In the end, that’s what the result of GRLZ CAN 2 CODE and pushing more women into pseudo-programming degrees is going to be. Using their sex to sell software to real programmers. Consider the function of the “developer evangelist”:
Developer evangelists are definitely a different
breed. You have to, on the one hand, have the technical chops to be able to
code software, and on the other hand, have the ability to talk about it. I know
a lot of people that are knee deep in their technical savvy, but when it comes
to explaining it to someone who’s never used it before, they fall short. You
need someone that can not only walk the walk, but talk the talk and communicate
it to the community.Developer evangelists should also
be forward thinking. You need visionaries who can assess the developer
community and see how you should be steering the ship. Otherwise, the developer
program might not necessarily take off. Developer evangelists need to be community
focused. This means elevating the developer community. It means being present
and going out there and working with the developer community.
As
it happens, I was an developer evangelist back in 1990, back when Apple
first popularized the concept. The formal title on my card was
“Transdimensional Evangelist” and my job was to visit the various hardware
manufacturers and computer game developers and convince them that they should be focused
on 3D-acceleration hardware, not MPEG-decompression hardware, for their
next generation of video cards and games. I was initially unsuccessful, but as I had been telling them, the superior technology won out in the end. It may be almost impossible to imagine now, but at the time, the vast majority of the industry was convinced that accelerated 2D video was the future, because 3D was flat-shaded, processor-intensive, and ugly… never mind that one could do so much more with it.
Now, unlike
most “evangelists”, I was actively involved on the strategic development
side; as it happens, I was the individual solely responsible for a chip
designed for the CAD market also having the critical features required
for the game development community; namely, accelerated Gouraud-shading
and texture mapping. I even named the chip: the 3GA. It’s not an accident that Creative Labs didn’t hold the original trademark on “3D Blaster”. However, (and this
is the relevant part), I was under no illusion that being the industry’s
first evangelist for the inevitable move from 2D to 3D made me an engineer, much
less a chip designer.
You may recall that I’ve said one
reason women are unlikely to succeed in programming per se is because
they tend to have an allergy to being held responsible for their own work.
This is mere anecdotal evidence, not conclusive proof, but consider what
sort of “technical chops” are required for this “developer” to “walk
the walk”:
I’ve had issues where my code
didn’t necessarily compile on the first try, and it’s great, because, all
of a sudden, you see them trying to figure it out with you, and it becomes an
engaging activity, as opposed to walking through a bunch of slides.
Isn’t that great? When you can’t do your job on your own but can get someone to help you figure out how to do it? And isn’t that totally unexpected and not at all anticipated by anyone who is sufficiently familiar with the female approach to technological responsibility?
This
is not to say there isn’t a place for women in technology. Nor is there
anything wrong with saleswomen actually knowing what they are talking
about; in fact, this is actually a highly desirable development. But what is
wrong is the pretense that this is not the probable outcome of a computer science degree, or that the
evangelist, (which is a function that combines marketing and strategic
sales), is even performing a production-related job at all.
And this part cracked me up:
Right now, some of the most interesting mobile app developers I know are people who started programming just two years ago. But they’re able to plug stuff together now in such a way to make something that’s cool.
Developers who aren’t Gamma programmers and didn’t study computer science engineering at university are always the most interesting, are they not? And they must be bang-up programmers to have picked it up so quickly!