Programming is Easy (part 1)
Check out this great call to programming for women, minorities, and everyone by one of our esteemed Hamptons Hackers, Marianne Bellotti @fspublishing.
Recipe for discussion about diversity in Tech: take one historically disenfranchised group, pull statistics on number of CS or engineer majors for said group, season to taste with calls for 1) more money 2) more formal education 3) thinly veiled accusations of discrimination in the Tech establishment.
Shake well.
And it might very well be true that if there were more formal programs and more money specifically for women and minorities we might actually have a tech industry that is not almost entirely homogenous. It might be true that if we had more girls receiving formal instruction in programming, we’d have more women programmers and a stronger technical presence in the startup scene. There might be some truth to starting girls young to cultivate life long love of tech.
On the other hand, the emphasis on formal education says to millions of women who want to get into tech but are past their college years that they’ve missed their shot. It reenforces the notion that writing code takes years of study in math and sciences. It sets people up for failure by making them think only super geniuses can teach themselves.
And that is definitely dead wrong. Programming is easy, everyone should do it.
