Re:The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM
by electrograv on Monday February 19, 2018 @08:34AM
(#16412745)
Obviously I cannot speak for others, but for me tech and coding was and still is inspired almost entirely by the “mathematical beauty” and “creative” aspects of the tech itself; it has little to nothing to do with pay, social reasons, or anything else.
It really does involve a lot of “staring at a screen” (or paper/whiteboard brainstorming) though, and just talking about it excites me, still — it’s the intellectual/mathematical beauty and creative potential of what is being sketched on those “authoring mediums” that is so very stimulating.
When I first started coding, I was 8 years old, and I didn’t even know the first thing about whether this field would pay well, whether it would be socially engaging, etc. In fact to some extent I was actively doscourage from it, rather than joining the family gardening business (manual labor care of plants — just not for me).
None of the circumstantial reasons for or against programming mattered to me. It was the coding, the very process of staring at a screen with complex patterns and ideas as they’re authored, that excited me. It still does; creating beautiful code that does intricately complex things, that all work correctly every single time to produce the designed results, feels almost like being a modern day wizard creating magic.
Because the work itself is intrinsically motivating, it never gets old, and no amount of social pressures could sway me away from doing this.
It really does involve a lot of “staring at a screen” (or paper/whiteboard brainstorming) though, and just talking about it excites me, still — it’s the intellectual/mathematical beauty and creative potential of what is being sketched on those “authoring mediums” that is so very stimulating.
When I first started coding, I was 8 years old, and I didn’t even know the first thing about whether this field would pay well, whether it would be socially engaging, etc. In fact to some extent I was actively doscourage from it, rather than joining the family gardening business (manual labor care of plants — just not for me).
None of the circumstantial reasons for or against programming mattered to me. It was the coding, the very process of staring at a screen with complex patterns and ideas as they’re authored, that excited me. It still does; creating beautiful code that does intricately complex things, that all work correctly every single time to produce the designed results, feels almost like being a modern day wizard creating magic.
Because the work itself is intrinsically motivating, it never gets old, and no amount of social pressures could sway me away from doing this.