This point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.
The largest enabling step for me was when I got my own laptop which I was free to break (software-wise) and free to take into my room so I could focus away from the distracting noises of the kitchen/living room.
Much of even the HN community would consider this irresponsible parenting. Probably even my parents wouldn't have let a daughter talk to strangers on IRC about something they don't understand. But how else is someone with nontechnical parents supposed to get started?
It's sooo much different when it's something you choose to do with your free time, rather than something half-assedly forced on you by parents or school curriculum. Especially to a kid.
One summer in my childhood, my parents decided to severely restrict my siblings and I's access to the internet for unspecified reasons. We were each allowed 30 minutes use of the family computer and its Internet connection, which was "locked down" by passwords on the BIOS and Windows 98 screensaver. The laptop I shared with my brother and sister was still connected to our home LAN (through one of those crazy Intel AnyPoint phoneline network adapters) so we could print out summer schoolwork and such at our leisure, but Internet access was completely firewalled off.
The collaboration between my brother and I to get around these restrictions is one of the earliest memories I have of fruitful "hacking." At the time we both played (and I was obsessed with) a particular MUD, and a half hour per day was not enough playing time, so we wrote a very crude proxy server in VB6 over a week (7 hours between us) that hid in the system tray with a very "system" sounding process name and icon. That way we could connect to the MUD in secret from the laptop, hidden away in our bedroom. I think we later wrote a terrible, barely functional HTTP proxy too. We pulled a few more tricks like reverse engineering the screensaver password (it was stored as a hex string in the registry or something), which turned out to be the same as the BIOS password, before my parents caught onto what we were doing and kind of gave up (maybe they even saw it as a positive learning experience, who knows).
That summer introduced me to the idea that a computer is totally malleable in the hands of a determined and motivated person equipped with the right tools. I haven't looked back since.
I'm a female developer w/ a EE degree, but mostly self-taught wrt coding.
My parents were nontechnical, but I was lucky enough to have my own computer and a good internet connection starting around 4th grade (8-9 yrs old). Feeling comfortable "breaking" my computer was another thing. I was deathly afraid of breaking things as a kid (unlike my younger brother), and I think it prevented me from coding and exploring things even earlier. I think becoming a great {coder, thinker, leader, etc.} requires internalizing that at some level, it's okay to break the rules.
I eventually found my way onto IRC around age 12, where everyone posed as a 17-yr-old female from LA. I was thankfully super paranoid and fended off child molesters by pretending I was a 56-yr-old man from Texas. ;)
I don't agree. Having unlimited access to technological resources is great, I don't think anybody is denying that.
But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc...
I really don't think it's responsible to let a 9-12 yo alone on the net in their room. Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do, giving them advice on how to use the web, find what they want etc... That sounds reasonable to me.
I may be a bit bias because while I consider myself a hacker I didn't have the net before I was 18 at home. My parents didn't care for it, only when I moved to my own studio did I get an internet subscription.
Before that I would use floppies (and later USB sticks) to download stuff from the high school library's computers and buying programming books. Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.
Maybe I'm just a bit paranoid, but on the web you're always one click away from a video of someone being burned alive or decapitated with a chainsaw.
>I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.
While starting early is obviously a tremendous advantage, it's a shame that it's often discussed in such an exclusive way.
For reference, I am a female programmer who got a /relatively/ late start. I took my first cs class because I was embarrassed that I used my computer like an Internet Explorer box. Barely three years later, here I am knee-deep in code with a job offer from Google. Am I an exceptional hacker? No. Can I hold my own with the 'started-at-12' crowd? Pretty much.
It saddens me that more people don't feel empowered to dive into a new field. Many people, especially high-achieving students, suffer from the misconception that to succeed in various technical fields, you must specialize early. Whenever an outsider expresses any interest in programming or math, I encourage them to try it. "It's too late for me," and "I'm just not an X person," are common responses. These attitudes are caused in part by the way we STEM folks don't bother as much with non-children. You might tell a little kid about how cool programming is, but do you even attempt a real explanation of your work with a young adult? Your uncle? If so, gold star. If not, you are only contributing to the wall between the tech-savvy and general populace. It's never too late for someone to learn.
Too much stress on the early start just adds another barrier to entry for people like myself who lacked either the exposure or awareness to get started sooner.
If our goal is to make the tech universe more accessible, we shouldn't be perpetuating the idea that you need a certain background to participate or excel.
> Young women don't magically become technologists at 22.
It depends. There is no strict requirement onto starting at the early age. Yes, there is a correlation, but no strict requirement.
I knew someone, who had really started coding only at around 22, after she had finished a computer science / engineering degree. She was not a tinkerer/nerd, just a regular bright girl, her dad was not an engineer [was an architect]. Only she was really really bright, and she really put in some effort, and just in a few years she became really really good. I've since met many good hackers [having started at 4 and now some 30 years down the line :-/], and I still consider her to be one of the best overall, starting from the love to build things, to clean code and clear thinking, to teamwork...
Yes! Had it not been for the incredible amount of time I spent unsupervised on the Internet, I wouldn't be as good a programmer as I am today.
Did I watch porn before I was of legal age? Yep, and I'm in a happy relationship with no sex problems. Break my computer often? Yep, I'd repair it every few days. I was also exposed to a variety of cultures, read about every operating system on Earth (toyed with emulated PDP-11s and VAXen and C64s for days and days) and wrote in every obscure language there is just because I was a kid and had enough time not to worry about whether spending a week to learn Forth was worth the hours I was putting into it.
I got my first unsupervised access to my grandparents' computer at age 7, but with no Internet. Then at age 10-11 some foundation for underprivileged kids gifted me my own computer with free unlimited dialup and a separate phone line. This was definitely a turning point in my life.
