Life extension in mice via senescent cell clearance

[Esquire]

Just to be clear: you're arguing that programming can't be learned in a social setting, and that it takes so much time to learn that if it can't it will prevent students from doing anything else? My experience is that neither of those things are true.

[Starglider]

Of course none of those things are true. Programming can be learnt in classroom, workplace or solo self-learning like most engineering and trade skills; ideally a combination of those. The vast majority of software systems are designed, built and deployed by teams, so in practice software engineering is a team activity. Only the actual coding is typically solo (but many people pair program and most people do peer review), but that is like saying that reading a legal brief is a solo activity so law must be a solitary profession. Stas is just concocting delusional fantasy worlds to add novelty and variety to his ceaseless whining.

In the future there may be no schools. Each child will taught by an AI teaching program

We haven't mustered the cultural will to change the factory school system set up in the late 1800s. America can't even rationalise a completely malformed tertiary education sector. Can you imagine what it would take to overturn the entrenched educational order and put all the teachers out of work? Do you think those powerful unions will just go quietly into the night? If you say that technological progress is an inevitable force that will eventually crush the dissent, you are probably correct, but long before we got there that same progress would have generated much more existential problems that would render these trivial by comparison.

Or if you were feeling optimistic you could just say that the current trendy child psychology (that you get implemented in nice schools in well funded areas) puts lots of emphasis on social skills development etc. Even newborns must be taken to baby socialisation sessions several times a week to spendf hours synchronising their baby noises with peers (speaking from recent personal experience). Indeed it's arguable that millenials are in a sense over-socialised by constant social networking on the ever-present smartphone.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

To make a grim future for children more plausible, you do not even need total isolation.

Total observation is enough. If children feel that they live in a Panopticon-like world where their every step is observed by an omnipresent authority, they will be more and more conformist at heart with every generation. It is a well-established fact that even observation itself, if known to the target, causes long-term behavioural shifts.

Or perhaps atomization through the technology pressure. "You have to learn programming or you will be worthless to the world". Children will then use most of their free time with computers, instead of collective activities outside, and also outside supervision.

The future could cut toward a positive direction, too. As humans we perceive threats more vividly than other stimuli so it's easiest to forsee how it could all go wrong, but the replacement of routine labor by machines might actually do more to break the cog-in-the-machine feeling of modern society than to reinforce it. If no one needs to perform mindless tasks that don't enrich the mind and spirit, maybe more people will do things that contain meaning and passion instead of punching a clock. If the majority of the population is free from dire financial worries and scheduling constraints, they might be less likely to elect stupid or malicious people that enact stupid or malicious policies.

Everyone criticizes optimistic visions of the future but not the doomsayers, yet it's the latter who have been wrong in a brand new way every generation since at least the beginning of recorded history. In the short time that I've been alive, the developed world has failed to choke to death on its industrial pollution, failed to annihilate itself in nuclear war, failed to obliterate the ozone layer and let the sun's rays flash fry us, and failed to descend into madness and chaos in a post-Peak Oil dystopia. Violent crime, war, bigotry, and hunger have decreased while knowledge, equality, and the dissemination of ideas have risen, and aside from a few (relatively brief) periods of darkness this has been happening for centuries. Maybe we should adjust our expectations accordingly when we predict that we are headed for a Brave New World of forced conformity and lost childhoods.

[K. A. Pital]

Of course none of those things are true. Programming can be learnt in classroom, workplace or solo self-learning like most engineering and trade skills; ideally a combination of those. The vast majority of software systems are designed, built and deployed by teams, so in practice software engineering is a team activity. Only the actual coding is typically solo (but many people pair program and most people do peer review), but that is like saying that reading a legal brief is a solo activity so law must be a solitary profession. Stas is just concocting delusional fantasy worlds to add novelty and variety to his ceaseless whining.

You are just bitter because I've hit the spot. You can become good at programming by being a desocialized person who lives in a real fortress of solitude with just a computer and the internet. You can't become good at real languages that way, it simply isn't possible. That there are alternative, more social ways of learning to program is not very relevant, and the presence of extremely desocialized people in the tech sector seems to suggest that this occupation is more hazardous in that regard.

Indeed it's arguable that millenials are in a sense over-socialised by constant social networking on the ever-present smartphone.

Ersatz-oversocialization is the flipside of technology-driven desocialization. Technology creates the illusion of a supportive community. However, contrasted with a real community, the virtual one will inevitably be less supportive in reality, especially when it comes to real problems.

