market....

Demonstrably not true. Game players are around 60/40 male/female, buyers 50/50.

Mousey- wrote: »

and really smart girls freak me out a bit.... they tend to be smug.....well the 1 i met was.
:Pbo bo bom cccchhhhh

El_Dangeroso

Points in medicine are high = dominated by females

Points in computing courses are generally low = dominated by males
:pac:

But seriously, I work in IT and I've only noticed a serious gender-disparity in development. Support etc seems to be quite evenly distributed between M and F, at least in the company I work for. I think most people in the development have a single-mindedness that is uniquely suited to sitting in front of a computer screen for 14hrs a day debugging code. I think this attribute is not totally absent from all women but is definitely more common in men.

jellie

fergalr wrote: »

It's very hard to BS your way through software - as at the end of the day, your code either compiles and does what its supposed to, or it doesn't;

Unfortunately in my experience its not that simple. your code can do what its supposed to do but it doesnt make it good code if it does it in the worlds most roundabout way and is incomprehensible to everyone but you (& possibly even you if you look back at in 2 months time). just because you can code something to do what its supposed to do doesnt make you a good programmer.

thats a whole other (nerdy) thread though. Im female, manage an all male development team. i was a developer first. i dont know if its just my team, but most of the lads have a completely different way of working to me (which is generally chaotic) and while that was fine when i had my own work as part of the team, attempting to manage the chaos is a job and a half. They have a problem with taking orders from me - maybe the just dont like me, maybe its because im female, maybe they resent the fact that they now have to take orders from me. A female did my job before me, and she had the exact same problem with them.

but, i have no other industry experience, and this may be specific to where i work.

Naikon

sar84 wrote: »

Unfortunately in my experience its not that simple. your code can do what its supposed to do but it doesnt make it good code if it does it in the worlds most roundabout way and is incomprehensible to everyone but you (& possibly even you if you look back at in 2 months time). just because you can code something to do what its supposed to do doesnt make you a good programmer.

thats a whole other (nerdy) thread though. Im female, manage an all male development team. i was a developer first. i dont know if its just my team, but most of the lads have a completely different way of working to me (which is generally chaotic) and while that was fine when i had my own work as part of the team, attempting to manage the chaos is a job and a half. They have a problem with taking orders from me - maybe the just dont like me, maybe its because im female, maybe they resent the fact that they now have to take orders from me. A female did my job before me, and she had the exact same problem with them.

but, i have no other industry experience, and this may be specific to where i work.

Managing good programmers can be similar to herding cats:pac:
I am not implying that you are a tyrant, but coders hate micromanagement.

For all my coding projects, well commented code is the best form
of documentation. Flowcharts/UML ect really only apply to large systems.

Perl hacking can be fun, but sometimes it can be hard to read past
code:pac: Oh yeah, a description of Algorithms used is also important.

On a similar note, when I do sysadmin work, Documentation is
really critical. I have learned this the hard way too many times...

IRLConor

This:

fergalr wrote: »

One example of this inertia is that science and maths are not taught equally all schools, and many schools are segregated by sex.

has an awful lot to do with it.

The secondary school I went to was single-sex. Many parents of guys in my school sent their daughters to a particular other single-sex school. The two schools were well funded and had excellent teachers. The pupils tended to do well at Junior and Leaving Cert level. The primary difference was that my school had double the number of honours maths and physics leaving cert places compared to the other school.

I have no idea why this was (do nuns have an agenda to keep women out of the science & technology industries?), but if you can't get a seat in an honours maths class you'll have a lot of the doors closed to you in the software world. It's certainly possible to do well in the software world without a good secondary education in maths & science but it's a hell of a lot harder.

I consider the current balance to be unhealthy for the industry as a whole but unfortunately the only way I can see it being rectified is at a point maybe a full decade before a woman is ready to enter the industry. Unless young girls are given the same educational opportunities as young boys there will always be an imbalance.

fergalr wrote: »

I've worked with enough highly skilled women in software to find that sort of comment, that says the disparity is because they are somehow intrinsically less good at software, is just ridiculous.

I can definitely vouch for this. When I was in college with fergalr, a few of our lecturers were women. When I worked with fergalr after college, our first major client had a woman VP of engineering and a load of women software engineers and QA people. The other companies we worked for also had many women in software development and technical management. The sheer numbers in those companies alone would make the notion of lack of capability very improbable.

radioactiveman

I think some women are less inclined to be interested in programming and logical problem solving. That said I've worked with girls that you would not class as being super nerdy or anything and they were excellent programmers.

On the whole I'd say it could potentially be 50/50 in workplaces if attitudes were different, it's hard to know how much of a role attitudes to women's work/men's work plays in preventing greater participation for women.

Actually I have worked with quite a few girls that were *excellent* at what they did, very quick logically and mathematically. One girl who was senior to me had a degree with a major in maths and it showed.

Machiavellian bitch as well unfortunately. She could program men as well.

Celly Smunt

women high knowledge and low intelligence

they can learn off things much quicker but when it comes to ACTUALLY thinking their brain goes down the ****ter.

fergalr

sar84 wrote: »

Originally Posted by fergalr:
It's very hard to BS your way through software - as at the end of the day, your code either compiles and does what its supposed to, or it doesn't;

Unfortunately in my experience its not that simple. your code can do what its supposed to do but it doesnt make it good code if it does it in the worlds most roundabout way and is incomprehensible to everyone but you (& possibly even you if you look back at in 2 months time). just because you can code something to do what its supposed to do doesnt make you a good programmer.