The fact that my single mother parent trusted me with my independence was a huge amplifier, too.
> I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.
Agreed! Those were about the ages I was when I learned to program and fell in love with computers. I became too sensitive to social pressures after that. (One memory I have is of being 13 and intentionally typing slowly in a class so that people wouldn't know that I was a fast typer, and therefore a computer nerd. The horror!) But that age was key to forming my passion for programming. Did I stumble upon "age-inappropriate" material? Of course, but so does any kid that rides a school bus.
My parents limited my video game time, but I managed to convince them that using my game creator software or editing starcraft macros counted as a different category. "Haha, I can build games and play them under the guise of 'testing', I showed them!"
Now programming is my job and my hobby. Turns out my parents are smarter then I gave em credit for at the time.
>>Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer
>This point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.
Sure. What about ages 3 to 7? I had access to a computer for those years, but no bbs or internet access (partly it hardly existed, partly we didn't have a modem). You definetively need to parent (all) media access these days - but I generally think if you can't trust your 10 year old to mostly do the right thing you already have a problem... Then again I also think that if you aren't involved with what your (young-ish) children are doing -you're not being a very good parent..
[edit: my point is that today this is a decision that needs to be made up there with bed times, comming in at night/evening times, watchingb(which) movies.. and for non-technical parents that's a decision they'll need help makimg]
Yep. I wouldn't be much of a technologist if not for computer games (to get me onto the computer), and vast quantities of unsupervised and unfiltered internet at a formative age.
I think just like with condoms vs. abstinence, the big issue is lazy parenting. Teach them about viruses, about people lying, about phishing etc. , THEN leave them to their own devices. Don't just shut it off because you cant be bothered.
I'm curious, were you on a linux os? Did you break your software often?
It seems to me people who get on linux early might have an easier time, because they can so easily break their system and rebuild it. It seems like a kid who breaks a windows/ mac os might need to go to their parents to deal with license keys, which might cause the parents to say "no more hacking".
You had unsupervised, unfiltered internet access when you were 9-12, yet did not hack into banks, steal credit card information, and other crimes? But you are a hacker!
Kids do not need to be warned to stay off the computer. They need to be taught right from wrong, to do the right thing, and to respect others.
I think that even with parents doing their best to keep kids off computers, kids will find a way to stay on computers if it is their passion.
Probably about half the time as a 10-16 year old (after 16, my parents stopped caring about what I did or where I went at all) I was banned from computer use for various reasons. That didn't stop me though, I'd go to bed at 10pm, wake up at 2am, then use it until school.
Was four hours of sleep every night good for me? Probably not, but kids can get away with that sort of thing.
(I was also banned from having my own email address, using IRC or any sort of chat program, having my own blog... Basically my parents were deathly afraid that I would talk to any of my peers, even though they were sending me to public school. Most of my computer bans were for violations of these rules. Circumventing enforcement of these various rules was a significant driving factor in my self-education)
Oh, it surely can. I got the first my own PC when I was ~24.
I had no access to computers till I was almost 18.
However I was very curious about them, I learned to program (with pseudo code) without them and I am still much more curious and willing to learn than many of programmers half my age.
It is interest what counts. As they say, one man can lead a horse to the river but even forty won't be able to make it drink.
Oooh, this was an icy stab right at the core. She's completely right:
>Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she's accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn't yet understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn't have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a females
This explains, better than I ever could, why I've always felt weird about all of the attention on getting women into programming.
As a kid, I loved programming. When I became a teenager, I got wind that it wasn't something "cool" and got spooked. For someone as insecure as I was, having a hobby that I couldn't really "explain" to normal people was embarrassing. Probably if I had known a single other kid/girl that liked computers like I did, I might have continued on that path and not been distracted for about 10 years.
When I became a teenager, I got wind that it wasn't something "cool" and got spooked. For someone as insecure as I was, having a hobby that I couldn't really "explain" to normal people was embarrassing.
When I was a teenager, coding or being technical in general wasn't cool either, and most of the people who were involved were or at least seemed insecure and embarrassed. Perhaps the climate in middle / high schools has changed since, but if not, we could also ask: what makes many boys persist in their uncool, embarrassing, low-ish status activity?
That's the reason why classes for girls (not necessarily primarily but directed towards) work so well. Being in a room full of men with few or no women in ANY circumstance is awkward unless you are top of your game.
I really love this article I came across a few years ago -- this is the kind of environment we should try to achieve again... sadly there aren't any technical hurdles to cross any more -- it's all hurdles we've created for ourselves (and our children...):
[The Best of Creative Computing Volume 1 (published 1976):
Learning About Smalltalk, Marian Goldeen]
"My name is Marian Goldeen. I'm an eighth grade student at Jordan Junior High
School in Palo Alto, California, and I would like to tell you about how I got
started working with computers at Xerox and the class I taught.
It all started in December, 1973 when I was in the seventh grade (...)"
themade.org teaches free programming classes to kids. We've been doing this for 2 years now, and most of the time, our ratios are 50/50. Yesterday, in fact, we had 3 boys and 6 girls for our scratch class, then had 8 girls and 2 boys for our interactive fiction class, taught in Twine.
Couple things we've learned. First, girls default to pair programming. They cluster, they work together, when they have a problem, they solve it for one another before asking the teachers. They work together and don't compete. The boys compete and try to get way far ahead of the teachers, and end up getting lost. The girls all move at the same pace except for the ones who were advanced-class level when they showed up.