A facebook group a commune is not.

If the majority of the population is free from dire financial worries and scheduling constraints, they might be less likely to elect stupid or malicious people that enact stupid or malicious policies.

I have found this to be the opposite of reality.

In the short time that I've been alive, the developed world has failed to choke to death on its industrial pollution, failed to annihilate itself in nuclear war, failed to obliterate the ozone layer and let the sun's rays flash fry us, and failed to descend into madness and chaos in a post-Peak Oil dystopia.

In the short time that I've been alive, I've seen nations collapse and people beg for food, I've seen superindustrial achievements - space programs, nuclear programs, cutting edge physics - turned to dust. I've seen the rise of the omnipresent surveillance state on a global scale - not a local regime, but a "state of states". I've seen how a vision of utopia turned into a cyberpunk dystopia. There's a world outside the First World, which is slowly choking on industrial pollution while the First World "purifies" itself. I guess I'm just a tad less optimistic because my pessimism is not a "doomsday!" type of pessimism. Life will go on, tech will advance. Cyberpunk is liveable. It's just a very displeasing present and near future, to me personally.

[Ziggy Stardust]

You are just bitter because I've hit the spot. You can become good at programming by being a desocialized person who lives in a real fortress of solitude with just a computer and the internet. You can't become good at real languages that way, it simply isn't possible. That there are alternative, more social ways of learning to program is not very relevant, and the presence of extremely desocialized people in the tech sector seems to suggest that this occupation is more hazardous in that regard.

Hey, genius: not all programmers are "extremely desocialized". In fact, most programmers are not. Most professional programmers (who have as much incentive to continue studying programming as anybody) manage to also have functional personal lives outside of work. If you really claim otherwise, you'll have to provide some proof.

Likely, the first thing you will probably want to point to as evidence (assuming you've actually thought that far ahead) is the fact that there tends to be a higher prevalence of autism and Asperger's like conditions in the programming and engineering professions compared to the general population. This, however, doesn't logically follow into your claim. Even with the higher prevalence in those professions, the overall prevalence is still extremely low.

Further, you are attributing causality where it is not evident to be appropriate. Yes, there are a decent number of "extremely desocialized" people that tend to gravitate towards computer programming and related disciplines. However, what you are ignoring is the fact that these people aren't desocialized BECAUSE they are programmers. Not only can computer programming provide a livelihood in which an introverted individual can choose not to interact much with others, thus disproportionately attracting people who are a priori interested in this sort of isolation, but there is still a rather prevalent cultural attitude towards programming being only for "loser nerds" and other similar stereotypes, which ends up acting as a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, the fact that there are extremely desocialized programmers is an artifact of our current society and cultural attitudes, and it is silly to think that in a hypothetical world where everyone is forced to program that everyone will suddenly become desocialized. Thinking otherwise seems to betray an incredible ignorance of basic human psychology and an inability to distinguish between correlation and causation.

Ersatz-oversocialization is the flipside of technology-driven desocialization. Technology creates the illusion of a supportive community. However, contrasted with a real community, the virtual one will inevitably be less supportive in reality, especially when it comes to real problems.

Which ignores the fact that a growing number of online communities being used to create "real" communities. Even ignoring dating websites for the moment, there's CouchSurfing, Meetup.com, and dozens of other examples (whose popularity is only INCREASING with this "oversocialization") whose sole aim is to bridge the world between online communities (in which it is easier than in real life to aggregate towards people with similar interests) and "real" communities. Claiming that the concept of an online community and a real community are somehow irrevocably separated from one another is ridiculous. Anyone who wants to socialize in the "real" world can trivially use online communities to make those social connections, and the ease with which this is possible will only increase, not decrease.

I have found this to be the opposite of reality.

Evidence?

[LaCroix]

In our offices (1500 programmers in total) we have less than 10 people who fit the stereotype of the "programmer" (Asperger or near authism, little no social life, scrawny nerd)

Actually, most of us are more outgoing and socially active than the average guy in our country - hardly a day none of my immediate office buddies had been out with his friends too long the night before. A great lot of us are active athletes in some sport or another - to the point we launch our own marathon and bike race events, and have some people who are performing in national competitions. One out of ten is a dabbling in "extreme sports", and a good dozen of the guys do play in their own rockbands at weekend festivals, pulling big crowds.

