Yes, dentists are well paid - eventually - but they start earning late, a few years after a software dev, they have a much larger school debt to pay off, and just like a software dev, the early years don't pay so well.

You can't just look at peak earning power, but at lifetime earnings at a given age, and it takes a long, long time for a dentist or doctor to pull ahead. BTW, you can certainly make $300k as a software dev at a big company - that's common for tech track paygrades equivalent to a second-level manager at the big names. Of course, there are far fewer such positions than there are dentists in America, and for someone capable of both I'd recommend dentistry, but the gap isn't as big as you might think.

Coding jobs can be easily outsourced to wherever the going rate for labor is cheapest.

SOME coding jobs can be, but many cannot - there is aways going to be a market for good coders that pays far above minimum wage, and is also vastly more enjoyable than most other jobs.

At the very least we should not steer people away from a career than can be very enjoyable, even if you are right about pay dropping (which I see no sign of for good coders)...

I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't push girls into programming exactly but we should present appealing options for them to learn (like all girl coding camps), just for the sake of more women making a more informed choice as to what to study in college.

He's just saying that making the choice to be home-maker should be just as valid for women as any other choice they could make. And he's right; it's not even close currently, as many look down on "homemaker" almost as much as they would "prostitute" or "stripper".

Why should choosing to be a home-maker be a choice any less honorable? And YES that also goes for Men, though if you think about it there's less of a societal stigma for men becoming a house maker than a woman!

Pretty sure the "brogrammer" is a creature wholly found in Silicon Valley (MAYBE NYC). As you say in practice I've never found a professional programmer that comes close to this.

If you think about it it only makes sense that fracking in America creates underground pressures which *must* force volcanos to erupt worldwide to alleviate the pressure. Frackers Drilled, Volcanoes Killed!

Look for my paper on this in Science next month. It contains MANY data points which took me ages to fabri---er, collect.

And why on earth would I want to do that? Facebook has nothing of value to offer me that I care about

Well apparently now it does, or you wouldn't be complaining.

ProTip: It's not like you need to give Facebook any real data to sign up, and you can access it in privacy mode to thwart tracking cookies.

"IT" is a crap career no one should enter. Answering calls on the helpdesk? No thanks - well, better than starving, but so are a lot of things. But we were talking about software development

Check out the hours lawyers work, or the oncall duties as a surgeon (or a vet - but dentists, that's the job!). It's not the hours that's the problem, it's the lack of dignity of the profession. When the field was doubling every few years, that meant most software developers were in their 20s, and management could get away with treating all of us like college students. My work environment is more like a dorm room or college lab than a professional office environment - that's what we need to push back against.

As far as pay, after your first 5 or so years in the field, jobs that pay well are there for the taking, though you may need to move to where the work is. If you're past your apprenticeship in the field and you're not making at least 1.5x the national median income, you're likely at a bottom-tier employer: shop around. While we may top out lower than the doctors and lawyers, they don't hit peak earning potential until later in life - a doctor or dentist is typically in his 40s before lifetime earnings net of school costs put him ahead of a plumber or other skilled tradesman.

Personally, I think many women are put off by the limited social interaction involved in the job, or at least that's my theory for why so many female software developers choose career advancement into management or product management over the dev tech track.

OK, but that's been true for 400 years, and isn't actually a barrier to retirement. You've IMO correctly understood the rules of the game, and under those rules anyone can retire on his own wealth, needing only to invest enough of his after-tax pay every year. I've been living on half my after-tax pay for 15 years now, and in another 5 or so I'll have the option to retire (though continuing to work would certainly improve that standard of living). You don't need to be nearly so frugal as "half" if you have 30 years instead of 20.

Good point all. I was thinking of a slow cooker, I've not used a pressure cooker for a while and knew the lids required sealing, but I could have sworn in the past the pressure cooker my mom used when I was a kid had a clear lid.

I guess it never occurred to you that, no matter how "personal" the nature of the typical Facebook account, those same people have plenty going on that they don't want made public.

Ar you sure? Why are you sure? There is absolutely zero indication that a large majority of people really care.

You need to back up your assertion with something beyond your own supposition - I have illustrated that many, many people post very private stuff all the time. Where is the equally large scale indications of people trying to hide anything?

If your gasoline powered car smells, something is wrong with it.

Not if you just filled it up and some gas spilled... that's not impossible or uncommon/

Someone with mod points please mod this up - it's seemingly the only non-trolling post for this whole story. This is exactly the stuff we should be discussing here - agree or not with the conclusion, this is the rational topic at hand.

Did you know most domestic violence in initiated by women? Did you know that by far lesbian relationships have more physical abuse than any other gender pairing? Abused men are just SOL - why do you need support or a shelter? Just man up! Perhaps not an argument for rationality, I'll grant you.

Or, just maybe, we could teach children of both sexes that it's a harsh fucking world out there, and if you don't learn the skills needed for a good job, your life will suck forever. No? Well, the social pendulum will swing back that way eventually, from the opposite extreme we're at now, and once that happens you won't need much to get everyone interested in fields that pay really well, and won't be displaced by automation.

MoFo is expert at making excuses for architectural deficiencies that slay the UX but have 15-year-old bugs on them because "that touches a lot of code". And fostering an environment where that's A-OK. In the time that Mozilla's not been able to get async tasks out of the UI thread, Elon Musk has build a spaceship company that's gone to the ISS and landed a rocket back to Earth. It's either a lack of engineering discipline or absurdist leadership - hard to say which or both but no for-profit firm would tolerate such complacence.