Second thing: little girls are not affraid, and not any less able to do this. It's a societal thing that pushes them away. They see the girls in their classes interested in other things, so they don't get interested in computers. Instead, they get interested in facebook, not the computer itself, because their older siblings use it, their friends use it, and they then learn that computers are for socializing. Given the proper environment, they can learn anything a geek would learn, it's just that they don't get spoon fed computer knowledge, they get spoon fed facebook, Snapchat, Pokemon and Minecraft knowledge.
Third: Minecraft cuts across all genders. All kids absolutely adore Minecraft, and about 50% want to learn programming just to make mods for the game.
Finally, girls who come to our classes keep coming back. They have a little social group with the other girls, and they welcome in other girls. The boys are left out, mostly, but that's fine as they're not having trouble learning or keeping up. The girls in our classes are their own support mechanism, and they tend to become friends outside of classes.
I groaned at what sounded like another SJW article on 'teh evil patriarchy of technology'.
I'm glad I read on for an interesting and original viewpoint.
More Susan Sons' and fewer Adria Richards', please. The former have meaningful and constructive contributions to make while the latter just make political hay for their own self-interest. As a learner, the perception of an increased emphasis on identity politics is off-putting to me. Not because I secretly want to have a career and interest in tech to further my patriarchal tendencies, but because it's shifting attention away from the interesting stuff - the stuff that makes tech fun and interesting in the first place.
I'm torn. I think she makes some really good points -- particularly about discouraging young girls and the futility of shoving adult humans into foreign social situations -- but I also think she might be rather narrowly defining the personality type of a "hacker", and dismissing behaviors that she doesn't find valuable (in her words: "ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting in").
Maybe it's possible that there are plenty of people out there who care about "ephemera", and yet are also capable of programming a computer or soldering things together? I think it's possible. And when I read stuff like this:
"Sometimes I want to shout 'you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!'"
it makes me think: this might be a problem. Is it harder to be a hacker if you also have an interest in social media and graphic design and popularity and friendships? Are we defining "hacker" to include only people with bad social skills and no interest outside of technology? I hope not.
For the longest time I harbored the biggest crush on a girl from my high school. The thing that made me fall in love with her (and it was love -- as much love as a 14-year-old could feel) wasn't that she was pretty or cute or popular -- though she was all these things. (Head cheerleader. Literally. Dated a football player and everything.)
It was that I had the good fortune to peek over her shoulder at some BASIC code she'd written in our completely noddy, intro-to-computers class. She wasn't going to put Grace Hopper to shame, but it was surprisingly well-structured and showed she knew how to reason about causes and effects within the machine. Which is, like, the first skill that you need to be a decent programmer.
But the thing about pretty girls is that they often find it is more immediately profitable to be pretty than to be bright. And staying pretty and popular -- keeping that limelight on you -- is a lot of work. It's a full-time job with potentially ruinous consequences without some sort of balance (look at Miley Cyrus). So she eventually forgot about coding and went on to become a television personality.
My point here is that you become what you invest time in becoming. If you want to ascend to elite-level hackerdom, then you almost have to put things like attractiveness and popularity on the back burner. You don't have to have poor social skills to be a hacker. But the people who are best at being popular and fitting in are the people who invested time and effort into doing just that, just like the best programmers are the ones who invested time and effort into programming. And we only have so much time to give, so yes, you kinda gotta pick and choose.
> it makes me think: this might be a problem. Is it harder to be a hacker if you
> also have an interest in social media and graphic design and popularity and
> friendships? Are we defining "hacker" to include only people with bad social
> skills and no interest outside of technology? I hope not.
I never said any such thing. I didn't say "you are pretty, what are you doing
here?". I said:
>> you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!
I am a highly social hacker, and a polymath to boot. I have a vibrant love
life, good friends from all walks of life, and plenty of non-coding interests:
writing, reading, psychology, music, crafts (I do leatherwork, weave rugs, sew,
do native american loomed seed beadwork, etc), backpacking, martial arts, and
more.
What I don't do is walk into a room and tell a woman who's good at something I'm
not -- a dancer, for example -- that she's being graded not on her ability to
dance, but on whether she looks like my idea of what a dancer should be. I
don't demand that her math skills (something just as orthogonal to dance as
fashion is to coding) be evaluated instead of her dancing.
In my not-so-humble opinion, if you can't code, you don't get a vote on how it
is or isn't okay to be a female (or any other) coder, period. Wave that
"feminist" flag all you want, I'm not buying it. Women in generations before me
didn't burn their bras so I could be judged on my fashion sense instead of my
work.
> I also think she might be rather narrowly defining the personality type of a "hacker", and dismissing behaviors that she doesn't find valuable (in her words: "ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting in").
I read that more as "where do your passions lie?" People have many interests, but few passions, and passions demand sacrifices. When push comes to shove, hackers will give up popularity and fitting in for the sake of hacking - not because they don't care about those things, but because they'd rather be hacking. Girls who are told that the most important thing for them is to be beautiful and popular are deprived of the opportunity to develop a passion for hacking, because their passion for popularity chokes out other competitors.
I don't think it's harder to be a hacker if you're interested in social media or graphic design, but if you'd rather be tweeting about your latest logo design than figuring out how to fix a bug, you might not be a hacker.
Maybe it's possible that there are plenty of people out there who care about "ephemera", and yet are also capable of programming a computer or soldering things together? I think it's possible.
Sure, Jobs did. On the other hand, Woz was the tech genius, not Jobs.
I've never heard of a tech genius who also cared much about the qualities you mention. This seems more than a coincidence. If it were, then there'd probably be at least one counterexample. Is there someone who is at the level of Woz or Blackwell who also cares about popularity, beauty, and fitting in?
>Maybe it's possible that there are plenty of people out there who care about "ephemera", and yet are also capable of programming a computer or soldering things together?