[Simon_Jester]

We haven't mustered the cultural will to change the factory school system set up in the late 1800s. America can't even rationalise a completely malformed tertiary education sector. Can you imagine what it would take to overturn the entrenched educational order and put all the teachers out of work? Do you think those powerful unions will just go quietly into the night? ...

In our defense, the early versions of this "teach the student with an individualized AI" probably won't work very well, making it entirely reasonable to resist widespread institutionalization of them.



Deliberately ignoring the "AI makes literally everyone obsolete" scenario in favor of the "automation makes half or two thirds of the workforce obsolete" scenario, I think we might actually go in the opposite direction and hire more teachers (also more para-educators, and more people monitoring the school environment and helping students cope with feelings of isolation and depression, and more people working on tasks that support the learning environment but are ultimately ancillary to it like grading, drafting curricula, and so on). Because one of our biggest problems with the automated 21st century economy is that bluntly, most humans taught in 20th century schools are not intellectually or academically ready to contribute to such a heavily automated economy.

19th century education had to expand massively to ensure that everyone got a solid enough ground in mathematics, reading ability, basic science, and the like for them to be functional in 20th century society... and as I understand it, the percentage of the population employed as teachers increased rather sharply, simply because children were getting 12-15 years of education on average rather than zero to six. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens again except that instead of teaching people longer we'll have to teach them 'harder.'

Which pretty much requires either more manpower thrown at the problem, or a greater willingness to just write off the bottom quintile of the student body as 'surplus population' not worth trying to educate.

Or if you were feeling optimistic you could just say that the current trendy child psychology (that you get implemented in nice schools in well funded areas) puts lots of emphasis on social skills development etc. Even newborns must be taken to baby socialisation sessions several times a week to spendf hours synchronising their baby noises with peers (speaking from recent personal experience). Indeed it's arguable that millenials are in a sense over-socialised by constant social networking on the ever-present smartphone.

AAAARGH YES.

Well, in my experience, they are "over-socialized" in that they massively overreact to social stimuli which spread with (literally) inhuman, unnatural speed through their social networks. Our school has a very serious problem responding to the fact that every confrontation turns into a flash-crowd surrounding that fight way faster than would have happened in 1996.

[Simon_Jester]

We haven't mustered the cultural will to change the factory school system set up in the late 1800s. America can't even rationalise a completely malformed tertiary education sector. Can you imagine what it would take to overturn the entrenched educational order and put all the teachers out of work? Do you think those powerful unions will just go quietly into the night? ...

In our defense, the early versions of this "teach the student with an individualized AI" probably won't work as well as the services they compete with, making it entirely reasonable to resist widespread institutionalization of them. Though they may work well enough to become competitive among home-schoolers, which gives them an in.

...

Hm. Deliberately ignoring the "AI makes literally everyone obsolete" scenario in favor of the "automation makes half or two thirds of the workforce obsolete" scenario, I think we might actually go in the opposite direction and hire more teachers (also more para-educators, and more people monitoring the school environment and helping students cope with feelings of isolation and depression, and more people working on tasks that support the learning environment but are ultimately ancillary to it like grading, drafting curricula, and so on). Because one of our biggest problems with the automated 21st century economy is that bluntly, most humans taught in 20th century schools are not intellectually or academically ready to contribute to such a heavily automated economy.

19th century education had to expand massively to ensure that everyone got a solid enough ground in mathematics, reading ability, basic science, and the like for them to be functional in 20th century society... and as I understand it, the percentage of the population employed as teachers increased rather sharply, simply because children were getting 12-15 years of education on average rather than zero to six. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens again except that instead of teaching people longer we'll have to teach them 'harder.'

Which pretty much requires either more manpower thrown at the problem, or a greater willingness to just write off the bottom quintile of the student body as 'surplus population' not worth trying to educate.

I would argue that education is one of the areas least vulnerable to "reduce manpower needs through automation," because you get extremely conspicuous reduction in outcomes from increasing student:teacher ratio, and putting computers in the classroom does not make this go away. The computers increase the effectiveness of the teacher, but trying to subtract teachers by adding computers causes you to hit diminishing returns really fast because so much of what the students need is fundamentally social in nature.

