Now that's what I call programming 16
Can anyone explain why the packaing of WinDev 919 looks like a record from the 1980s?
Perhaps WebDev comes on LaserDisc™?
French software developers are all beautiful women
Development tools outfit PC Soft has given the world a look at software developers in its native France, and most appear to be beautiful young women wearing not very much. PC Soft makes the WinDev, WebDev and WinDev mobile tools, version 19 of which was released in preview during the middle of April. One of the marketing …
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Friday 2nd May 2014 08:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Now that's what I call programming 16
I think maybe Clement Delafargue is being a bit harsh.Also it is the brochure that the young lady civil engineer is holding rather than the box. Reading through the brochure there does seem to be a mixture of photos of both young women, and men developers which isn't really sexist at all.
This is probably a brave attempt by PC soft at destroying some developer stereotypes. Stereotypes such as the male social inadequate knocking out under the desk code while paging through fan folds of ASCII art.
Throughout the brochure the developer pictures all seem to entirely appropriate. I would particularly highlight three very apposite pictures of software users, the photo of the young lady Linux app developer, the Dashboard project manager and 'Master Home Communications Domotics user'.
During my IT career these are very much more the sort of people I have encountered. In detail:
Linux app devevelopers - have exclusively consisted of scantily clad young ladies wearing fetish heels.
Dashboard project managers have without fail always worn a pilots hat.
Home Communications Domotics user have always been wearing a blue bikini, or maybe PVC, or leather ..... whips maybe
That said your mileage may vary .... having just woken up from a bit of a day dream just off to knock out some code. Now where is my ASCII art? Then again maybe the back dates of the PC soft brochure....
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Friday 2nd May 2014 15:36 GMT JEDIDIAH
Re: Now that's what I call programming 16
This reminds me a lot of the Law & Order collection of shows. The female legal talent is all portrayed like supermodels. On the one hand it seems "sexist". On the other hand, that's the same ideal that women push on each other. So if you are going to appeal to the female demographic, then it's the "Cosmo" approach you're going to have to take.
Lo and behold... after a few years of this wildly successful show that "objectifyies women" you see a glut of lawyers that look very much like their Hollywood counterparts.
This is not a "brogrammer" problem. Geeks just get trashed because the media (probably full of jocks and frat boys) probably want to perpetuate the same tired old "Revenge of the Nerds" narrative.
Bleeding hearts might want to whine about this kind of nonsense but the tech sector is just the very tail end of the problem.
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Friday 2nd May 2014 08:29 GMT Elmer Phud
Re: What's with the bizarre self censorship?
"Too young to remember the discussions being had before the War on Terror?"
Oh what fun we had when our work email systems were beginning to be filtered.
We did indeed do the 'Scunthorpe' and 'Penistone' and others -- as well as trying all sorts of messages about 'bombs' and 'explosions'.
It ended up with many people being highly descriptive and quoting Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hansard . Plus careful use of double-entendre and innuendo.
Also a smattering of Carry On and Python quotes (always use quotation marks when telling someone to 'Fakir off!')
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Friday 2nd May 2014 11:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: What's with the bizarre self censorship?
Fictional?
Are you trying to tell me Group Captain Biggles is a fictional character?
I'm going to have to move all my Biggles books from the History to the Fantasy section of my library, and my forthcoming book on aviation in WW1 is going to need a complete rewrite. My weekend is ruined.
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Friday 2nd May 2014 08:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hard hats required!
Software development can be dangerous, if you are working with real time machinery control. I still have the broken finger that has never quite healed straight to prove it, and I heard of someone else who ended up with a broken leg.
It's a pity that no standard hat has evolved for software developers. I have one child whose hat is a silly 18th century wig, and another whose hat is white and hard. Worn with the usual suit, both of them are immediate guides to profession. And fans of the girlgenius comic will recall this episode.
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Friday 2nd May 2014 12:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hard hats required!
"Software development can be dangerous, if you are working with real time machinery control. I still have the broken finger that has never quite healed straight to prove it, and I heard of someone else who ended up with a broken leg."
I've been working with realtime machinery control since the late '90s, and have yet to injure myself or anyone else - can you tell me which companies you've worked for so I can avoid their products? :P
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Friday 2nd May 2014 15:38 GMT JEDIDIAH
Re: Hard hats required!
Some work sites are hard hat required, not exceptions. If you get caught, you get thrown off the site. It may make no sense at all. Although it's likely driven by government safety regulations which themselves likely make no sense at all.
You can either ignore this stuff or be a statistic... much like cycling without a helmet.
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Friday 2nd May 2014 07:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Pick up a women's magazine and look at the adverts inside, they are full of good looking women, often scantily clad. Pick up a men's magazine, they are full of good looking women, often scantily clad.
Good looking women help sell a product. It doesn't matter if they are in context or out of context or if the audience is male or female. They sell.
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Friday 2nd May 2014 08:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
I call out the media
"Good looking women help sell a product. It doesn't matter if they are in context or out of context or if the audience is male or female. They sell."
