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The responses led me to think about my attitude toward failure.  While it can be discouraging and disheartening to fail at something, it’s also inevitable.  It is only the most gifted of people who doesn’t experience failure on a regular basis, and those who push themselves experience it more often.  Personally, I see failure as feedback.  It’s a sign that you were doing wasn’t quite right and that you need to try something different.  The only part of failure that reflects on me as a person is my reaction to it.

Since this experience had come about in a work context, I also thought about failure and computing.  It occurred to me that my attitude about failure is particularly helpful in someone who wants to work in a computing-related field.  Problem solving, and the inevitable failure associated with it, is core to computing.  People who are successful in computing are people who handle failure on a regular basis: the program crashes, the network goes down, the algorithm has a problem, the machine dies.  Handling these situations requires a certain acceptance of failure as a natural part of the process.

But my experience teaching has let me see that students don’t tend to develop this attitude about failure until at least midway through their programs.  Students in early classes, typically programming classes, often personalize failure in ways that may not be helpful.  Yes, a student who repeatedly fails at coding probably isn’t going to be a developer, but some amount of failure is part of the process of coding and therefore part of the process of learning to code.  When I teaching CS1/2 I try to convey that failure is natural, as a way of letting the students see that they shouldn’t take their failure personally.  I’m not sure how effective I am at this.

Speaking of effectiveness, all of this led me to consider what the literature has to say about failure and computing education.  In my search I ran across two interesting articles.  In the first, Tony Clear writes about failure in the context of a capstone course, which is a situation on the opposite end of a degree program from CS1/2.  In the second, Klara Benda, Amy Bruckman, and Mark Guzdial examine failure in online courses.  There failure means lack of retention, and I particularly enjoyed their summary of the literature on retention.  It also surprised me how few articles in computing education were displayed in the ACM Digital Library when the keyword failure is provided.  It was a much more common term in the broader computing literature, which is somewhat ironic.

Yesterday I made a rare trip downtown for a work-related meeting.  Normally December is a time spent with quietly writing away in my home office since our quarter system does not have regular classes between Thanksgiving and the start of the new year.  But a technology company in Chicago is interested in recruiting students from the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul, and the staff member who handles employer relations likes to have a subject-matter expert with her.  I left the meeting with a lot of new information, but two pieces stand out to me: 1. Employers are desperate to hire computer science graduates and 2. technology companies are most interested in people who blend into the (somewhat unique) culture of their workplace.

I then spent today reading most of the latest issue of ACM Inroads, for a paper I’m writing on diversity in gaming.  There are many fascinating articles in that issue, but one theme stood out to me.  Computer scientists have put, and continue to put, a lot of energy into improving diversity in the field.  From college-level initiatives like those at Harvey Mudd College, to NSF-funded programs to improve access to computing among the disabled, to a transformation of the high-school curriculum, computer scientists are deeply interested in seeing women and underrepresented minorities participate at higher numbers.  The hope, of course, is that these projects and programs will succeed, resulting in a transformation of computing into a field where gender parity is within reach.  In that process and with that goal, I think that computer science is serving as a model for other technology-focused disciplines.

The interaction I had with the employer-relations staff member after our visit yesterday made me wonder if technology companies are ready for this change, should it actually occur.  She and I started discussing the need that technology companies have for employees to fit their culture, and how their culture can be very different from other industries.  In response she told me a story about a visit she paid to a large technology company based on the West Coast (that will remain anonymous for reasons about to become obvious).  A representative for this company emphasized that adapting to the culture was important, causing the DePaul staff member to ask how the representative would describe the culture.  The response: The average employee age was 26 and the culture was like a “frat house”.  (Note that this company has been around for at least 8 years, so this is not a small start-up).  I rolled my eyes when I learned this and commented that I certainly would not be recommending the company to any of my female students.  She countered that this company was particularly interested in hiring female graduates.  We noted that the lack of reflection on this situation was intriguing.

Now I understand many technology companies are encouraging of and enthusiastic about the goal of broadening diversity in computer science.  But I think it takes more than a diversity initiative, which I know that the company described above has, to make the workplace welcoming.  It particularly remains unclear to me whether technology companies are ready to deal with the changes that would come from a pipeline that begins to approach gender parity.  On the other hand, technology companies are nothing if not adaptable, so maybe they would surprise me.