Or if you were feeling optimistic you could just say that the current trendy child psychology (that you get implemented in nice schools in well funded areas) puts lots of emphasis on social skills development etc. Even newborns must be taken to baby socialisation sessions several times a week to spendf hours synchronising their baby noises with peers (speaking from recent personal experience). Indeed it's arguable that millenials are in a sense over-socialised by constant social networking on the ever-present smartphone.

AAAARGH YES.

Well, in my experience, they are "over-socialized" in that they massively overreact to social stimuli which spread with (literally) inhuman, unnatural speed through their social networks. Our school has a very serious problem responding to the fact that every confrontation turns into a flash-crowd surrounding that fight way faster than would have happened in 1996.

[Esquire]

Our school has a very serious problem responding to the fact that every confrontation turns into a flash-crowd surrounding that fight way faster than would have happened in 1996.

Would you care to expand? Any theories as to why this should be?

[Simon_Jester]

Because the first thing anyone who knows about any major social or physical confrontation between students does is text/IM/instagram/whatever their closest fifty friends. SOME of those friends are undisciplined, defiant, or ignorant enough to leave class (or have already left class) to rush to the scene of the incident, resulting in an uproar, and more people doing the same thing...

It's basically just the usual mechanisms by which teenagers will overreact to social stimuli (oh wow there's gonna be a FIGHT!), but with the social media acting to amplify and accelerate their overreactions, and drive the effects of the reactions beyond what the adults responsible for the situation can readily hope to keep under control.

[Esquire]

Any supporting data? I believe you; that lines up very well with my own observations - I'm just wondering about the effect size and any potential moderating variables.

[Simon_Jester]

Sorry. To be quite honest it's an anecdotal observation, and anything based on my school would be anecdotal because it's "only" a sample size of on the order of a thousand people.

Doing actual studies of things like this is going to be hard, because we don't really have lots of good ways to quantify "how controlled are people" and "how do people react to disturbances," and because we don't necessarily have easily comparable data on how kids behaved before cell phones because we didn't retroactively know we'd need to collect such data for comparison purposes.

I'm not saying doing studies on the effects of cell phones on child behavior is impossible- just difficult.

[K. A. Pital]

Hey, genius: not all programmers are "extremely desocialized". In fact, most programmers are not. Most professional programmers (who have as much incentive to continue studying programming as anybody) manage to also have functional personal lives outside of work. If you really claim otherwise, you'll have to provide some proof.

I am not claiming all or most programmers are severely desocialized. The point is very simple: is that it is possible learn to be a good programmer and become extremely desocialized at the same time. It is not possible with other activities, such as team sports or learning to speak a real language.

This, however, doesn't logically follow into your claim. Even with the higher prevalence in those professions, the overall prevalence is still extremely low.

The mere possibility of being desocialized while learning will tend to push many people towards this. Socialization is not something that comes easy. It requires people to constantly operate outside their comfort zone. I guess it is also why people who have conditions that make socialization harder tend to choose these professions: because that is the field where you can be isolated if you choose it, and you can control the volume of interaction that you have with others.

However, what you are ignoring is the fact that these people aren't desocialized BECAUSE they are programmers.

This is not a one-sided causal system - and I'm not ignoring it. See above: the option to control the volume of contact will be very often used if people are not forced to socialize.

That is, the fact that there are extremely desocialized programmers is an artifact of our current society and cultural attitudes, and it is silly to think that in a hypothetical world where everyone is forced to program that everyone will suddenly become desocialized.

If you force people to spend most of their time on interacting with a machine, human-human interaction skills will inevitably suffer as a result. It is not "silly" neither does it betray "ignorance". But you are free to hold whatever opinions you like on the matter.

Which ignores the fact that a growing number of online communities being used to create "real" communities. Even ignoring dating websites for the moment, there's CouchSurfing, Meetup.com, and dozens of other examples (whose popularity is only INCREASING with this "oversocialization") whose sole aim is to bridge the world between online communities (in which it is easier than in real life to aggregate towards people with similar interests) and "real" communities. Claiming that the concept of an online community and a real community are somehow irrevocably separated from one another is ridiculous. Anyone who wants to socialize in the "real" world can trivially use online communities to make those social connections, and the ease with which this is possible will only increase, not decrease.

Do you really not see the difference between a real community and an online one? Similar interests do not make a real caring community. If I kill myself tomorrow, I seriously doubt this board would even know why, where and when. Much less be able to somehow prevent his. They are not irrevocably separated, but to be a part of a real community socialization, with all its unpleasant sides, is required. To be a part of a virtual club, nothing is required except basic internet and communication skills.