...and this week we are taking a close look at Windev's brochure. The approach might be disrespectful etc, but it obviously works. It works because they get coverage in the media. Yes, I'm looking at you ElReg.
What would help reduce this nonsense is if the media would give the same editorial coverage to an equivalent product purely on its technical newsworthy merits, without the need for an irrelevant 'angle' to pitch it (whether that be the females on show here, or some advertising deal elsewhere).
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Friday 2nd May 2014 08:32 GMT Elmer Phud
Incorrect Icon used
"Pick up a women's magazine and look at the adverts inside, they are full of good looking women, often scantily clad. Pick up a men's magazine, they are full of good looking women, often scantily clad."
Why use the Anonymous icon when it's an obvious but very poor and juvenile troll?
I bet you used to buy loads of peanuts at the pub just to see rthe photo on the card.
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Friday 2nd May 2014 15:42 GMT JEDIDIAH
Re: Incorrect Icon used
>> "Pick up a women's magazine and look at the adverts inside, they are full of good looking women, often scantily clad. Pick up a men's magazine, they are full of good looking women, often scantily clad."
> Why use the Anonymous icon when it's an obvious but very poor and juvenile troll?
The posting of an invonvenient fact is hardly a troll.
People have forgotten what that word really means and just throw it around mindlessly when they don't agree with someone. It's little wonder that meaningful discussion no longer occurs in public venues in meatspace. Probably deadly for democracy that.
People love to whine about tech but they've got nothing on Cosmo or Vogue. Even the ads in Family Circle would probably offend the Womyns Studies types assuming they even acknowledge this stuff.
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Friday 2nd May 2014 08:23 GMT dogged
I worked in France
Programming for BNP Paribas.
Nobody could stand the sight of anybody else in the programming team. Uniformly male and not exactly comely, partly due the permanent expressions of anger and hatred induced by working with Siebel.
The project office manager was pretty fine though, despite the constant miasma of earwax-melting perfume that surrounded her.
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Friday 2nd May 2014 08:25 GMT Charlie Clark
Slow news day?
The shots included on Delafargue's website do make the whole thing look a bit like a lad's mag. In which case I think the whole brochure is doomed to failure as totally off the mark. I suspect most people wouldn't care if the brochure was full of pictures of the usual beautiful people as long as it made the right kind of claims about productivity and world domination in "three easy steps".
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Friday 2nd May 2014 09:16 GMT Hollerith 1
Good heavens! I don't remember the camera...
...but there I am, larger than life in the first pic, clearly taken just as I was about to deal with the latest set of patches. If I'd known I'd be featured in advertising, I'd have worn something more business-like.
It's just a pity they didn't happen to capture my colleagues Lola and Desiree. They deserve the recognition, hard-working lasses that they be!
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Friday 2nd May 2014 10:12 GMT Teiwaz
Too sensitive
You could look at it this way...
That we should accept beautiful women (who obviously got up several hours area to get that proffessional makeup done at a salon (did I spell it right? I know it's not saloon)) can be equally efective as their male counterparts in the tech industry. I've never seen any though, maybe they all emigrated to France...
Has the pictures been of overly handsome men (with equal makeup) now, I think we'd al be just as b*ggles.
Either type coming to an interview with me, I'd think fraud (or a casting couch interview). Probably a good thing I don't do interviews...
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Friday 2nd May 2014 13:28 GMT Disgruntled of TW
Infosec '14 yesterday ...
... demonstrated that young, beautiful women in very short dresses are exceptionally strong in IT security knowledge and skills. Why else would so many have crammed into the conference?
Didn't the French once try to sell washing machines, by putting a bra on a model and sitting her on top of the machine in the advert?
No different.
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Saturday 3rd May 2014 21:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Before we rush to conclusions re: exploitative content, we may want to pause and consider that it may be targetted marketing(gone awry ofcourse) for do it yourself pornography website creation.
Naturally an independent IT consultant is going to find flaws in the marketing for a product that claims to provide the same functionality that he charges alot more for by the hour.
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Saturday 3rd May 2014 21:35 GMT syspredl
We're using PC Soft's products for 14 years now ...
... and they're working just fine for us. Their brochures may be a (thoughtless) oversexed but their products are quite ok. You get a lot with e.g. their main Windows/Linux/Java/.NET development product named WINDEV, whis is published in its 19th edition now. Distribution of executables is royalty-free, which is not common to most 4GLs. True, these developer tools are different from the usual US-products. PC Soft puts a lot of effort into the looks of the end-products you're delivering, skins, styles etc. Their claim that you can develop 10x faster may not be true in all cases but 2x is good enough for us, copmpared to VB.NET or C#. Products come with a free client/server database system which is quite good and compares well with many database systems like MS SQLServer or MySQL. This little shit who thinks that PC Soft's products are shitty may be a nerd who doesn't care for development cost. Actually, if you tell any project manager that s/he could reduce development time for a certain software product from 12 months to 6 months and s/he would run and buy the product. Even big projects with up to 99 developers can be managed, collaboration is built in, version control, branching, automatic tests - no need to buy those lots of add-ons anymore!
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
