Where is it written that men and women have to like the exact same things in the exact same percentages? Has anyone considered that the percentage of women in IT is low because *drumroll* Women find other professions more interesting / fulling? Do you like rhetorical questions? For instance, around 2011, 91% of all nurses were Women. And before you say "well, it's because Women are naturally nurturers", consider only 35% of Doctors are Female (http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/employment_occupations/cb13-32.html, http://www.yalemedlaw.com/2012/05/women-in-medicine-how-female-doctors-have-changed-the-face-of-medicine/). I don't see men launching music videos trying to get boys to put the GI Joes down and be nurses (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/a-viral-video-encourages-girls-to-become-engineers/?_r=0) How about let the women who want to be engineers be engineers without forcing it because you're OCD and can't stand an uneven split in the demographics.

Troll much? Last I checked, the whiteboard portion of the interview processes is still in style. Last I checked, asking people questions during an interview is still in style. Maybe you ask irrelevant questions, like why are manhole covers round -- and you somehow think that it is indicative of skill ... but for us, the demonstrable ability to solve basic programming problems without giving up in frustration is pretty important for a company that is hiring people to solve programming problems.

One example of the problems I ask all candidates is this softball: Write code (in any language, or in psudocode) that determines if a word is a palindrome. There is a very quick way of doing this (str == str.reverse) and then there is the writing of the actual algorithm. If someone gets the quick way first, they get bonus points, but we still ask to see the algorithm written out. When I asked this of the 15 - 20 women I have interviewed, I noticed they second guessed themselves too much, and got intimidated easily. They are not confident (dare I say egotistical?) and back track a lot when we ask them verbal questions.

It could be my experiences only, and there are of course men who are the same way, but what we look for is this: The ability to confidentially and quickly put something up on the board, look it over, realized you fucked up (because almost no one gets things right the first time), correct it, look it over again, realized you fucked up (because very few get it right on the second try), and correct it. Be done with it, then describe all of the other things you were thinking you could do with it. It shows you aren't pressured by mistakes, you own up to problems, quickly fix them, and think of ways to better it later on. This is a quality I don't find in the women I've spoken with (with one exception). It seems like they don't understand shit happens, no one is perfect, and that's what you have a debugger for.

Canon-faithful ?In this Interview, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLFPn6eyszY#t=277, Tim Russ says they want to go a different direction than anything we've seen so far.

So, there was a story recently on the unhirability of geezers. Now it's that there will be a huge vacuum when geezers leave tech to retired?

Blizzard will have to pay me to play this. I gave up on WoW after Cataclysm, but was looking forward to D3. The game was fun for a week. Once the cap was hit, it was just grinding and filling up your inventory with worthless loot. I gave them a chance after every patch that they promised to make it better. The Paragon system was interesting, though the initial time to get to level 100 was some astronomical amount of effort. It still didn't change the fact that at 100000% MF, you'd still have an inventory of things that you can't sell on the AH. Then for new players? Good luck if you want to buy anything. Everything costs 1m - 100bill. Only if you get lucky (which doesnt happen very much) can you buy loot .. unless of course you buy items or gold with real money. And that's the way they want it. Sorry Blizzard. You used to be awesome. Now you're just hopeless.

Totally. I am not knocking folks who enjoy that kind of game at all :) I think, if anything, is a pretty accurate simulation of what space would be like. Empty, quiet, not much action except on a few bases and sectors where there were resources. The newbie help channel was very beneficial -- the best community support in any game I've played (rightfully so, the UI is crazy). I was mostly speaking from a server technology standpoint. I marveled at how some random company could do better to handle user load than old guard Blizzard when it comes to MMOs, and I found the painful truth :)

Before I tried out Eve, I thought these epic space battles were technological breakthroughs. At the time, I was playing WoW was was restricted to 40 players and some mobs up at once. When I actually played Eve, I was quickly disillusioned. There are not many real-time controls in the game. You pick an action, then when the game decides when it's time, it executes it. It's a queuing system and it's nearly turn-based, like Civilization. You aren't controlling your space craft in real time. I am not as experienced as a lot of you guys are and you may have other input, but I quickly gave it up because it was boring as hell to do something then wait 10 seconds until it completed.

Don't you already put your address on the letters you send? How is this different than them looking at the letter and going to the origin location if something is awry?

Conflict of interest much, Google?

Blind Jimmy Jackson, NSA Agent for 10 years, can't positively identify you as a US Citizen because he can't see the monitor. That gives us the right to retain your data. PS. Do you know any blind people? We're looking to fill many positions here at the NSA!

Lunar Distance = 384,400km Venus comes as close as 38,000,000km (http://www.universetoday.com/14152/venus-distance-from-earth/) AKA, the asteroids came as close as Venus is to earth on it's shortest point. Hooray for sensationalism.

Monthly, $125k for me is:

• $6100 after taxes, health insurance, and 401k contributions
• $1550/mo cost of living (50/day food ($15 meal average after tip), public transportation ($4 - $6/day), coffee, $8/pack cigarettes, etc.)
• $365 (cable/electric/gas/phone)
• $1530 rent
• $600/mo for loans/credit card pay offs
• $500/mo for car insurance / gas/ tickets (no note)

Leaves $1555 for the other stuff .. like going out to bars, enjoying life, taking a vacation once in a while and having money to do it without touching savings, doctor visits, movies, concerts, buying new toys once in a while.

I'm not hurting, but when you consider that I save around $800/month, and the average cost of a house in SF is $735k, it would take 15 years to have enough money for just the 20% down payment in the present, which by then would be probably only 12% of the total cost of the house. Also you have to consider my rent is really cheap as it is rent controlled. Apartment seekers here are faced with 1 bedroom rents of $2000 and up, and 2 bedrooms at $3k or more, if they can even find a place .. and it is going up even more because of guys like me that aren't completely priced out of getting a place.

125k is OK for me. It's not enough for a person who wants to live in the city and have a social life and doesn't want to live with 5 other people in a 1200 sqft place, and who has aspirations of buying a house here.

If you make $80k in tech in SF, you better be living with 5 other people and eating ramen noodles. I'm at $125 and I feel it is pretty low. I get the luxury of living by myself in a rent controlled $1500/mo 1.5 bedroom .. that is pretty much the only splurge I have. Everything else goes to pay off loans, parking tickets, and the cost of living in the city. I know guys here that are Sr. Software Engineers making $180k. The average for in my group of friends for Senior Rails or Java dudes is around $140k.

There are Javascript "engineer" positions going for 160k/yr in SF, and I know many folks making 150k-160k as Senior engineers, http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/eng/3343883515.html