Did you even read the article? The point she made is that feminists are trying to "fix" the gender ratio in tech by expanding the definition of hacker to people who have no idea what solder even is and have never printed a hello world in their life.
>dismissing behaviors that she doesn't find valuable (in her words: "ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting in").
These things are in no way relevant to producing good code. They're completely orthogonal.
>Are we defining "hacker" to include only people with bad social skills and no interest outside of technology?
The only person putting forth that argument here is you.
>you also have an interest in social media and graphic design
You added an "also." The criticism was of "women-in-tech" advocates who are solely "women-in-tech" advocates/PR people/designers and who are not programmers.
> I think she makes some really good points -- particularly about discouraging young girls and the futility of shoving adult humans into foreign social situations -- but I also think she might be rather narrowly defining the personality type of a "hacker", and dismissing behaviors that she doesn't find valuable (in her words: "ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting in").
Also the ephemera are gateways to something less ephemeral: social contacts and human capital. I don't think this can be understated. Most women are social to a degree that most men will never be, and this is ok because being social is being powerful in every way that matters in day to day life.
The thing is, I am not sure one can really be technical and social in the same moment. These are very different thought processes. Social context is fluid and changing, and it can't be directly measured. So these are different.
It's funny. I suspect that my grandmother (who introduced me to computers and punchcards(!) would agree with everything in this article. Of course she mostly programmed in Fortran relating to her work in astrophysics (a field she entered in 1964).
> it makes me think: this might be a problem. Is it harder to be a hacker if you also have an interest in social media and graphic design and popularity and friendships?
I do think that brain cycles are finite, and while I am male I tend to find that if the very things that make me good at solving certain sets of technical problems can make me socially out of touch at times.
I resubmitted this because it seems like an viewpoint that's important in the larger gender in tech conversation, but the author seems to be outside the mainstream conversation (or at lest what I see of it on Hacker News).
Sadly it looks like this submission is dying an even more uneventful death than the first time it was posted.
>Young women don't magically become technologists at 22
I did exactly that. I have a degree in the arts, but always loved physics and pursued that secondarily. I failed physics because I had taken arts instead of mathematics but found that that didn't stop me learning C and building all the arts programs I ever wanted. Quite some years ago now and I was an outlier but it's not too uncommon.
Good schools are now getting girls into robotics and coding before puberty. That's when you get exited. I loved messing with radios and old VHS players when I was a kid, and probably MOST importantly my father was a technologist: exposure at a young age is everything.
Growing up watching shows like "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius" definitely shaped me as a child into the tech freak I am today. Girls getting barbies thrown at them when they are 12 does not help put girls into the tech sector. We need television shows like "Diane's Laboratory" or "Jennifer Neutron Girl Genius" to get girls interested in tech. Hit 'em when they're young.
She will probably be glad to hear there's still young hackers out there who don't give a shit about this feminist propaganda.
I for one don't care what gender you are the rules are the same regardless of gender.
If i happen to have a complaint about your code or anything else for that matter and you happen to be a girl ...well what do i care?
On the other hand every girl in STEM that constantly complains about how awkward the guys are just outed them selves as not a hacker gir.
A real hacker girl knows that the guys are awkward but it's not intentional the just never bothered with social skills.
A real hacker girl also puts as much value into fasion and the likes like any other hacker which is to say very little at all.
So that well dressed and social girl in IT is most likely not really a hacker then again this is just a generalization and would gladly be proven wrong.
Hell if you happen to know someone like that i would love meet her that is quite rare.
The reality of people like us with a curious nature is the we never find time to learn social skills and fasion we're just too busy satisfying our curiosity.
I personally would love to have a better fasion sense but i really need to get that arch install working perfectly :)
Many good points in this article, but I think it falls short in analysing what's changed (or what's wrong).
> Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it.
Well, yes. Computing and programming has become (more) mainstream -- it's no longer a tiny sub-culture free of mainstream bias. I'm sure there are disappointed skaters, surfers and punks out there too.
I don't think the best way forward is to throw out years of feminist research, or think that "if we could all just get along like before, the problem would go away". It's not that it wouldn't go away, it's just that we need to make an effort to get there. One way to do that is to have sex-segregated introduction classes. They shouldn't all be segregated, nor is it the only thing that we should be doing -- but that is one way of creating a safe and rewarding environment. If we have tutors managing to get mixed classes going, in a way that works well, then that's great too (see VonGuard's comment for example). Generally if you can grab kids before they've been hammered into groupthink about toys, fun and gender roles (which is harder and harder to do with increasing tv commercials, product placement etc) -- then kids don't need to be "de-programmed" -- they can just be allowed to be kids. And they'll play and learn by themselves. But the later you start, the more likely you'll need to have a plan of attack if you want everyone to get a fair shake, and similar participation.
I do think she's right in calling out a lot of the crap that people do in the name of "political correctness" -- without much thought about how or why, though. Being righteous isn't enough; if you're not right, you're probably just making things worse.
[edit: I don't usually comment down-votes -- but I'd like to see a comment. The general idea is to down vote submissions that don't contribute to the discussion -- while I certainly expect many to dis-agree I certainly hope this post isn't perceived as vapid?]
The problem I have with the particular form the tech-feminist crusades have taken is that it seems to me to be diversionary at a fundamental level. Women are not just under-represented in tech, but in the majority of the most lucrative professions as a whole. So, unless we accept the bogus argument that women are just naturally worse at stuff other than babies, we must assume that this is a problem with society as a whole (the dolls-versus-lego thing is a part of that, but not the only one).
Women-only classes and so on may or may not help the particular women involved into the industry - I don't know. Presumably that can be empirically studied by people with the time and resources to do so. But the underlying problem is a matter for 'concerned citizens', not the tech industry as the tech industry.
