NancyLebovitz comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

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Comment author: Morendil 25 November 2012 09:34:49AM *  3 points [-]

IT is certainly well-suited to people who don't like human interaction all that much

Uh, I'm pretty sure this assertion is the result of the particular culture that's developed in IT, rather than its truth being a cause of it.

Is this claim actually even close to true? To the extent that there are in fact professions "well-suited to people who don't like human interaction", by virtue of which problems the professionals are working to solve, I would think of farming or legal medicine first, not IT.

IT jobs require constant interaction with people, because they are mainly about turning vague desiderata into working solutions; on the "solution" end you are interacting a lot with machines, but you absolutely can't afford to ignore the "desiderata" side of things, and that is primarily a matter of human communication. Our current IT culture has managed to make it the norm that much of this communication can take place over cold channels, such as email or Word documents. I think of that as pathological; but more importantly, this still counts as human interaction!

Then there's the extra implication in your statement - that jobs "well-suited to people who don't like human interaction" will attract males more. That may well be true, but it'll take actual evidence to convince me.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 25 November 2012 09:02:48PM 3 points [-]

A lot of people in IT interact plenty with other people in IT, so they like and can sustain some types of human interaction.