Pandemonium reigned

This book is my midlife crisis.

I got divorced at the age of 40. Leaving a bad marriage enabled me to enjoy a crisis of identity that led to the success of Backstage, which in turn prompted me to write this book.

But why write this book now, at this age and stage of my life? I used to be able to write to entertain, but then I went to grad school and learned to write in a formal, academic style. I wondered if I had permanently dulled those neural pathways that were involved in writing goofy short stories when I was younger, especially the one that ended up giving the kids in my high school something else to make fun of other than my intense social awkwardness, lankiness, glasses, and braces?

This excerpt is from the book Lord of the Files, published by Thought Pilots.

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What the bleep should we know!?

You can work for me if you can answer one simple question.

David Parnas was once asked what he thought was the most often overlooked risk in software engineering. His answer was “incompetent programmers.... One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.”[1]

That was harsh. As usual, though, he is correct.

At this point in my life I think I must have interviewed over 300 candidates for various positions in software development. I have hired dozens of co-op students, and made the hiring decisions on countless permanent positions. I have also fired three people. I only had employees at Backstage from 2005 to 2010, so why all this experience in hiring and firing? Somewhere early on in my career it became known that I was good at the difficult job of appraising the technical skills of applicants. Because of this skill, my previous employers asked me to become intimately involved in the process of assessing the talent of potential employees.

The technical screening interview consists of a twenty minute conversation where I attempt to verify that the applicant is competent, and that his or her resume is, in fact, truthful. Depending on the position we were hiring for, I had managed to boil the interview down to one simple question—answer it, and you could work for me. It was rather disheartening how many computer scientists were unable to answer it correctly.

This excerpt from the forthcoming book Lord of the Files is brought to you by Thought Pilots. Join the discussion on Facebook.

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[1] Nancy Eickelmann, “ACM Fellow Profile: David Lorge Parnas,” ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 24 (3), 1999.

Nobody ever got laid for buying IBM equipment

Where are all the babes? The dearth of women in our industry is examined from the perspectives of the female reproductive imperative and the systematizing male brain hypothesis.

I chose to major in computer science for two reasons: money, and I was good at it. As a teenager in the early 1980s, everyone kept telling me “computers—now that’s where the future is headed!” and “computers is where the good jobs will be!” I felt a bit like Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate, only computers had displaced plastics as the one word to remember. While I didn’t end up seduced by a cougarific Mrs. Robinson, I did notice that the advertised salaries for computer programmers in the weekly careers section of the Vancouver Sun would invariably make my girlfriend very horny. The promise of lots of money was getting me lots of honey.

But to be honest, I really wanted to be a physicist with expertise in acoustics so that I could grow up to design concert halls. However, in my first semester at university I got a D in physics and an A in computer science, and my path was chosen. Since people like to do what they are good at, and since I am people, I stuck with computer science. It was a good fit for me because I enjoyed it, and it seemed incredibly easy. If there was ever an academic pursuit that was uniquely designed for the way my brain worked, it was computer science.

I once asked my class at Camosun College why they had chosen to major in computer science. This was the year 2001, and I had become slightly exasperated with trying to teach data structures and algorithms to a group of adults who did not seem to share my love for the topic. Indeed, many of my students were only there because the job prospects had seemed so promising just two years earlier. The best response I received to the question was from a young man sitting in the back row, who sarcastically exclaimed “I’m here for the babes!”

Why are there so few women in computer science? For many universities, this seems to have replaced does P = NP as the single greatest research challenge facing computer science departments throughout North America. I respectfully submit this essay as my take on the situation. Cautiously, and without judgement, I think there are two leading causes:

1. the lack of attractive male mating partners in our industry is at odds with women’s biological imperative for reproduction: women are just not attracted to repressed, unkempt, socially awkward, high functioning nerds with Asperger’s; and,

2. computer science is particularly suited to those endowed with a systematizing brain, which women tend not to have, but is usually found in men—especially the repressed, unkempt, socially awkward, high functioning nerds with Asperger’s.

Taken together, these two reasons conspire to ensure that women choose not to pursue careers as software engineers.

This excerpt is from the book Lord of the Files, published by Thought Pilots.

Want more? Buy it today at CreateSpace.

Join the discussion on Facebook.