Except those over the hill freaks with their comb overs and sandals with socks. Fortunately their skill sets were rapidly obsolete, so we got rid of them.

On the other hand, my wife (a senior Oracle DBA with close to 20 years of experience) sees it on a regular basis. It's disheartening to hear her talk about it because I realize I'm guilty of many of the same behaviours.

I guess I could try to protect my ego and claim it's not sexism, but that's not who I want to be. I don't want to be the guy denying something I know to be true.

I went into an interview a couple of years ago and realized I was about 20 years older than everybody in the company. I don't have a comb over and I don't wear socks with sandals, but it was pretty obvious I was too old to work there. That's the day I realized my job opportunities are becoming limited. I should have seen it coming.

Hmm, maybe it's possible women don't want to be in tech because of the sexism they face.

"but it was pretty obvious I was too old to work there"

Who said that? Did they say that to you? If they did that was definitely wrong. However it sounds more like you imposed that criteria on yourself, and then attribute the blame to them.

If gender diversity in tech is a good thing, why not age diversity? Sounds like they needed you there.

And no, nobody came out and said I was too old. They just reacted like I used to react when old people told me they understood computers. Pleasant, but patronizing. How could an old guy possibly handle any modern technology when he's got COBOL and FORTRAN on his resume?

Discrimination is rarely blatant. I'd guess that most people are never aware they're doing it. That doesn't mean it's not happening.

Wait what? That right there is blatant age-ism.

You know what helps learn new technology? When it's the same shit we did 15 years ago repackaged. WSDL is coming back around right now, just in JSON or Protobuf form. Don't you think mobile apps that have to sync with the server are a lot like server/client apps from the 90s?

To think that it's hard to pickup a new language just because you are 50 is really missing the forest for the trees of what it means to be a software engineer.

If you're in your fifties it doesn't mean that you are stupid but it does mean that you're going to have to learn a lot of technologies from the recruiting company's stack.

Now if they can find someone that already know's them, their return on investment will be faster and safer.

The older developer will also most likely not program on his free time for family reasons or because he has more interesting hobbies.

Now this is controversial but I still would say that this is career / life choice which means that not having a very sexy resume won't get you everywhere no matter what your experience is.

This of course sounds very "hipsterish" but if you loot at the kinds of companies that are talked about here (start-ups and ex-startups that grew), it does make financial sense.

I'm not a psychologist but I would also wager that age gap is lowering team performance due to a lesser bond / closeness between the members.

Kind of a tangent, but I have a soft spot for that language.

[1] Most recent standards rev was 2008, current draft standard slated for release in 2016.

You can trace the herritage of the code back to the 80's but it has been more or less constantly maintained since then there is a lot of company IP wrapped up in the code. You certainly don't need to know Fortran to use or understand the models (it's wrapped in a 'modernish' C++ GUI) but the engineers working on improvements to the backend definately need to know Fortran.

I suspect there is a lot of reasons for the prevalence of Fortran in Engineering code. Industrial plants tends to operate continously you can't exactly replace all the infrastructure without large downtime. A large part of our plant was built in 1996, so the technology is very much what you'd expect from that era (RS/6000 Unix boxes everywhere in the control system). The Libraies and compilers etc all have to link against that vintage. It's not slated to get upgraded until 2018 and we will probably try to push that as far back as we can. When the upgrade happens I suspect we will be on Wintel (and in another 20 years that will probably be just as outdated).

The other reason for Fortran is that Engineering processes tend to be stable. A chemical reaction does not change so once some code is written and it works very low incentive to replace it. At my plant our models were first written in the 80's (when personal computers began to become ubiquitous) by senior engineers in the company - these were guys who grew up in the 70's and were raised on Fortran. Eventually the code was handed to the junior engineers to maintain. The juniors passed up the ranks to become seniors and when it came time to write the next generation of models "I'll base it on this existing Fortran Model which I know inside out and works really well" became the mantra and so Fortran become self perpetuating and entrenched across the industry. If it had been a decade later would probably have been C

This is so far from the lived reality of women in tech or any of the data on hiring that you should be embarrassed to open your mouth.

