I’ve been a “coder” for 20+ years, and so thought it would be interesting to get an outsider’s perspective on the field. For the first few chapters I enjoyed the book, and I think he got a lot right – coding is a roller-coaster ride, it takes immortal-amounts of patience, it can make us cantankerous and grumpy, and it might not always be great for our emotional well-being…BUT it’s immensely satisfying to build something from nothing and the profession has much less of the posturing and BS than perhaps others do. Your code works, or it doesn’t. You fixed the problem, or you didn’t. The book captures a lot of these dichotomies, and it was cool to have this articulated more deftly/elegantly than if one of us coders wrote it!
That being said, the political agenda that is artificially woven into an otherwise great exploration of the psyche and importance of coding was, in my opinion, unnecessary, off-base/invalid, and almost offensive. I get the facts – women make up a minority of coders, but that wasn’t always the case. The problem is, only one explanation is offered: that male coders must be creating a toxic environment for women…and then the author parades out a bunch of anecdotes in support. For example, the woman who received overly-critical feedback in code reviews. Guess what? That’s totally normal in the field. In fact, see preceding chapters: coders are cranky and impatient. I get slammed in code reviews *all the time*. Is it worse for women? I doubt it, but maybe. Or how about the stats that women don’t contribute to open source at the rates that men do? In the open source world, no one knows who you are! Not your sex, your race, your age, anything. You have a pseudonym. Your identity doesn’t matter. That’s the beauty of it. If you have a good pull request, it’ll get accepted on the merits – it has nothing to do with your gender. If women are not contributing to open source at the same rate, then does that speak to a toxic culture toward women? Or just that women, for whatever reason, are not contributing to open source. The point is that it would be intellectually more honest to at least offer the possibility of another explanation – that there ARE biological differences between the genders, and it’s possible that women by nature aren’t, on average, as interested in the largely anti-social professional pursuit of programming.
In all, the book is well written, but I found the social commentary insulting.