I used to do hiring for IT. Interviewed several chicks for coding positions, hired a couple, none could code well and ended up putting them on the help desk or similar. There were a couple of excellent coders in my classes at Uni who were female but they probably stayed in academia. I'm not saying girls can't be good coders but generally speaking it does not play to their strengths.
I've heard that chicks tend to make good technical writers but I've never witnessed it myself.
It's fucking rare, indeed. The dev gal I mentioned does write pretty decent documentation but it's nothing super special, it's just concise and accurate unlike what most of the other devs do.
Our best dev ever was my boss for a couple years and that was great because he's one of those freakishly brilliant coders who just understands EVERYTHING. He reads RFCs and documentation for fun and remembers all of it, so every protocol, specification, whatever, he just KNOWS it, and can put together whatever is necessary to just make a project work out. It was inspiring to provide support to this guy's [occasionally insane looking] ideas. It sucked when he got bored with this company and moved on.
Yeah I've known a few 'brilliant' coders over the years -- and they knew it too, not arrogant or anything but completely self assured -- but by far the scariest coders as a group were Russians. These guys had all worked on some crazy military project back home -- one fellow had helped program the guidance systems of the Russian cruise missile -- and they had a way of looking at and solving programming problems that was like watching a black box perform magic. They were to a man cheerless bastards and very insular but made a point of being pleasant to work with and always produced top shelf results.
That sounds like an oddly perfect way of describing Russian programmers I've known as well. I'm sure they have some great stories. And I'm sure they never told me any of them.
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