Crusading, say, for 'codes of conduct' at conferences has the seductive appeal of a modest and realisable goal; unfortunately, there is no nice, pat answer to gender inequality in society, as the last three centuries of 'concerned citizens' have learned. To put it bluntly, it's not dick jokes at PyCon keeping women out, any more than it's dick jokes at law school that produces the gender gap in law firms.
Blimey this piece is spot on. It manages to basically sum up many of the wordless, un-expressed proto-opinions I have on on the matter into one incredibly coherent package. Lucid, rational and heart felt - great discourse.
I'm not sure I understand what the definition of "hacker" is in this article:
> Young women don't magically become technologists at 22.
> Neither do young men. Hackers are born in childhood,
> because that's when the addiction to solving the
> puzzle or building something kicks in to those who've
> experienced that "victory!" moment like I had when I
> imposed my will on a couple electronic primates.
It seems to imply that people who simply make their living programming computers, and who came to programming when they were older, aren't "hackers". Am I missing something?
(Edit: Given that programming careers can be quite lucrative, and that careers in general are now quite long, it makes economic sense that people would want to join in later in their lives. Short of building a time machine to correct past parenting, must these people be permanently excluded from the industry?)
"Young women don't magically become technologists at 22. Neither do young men. Hackers are born in childhood..."
Nitpick: I actually only started learning to program in university as an undergraduate (I was ~21). I have a female friend who had a similar start, so you don't necessarily have to start as a child. It's not gymnastics. The thrill of solving puzzles can be experienced at any time in your life, I think.
Great text by Susan on very important issue. I'm a male software engineer and the predominance of male pears has been the only major downside of being in the business for me ever since i started studying CS almost 20 yrs ago. It should be understood and fixed for the sake of future generations.
[+] [-] superuser2|12 years ago|reply
This point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.
The largest enabling step for me was when I got my own laptop which I was free to break (software-wise) and free to take into my room so I could focus away from the distracting noises of the kitchen/living room.
Much of even the HN community would consider this irresponsible parenting. Probably even my parents wouldn't have let a daughter talk to strangers on IRC about something they don't understand. But how else is someone with nontechnical parents supposed to get started?
It's sooo much different when it's something you choose to do with your free time, rather than something half-assedly forced on you by parents or school curriculum. Especially to a kid.
[+] [-] tomjakubowski|12 years ago|reply
The collaboration between my brother and I to get around these restrictions is one of the earliest memories I have of fruitful "hacking." At the time we both played (and I was obsessed with) a particular MUD, and a half hour per day was not enough playing time, so we wrote a very crude proxy server in VB6 over a week (7 hours between us) that hid in the system tray with a very "system" sounding process name and icon. That way we could connect to the MUD in secret from the laptop, hidden away in our bedroom. I think we later wrote a terrible, barely functional HTTP proxy too. We pulled a few more tricks like reverse engineering the screensaver password (it was stored as a hex string in the registry or something), which turned out to be the same as the BIOS password, before my parents caught onto what we were doing and kind of gave up (maybe they even saw it as a positive learning experience, who knows).
That summer introduced me to the idea that a computer is totally malleable in the hands of a determined and motivated person equipped with the right tools. I haven't looked back since.
[+] [-] stchangg|12 years ago|reply
My parents were nontechnical, but I was lucky enough to have my own computer and a good internet connection starting around 4th grade (8-9 yrs old). Feeling comfortable "breaking" my computer was another thing. I was deathly afraid of breaking things as a kid (unlike my younger brother), and I think it prevented me from coding and exploring things even earlier. I think becoming a great {coder, thinker, leader, etc.} requires internalizing that at some level, it's okay to break the rules.
I eventually found my way onto IRC around age 12, where everyone posed as a 17-yr-old female from LA. I was thankfully super paranoid and fended off child molesters by pretending I was a 56-yr-old man from Texas. ;)
[+] [-] simias|12 years ago|reply
But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc...
I really don't think it's responsible to let a 9-12 yo alone on the net in their room. Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do, giving them advice on how to use the web, find what they want etc... That sounds reasonable to me.
I may be a bit bias because while I consider myself a hacker I didn't have the net before I was 18 at home. My parents didn't care for it, only when I moved to my own studio did I get an internet subscription.
Before that I would use floppies (and later USB sticks) to download stuff from the high school library's computers and buying programming books. Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.
Maybe I'm just a bit paranoid, but on the web you're always one click away from a video of someone being burned alive or decapitated with a chainsaw.
[+] [-] rahw|12 years ago|reply
While starting early is obviously a tremendous advantage, it's a shame that it's often discussed in such an exclusive way.
For reference, I am a female programmer who got a /relatively/ late start. I took my first cs class because I was embarrassed that I used my computer like an Internet Explorer box. Barely three years later, here I am knee-deep in code with a job offer from Google. Am I an exceptional hacker? No. Can I hold my own with the 'started-at-12' crowd? Pretty much.
It saddens me that more people don't feel empowered to dive into a new field. Many people, especially high-achieving students, suffer from the misconception that to succeed in various technical fields, you must specialize early. Whenever an outsider expresses any interest in programming or math, I encourage them to try it. "It's too late for me," and "I'm just not an X person," are common responses. These attitudes are caused in part by the way we STEM folks don't bother as much with non-children. You might tell a little kid about how cool programming is, but do you even attempt a real explanation of your work with a young adult? Your uncle? If so, gold star. If not, you are only contributing to the wall between the tech-savvy and general populace. It's never too late for someone to learn.
Too much stress on the early start just adds another barrier to entry for people like myself who lacked either the exposure or awareness to get started sooner.
