> The analogy that programmers “build things” is just that—your typical programmer is certainly not cut out to be a construction worker.

Building things is not just construction though. I mean, your average clock maker is not qualified to plumb a bathroom, but that doesn't mean he's not making things.

I don't have an opinion on this, but the idea that programmers aren't building something is a bit silly.

Programmers build things the same way garment-makers build things with sewing machines and needles.

Construction worker may do even less engineering design work than garment-makers do.

Right... garment workers do build things. That's the point.... building is not just making structures. It's production in general.

>Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming?

Programming jobs often involve extremely minimal face to face interactions

I've spent the last 15 years of my life working with engineering teams, hundreds of them, and I've never met a single one that worked this way. The opposite thing is true, unless you're fixated on literal in-the-same-room face-to-face interactions, in which case, what's your point?

You think programmers spend more time having face to face (as opposed to face to computer) interactions than people in health care, child care, social work, or education?

I don't believe the distinction between face-to-face and screen-to-screen is at all relevant. But: the programmers I work with spend lots of time in meetings, too.

Why don't you believe there can be any relation between female infants preference towards faces and female adults preference towards occupations with more face to face, people oriented interactions?

I don't, but I also don't care to debate it, and don't need to, because, once again, face-to-face interactions are also extremely common in professional software development.

Not common enough, it seems. As a former software developer, the mental isolation was one of the main reasons why I changed professions, and I feel much better for it.

Deep contemplation of technical problems while staring at a screen and talking to computers for hours on end often made talking to people after work exceedingly difficult

You’ve a skewed perception of “extremely common”. There are many jobs where pretty much the entire job is dealing with people - doctor, lawyer, clerk, marketer, teacher, ... in contrast, programmers can get a lot of stuff done (except coordination) just with computers.

And some of us like it that way.

This seems like shifting rationalization to me. They used to say women don’t want to be lawyers because it’s too much confrontation. Now women are well represented in law because it’s people oriented. Moreover, corporate law firms are 50% women, but that work is even more solitary than programming in a corporate environment. (Having done both myself.) You’re sitting in your office alone reviewing documents, writing briefs, or doing due diligence ten times as much as you’re in court or talking to clients.

Also, if programming is solitary as you suggest, why do tech companies discourage remote work and insist on culture fit, team building, collaborative work spaces, etc.? Much more so than law firms.

I've wondered about that. I think its part the youth culture of programming. Have to be in the clique to be acceptable. Counteracting the isolation of the programming process, with rules to try and create social interaction in the group.

The core activity of software engineering, programming, writing code, is a solitary activity. It's what people think of when they think of programming. It's what we spend hours being trained for, getting good at. Yes, in between writing software, we need to coordinate with others, so we have meetings. You'd really describe this overall process as being more people-oriented than thing-oriented?

I've heard the argument that somehow "actual coding is a relatively small part of being a software engineer," but unless you're a manager (of which there are many more women), the thing you're being trained for, the thing you spend most of your time doing, and the basis of how people perceive the profession, is sitting in front of a computer coding. You can describe any profession as people-oriented on the basis that one needs to work with others, but the key question is whether the basic activity of the job is a social one.

Regardless of whether the people-vs-thing distinction is significant or not, it seems inaccurate in a big-picture way to describe programming as people-oriented. Like, that's not what people mean when they draw that distinction.

Does this apply to other solitary activities, like writing prose (majority women), painting and drawing, poetry, creating clothes & other fashion?

According to research[1], on average, men tend to be more utilitarian while women tend to be more expressive; so your examples seem to be in accordance with those differences. Social nature is quite nuanced, so any one particular variable cannot be used to totally explain everything.

[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-...

Ime this is completely untrue.

The purpose of the faces/trucks data point is just to illustrate that these differences start from birth. The larger argument is that the people-vs-things gap, and later, interest in computers specifically, basically remains stable throughout childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...

I don't even know if the data is ready for us to draw any conclusions, but at the very least it seems to me we should find this to be an extremely interesting pattern, and use it to motivate hypotheses.