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by ritchiea 4466 days ago
It would be even better if this was about more than gender. I am not one of the gender inequity deniers in this industry and I don't see anything wrong with valuing a better gender balance in the industry, in fact I think it's a good thing.

But love is such a loaded, unclear term. Why is it not good enough for someone to enjoy programming and have an intellectual curiosity about programming? To me that sounds like perfectly reasonable criteria to identify people who are a good fit for 3 months focused on programming. But you're basically saying that if it weren't for this gender inequity it would be totally reasonable to continue searching for a love of programming. It's hard enough for me to say I love my family and yet it was thought of as a good requirement to expect people to love programming to be qualified to participate in 3 months of programming in a community environment?
2 comments
nicholasjbs 4466 days ago
As the post mentions, we stopped using the word "love" for both reasons -- gender was part of but not the entire reason we switched.

In fact, the alum we quote as an example of the trouble with the word love is male:

We used to say applicants must "love" programming, but we've learned that was a mistake. While it sounds good, it doesn't actually describe what we care about, and it was dissuading qualified people from applying.

In fact, many of our best students have said they almost didn't apply because they worried they didn't love programming enough. Hacker School alum David Peter expressed this fear perfectly:

  One of the questions in the interview was, "Do you love programming?"
  I said   yes, because I loved it more than most people I knew.
  But was it love? I enjoyed writing and drawing equally, if not more.
  After Hacker School, I'm revisiting these hobbies. Programming wasn't my first love."*
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sown 4466 days ago
> Why is it not good enough for someone to enjoy programming and have an intellectual curiosity about programming?

For me, it's not so much programming, but the power it gives me. The capabilities that programming gives me. I can sure talk about static vs dynamic typing, but I'm going back again to things like power.

Programming the same thing over and over again sounds kind of boring, but making something new sounds grand!

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