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Nerd bravado
Brad DeLong excerpts an article by Peter Lawrence suggesting that the predominance of men in certain creative and scientific fields arises in part because the personnel selection process emphasizes aggression and self-promotion.
(Personally, I suspect that Lawrence is underestimating the effect of overt sex discrimination in science because he's a biologist. In physics, at least in the US, it's much, much more obvious. But that's beside my point.)
Anyway, in DeLong's comments, somebody identifying himself as "George W. Bush" explains what he thinks is the real problem with women in technical fields (specifically in engineering), and it's kind of strange:
Granted, I didn't hack it as an academic physicist, so maybe you really need the crucial 25 hours in your hallucinatory vision quest to succeed in physics. But I think I've done pretty well and garnered a certain amount of respect in a software field since then (in particular, wherever I go I tend to accumulate a rep as a tenacious and prolific bug-stomper), and somehow this requirement to go for 25 to 30 never came up. The most heroic hackathons tend, on the outside, to be more like repeated 12-to-14-hour stints over a few weeks. There are people who will stay longer, but they're not necessarily the best programmers (certainly not the best at working with teams, which over the long haul is more important); they're typically just the youngest ones.
In my experience, when I am in one of these obsessive solitary jam sessions, getting several hours of sleep in the middle helps immeasurably. I may lose a logical thread or two and have to pick them up again, but, on the other hand, that can be good. The logical threads that I go down when I'm several hours past bedtime tend to be crazy bad ones, and letting my subconscious stew on the problem and coming back to it in the light of morning can help add in some lateral thinking.
If, on the other hand, he's right, it's fortunate that the really mission-critical engineering problems in this universe all happen to require between 25 and 30 hours of continuous work. If they required 48 or 72 hours, few people would be able to solve them at all and civilization would collapse.
Maybe I'm just reading him unsympathetically, and he's allowing breaks to sleep, decompress and have dinner, and is just adding up total hours until you "call for help, form a team," etc. It's true that, as a male-type guy with a few of the borderline autistic characteristics that Lawrence mentions, I tend to be loath to do that. But if that's what he means, I disagree that no women will do this, because I know and work with female software engineers who easily match or exceed me in solitary bulldog persistence.
The "gain the respect of your peers" part may well be true in some organizations, but, if that's true, that's a cultural problem: they're using obsessive hackathons that don't necessarily produce the best technical solutions as a kind of macho initiation ritual. I have a certain amount of mistrust for the idea that good coding and problem-solving comes from being tough enough.
(Personally, I suspect that Lawrence is underestimating the effect of overt sex discrimination in science because he's a biologist. In physics, at least in the US, it's much, much more obvious. But that's beside my point.)
Anyway, in DeLong's comments, somebody identifying himself as "George W. Bush" explains what he thinks is the real problem with women in technical fields (specifically in engineering), and it's kind of strange:
In every engineer's first 2 or 3 jobs, over the first 10 years of his career, there comes a time when he faces a _difficult_ problem. One which MUST be solved. And the only way to solve that problem is to sit down at the computer / pull up a stool in front of the machine / go out and walk the plant floor / search and search in the library * without stopping * until the problem is fixed.Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether this is actually true of female engineers, I find his initial premise about critical problems (particularly all those musts and onlys) hard to believe. I've never actually done any of these 25-hour stints; I always get some sleep after about 14 or 15 hours at the absolute most, maybe as much as 18 or 19 when I was in school.
And it is the nature of these problems that it usually takes 20 or 25 or 30 hours of * continuous * effort by the same person to arrive at a solution.[...]
Clearly you can only do this when you are in your 20s or early 30s. But you must do it at least once to be a successful engineer or engineering manager, and to gain the respect of your peers.
And women just won't do it. [...] The women give up at the 12 hours mark. Or at best 18 hours. They want to call for help, form a team, bring in consultants, get the manufacturer's field engineer in. Anything but stare at the problem for 25 hours until a solution appears.
Granted, I didn't hack it as an academic physicist, so maybe you really need the crucial 25 hours in your hallucinatory vision quest to succeed in physics. But I think I've done pretty well and garnered a certain amount of respect in a software field since then (in particular, wherever I go I tend to accumulate a rep as a tenacious and prolific bug-stomper), and somehow this requirement to go for 25 to 30 never came up. The most heroic hackathons tend, on the outside, to be more like repeated 12-to-14-hour stints over a few weeks. There are people who will stay longer, but they're not necessarily the best programmers (certainly not the best at working with teams, which over the long haul is more important); they're typically just the youngest ones.
