Some Thoughts on Diversity Messaging

[Siddhartha Kattoju <sk...@cloudops.com>]

Hello Diversity People,

I happen to have a chat with Myrle Krantz during one of the ApacheCon Runs
that got me thinking.

The following is a sort of brain dump that resulted. I'm sharing this with
the hope that your thoughts around this will help clarify diversity
messaging.

All of the messaging around getting people involved in software and stem
seems to revolve around learning to code when actually it should be about
problem solving in general. People don't generally reason about things in a
constrained abstract framework like code. People generally think in higher
layers of abstraction. The whole learn to code message in some sense is the
equivalent of saying don't worry about all these high level concepts and
constructs you have learned and reason with now, instead learn assembly
because it's the future. This is obviously a bit exaggerated. The way I see
it is that in order to be able to express and reason in code one need a
translation layer between the layers of abstraction. I think this what the
11 year old who spoke at ApacheCon NA 2019 solved with her board game.

Being a STEM person I have been trained to think of the world in terms of
solving problems. This probably makes me biased but I think it would have
been cool if the process of solving the problem of making the "code" layer
of abstraction accessible to kids was showcased as opposed to the some what
prescriptive feeling way in which the talk was delivered. I guess this kind
of ties into the diversity thing a bit. I have only one data point to
support my thesis but I will share it anyway. A cloud infra company has
~20% women and a neighbouring data science company has over 50% women. Both
use computers to solve problems but at different layers of abstraction. I
think this suggests that "code" is not always the best primary problem
solving medium. It is a tool that can be leveraged in a lot of places. I
find that the messaging around diversity does not reflect this. Essentially
diversity messaging doesn't convey diversity of thought. That said I don't
mean to imply any correlation between types of reasoning and different
genders.

Best Regards,

*Sid Kattoju*

Cloud Software Architect | Professional Services

c 514.466.0951


* <https://goo.gl/NYZ8KK>*

Re: Some Thoughts on Diversity Messaging

[Matt Sicker <bo...@gmail.com>]

I, too, describe it as “managing a hierarchy of abstraction”. I come from a
mathematical background initially, so the idea of finding patterns in
things was already an interest. I think you’re on to something here :)

On Wed, Sep 25, 2019 at 07:57, Siddhartha Kattoju <sk...@cloudops.com>
wrote:

> Hello Diversity People,
>
> I happen to have a chat with Myrle Krantz during one of the ApacheCon Runs
> that got me thinking.
>
> The following is a sort of brain dump that resulted. I'm sharing this with
> the hope that your thoughts around this will help clarify diversity
> messaging.
>
> All of the messaging around getting people involved in software and stem
> seems to revolve around learning to code when actually it should be about
> problem solving in general. People don't generally reason about things in a
> constrained abstract framework like code. People generally think in higher
> layers of abstraction. The whole learn to code message in some sense is the
> equivalent of saying don't worry about all these high level concepts and
> constructs you have learned and reason with now, instead learn assembly
> because it's the future. This is obviously a bit exaggerated. The way I see
> it is that in order to be able to express and reason in code one need a
> translation layer between the layers of abstraction. I think this what the
> 11 year old who spoke at ApacheCon NA 2019 solved with her board game.
>
> Being a STEM person I have been trained to think of the world in terms of
> solving problems. This probably makes me biased but I think it would have
> been cool if the process of solving the problem of making the "code" layer
> of abstraction accessible to kids was showcased as opposed to the some what
> prescriptive feeling way in which the talk was delivered. I guess this kind
> of ties into the diversity thing a bit. I have only one data point to
> support my thesis but I will share it anyway. A cloud infra company has
> ~20% women and a neighbouring data science company has over 50% women. Both
> use computers to solve problems but at different layers of abstraction. I
> think this suggests that "code" is not always the best primary problem
> solving medium. It is a tool that can be leveraged in a lot of places. I
> find that the messaging around diversity does not reflect this. Essentially
> diversity messaging doesn't convey diversity of thought. That said I don't
> mean to imply any correlation between types of reasoning and different
> genders.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> *Sid Kattoju*
>
> Cloud Software Architect | Professional Services
>
> c 514.466.0951
>
>
> * <https://goo.gl/NYZ8KK>*
>
-- 
Matt Sicker <bo...@gmail.com>