Evidence?

The First World is a cornucopia, and in the last decades they've repeatedly invaded and bombed countries in the Middle East (electing GWB twice, too), causing millions to suffer and hundreds of thousands to die horribly. These are people who are free from hunger, almost free from need and, as you seem to imply by your rants, very actively socialized in perfectly cool online communities. The idea of a benigh cornucopia where stupid and malevolent politicians are not elected is attractive, but it is not real. This isn't Star Trek, OK?

[Purple]

I am not claiming all or most programmers are severely desocialized. The point is very simple: is that it is possible learn to be a good programmer and become extremely desocialized at the same time. It is not possible with other activities, such as team sports or learning to speak a real language.

A problem with that line of reasoning is the fact that programing is a team sport. Yes you can pick a programing language up on your own but that's basically meaningless in this day and age. Unless your life goal is to write excel macros for your grandmothers grocery store any serious employment will require a proper university degree (thus forcing socialization) and team work in the workplace (thus again, forcing socialization). The stereotypical brilliant introvert who sits at a computer silently coding away all his life was really newer a thing and certainly is not one now. And if such jobs do exist they are or will shortly be automated away.

[K. A. Pital]

I think I'll have to do a quick research on marriage rates by occupation, prevalence of home-office work by occupation and other statistics before continuing this discussion. I know that out-of-office work is a lot more prevalent for programmers than for most other occupations which I've seen.

[His Divine Shadow]

*shrug* I program (only a part of my job, one I wish I could do more though) and I'm somewhat unsocial I guess. Even in my own hours I prefer to spend time in my workshop by myself.

[K. A. Pital]

What I know off-hand is that the percentage of women in computing has been steadily declining. I will quote Wikipedia on this as I'm too busy to read through the original sources right now:

In the United States, the proportion of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998. Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that fewer than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at U.S. PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11.

...

The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) reports that of the SAT takers who intend to major in computer and information sciences, the proportion of girls has steadily decreased relative to the proportion of boys, from 20 percent in 2001 to 12 percent in 2006. While this number has been decreasing, in 2001, the total number of these students (both boys and girls) reached its peak at 73,466.

So this is not just a naturally-arising gender gap, but a temporal development which led to women abandoning this career. Not sure what else to add here, except that it had a profound impact on the development of the field, as this interesting draft paper says:
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nathanen/files/cbi-gender.pdf

I think that the uncritical dismissal of the more and more obvious demands from the industry for the programmer to be asocial, job-devoted machine appendage that works 13-15 hours on "important projects" has been what happened in the last decades, making the field unattractive for women and also attractive for just about every asocial type there is.

I am sorry if my conclusions hurt someone reading this thread, but the core point is: corporations want loyal drone bots willing to work Japanese hours for them, and for this, asociality is important. It is therefore very predictable that asociality will be encouraged, and only certain types of socialization will be allowed (for example, socializing as drinking beer and playing football with your colleagues).

[LaCroix]

Your pre-conscieved notions of programmers being antisocial is showing again.

In our company, the IT department is the one who is running the parties. Other departments keep complaining about how many parties we do have on company money - we DEMAND that each and every version rollout is followed by a party in some restaurant/bar, paid by the company.

Home-office is a result of the fact that we want to be able to spend a bit more time with our family, instead of in the commute. Home office also means that you have to be tele-present at all the meetings (which we do have 2-3 per day on average), so no "only you and your pc" day.
Normal work means that you have to interact with other people a lot more than that. A day without spending at least 2 of your 8 hours working along some collegue sitting next to you as you ponder things is unusual.

In my immediate office are, we do have 4 female programmers out of 50. The fact why women did get rare in the profession is pretty well known, though. In the earlier days of IT, it was seen as a "secretary" equivalent for engineers to do IT instead of 'manly' things like dabbling with engines and stuff. That "easy work field" was usually disregarded, and female engineers usually found themselves there. When people realized that this was the future and well paid, men flooded back into the profession. The actual number of female engineers (who are still rare) did not go down.

