At a typical large company, the ingress point into the company is at an entry-level position. Many women want to interrupt employment when they have children, which isn't practical for a IT person or programmer at a bank or government agency.
My mother, to use a fairly typical example, is a nurse. She took 5-6 years off at various times when my siblings were born or when daycare costs became prohibitive. Impact on her career? Not too bad -- hospitals need nurses, especially nurses with the specialist certifications she had.
More to the point, medicine is portable because people need doctors everywhere. You can practice medicine in New York just as well as you can practice medicine in Ouray. Further, barring highly specialized fields (e.g. pediatric oncology, transplantation surgery), the work you'll be doing will be more or less similar and available wherever you go. Software just doesn't offer that.
Most of the places I've seen that advertise telecommuting are really only paying lip service to the idea that where you develop software simply doesn't matter all that much. You see places that say you can work from home one day a week, and call that "remote work." There are some companies that acknowledge this fact, and are structured for true remote work, but software engineers as a class are far more tied to location than doctors are.
Software does offer exactly that. Last I checked, a hash table works the same in New York and Ouray. And you can remotely contribute to a project from pretty much anywhere you get Internet. Sure, that excludes e.g. large parts of Africa, but let's be honest: People don't get into medicine because they could always get a job in Africa. Yes, there are some who have that calling, but most like the developed world just fine.
So the issue is not with the profession per se - that leaves the employers. And there, you have a point for large swaths of the industry. But it seems the world of web/backend development is a bit more flexible there, no?
Your perception is wrong. Medicine (and, especially the implementation of it) is (in many areas) changing as much as software engineering.
There is, however, stronger certification around medicine: once you have a medical license, it's pretty hard to lose it - especially through inactivity.
Why should it be a big deal if you interrupt your career for a few years (whether to have a family or to travel the world...somehow I bet the second would be seen as ok in tech circles)? A good programmer can pick up a new technology in a couple of months.
If you are hiring based on candidates winning resume buzzword bingo, you are going to get crappy candidates anyway. Hire for intelligence and capability and five years off to have a couple of kids is meaningless.
You take a break for some years come back and see who was your peer sometime back is now your boss. How would you feel? The feeling of underachievement especially when you know you were helpless to prevent that, hurts!
It would hurt me atleast. If I knew I would face a such situation I will rather take up some other profession.
This is exactly the senseless obsession with competition that the article is complaining about.
My boss is a woman who was my peer in school and has children now. She is one of the best techies I have ever worked with and I love having her aboard.
It shouldn't be, but most large organizations (corporate and public sector) have setup systems designed to avoid the appearance of discrimination or subjectivity in hiring decisions. The irony is that these systems make it difficult for people who don't have a "perfect" (from the perspective of the system) record to get in.
The problem with such systems is that it is difficult to assess someone's ability to perform a job objectively. So the systems are design around measurable facts (ie. years of experience, education), biased towards promoting from withing, with the final selection being made by rolling the dice using tools like job interviews that are at best randomizers.
Humans aren't "resources" -- they are people. But we try to treat them like commodity goods, and in the process create some crappy situations for many people.
> A good programmer can pick up a new technology in a couple of months.
I would love it if things worked this way. But I told someone I could get coding in C# in a week, and probably be quite comfortable in a few months, and they sent me a polite rejection letter saying they were "impressed with my confidence" but there were many highly qualified candidates, etc. But then, that's probably the only advertised tech job I pursued that I didn't land an offer for.
It's a pity that when I read your good comments and the one above it, both had been downvoted into the grey. Many newcomers here at HN don't seem to understand that downvoting here is not meant to indicate that one doesn't like an opinion, it's supposed to be for comments that are abusive, obviously trolling, or that contribute nothing.
I propose an improvement to the downvoting API: One can downvote all they want, but each downvote will cost 1 karma/reputation point. That way, people with much good reputation can as needed mark abusive posts. But the newcomers will think more carefully about marking down posts they simply don't agree with since it can plunge them into negative.
At a typical large company, the ingress point into the company is at an entry-level position. Many women want to interrupt employment when they have children, which isn't practical for a IT person or programmer at a bank or government agency.
My mother, to use a fairly typical example, is a nurse. She took 5-6 years off at various times when my siblings were born or when daycare costs became prohibitive. Impact on her career? Not too bad -- hospitals need nurses, especially nurses with the specialist certifications she had.