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Google and the Sexist Letter

I’ve been reading about that fellow, James Damore, at Google now fired for his use of sexist language about the skills of computer coding.  He does make some points of interest.

The fact is that women seem to prefer working in more humanist environments – even if very scientific.  Men seem more willing to work in the highly sterile world of pure coding.   Seems to be a fact - as explained to me by a woman electrical engineer.  She ran a summer school workshop for HS students.  One year, building an amplifier was the project.  The girls were not as enthusiastic as the boys.  Next year, the project was a heart monitor – similar electronics.  The girls loved it. She learned a lasting lesson.

Moreover, most women and men cannot endure the world of pure coding.  It is a harsh environment.  Industry should be happy to discover these people wherever they can find them.  Sex, race, or even religion have nothing to do with it!  Expert coding is a very rare skill.  In many cases, it is not one that leads to any higher calling.  For example, when I was a student and learning to code, there was among us a very tall, very thin, fellow that could code like gangbusters.  But he was not social, having little sense of humor, not very interesting, and in fact kind of boring.

My advice to advisors.  Assume not just anybody can be trained to expertise at coding skills.  Some of the smartest people I know cannot code worth a nickel!  I can code somewhat, but for me it has always been a struggle; I am too darn slow to make a living at it.  I can and have designed projects and managed them, but thankfully did not have to write the code.

Coding requires a special type of thinking that proceeds in what I call micro-steps. Most of us think in macro-steps of ordinary social thinking, making it difficult to penetrate or break a thought into a thousand pieces of actual code.  Real coders can.

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