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Re:On Technical Entitlement by jerf on Friday June 29, 2012 @07:13PM (#4179647)
This sounds a lot more like the problem than entitlement.

But nothing can be done about it. Getting professionals in the field to be more respectful of women? Can be done. Making efforts to reach out in elementary schools earlier and get girls more interested in tech at an early age? Sure. Great stuff. Getting teenaged boys to stop swaggering at each other, especially in front of the girls? Like stopping the tide from coming in. Never going to happen.

No sarcasm, no cynicism. You can't make teenage boys not be teenage boys. People have been trying for a long time for reasons a lot better and more numerous than this.

It may help to be less intimidated, though, to point out that while swaggering at each other, teenage boys can often be... shall we say... less than truthful? I've been programming since I was about nine... if by "programming" you mean stringing together some GOTOs and PRINTs in BASIC. I didn't really start programming programming until college. But rest assured teenage-boy me isn't exactly going to fill in the less-than-flattering details of my tech experience while claiming to have been programming since I was nine.

(Oh... and... don't try to throw this fact back in the teenaged boy's face. Whatever will happen, it won't be fun for anyone. Just keep it in the back of your head, share it as needed.)

Re:On Technical Entitlement by slaundy on Friday June 29, 2012 @08:57PM (#4179993)
If the problem is something inherent in the male constitution, then why don't we see this disparity across all majors?
Re:On Technical Entitlement by jerf on Saturday June 30, 2012 @09:10AM (#4181526)
The vast bulk of majors either lacks the ability to get into it so early ("I've been civil engineering since I was 9!"), women get into them just as easily ("I've been into biology for a while now"), or it sounds really lame when you brag ("I've been making lumps of indistinguishable chemicals with chemistry sets since I was nine"). I wouldn't be surprised there's a couple of others that have at least a trace of this problem.
Re:On Technical Entitlement by Tichy on Friday June 29, 2012 @08:09PM (#4179848)
I don't think if somebody says "I have been programming since age 9" people assume that age 9 that person was engineering a huge enterprise project employing TDD.
Re:On Technical Entitlement by mgkimsal on Friday June 29, 2012 @10:35PM (#4180256)
100% correct.

Much like someone learning a foreign language from an early age, or growing up in a bilingual house. Even if this was the case, we don't expect that the person is saying they were a great writer, orator or debater at age 11.

I started programming at 9. What I mean when I say that is I was able to think about problems, data, logical rules and how to break those down in to something a computer could understand, usually in BASIC (much later 6502 assembly). True, I wasn't programming enterprise apps, but the foreign language thing feels like it rings true to me.

If I was looking for a translator, I'd prefer someone who was a native speaker their whole life, or someone who'd been studying from an early age. Someone who took "spanish I" at a community college 3 years ago, and perhaps visited Spain last summer .... they might be able to do the translation, but it likely won't be as comprehensive and nuanced as someone who's lived with that language for a lifetime.