If our goal is to make the tech universe more accessible, we shouldn't be perpetuating the idea that you need a certain background to participate or excel.
[+] [-] dchichkov|12 years ago|reply
It depends. There is no strict requirement onto starting at the early age. Yes, there is a correlation, but no strict requirement.
I knew someone, who had really started coding only at around 22, after she had finished a computer science / engineering degree. She was not a tinkerer/nerd, just a regular bright girl, her dad was not an engineer [was an architect]. Only she was really really bright, and she really put in some effort, and just in a few years she became really really good. I've since met many good hackers [having started at 4 and now some 30 years down the line :-/], and I still consider her to be one of the best overall, starting from the love to build things, to clean code and clear thinking, to teamwork...
[+] [-] weland|12 years ago|reply
Did I watch porn before I was of legal age? Yep, and I'm in a happy relationship with no sex problems. Break my computer often? Yep, I'd repair it every few days. I was also exposed to a variety of cultures, read about every operating system on Earth (toyed with emulated PDP-11s and VAXen and C64s for days and days) and wrote in every obscure language there is just because I was a kid and had enough time not to worry about whether spending a week to learn Forth was worth the hours I was putting into it.
[+] [-] shazow|12 years ago|reply
I got my first unsupervised access to my grandparents' computer at age 7, but with no Internet. Then at age 10-11 some foundation for underprivileged kids gifted me my own computer with free unlimited dialup and a separate phone line. This was definitely a turning point in my life.
The fact that my single mother parent trusted me with my independence was a huge amplifier, too.
[+] [-] krstck|12 years ago|reply
Agreed! Those were about the ages I was when I learned to program and fell in love with computers. I became too sensitive to social pressures after that. (One memory I have is of being 13 and intentionally typing slowly in a class so that people wouldn't know that I was a fast typer, and therefore a computer nerd. The horror!) But that age was key to forming my passion for programming. Did I stumble upon "age-inappropriate" material? Of course, but so does any kid that rides a school bus.
[+] [-] kazagistar|12 years ago|reply
Now programming is my job and my hobby. Turns out my parents are smarter then I gave em credit for at the time.
[+] [-] e12e|12 years ago|reply
>This point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.
Sure. What about ages 3 to 7? I had access to a computer for those years, but no bbs or internet access (partly it hardly existed, partly we didn't have a modem). You definetively need to parent (all) media access these days - but I generally think if you can't trust your 10 year old to mostly do the right thing you already have a problem... Then again I also think that if you aren't involved with what your (young-ish) children are doing -you're not being a very good parent..
[edit: my point is that today this is a decision that needs to be made up there with bed times, comming in at night/evening times, watchingb(which) movies.. and for non-technical parents that's a decision they'll need help makimg]
[+] [-] imsofuture|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinXitoW|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] japhyr|12 years ago|reply
I'm curious, were you on a linux os? Did you break your software often?
It seems to me people who get on linux early might have an easier time, because they can so easily break their system and rebuild it. It seems like a kid who breaks a windows/ mac os might need to go to their parents to deal with license keys, which might cause the parents to say "no more hacking".
[+] [-] snarfy|12 years ago|reply
Kids do not need to be warned to stay off the computer. They need to be taught right from wrong, to do the right thing, and to respect others.
[+] [-] htns|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaybe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillysaurus2|12 years ago|reply
Same here. Emphasis on "vast quantities," "unsupervised," and "unfiltered." All three were required.
[+] [-] Crito|12 years ago|reply
Probably about half the time as a 10-16 year old (after 16, my parents stopped caring about what I did or where I went at all) I was banned from computer use for various reasons. That didn't stop me though, I'd go to bed at 10pm, wake up at 2am, then use it until school.
Was four hours of sleep every night good for me? Probably not, but kids can get away with that sort of thing.
(I was also banned from having my own email address, using IRC or any sort of chat program, having my own blog... Basically my parents were deathly afraid that I would talk to any of my peers, even though they were sending me to public school. Most of my computer bans were for violations of these rules. Circumventing enforcement of these various rules was a significant driving factor in my self-education)
[+] [-] rimantas|12 years ago|reply
It is interest what counts. As they say, one man can lead a horse to the river but even forty won't be able to make it drink.
[+] [-] quenlinlom|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] krstck|12 years ago|reply
>Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she's accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn't yet understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn't have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a females
This explains, better than I ever could, why I've always felt weird about all of the attention on getting women into programming.
As a kid, I loved programming. When I became a teenager, I got wind that it wasn't something "cool" and got spooked. For someone as insecure as I was, having a hobby that I couldn't really "explain" to normal people was embarrassing. Probably if I had known a single other kid/girl that liked computers like I did, I might have continued on that path and not been distracted for about 10 years.
[+] [-] jseliger|12 years ago|reply
When I was a teenager, coding or being technical in general wasn't cool either, and most of the people who were involved were or at least seemed insecure and embarrassed. Perhaps the climate in middle / high schools has changed since, but if not, we could also ask: what makes many boys persist in their uncool, embarrassing, low-ish status activity?
[+] [-] marquis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|12 years ago|reply
http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc1/showpage.php?page=61
[The Best of Creative Computing Volume 1 (published 1976): Learning About Smalltalk, Marian Goldeen]
"My name is Marian Goldeen. I'm an eighth grade student at Jordan Junior High School in Palo Alto, California, and I would like to tell you about how I got started working with computers at Xerox and the class I taught.
It all started in December, 1973 when I was in the seventh grade (...)"
[+] [-] VonGuard|12 years ago|reply
Couple things we've learned. First, girls default to pair programming. They cluster, they work together, when they have a problem, they solve it for one another before asking the teachers. They work together and don't compete. The boys compete and try to get way far ahead of the teachers, and end up getting lost. The girls all move at the same pace except for the ones who were advanced-class level when they showed up.
