A close friend of mine recently graduated from college. She was quickly offered a couple of programming jobs, but turned them down. After a while, she altogether stopped applying for any programming jobs. Finally, after one year of searching, she found a (non-programming) consulting job that she jumped onto. When I asked her why she avoided programming so much, she said that spending 8+ hours a day interacting with just a computer was close to her personal idea of hell. She likes to interact with people, meet new people etc.
Now granted this is just one data point. But, for me at least, it opens the door to a different hypothesis:
1. Women have a significantly different nature of the work / salary trade-off from men.
2. Reduced interaction with people is a put-off for women.
3. Thus, only half of society is really willing to do the geekiest tech-sector jobs, which puts a premium on the salaries for those jobs.
This sort of thing also tells me that people have an incorrect notion of what our work is really like. As a senior developer, I spend quite a bit of time interacting with people: discussing the problems our customers have; how we can make our product better; how I can make other coworker's jobs easier; how my systems will interact with other components; reviewing proposals, feature requests, and requirement documents and providing feedback to help refine them; reviewing other developers' code and mentoring junior members of the team.
I absolutely _don't_ spend 8 hours just interacting with a computer. I won't argue that there aren't any jobs in the field like that; and, in fact, entry-level positions do tend more towards "just implement this spec". But I think it's misleading to give people the idea that there is no human interaction involved in our jobs.
Comments
A close friend of mine recently graduated from college. She was quickly offered a couple of programming jobs, but turned them down. After a while, she altogether stopped applying for any programming jobs. Finally, after one year of searching, she found a (non-programming) consulting job that she jumped onto. When I asked her why she avoided programming so much, she said that spending 8+ hours a day interacting with just a computer was close to her personal idea of hell. She likes to interact with people, meet new people etc.
Now granted this is just one data point. But, for me at least, it opens the door to a different hypothesis:
1. Women have a significantly different nature of the work / salary trade-off from men. 2. Reduced interaction with people is a put-off for women. 3. Thus, only half of society is really willing to do the geekiest tech-sector jobs, which puts a premium on the salaries for those jobs.
This sort of thing also tells me that people have an incorrect notion of what our work is really like. As a senior developer, I spend quite a bit of time interacting with people: discussing the problems our customers have; how we can make our product better; how I can make other coworker's jobs easier; how my systems will interact with other components; reviewing proposals, feature requests, and requirement documents and providing feedback to help refine them; reviewing other developers' code and mentoring junior members of the team.
I absolutely _don't_ spend 8 hours just interacting with a computer. I won't argue that there aren't any jobs in the field like that; and, in fact, entry-level positions do tend more towards "just implement this spec". But I think it's misleading to give people the idea that there is no human interaction involved in our jobs.
Yes, but when you first take the job you'll spend at least a couple of years dealing mainly with just the computer.