The problem is a certain things have a very high barrier to entry. Getting into such things requires over the natural amounts of persistence and other myriad life skills for which you need a certain level of biological independence(like not having kids for example).
These barrier to entries vary with each profession. They are higher for the cool jobs, like the CS ones. Most of these career type jobs where continued work is required. Taking long breaks, asking for lesser working hours(While having colleagues at office who would be pushing 15-18 hour workdays) and other such things makes you a bad worker even if you were to somehow work hard and gain initial access. Net result is people feel they are better off doing things where their contributions have some meaning than having to compete with 16 hr shift workers against whom you are set up to lose by default.
This is the whole difficulty with the diversity problem. There is a inherent assumption that things be made easier to accomodate minorities of all kids. Whereas doing well in any profession requires the exact opposite. Harder the things, the better you get by doing them. But that also means, people who are not tough enough for the job get filtered out every iteration along the way.
You just come down to the point that you can't make people do, what they are not ready to put over the necessary efforts to make happen.
> They are higher for the cool jobs, like the CS ones.
Well, for the cool CS jobs, yeah, which is maybe 1% of the total. The rest aren't cool—they're brain-meltingly boring, often frustrating, health-destroyingly sedentary, and often (not always) fairly low-status, despite the pay[0]. The way-above-median pay's just about all a CS career's got going for it, for most.
[0] Compare especially the status boost granted by entering either of two full-on professions which, strikingly, kept improving gender balance through the 80s and beyond despite a long history of being dominated by men: law and medicine. Meanwhile, CS/programming started out better, then got worse around the mid 80s, as measured by graduates in relevant majors.
But those 1% are all that matter in this context, because they are the only ones doing outreach and are thus the only ones being perceived by outsiders. Nobody (outside the industry) knows what the other programmers do or what their work conditions are, because they don't actively tell anybody.
Partly that's because those 1% have to do outreach to get enough workers willing to endure those conditions, and partly it's because those are entire companies filled with passionate people (because everyone who doesn't love the job quickly quits) and they want to share their passion.
Maybe it's like that in, say, game development, but I've never seen these absurd hours in my career. A certain willingness to learn and do more than the standard curriculum is valued, yes, and there's crunch mode and harder-working startup jobs, but I haven't seen this hazing and exploitation from any of my employers.
>>I haven't seen this hazing and exploitation from any of my employers.
Most employers won't. But yet some people pour in a lot of time to make themselves better. That is precisely the whole point.
Its exactly a bit like school. Schools won't force you to put any hours. But people putting in late nighters and burning the midnight oil end up scoring high marks and getting better grades.
How do you suggest we help low scoring students? By telling the better student to study less?
My top advice would be to look for their comparative advantage. For some that's an ability to work very hard at something they're not obviously talented at or attracted to. OTOH I knew someone who fit just that description who still failed to make the move from technician to programmer, after a lot of personal time studying.
The problem is a certain things have a very high barrier to entry. Getting into such things requires over the natural amounts of persistence and other myriad life skills for which you need a certain level of biological independence(like not having kids for example).
These barrier to entries vary with each profession. They are higher for the cool jobs, like the CS ones. Most of these career type jobs where continued work is required. Taking long breaks, asking for lesser working hours(While having colleagues at office who would be pushing 15-18 hour workdays) and other such things makes you a bad worker even if you were to somehow work hard and gain initial access. Net result is people feel they are better off doing things where their contributions have some meaning than having to compete with 16 hr shift workers against whom you are set up to lose by default.
This is the whole difficulty with the diversity problem. There is a inherent assumption that things be made easier to accomodate minorities of all kids. Whereas doing well in any profession requires the exact opposite. Harder the things, the better you get by doing them. But that also means, people who are not tough enough for the job get filtered out every iteration along the way.
You just come down to the point that you can't make people do, what they are not ready to put over the necessary efforts to make happen.