On HN most people get that before opining on the merits of functional programming, they should have tried it. Or at the very least spent a fair bit of time reading about what people who have tried it see as the pluses and minuses. But somehow we get to questions of discrimination in tech, an article can't be up for 10 minutes before somebody feels free to opine based on no knowledge whatsoever.

I find it maddening. Partly because so many of these people seem to think it's somebody else's job to argue them into an understanding. (Rather than, say, their responsibility to do a Google search and read for a whole hour.) And partly because it traps these discussions at a level of "let's explain Discrimination 101" over and over and over.

But to answer your direct point: your hypothesis that "people do what they want to do" is obviously worthless when you look at actual data on what people do. Consider this graph, for example:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

By your interpretation, in 1965, women wanted to be lawyers at 1/10th the rate that men did. But 40 years later women suddenly wanted to be lawyers a lot more. Why? Well, who can know what people want? They just want things. Or they don't. But it definitely, positively, absolutely couldn't have anything to do with the millennia of structural oppression of women or the dramatic changes over the last century in the status and legal rights of women. Nope! Not a thing.

It's ridiculous. Which you would know if you had bothered to put forth any effort. Now ask yourself: why didn't you?

A serious question: do you think you will change how people behave by acting in this way?

First, there are informed opinions versus uninformed ones. I am happy to talk with people who have informed opinions even when we disagree.

Next, there are naively uninformed opinions versus lazily or willfully uninformed opinions. For example, suppose somebody says, "Hey, I'm a high school student thinking of going into tech, and don't understand all this recent discussion about diversity. Can somebody help me out?" I am also very happy to talk with that person; there's no shame in being honestly ignorant but eager to learn. (Most of the time I'm even glad to give the lazy or mildly willful people a chance, although my experience suggests it rarely helps, at least right away.)

Beneath that we have willfully uninformed opinions presented in a way that actively harms the discussion. When somebody doesn't know what's going on, doesn't want to, and perhaps doesn't even want people talking about the topic, then yes, I actually don't want them in this discussion right now.

For the record I believe my reply is proportionately angry. It's a serious problem that harms both the field and actual individuals. We have been discussing it for decades. (Note also that quibbling about tone itself has a long history in these discussions: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument )

So, serious answer: Yes I hope that a) I will reduce the frequency with which the last category of opinion is deployed to halt or degrade useful discussion, b) more people will be able to recognize a particular dumb argument as a dumb argument, and c) some of the lazily or willfully ignorant will actually try to understand the context before opining.

Please, do not attempt to answer. I would like you to contemplate this. It's not senseless navel-gazing and is quite significant.

Also, tone matters because we're dealing with real human beings who respond to tone as well as substance. To say "That's a tone argument!" as a form of dismissal is to miss that the whole point is supposed to be persuasion.

I think any opinion is welcome in honest dialog between people who are pursuing sincere understanding and are acting with sufficient empathy toward all participants. I also think that is about 1% of public discussion, and that it takes an immense amount of effort to create the proper preconditions for that.

Outside of that, no, I think there are plenty of opinions that merit social opprobrium for their straightforward expression. And I'd bet you do, too. If you can't name 5 in the next 30 seconds, you aren't trying. Speech has consequences. And I think it has to. [1]

I also think that regardless of opinion, there are ways to engage in dialog that are so harmful that they should be called out. And you think that too, or you wouldn't be giving me your more-in-sorrow, think-about-what-you've-done routine. The only difference is that we have different standards for what merits objection.

I agree that tone matters, which is why I chose the tone I did. If your goal is to personally persuade every sexist goof to come to a considered realization that they have made a deep mistake, then godspeed. (If that is your goal, though then your recent comments history doesn't show you working very hard at that.)

But that's not my goal. My goal is to fix the goddamn problem. It's hurting my field, it's hurting people I know, and it's hurting a lot of people I don't know. I want the ongoing harm to end.