And no, work time of 13-15 hours is a non-issue these days. We actually get told to not work overtime if not necessary (for it's too expensive) and are under strict rules to not work more than 10 hours a day without permission. And frankly, nobody here (except for a handful guys who are in it for the money or the 1% actual antisocial guys) would want to work that long, anyway, as we are all living very social lives and have families and kids. (We even have an annual "family party" where we all bring our families to a big BBQ event - on company money.) Most of us show up at the office around 10 to 11 o'clock after a nice, long sleep-in (or pretty hung over for the younger ones who party a lot more than we older farts) and a bit of morning shopping, and the office is barren at 6 -6:30 pm. (I am among the ones who works the longest, averaging 9 hours a day to get some OT extra money for my ranch)

If a company tries to push 13 hours or more on us (which is illegal, btw), they find themselves quickly without a programmer, for we can just leave and find another job, instantly. That (and the high price for OT money) led to overtime demands decreasing in that field for several years. The opposite of your "trend prediction".

[K. A. Pital]

Do you have actual statistics that would prove me wrong about the number of women in computing occupations? The most easily found statistics are the ones for the USA (where the number of women in the workforce has been steadily declining since the 1980s as well), but perhaps the European ones are different... Although it seems even the European government acknowledges the problem:
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/women-ict

A policy change is needed particularly because of an alarming drop in ICT female graduates (today only 29 out of every 1000 female graduate have a computing or related degree, and only 4 go on to work in ICT-related activities).

If a company tries to push 13 hours or more on us (which is illegal, btw), they find themselves quickly without a programmer

Your examples are very nice to hear, but are they actually a general thing or just an exemption? I am happy to hear that 13-hour work days are not an issue for you, but most of the people I know are struggling with this issue. Do you have trusted working time? If not, you enjoy the typical legal protection that most workers enjoy, but with programming, the trend to shift to TWT has been very noticeable in larger corporations. You are quite lucky if you haven't found yourself facing the pressure from the boss to work more or leave.

The actual number of female engineers (who are still rare) did not go down.

I know that USSR, China employed very high share of female engineers - 40% and more (and Singapore even a very high share of female programmers, maybe also over 40 percent, but I can't be sure of that). I'm not sure the US ever employed such a high share, and I'm not sure Europe did so, too. So the development of the absolute number of female engineers is only interesting if it grew faster than the absolute number of the female workforce participants. Otherwise, only the declining share is interesting.

[LaCroix]

I do not have the time to mine all the data for you, but wikipedia has a nice table from eurostat for Females starting IT studies (German, but I know you speak it and for others, there is Google translate. Anyway, it's just a single table...). You can see a general reduction (work market is kind of bad, still, and usually women are worse off during these times, sadly, as they sometimes choose to focus on family, instead.), and worst reduction in countries with a general high unemployment rate. This is in part due to the fact that unlike other jobs, in IT an old experienced employee is not worse than a young and healthy one - the languages do change, but are easy to keep track of. Just the same, you cannot easily downsize IT. The work is planned in hours, so you know exactly how many people you need to code. You cannot change this, and if you aren't willing to increase project time accordingly (with the extra cost of not getting things done for a lot longer), you cannot downsize. Thus, IT jobs are usually a lot more stable and have less job openings in times of crisis.

This table shows the number of new students in Engineering in Germany. You see that there was a recent boost for men to go into engineering, but the ratio is pretty stable at 2:1.
As I said, the absolute number of female students did in fact increase. Sadly, the most important reason for this reduction in actual female coders is the wrong image of IT that you share and promote. Companies do fight tooth and nail to get this stereotype changed for the lack of IT personal keeps driving our rates up and hurts them. Usually, a female coder working the field is someone who knew a coder, and knew the image was wrong. In Austria, a lot of initiatives showing the reality of the work made the quota almost double, and we're still working on improving it.

About the work times. There are a few companies trying to force that times upon their employees (as my recent rant in venting about wage negotiations - these guys had to fold after the CEOs of companies like Siemens told them to cut this shit and behave in the interest of the field, which needs more people, not less). These are usually arseholes which are well known in the field and only a few people work longer than a few months for them (usually newbies who realize quickly they got into a hellhole). Still, working times over 12 hours are completely illegal in most of the EU (as well as routinely inspected, and you can sue the shit out of them, if they try to make you), and working times over 10 hours are in a grey area which is heavily regulated and controlled. So the working hours are just as regulated as in every other workplace.

[LaCroix]

I think I nneed to expan upon the specialities of the trade.

Why do you not want to exploit your coder and demand insane hours?