Second thing: little girls are not affraid, and not any less able to do this. It's a societal thing that pushes them away. They see the girls in their classes interested in other things, so they don't get interested in computers. Instead, they get interested in facebook, not the computer itself, because their older siblings use it, their friends use it, and they then learn that computers are for socializing. Given the proper environment, they can learn anything a geek would learn, it's just that they don't get spoon fed computer knowledge, they get spoon fed facebook, Snapchat, Pokemon and Minecraft knowledge.
Third: Minecraft cuts across all genders. All kids absolutely adore Minecraft, and about 50% want to learn programming just to make mods for the game.
Finally, girls who come to our classes keep coming back. They have a little social group with the other girls, and they welcome in other girls. The boys are left out, mostly, but that's fine as they're not having trouble learning or keeping up. The girls in our classes are their own support mechanism, and they tend to become friends outside of classes.
So, learn from this what you will.
[+] [-] mistakoala|12 years ago|reply
I'm glad I read on for an interesting and original viewpoint.
More Susan Sons' and fewer Adria Richards', please. The former have meaningful and constructive contributions to make while the latter just make political hay for their own self-interest. As a learner, the perception of an increased emphasis on identity politics is off-putting to me. Not because I secretly want to have a career and interest in tech to further my patriarchal tendencies, but because it's shifting attention away from the interesting stuff - the stuff that makes tech fun and interesting in the first place.
[+] [-] timr|12 years ago|reply
Maybe it's possible that there are plenty of people out there who care about "ephemera", and yet are also capable of programming a computer or soldering things together? I think it's possible. And when I read stuff like this:
"Sometimes I want to shout 'you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!'"
it makes me think: this might be a problem. Is it harder to be a hacker if you also have an interest in social media and graphic design and popularity and friendships? Are we defining "hacker" to include only people with bad social skills and no interest outside of technology? I hope not.
[+] [-] bitwize|12 years ago|reply
It was that I had the good fortune to peek over her shoulder at some BASIC code she'd written in our completely noddy, intro-to-computers class. She wasn't going to put Grace Hopper to shame, but it was surprisingly well-structured and showed she knew how to reason about causes and effects within the machine. Which is, like, the first skill that you need to be a decent programmer.
But the thing about pretty girls is that they often find it is more immediately profitable to be pretty than to be bright. And staying pretty and popular -- keeping that limelight on you -- is a lot of work. It's a full-time job with potentially ruinous consequences without some sort of balance (look at Miley Cyrus). So she eventually forgot about coding and went on to become a television personality.
My point here is that you become what you invest time in becoming. If you want to ascend to elite-level hackerdom, then you almost have to put things like attractiveness and popularity on the back burner. You don't have to have poor social skills to be a hacker. But the people who are best at being popular and fitting in are the people who invested time and effort into doing just that, just like the best programmers are the ones who invested time and effort into programming. And we only have so much time to give, so yes, you kinda gotta pick and choose.
[+] [-] HedgeMage|12 years ago|reply
I never said any such thing. I didn't say "you are pretty, what are you doing here?". I said:
>> you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!
I am a highly social hacker, and a polymath to boot. I have a vibrant love life, good friends from all walks of life, and plenty of non-coding interests: writing, reading, psychology, music, crafts (I do leatherwork, weave rugs, sew, do native american loomed seed beadwork, etc), backpacking, martial arts, and more.
What I don't do is walk into a room and tell a woman who's good at something I'm not -- a dancer, for example -- that she's being graded not on her ability to dance, but on whether she looks like my idea of what a dancer should be. I don't demand that her math skills (something just as orthogonal to dance as fashion is to coding) be evaluated instead of her dancing.
In my not-so-humble opinion, if you can't code, you don't get a vote on how it is or isn't okay to be a female (or any other) coder, period. Wave that "feminist" flag all you want, I'm not buying it. Women in generations before me didn't burn their bras so I could be judged on my fashion sense instead of my work.
[+] [-] cheald|12 years ago|reply
I read that more as "where do your passions lie?" People have many interests, but few passions, and passions demand sacrifices. When push comes to shove, hackers will give up popularity and fitting in for the sake of hacking - not because they don't care about those things, but because they'd rather be hacking. Girls who are told that the most important thing for them is to be beautiful and popular are deprived of the opportunity to develop a passion for hacking, because their passion for popularity chokes out other competitors.
I don't think it's harder to be a hacker if you're interested in social media or graphic design, but if you'd rather be tweeting about your latest logo design than figuring out how to fix a bug, you might not be a hacker.
[+] [-] sillysaurus2|12 years ago|reply
Sure, Jobs did. On the other hand, Woz was the tech genius, not Jobs.
I've never heard of a tech genius who also cared much about the qualities you mention. This seems more than a coincidence. If it were, then there'd probably be at least one counterexample. Is there someone who is at the level of Woz or Blackwell who also cares about popularity, beauty, and fitting in?
[+] [-] Crake|12 years ago|reply
Did you even read the article? The point she made is that feminists are trying to "fix" the gender ratio in tech by expanding the definition of hacker to people who have no idea what solder even is and have never printed a hello world in their life.
>dismissing behaviors that she doesn't find valuable (in her words: "ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting in").
These things are in no way relevant to producing good code. They're completely orthogonal.
>Are we defining "hacker" to include only people with bad social skills and no interest outside of technology?
The only person putting forth that argument here is you.
[+] [-] superuser2|12 years ago|reply
You added an "also." The criticism was of "women-in-tech" advocates who are solely "women-in-tech" advocates/PR people/designers and who are not programmers.