History suggests that a lot of people never get over the idiotic opinions they grew up around. This is true even for very smart people; Planck wrote, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

So consider today's KKK. Do I want everybody to be not racist? Yes. Would I like every member of the KKK to realize that they have been assholes all their lives and start making up for lost time? Sure. If some rando starts talking to me about the inferiority of black people, am I going to patiently talk to him about what the research really shows? Fuck no. I am going to tell him that he's an asshole, and that I don't want to hear his racist bullshit around me. If he ever wonders why, he can hop on Wikipedia and read a little history. He won't, of course, because the problem here isn't primarily his ideas; it's his biases.

[1] See, e.g.: https://www.popehat.com/2013/09/10/speech-and-consequences/

I happen to entertain the fringe belief that call-out culture is unhealthy and serves to further the problems it purports to address. I can see that you do not share this belief.

Good day to you.

Also, your claim that you were being "charitable" is obviously disingenuous. How kind of you, so rich in thought, to donate your pearls of wisdom to the impoverished thinkers with regrettably different politics than yours. I only hope you have more time in the future to condescend to me while ignoring my actual points.

If you were all that serious about addressing the problems that you see "call-out culture" as attempting but failing to solve, I expect you'd be doing something about it besides tsk-tsking and making tone arguments. Otherwise, though, the simple explanation is that this is garden-variety concern trolling on your part. So yes, feel free to good-day yourself right on out of my replies.

Honestly you don't deserve any reply though, after the way you treated OP. It is always the person who makes a claim who has to provide evidence for it - it is NOT the person who disagrees with the claim.

>Partly because so many of these people seem to think it's somebody else's job to argue them into an understanding. (Rather than, say, their responsibility to do a Google search and read for a whole hour.)

That is exactly what the rules for civilized debate proscribe. You have to argue your case, I don't have to.

1)Lawyers were (assumed) to be a safe career in 2005, in a world that did have that many safe jobs left. In 1965 there were a lot of other jobs that seemed safe, but didn't require you to work as hard to obtain them.

2)Lawyers have high earning potential - unlike most other jobs you can get with a college degree today. In 1965, this would have mattered less, because most jobs were relatively high paying (boom time does that).

3)In a world that changes rapidly, lawyering seems relatively safe, again the world changed less rapidly in 1965, with fewer obsolete jobs.

4)A safe, high paying job gives a high prestige. With fewer such types of jobs, more people will want to join those that exists.

So those would explain a higher amount of applicants to law schools, but not necessarily a higher amount of women, right? The thing is that law schools are limited in how many can be accepted and in how many new law schools can be created. You can't learn the law on your own in your bedroom and then get a job as a lawyer.

Is this what happened? Hell I don't know. I do know that it is at least possible it went this way and the explanation is as good as there were a large amount of sexism in law. After all if there were that much sexism in law in 1965, but not in 2005 why would there be so much sexism in computers today?

You miss my point. Suppose I turn up and say, "The Earth is flat!" And maybe I even provide some evidence. Is it your job to argue and argue until I admit you are right? No. You are free to go about your business. If you don't take the time because you think I am a lunatic or a troll, does that prove me right? No. It is my job to know what's going on, not your job to convince me of it.

I make this obvious point only because many people like ManFromUranus seem to believe that anybody who says, "Hey, maybe several thousand years of blatant sexism didn't end on Jan 1" is obligated to argue with them until they are convinced. They aren't.

AFAIK, there's been a fairly dramatic turnaround in some areas of engineering and technology (biotechnology particularly), modest turnaround in others, and substantially less turnaround (even compared to other engineering and technology domains in general) in computing, both hardware and software, domains.

Biotechnology, like medicine, may benefit from the fact that the early preparation overlaps substantially with the early preparation for traditionally female-dominated fields (e.g., nursing) such that early interest isn't socially discouraged even in contexts where gender stereotypes about appropriate careers remain significant social influences.

