Computer Science Just Isn't Easy (Score 1)

If you would be so kind as to listen to my experience as someone who went through a computer science program (and completed it with a degree) in the late 00s, I'd appreciate it. The one thing I learnt, is that computer science and tech is difficult, yet everyone wants to do it. I was fortunate enough to get into a relatively high end private university. However, at the start, computer science courses were absolutely filled to the brim with people. Males, females, different races, etc The majority were there to do things like make games and other basic things. They weren't in it to learn how computers work, to do low level stuff, etc. My courses were filled all the way up for computer science for 100 level courses. 35 people with a wait list. And do you know what happened after those 100 level courses were over and people just had things like writing sorting algorithms in C and programming in x86 and SPARC assembly that wanted to make games or some sort of app to get rich easy? They all bailed. The end of the program, I had courses that got cancelled because there weren't enough people there. The university I chose was different from the others, they had a more academic approach still and wanted to teach you how computers worked. It was academia and not a school to teach you how to get a job. And it was a bloodbath of people failing out of computer science. Men, women, Whites, Asians, Blacks, etc.They all bailed so hard when they realized things were not what they wanted. Ironically enough, by the end of the program, there were a significant amount of females left in my small sample size of a program, however, the White ones were nearly gone and all that were left were Chinese students from abroad and some local Asian females. To be completely honest, as a white male, I was in the minority by a huge margin. As mentioned in this thread, women are more than capable of sciences. They do very well in fields like biology. Tech is just not an easy field and people flee it like crazy. You have to keep up with things, it's always changing. If you learn biology, it takes a long time for things to change due to evolution. If you learn math, well it rarely changes. People don't go back and make addition obsolete. It has zero to do with women's ability in comparison to men or anything and it has to do with people just failing at the programs in general. Does no one remembers the whole "how can we get the next generation more into computer science?" thing that was going on years ago? Well, the solution was to lower the bar and make computer science into "write some Java applications, well it doesn't even work but here's a B" But that's not the case with computer science and tech in general. And that makes it a far more difficult field to get into, for everyone. Not just women. Not just minorities. But EVERY SINGLE PERSON. I think people are confusing maliciously denying certain people opportunities with the field being a difficult one that most will fail in, regardless of race, gender, etc. Proof of this is that this group of people generally is complaining that minorities don't have an advantage, yet Asian people are ahead in tech so far that universities like UCLA will shy away from admitting them because they already have too many. Which brings me to the next point that changing tech fields to be more accomodating to people who aren't up for the task is only going to leave us behind. We have places like Tokyo where the Japanese are literally breeding to make genetically superior babies and they're extremely competitive. We have places like Vietnam pushing computer science education from an extremely early age. The rest of the world is pushing people further and if they can't make it, tough. The West, specially the USA, feels compelled to lower standards and requirements to make things more accomodating. I took a course at public university just for extra eduction (and ironically enough my professor was another Asian Female), and I got to experience the watered down computer science programs that have been coming. In fact, I did so well in the course (which was 300 level undergrad), I made over 100% in the course. It consisted of people looking at League of Legends streams most of the session, browsing Facebook, etc. The course was also filled up. I contrasted it with my other school with a more traditional approach to computer science, and everyone would be taking notes and working hard. To me, and I could be wrong, that was lowering the bar to make things more accessible to people instead of telling them they aren't cut out for it. And it was horrifying to see these kids going to get degrees with the skills they had. You can only lower so many bars. Once you start lowering them in the workplace, companies wonder why they have to stay in the USA to meet quotas of unskilled or underqualified people. Why spend all this effort for H1B visas when you can just move overseas and have skilled and qualified workers? But the point to take away is that tech is not an easy field and a lot of people fail at it regardless of what they are physically. I got to watch people fail at computer science first hand, and most people wouldn't accept responsibility for not being bright enough to do it. They'd almost always blame something, the professor, the school, the textbooks, etc. It's just that there's a very vocal group of people who failed at tech that decided to blame what they were born as. And then they rush to stats that show that a field doesn't represent the national population's demographics and jump to the conclusion that it's because something is holding them down. Why don't fields like excavation, construction, various labor, etc see people complaining about unfair representation? Because this debate is not about unfair representation, otherwise they would be more concerned with other less desirable fields. There are people who didn't make it in tech because they weren't smart enough, so they're trying to get based on what they were born as instead of what they're able to do. And the rest of the world still is "old fashioned" I guess in thinking that what you can do is most important. And before someone comes out and starts going off about victim blaming or some crazy thing, I'm referring to everyone I've seen fail at computer science, including the much dreaded straight CIS white males. What's happening is women are failing to make inroads to tech, just like every other person in the world (specially those who think computer science is making sweet games), yet they don't own up to it and blame something else. Let me ask you this. Have you ever seen one of these extremely vocal females, minorities, etc, push themselves into a place they weren't successful in tech and then become successful? I've NEVER seen it. The people with talent, regardless of gender or race, are already working in the field. If this was really about discrimination, we'd be seeing people move into tech companies and dominate what the men are doing and making them obsolete. Instead, we have companies like Intel spending $300 million to hire unqualified people to fill quotas. I'm sorry, feminists, but hiring unqualified people just to fill quotas is far more damaging to the reputations of those being hired to fill those quotas, as it's saying they're just there for decoration and they aren't capable of actually doing the jobs. Remember that quote by Carmack regarding why the Oculus team was so white and male? He basically went "we don't care, we can't find qualified people regardless of what you are. We just want meat bags that can do what we need". Spending $300 million to hire people and push unqualified people through the education system isn't going to fix anything. It's just going to make the HR departments more eager to throw away resumes because there's more junk to sift through.