| I don't really agree with this passage: "Back-end developers often attribute front-end expertise not to mastery but to alchemy, wizardry or magic. Its adepts don’t succeed through technical skill so much as a kind of web whispering: feeling, rather than thinking, their way through a tangle of competing styles – in other words, those soft fuzzy things that women are supposed to excel at. That’s not true, of course; nothing on a computer is any more or less logical than anything else." I think it's pretty well understood in the industry that front end computing can be relentlessly complicated and technical. 'd say dealing with state and synchronous javascript front end frameworks and apps is one of the more technically demanding and cutting edge roles in software development these days, full of churn and confusion and technical complexity. In fact, malaise is so widespread that the technical complexity of javascript front-end has created a blogging subgenre of javascript framework despair. I'm bummed to be writing this, because I see merit in the claim that fields that employ a higher percentage of women experience wage supression due to gender bias and sexism. But this is an article that describes learning HTML and CSS as "learning to code", and then attributes differences in pay to gender rather than the nature of the work. The difference in pay within a job and between different jobs may well have plenty to do with gender. But in this case (HTML vs say, Ember) we are comparing essentially different jobs, not different versions of the same job. Oh one last thing - the author is entirely correct that learning to code, no matter how good you get at it, will not gain you entry in to the upper echelons of tech's ruling class. |