Your introduction of that graph appears to be an attempt at making an improper inference based on conditional probabilities. You can't just flip-flop between probability of woman, given job, and probability of job, given woman. There's math involved, based on additional data not necessarily obvious from the visualization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_probability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_of_the_inverse

To make an inference about what women want, you have to remove the men from the data. It doesn't matter one little bit what the female numbers are in proportion to the male numbers. And what the female numbers show is that around 1985, women generally stopped wanting to earn CS degrees, preferring medicine, law, or physical sciences. The graph does not say why. It just suggests that women very abruptly reversed the previous trend and started choosing other careers. It also happened before the vast majority of people now working in the field had graduated from elementary school, which suggests that it is an institutional bias, and not a personal one.

It's easy to guess at the reason why, but those guesses would not be supported by anything short of surveying actual women with college educations, asking them "why not computer science?"

My hypothesis is that for those answers that cite the composition of the CS classes and faculty as a contributing factor, it wasn't because they were full of men, but because they were full of nerds. For a variety of reasons revolving around the capricious cruelty of adolescents, females are less likely to be in the nerd social caste, and possibly also strongly conditioned to avoid it.

That social dynamic fuels a lot of nastiness later in life. Sex balance in the workplace may be just another symptom of it.

But really, it's all useless speculation until someone actually goes out and asks some people about their reasons for doing things, in a manner that avoids known biases.

If you're saying what careers people choose is a complex function with many inputs and interactions with the social context, I agree. I am arguing against the view that career mainly driven by a simple, stable, gender-based biological intrinsic, which is the usual thing meant by "women just X", as in "women just can't science" or "women just want want to stay at home with babies".

There's gender imbalances in lots of places now between executives, teachers, prison, the military, some of those are positive places to have a gender balance in.

I've seen lots of discrimination against females in the places I have worked, behind their back for the most part. I have also seen examples of positive discrimination in their favour, but not as much.

Personally, I think it's a manufacturing line of institutions that lead to a hireable tech worker - and if you go back each step along the assembly line, the female involvement is higher percentage wise.

So I think the lower representation is a product of women opting out of maths and science based subjects at an early stage, and later choosing the medical profession over engineering.

It would be interesting to get some statistics over the span of a career, do a higher percentage of women change career away from tech once they start?

To be honest I'm sure I've transgressed a few times myself! Like many things you just have to be vigilant.

I disagree with this assertion that I belong to an oppressive majority, or that the majority is oppressive.

>Sure it's inconvenient, but politeness doesn't cost much effort. Eggshells is a good way of putting it.

Tolerance goes both ways. Why should 100 people modify their behaviour so that 1 person doesn't get offended, when 1 person could modify simply raise their threshold for offence, and save a 100 people a lot of hassle.

>If you or anyone you see steps over the line

There is no way to know what or where the line is. The line is totally subjective and unique to each individual. So it would simply be easier and less risky (remaining employed wise) to avoid interacting with the person than spend the time to learn how to avoid triggering their offence reaction. I guarantee the path of least resistance is the one that will be followed.

The line is subjective I agree. Being polite and courteous rather than unprofessional works best for everyone. It's pretty easy too.

The path of least resistance is being followed and we are all the worse for it.

Also the opinions you are expressing are very much those belonging to a member of the oppressive majority, as far as I am concerned. 100 to 1? Oppressive majority? Fairly cut and dried.

That sure sounds like most nerds I know - we are just so high on the social scale, even pop stars wish they were us.

And let me put it this way: I have no intention of walking on eggshells my entire career, never knowing when I hurt some delicate being. I don't for a second believe women are that delicate (there are far too many women in combat for that to be the case) but if they are as delicate as I read your comment to assume they are then they don't belong in computing - the compiler will not care how much it hurts your feelings.

Oppressive majority: I meant white male, rather than programming nerd.

yep i'm convinced those industry ladies should get thicker skins alright, especially when they are in your industry - they should play by your rules - right?

Why don't women want to be in tech? Full of nerds, full of people they don't really want to be around. Hard work, the pay is getting lower every day, have to compete with low wage offshore workers. There are lots of men with no social skills in tech. Women can probably earn more money outside of tech, and have more networking and social outlets in non-tech jobs.