There are many stereotypes that go along with being a programmer that are negative. There are stereotypes that go along with being a recruiter that are positive. While gender may have something to do with people thinking she is a recruiter it may not be the main factor. If you meet someone who is well spoken, well dressed, writes books on how to interview, knows how to talk about code, etc. might there be a greater chance that their job is something other than writing code every day?
Sure. And then if someone's talking about binary trees, dynamic programming, depth first search, object oriented programming, don't you think you'd conclude "was or used to be a programmer"?
Again THIS was the example. Stop constructing straw mans.
The quote in the article simply said that you can talk about code for an hour and people still think you are a recruiter. Most people take that to mean that people don't think you currently work as a programmer or more specifically, don't think you currently write code as your primary job function. Yes I agree, if someone talks for an hour about those technical topics, I'd assume they have experience as a programmer. However, I may still assume you are not currently working as a programmer and things I would use to make that assumption have nothing to do with gender.
You appear to be upset when people point out that there may be some non-gender reasons for assuming you are working in a role other than writing code. Please keep in mind that from the article there is very little information about the particulars of the talk in question. However, anyone who tries to fill in the gaps by looking at your lists of topics for recent talks, your website, etc., is going to assume you don't current write much code and that most of your work is done in the technical aspects of the interview process.
If I talk to someone who used to be a programmer but not is obviously working in an HR recruiting role, I will probably consider them to be a recruiter. This isn't an insult...it is just the way we categorize people by what they do currently.
What's frustrating is the continuous straw mans. People are creating new situations, saying that those situations wouldn't be sexist, and therefore using that to prove that I'm inappropriately assuming sexism. Straw man.
There are situations where it's reasonable to assume that I'm a recruiter, even if that assumption happens to be wrong. But this situation wasn't one of them.
It would also be fine to say that I'm not a programmer, depending on what you mean by that. I am a programmer, just like I'm an author. If you define it though as someone who is currently employed exclusively as a software developer, then sure, I'm not a software developer presently. But again, this isn't the situation being described.
This is a specific situation in which someone was at a talk where I spent an hour talking about big O time, data structures, algorithms, modularizing code, and a bunch of other technical talks and then asked me about my time as a recruiter at Google. It wouldn't matter if my website now said in giant flashing letters "HELLO I AM A RECRUITER." The person wasn't looking at the website (which didn't even exist then, at least not in that form).
