It's official: The Internet is Owned by White Dudes

[jeff47]

77. Is there a specific change you are seeking, or is this more of an "observational" post?

'Cause if this is more along the lines of "this culture is bad/not as good as it could be" and that's it, then you can just skip the rest of this.

IMO, the fundamental problem is people have an unrealistic idea of what it takes to develop software. People believe it's a very "geeky" profession requiring vast amounts of math and science.

And it doesn't. At least, not anymore.

There was a time you needed to do a whole lot of the low level work to make software. You actually had to understand the calculus behind image compression because you had to write something to read or write an image. Now, you let someone else provide that work. You just do "LoadPicture()"

Writing software today is much more like assembling Legos. You don't form your own plastic blocks, you use someone else's blocks to build your castle. You don't even have to find a place to build your castle anymore, thanks to things like Amazon Web Services.

That mistaken belief that you can't possibly make software if you are not a "geek" causes a lot of people with good ideas to not even try. Intersect that with broader cultural mis-beliefs (ie. sexism like "girls aren't good at math&quot and a lot of the people just don't try when they are young and figuring out what they want to do with their life. So the young white men give it a shot, a portion of them like it, and then go on to write software. A girl who's interested gets misdirected to something else, never tries it, and grows up believing that door is closed.

There's also a large economic factor at play. You have to be able to afford a computer for the kids to play with and occasionally break, in order for them to play with software enough to want to write software.

Now, I do think this is gradually fixing itself - I used to see maybe 99% white male job applicants when interviewing people. There was nothing like "Irish need not apply" in the job listing, the pool of applicants was really damn white and male. We are seeing more women and more minority applicants now, but it's still a very white male pool.

I think this is partially due to the economic factors being a little easier (The original IBM PC cost about $4,000 in 2015 dollars) and partially due to computers being more "normal". But we still have a lot of very long-running battles against sexism and structural racism to overcome before we stop shutting doors for young people.

Btw, if you're* interested in actually creating a site or software or whatever, it is easier than ever to do so. That door is never closed. Get some books and start writing stuff. Just like building with Legos, you will be taking very small pieces and putting them together into larger and larger structures. Don't worry about "How do I make a site like DU". Start with "How do I store a post". Then "How do I show a post". Then "how do I write a post". And so on. Eventually, you have your own castle.

*Global "you", not you specifically