[+] [-] einhverfr|12 years ago|reply
Also the ephemera are gateways to something less ephemeral: social contacts and human capital. I don't think this can be understated. Most women are social to a degree that most men will never be, and this is ok because being social is being powerful in every way that matters in day to day life.
The thing is, I am not sure one can really be technical and social in the same moment. These are very different thought processes. Social context is fluid and changing, and it can't be directly measured. So these are different.
It's funny. I suspect that my grandmother (who introduced me to computers and punchcards(!) would agree with everything in this article. Of course she mostly programmed in Fortran relating to her work in astrophysics (a field she entered in 1964).
> it makes me think: this might be a problem. Is it harder to be a hacker if you also have an interest in social media and graphic design and popularity and friendships?
I do think that brain cycles are finite, and while I am male I tend to find that if the very things that make me good at solving certain sets of technical problems can make me socially out of touch at times.
[+] [-] forgottenpass|12 years ago|reply
Sadly it looks like this submission is dying an even more uneventful death than the first time it was posted.
[+] [-] marquis|12 years ago|reply
I did exactly that. I have a degree in the arts, but always loved physics and pursued that secondarily. I failed physics because I had taken arts instead of mathematics but found that that didn't stop me learning C and building all the arts programs I ever wanted. Quite some years ago now and I was an outlier but it's not too uncommon.
Good schools are now getting girls into robotics and coding before puberty. That's when you get exited. I loved messing with radios and old VHS players when I was a kid, and probably MOST importantly my father was a technologist: exposure at a young age is everything.
[+] [-] dev1n|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fuxy|12 years ago|reply
I for one don't care what gender you are the rules are the same regardless of gender.
If i happen to have a complaint about your code or anything else for that matter and you happen to be a girl ...well what do i care?
On the other hand every girl in STEM that constantly complains about how awkward the guys are just outed them selves as not a hacker gir.
A real hacker girl knows that the guys are awkward but it's not intentional the just never bothered with social skills.
A real hacker girl also puts as much value into fasion and the likes like any other hacker which is to say very little at all.
So that well dressed and social girl in IT is most likely not really a hacker then again this is just a generalization and would gladly be proven wrong.
Hell if you happen to know someone like that i would love meet her that is quite rare.
The reality of people like us with a curious nature is the we never find time to learn social skills and fasion we're just too busy satisfying our curiosity.
I personally would love to have a better fasion sense but i really need to get that arch install working perfectly :)
[+] [-] e12e|12 years ago|reply
> Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it.
Well, yes. Computing and programming has become (more) mainstream -- it's no longer a tiny sub-culture free of mainstream bias. I'm sure there are disappointed skaters, surfers and punks out there too.
I don't think the best way forward is to throw out years of feminist research, or think that "if we could all just get along like before, the problem would go away". It's not that it wouldn't go away, it's just that we need to make an effort to get there. One way to do that is to have sex-segregated introduction classes. They shouldn't all be segregated, nor is it the only thing that we should be doing -- but that is one way of creating a safe and rewarding environment. If we have tutors managing to get mixed classes going, in a way that works well, then that's great too (see VonGuard's comment for example). Generally if you can grab kids before they've been hammered into groupthink about toys, fun and gender roles (which is harder and harder to do with increasing tv commercials, product placement etc) -- then kids don't need to be "de-programmed" -- they can just be allowed to be kids. And they'll play and learn by themselves. But the later you start, the more likely you'll need to have a plan of attack if you want everyone to get a fair shake, and similar participation.
I do think she's right in calling out a lot of the crap that people do in the name of "political correctness" -- without much thought about how or why, though. Being righteous isn't enough; if you're not right, you're probably just making things worse.
[edit: I don't usually comment down-votes -- but I'd like to see a comment. The general idea is to down vote submissions that don't contribute to the discussion -- while I certainly expect many to dis-agree I certainly hope this post isn't perceived as vapid?]
[+] [-] tragic|12 years ago|reply
The problem I have with the particular form the tech-feminist crusades have taken is that it seems to me to be diversionary at a fundamental level. Women are not just under-represented in tech, but in the majority of the most lucrative professions as a whole. So, unless we accept the bogus argument that women are just naturally worse at stuff other than babies, we must assume that this is a problem with society as a whole (the dolls-versus-lego thing is a part of that, but not the only one).
Women-only classes and so on may or may not help the particular women involved into the industry - I don't know. Presumably that can be empirically studied by people with the time and resources to do so. But the underlying problem is a matter for 'concerned citizens', not the tech industry as the tech industry.
Crusading, say, for 'codes of conduct' at conferences has the seductive appeal of a modest and realisable goal; unfortunately, there is no nice, pat answer to gender inequality in society, as the last three centuries of 'concerned citizens' have learned. To put it bluntly, it's not dick jokes at PyCon keeping women out, any more than it's dick jokes at law school that produces the gender gap in law firms.
[+] [-] Wintamute|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jt2190|12 years ago|reply
(Edit: Given that programming careers can be quite lucrative, and that careers in general are now quite long, it makes economic sense that people would want to join in later in their lives. Short of building a time machine to correct past parenting, must these people be permanently excluded from the industry?)
[+] [-] shurcooL|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shiven|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donaq|12 years ago|reply
Nitpick: I actually only started learning to program in university as an undergraduate (I was ~21). I have a female friend who had a similar start, so you don't necessarily have to start as a child. It's not gymnastics. The thrill of solving puzzles can be experienced at any time in your life, I think.
Otherwise, great article.
[+] [-] skybrian|12 years ago|reply
I'm less happy about excluding people who are coming into computing late, though.
[+] [-] overgard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piokuc|12 years ago|reply