In my experience, when I am in one of these obsessive solitary jam sessions, getting several hours of sleep in the middle helps immeasurably. I may lose a logical thread or two and have to pick them up again, but, on the other hand, that can be good. The logical threads that I go down when I'm several hours past bedtime tend to be crazy bad ones, and letting my subconscious stew on the problem and coming back to it in the light of morning can help add in some lateral thinking.
If, on the other hand, he's right, it's fortunate that the really mission-critical engineering problems in this universe all happen to require between 25 and 30 hours of continuous work. If they required 48 or 72 hours, few people would be able to solve them at all and civilization would collapse.
Maybe I'm just reading him unsympathetically, and he's allowing breaks to sleep, decompress and have dinner, and is just adding up total hours until you "call for help, form a team," etc. It's true that, as a male-type guy with a few of the borderline autistic characteristics that Lawrence mentions, I tend to be loath to do that. But if that's what he means, I disagree that no women will do this, because I know and work with female software engineers who easily match or exceed me in solitary bulldog persistence.
The "gain the respect of your peers" part may well be true in some organizations, but, if that's true, that's a cultural problem: they're using obsessive hackathons that don't necessarily produce the best technical solutions as a kind of macho initiation ritual. I have a certain amount of mistrust for the idea that good coding and problem-solving comes from being tough enough.
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(Anonymous) 2006-03-03 01:42 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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That's exactly
I should ask my big sister
I don't know how much success I can really claim in the software field, but I am one of the (ever-shrinking VM-using) world's leading authorities on CMS Pipelines, and I've definitely never pulled a 20-hour shift--at least, not out of necessity! Only compulsive curiosity can be strong enough to motivate something like that. Anyhow, the best and most respected programmers I've know have always been the ones who refuse to spend long hours on a problem, and then come back to it the next day or after lunch with a ten-second solution.
Oh, and it's absolutely not clear that you can only muster those 30-hour efforts before age 40. I've never been any kind of iron man, except in the stomach lining, but I can sit obsessed in front of the computer for at least as long now as I ever did.
Also how could he have blown such a perfect opportunity to mock some people's choices of schools as "Lo-Cal Tech"?
Re: I should ask my big sister
Go home, get some rest and some R&R, come back and tackle the problem anew. You'll be a lot less miserable and you may even end up with a better solution.
Re: I should ask my big sister
Amen to that (in other similar fields even). My thesis advisor was easily among the most respected mathematicians in the country, was insistent that getting 9 hours of sleep each night was a job responsbility of being a mathematician. On top of that, it was well known among his grad students that the most sure-fire way to excuse oneself from a mathematical discussion that was getting rather too long, was to need to go and eat.
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I'll quit and do something else while it's still percolating in there somewhere until an idea presents itself because I already know the mental exhaustion is coming soon which will make it wasted time on my part.
He's tried it my way to see if it helped by watching some mindless tv show that didn't require thought, doing something such as cooking, etc.
Whether or not it shaved any time off of the solution is debatable but he felt better for having taken the brief mental break from his usual direct *attack mode. Maybe it's a Mars/Venus thing in problem solving, who knows?
* I call it the attack mode but it's technically his viewpoint of meeting/beating the challenge. He views it more as a competition, I call it being stubborn. Yes, we're still married. :)
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I very much agree with this. In my experience the best thing to do if I'm really stuck on something is to go and tell someone else what the problem is. The act of trying to explain a problem somehow lets me shake loose a few new ideas, or even consider new approaches.
And we've all (maybe just me) been in the situation where you spend a day on the problem, leave work, get on the bus, *and* then have a bright new idea.
Maybe that's why we don't have quantum gravity
I have a few candidates for problems that might require 48 or 72 hours of intense, uninterrupted thinking to solve...
Re: Maybe that's why we don't have quantum gravity
Re: Maybe that's why we don't have quantum gravity
Sorry, it doesn't count unless you get published.
Re: Maybe that's why we don't have quantum gravity
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