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Comment Re:Mob Programming, huh? (Score 1) 126

Keep in mind that human beings are pretty good at creating a shared mental context of their conversation

You also assume a certain amount standard knowledge and understanding among the peers in order to have a "shared mental context". Depending with whom I am talking, I may need to dumb down my vocabulary or complexity of ideas. If I toss out the phrase "scalable lockless eventually-consistent datastructure", it is going to WHOOSH over 99% of the people I talk to. Now I need to spend several days trying to get someone up to speed with the concept, but they probably won't fully understand a lot of what I'm talking about for months or ever. They're not less smart than me, they just don't have the obsession required to maintain the attention to detail required to understand some advanced topics.

I know 1, maybe 2, people at work I can talk with at full capacity, and we can tear through ideas quickly. We don't "brogram", but we do go to each other with a well thought out issues and present pros, cons, and random thoughts. I work with many bright programmers who do a great job, but most of them are "normal" intelligent people. Not nearly as obsessed as a small handful of us. There is a huge gap between an intelligent person who can program and a probably equally intelligent person who has been programming since a young child and can tell you almost exactly what is going on under the hood networks, CPUs, thread schedulers, memory allocators, garbage collectors.

I've done my fair share of nonintuitive optimizations that result in slower micro-benchmarks, but faster macro-benchmarks. Maybe using a struct instead of an object shows as being slower in a micro-benchmark because you're copying around more data, but the macro-benchmark shows up faster because the random memory access caused by objects is thrashing the cache and the struct has better locality with fewer evictions.

Maybe your simple lock looks to be faster, but has horrible scaling under high contention.
Maybe allocating objects looks plenty fast, but putting pressure on the garbage collector is invoking many stop worlds which is hampering your thread scaling
Maybe your SQL query optimizer is showing you that a column is causing a scan, so you want to index it, but if you rearranged your query, you could do without the index all together.

Of course most of their programs work just fine and don't need these levels of understanding, but there is a reason why my programs seem to just work so well. They're quite thought out, from top to bottom.

Comment Re:No National Center for Men & Tech...? (Score 1) 473

That could be said of anyone. Add some optional easier starting classes. I guess I assumed the boys knew more because they started self learning at a young age. Many high end Universities have something like 50%-80% drop out rates in their CS 101 classes because it is so hard, with no option to minor in CS. Considered one of the hardest courses, worse than many other STEM fields.

Comment Re:No support for dynamic address assignment?!? (Score 1) 287

Also, even with DNS it would be a PITA to change all the records to point to new IPs.

Mine just works. Out of the box, Stock PFSense picks up the machines name and adds it to the DNS records. My 5 year old wireless $40 printer even works with DNS and no configuration at all on my part.

Comment Re:No support for dynamic address assignment?!? (Score 1) 287

Just you wait. ICANN is changing policies and will soon start taking back IP blocks from people and drastically raising prices. Need a /24 so you can multi-home? Too bad! We can't be wasting those large IP blocks, yoink. Well shit, your company no longer has failover. Get ready.

Comment Re:What about low-income boys? (Score 1) 473

I forgot to mention, I had to put myself through college, which involved skipping meals, eating cheap ramen, and making a 5Lb bag of unshelled peanuts last until next paycheck as my lunch and sometimes dinner. My co-workers regularly offered me their left overs. I lived in an apartment with black mold issues, but I didn't complain because the rent was cheap, even that I could barely afford.

Yes, what a lavish lifestyle.

Comment Re:What about low-income boys? (Score 1) 473

For me, graduating with a 3.6 in a programming that my Uni has a multi-decade 100% job placement with an average fresh out of colleges starting wage of $60k-$80k. In mind to late 2008(recession), I was inundated with job offers after graduation that would have placed me above the median household incoming for any of the cities where the jobs were located.

So yes, getting a 4.0 means you're out of poverty and above the median household income for your personal income.

Comment Re:It never dawns on women... (Score 1) 473

Therefore, it is a cultural thing and I doubt that it will improve any time soon.

We already have a flood of bad programmers, why do we want more? Your "facts" only show that there is more demand or more monetary desire for women in STEM in those other countries. More modern research is showing that the percentage of women who actually WANT to do STEM is actually very close to what the USA has for current percentages. It's also a note of interest that the percentage of women who want to do STEM is identical in all countries and cultures.

The initial research was done by a collaboration of some very prestigious universities, but they did say that while they feel confident in their findings, more research from different angles must be done on the subject.

We don't need more STEM, we need more good STEM. Don't push women into the fields, just don't hold them back. While we at it, lets get rid of this surplus of idiots.

Comment Re:No National Center for Men & Tech...? (Score 1) 473

Sometimes I think people just want to complain. There was a "gender discrimination" article about CS a while back that garnished a lot of attention. The funny thing it started with the father talking about how smart and interested his daughter was in CS, but ended with her dropping out because it was too hard and all of the boys already knew most of the material coming into the class. I suddenly lost all sympathy.

It was probably a bad example of what women are experiencing, but the amount of attention and community support made me question the rational. She couldn't compete, that's all there is to it.

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