> > society does not prepare females for failure. Male children are almost
> > required to play on athletic teams, until a generation female
> > athletics
> > was discourgaged. Failure (losing) is part of athletics, the coachs
> > extols their charges, "forget what happened and just try harder."
> >
> hmm, interesting observation, urb, and not the first time i've heard
> this. but there are types of competition other than sports -- I was on
> the debate team, competed at state level. extemperaneous speaking; same.
> one-act play; same. are those kind of competitions still available? it's
> not exactly the same -- more like basketball round-robin finals, but
> there is still the possiblity of loss.
I've heard this too, an I'd would have to agree, having worked with
some rather prickly female types.
Programming is mostly about failure. Programs are buggy, the ideas
they are built upon are often half baked, or totally bogus. And so often,
when you are half way there, management moves your foundation spec out
from under you, requiring you decide whether to start over, or warp your
code. (HINT: START OVER!!!)
If you want to succeed at programming, you have to make prototypes,
question the assumptions of others, and just be... in some sense, paranoid
about the functionality of what commands and data will be thrown at your
program, as well as the functionality of your code. The stuff you build
will not work, till YOU find all the mistakes you made!
So if a person is prickly about critiques, about discussing options
before committing to a path, etc., as a lot of girls become, programming is
The Wrong Profession!
"I don't have to be right. But when I sign off on it, it has to
work!" -Javilk-
My greatest problems in this profession was my upbringing to have
everything planned out and being sure I could succeed before starting. It
took me a while to learn the value of opting for max-flex restructurable
architectures vs a solid unified piece of code.
Decompose to identify most useful functions first, (or perhaps key
blocks of text for web pages,) not exact hierarchical structures. Then
look at glue and glue blocks to link them together into something useful.
Part of the analysis these days, is building the prototype to find
out (or prove) that the design as specified isn't what the customer really
needs. But if you are to meet schedules, you need to structure the code
(or text,) in such way that you have a LOT of functionality that you can
re-organize to support what your prototype helps you discover the customer
really needs. If you have build the right functional blocks, this is
easy. But if you have not "noded" or sectioned things up in your mind from
the start, it is hopeless!
I think a lot of this applies to designing sites as well.
> if that is the case, then the "one track mindedness" of hard-core tech
> may not be appealing. *I* certainly wouldn't want a job where all I did
> was code.
When a good programmer codes, in his mind, he is looking beyond the
code to the functionality, and the use of what he is working on. Yes, he
may be enamored of certain structural and functional things he has come up
with, but he knows the proof of the pudding is in the eating of it -- the
end user's appreciation for a fine tool that fits his or her "mental
hands".
> > > for further reading <g>:
> _The Moral Animal: Why We Are The Way We Are_
> This month's copy of _Utne Reader_ -- something like, "It's 2 am, do you
> know what sex you are? Does anyone?"
(Laughing!) I am a point of view, a mobile point of view with a
pair of hand that I can cause change upon this world.
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