An older coder is very valuable, due to experience. After 15 years in the company, I can fix problems/create code in an hour that a newbie would need a day to even locate the spot he needs to work on. Losing an employee means that you would need to hire two or three others to get to the same productivity you had. Thus, you do not want to lose anyone.

That's why these scammer/slaver bosses are only found in small companies - they only do small and quick projects (weeks or a few months, top), all done on the green field, where these losses don't count that much. They also rarely service their code once it's out.

Second, a rushed coder produces bugs. A bug in a program WILL cost you a lot, one way or another. Usually by time losses whne your application grinds to a halt and nothing works. Sometimes, even worse - in the last half year, I saved my company (big insurance) a couple millions per year by finding some bugs which would have made them pay out a bit too much.

That's also a reason why these bad bosses are in small companies - their code usually sucks because of the bad treatment of coders, and they rarely have contact with the same customer ever again (because he will go to someone else to get replacement)

Because of this, companies have realized in the last decade that treating coders well results in a more cost-efficient product, even though it might cost a bit more.

[Terralthra]

Stas very quietly changed his argument from "Programmers are antisocial" to "the IT/programming field is dominated by males". Those...aren't the same thing, at all.

[K. A. Pital]

You know that I don't like to argue with anecdotes and personal examples, but I am open to statistics. I have not changed the argument - you were simply not following closely. Engineering and programming is not even "dominated by males" if you take a broad picture and include more than just the US and Western Europe, and I noted that - the inclusion of the Second World can dramatically alter the gender balance for this job.

The argument was that large corporations in developed economies would tend to encourage asociality and long working hours for this occupation, and this might be connected to the loss of interest from female candidates.

I admit that so far, I have not been able to find convincing evidence for such a link. I appreciate your attempt to speak for me, but please, I am perfectly capable of expressing myself without your help.

That's why these scammer/slaver bosses are only found in small companies...

Once again very happy for you and your nation of residence if that is so. Deutsche Bank is not a small company, neither are the Big Four and some other places I know.

Thanks for the MINT student stats link, and by no means is this debate over yet. I will find the time to dig through the numbers.

[K. A. Pital]

Now, to be more precise as to why I think overtime, gender imbalance and asociality are tightly connected: the IGDA survey (in 2004, I think) reported that only 2,4% of employees were not subjected to crunch with atrocious work times that stretch over 50 hours a week:
http://www.gameqol.org/discussions/2015 ... ife-survey

I am not sure game development is typical for software engineering in general, although I can attest that bank work environments, as well as those of the larger audit and financial services companies is quite similar to gamedev in regards to pressures, endless crunch demand and the prevalence of "trusted working time" contracts which mean no time tracking is present and therefore any occuring violations cannot be actually proven to the authorities. Unless you're willing to literally take your company to the courts with multiple witnesses, which is not as easy as reporting them to the overseeing bodies due to easily-found time-tracking records.

My general view of the situation (which can be wrong, of course) is that since the 1980s, the large companies put a lot of pressure on employees to work longer hours. This, among other factors, decreased the appeal of such jobs for women massively. It is no secret that women work fewer hours compared to men, they are not susceptible to overtime pressures (just look at the gender gap at the 43-55 hour mark, women are much less likely to have such a long working week), and they don't have a macho culture where overtime hours become a bragging topic. And so women were forced out of the trade in countries like US and UK.

So this was not some sort of benigh and objective process that had no relation to the pressures of the trade, and I'd be wary of attempts to claim otherwise.

I think that it is also quite alarming that women in engineering careers and STEM careers in general have had a very high percentage of never-married individuals (around 25% in general and at almost 30% for female computer specialists). Why is that so, if the profession was not coupled with demands that didn't allow women to pursue such a career and maintain a marriage at the same time?

[Purple]

If I might throw in my 2 cents, literally as I have two things to say.

1. K.A. Why is newer getting married a bad thing? I mean, it is if you are the kind of person that wants to get married. But if not it isn't. You keep bringing it up as if marriage = good is some sort of ultimate truth for everyone when in fact a lot of people just don't care about it. And it certainly isn't any sort of reflection of ones social life.

2. I think you both need to stop generalizing the entire field of software development as if it was a single block of jobs. Working conditions in any field are going to depend far less on the field it self than the geographical location of the job in question and the laws and culture associated with them. This is just as true for programers as it is for burger flippers. You can't just take an average across the entire human race, or even across more than a small clump of countries like that. Hell you can't even take an average across the EU or US and have it make sense.