Yes, of course there's more to being a good developer than an ability to make your code perform the tasks specified. I'm not claiming there isn't.

But what I am trying to say is that the specific, measurable, verifiable aspects of software ability can be a great leveller.


Ultimately, in most software jobs, it becomes pretty apparent from the performance of the developer whether they are any good at their work or not.

It's not as if they are a psychologist interacting one-on-one with their patient; or a HR person, trying to hire the right people; or an economist, making predictions about the economy; or a business person, doing some long term corporate planning; or a secondary school teacher teaching a class of 2nd years.
In all of those examples its hard to put any sort of an objective measurement on the persons performance - there are so many other variables that could affect the outcome of what they do. It can be very hard to assess whether the teacher got good grades because the students were good, or because the teacher was good - it can be very hard to say whether the economist got lucky, or whether the psychologist did a good job behind closed doors.
As such, sometimes merit can get hidden by preconceptions.

Its like the difference between playing Poker and playing Chess. Sure, in a long number of games, the better poker players will end up with more money - but a very bad poker player can beat a very good poker player in any given tournament - whereas a very good chess player will almost always beat a very bad chess player in each game.

I'm saying that software development, specifically coding, is very much more like Chess.

There are certainly soft skills that are important, and harder to test for - but there are also a core set of skills and competencies that are easily examinable and verifiable.

And I do think the ramifications of this have had knock on effects the whole of the software industry. Especially when coupled with the fact that the discipline is young, and the low cost of doing projects in it.

In software, it's much more about what you can do and how good you are, more so than whether you have put in your time, and 'earned your spurs'.

You can't ask a civil engineer out of college to show you a working bridge they've built, or a recently qualified barrister to tell you about cases they've done. But you can ask a software engineer to show you a working piece of software they've wrote.

I think that, partly as a result of these factors, software tends to be much more about what you personally can do than some other fields are.
And I think as a result of that, and of the relativity young and dynamic culture in it, its more focused on merit and individual ability, and less vulnerable to sexism/racism/etc

sar84 wrote: »

thats a whole other (nerdy) thread though. Im female, manage an all male development team. i was a developer first. i dont know if its just my team, but most of the lads have a completely different way of working to me (which is generally chaotic) and while that was fine when i had my own work as part of the team, attempting to manage the chaos is a job and a half. They have a problem with taking orders from me - maybe the just dont like me, maybe its because im female, maybe they resent the fact that they now have to take orders from me. A female did my job before me, and she had the exact same problem with them.

but, i have no other industry experience, and this may be specific to where i work.

Maybe they just have problems 'taking orders' in general. Or maybe it comes across too much as 'taking orders' and not enough as working together to get things done. Or maybe they are a bit sexist. I wouldn't like to extrapolate from your single datapoint to generalisations about how all software devs deal with female bosses. I've had the opportunity to work for great female bosses that were much better than me in the domain in question, and that I'd be only too happy to work for again.
So if it is the case that your team has issues with you because you are a woman, its certainly not universal.

I would say though that from my own experience in software, I would try not to think about managing a software team as about giving orders and orders having to be followed. Its sort of the other side to the coin of it being based on merit - people don't necessarily respect managers just because they are managers - its like the pointy haired boss character in the dlibert cartoons ! I'm sure your not the PHB or anything - I'm not speaking personally about you - but just that as its a high skilled job, its more about working together to get stuff done, and as manager, facilitating an environment where everyone can work together, with minimal distraction and maximum efficiency, than an old-school style organisation where orders are pushed from the top down.

I'd hate to attempt to try to give management advice, with no real understanding of the situation, and on After Hours no less; but I would say that if your underlings don't respect you and won't work for you, you definitely need to do something about it - if you've no formal training in management (and often developers don't when they are promoted!) I'd suggest picking up a copy of Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister, and maybe reading some of the stuff Joel Spolsky has to say about managing developers. Rapid Development by McConnell is work a look too. And don't shoot me if you know way more about this stuff than I do - only trying to help :P

thebman

Mousey- wrote: »

because most ppl get into moding files and all that by playing games.....and computer games are about 95% male market....

and really smart girls freak me out a bit.... they tend to be smug.....well the 1 i met was.


:Pbo bo bom cccchhhhh

In fairness you can avoid that in games and many guys do especially now with consoles.

I didn't, I don't know why. I guess I really wanted to play Sega Rally and our computer didn't meet the minimum requirements so I had to find a way to get that framerate stable

There were probably 6/7 girls in our class in college and TBH any of the ones that lasted exhibited a certain personality trait that would have been in common with the guys that did extremely well in the course.

Really difficult to say what that is in text or even words and its late.

Procasinator

fergalr wrote: »

String is about the only type of object that an == equality test is good for - just make sure they are interned.

Of course, but in this case, they won't be interned.

Even if they are, I still prefer to use equals, because:

• If strings are not interned, I still get a proper equality test and
• If they are interned, equals itself first does the == check meaning the performance penalty from using equals is negligible (that of a stack for calling the method, etc)

Of course, if strings are not equal and all strings are interned, you do get a bit of a performance whack (because it will do the further checks). intern itself has a performance overhead too, however.

So, I would personally recommend the equals method: you still get most of the performance benefits AND have the reliability if strings are not interned.