If you are NOT a good manager, that is all that you care about.
Did you fail to plan the rest release? Developers will do extra hours.
Did you miss understood the requirements? Developers will fix it with extra hours.
Did you decide to use the wrong technology for the project? Developers will work extra hours.
A company that hires only people that does what is told and stays longer hours have incompetent management.
> I wonder if it’s a good for efficiency.
Companies that value diversity (age, gender, nationality, etc.) are the ones looking for that high-quality output that makes products work in the long term.
Sweden is as successful as China when it comes to software, even that there are orders of magnitude of the difference of population. The main reason is the respect for family and employees. Even that Sweden also is far from perfect.
What’s the evidence behind this assertion?
To have Chinese engineers in China, Brazilian in Brazil and Mexicans in Mexico is NOT diversity. That is the contrary of diversity. That is to have homogeneous teams.
I have worked for companies in Stockholm that have people from India, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Spain, Ukraine, Poland, ... working together in the same office. That is diversity. All of them were had the same range of salaries and expectations. Of course, it was not fairytale perfect. But it was quite good.
Externalizing costs to a low-cost country has nothing to do with diversity, as I understand it.
I'm curious what definition of Diversity you're using that a team of people from all over the world doesn't qualify.
> I'm curious what definition of Diversity you're using that a team of people from all over the world doesn't qualify.
What you wrote would work better as a response to that than to what I wrote.
Like an office in sf with all genders and colors represented is diverse...even tho they are all impacted by being im sf and sf culture
Intuitively though this position makes sense to me that, as long as the various issues surrounding natural human tribalism are managed, diversity is generally helpful -- as each "tribe" may offer a unique perspective towards problems and solutions.
Having said that, a lot of articles on "ageism in tech" more or less seem to focus on cultures of work that promote "long hours" for long hours sake, over something more balanced (and, in the end, productive and efficient). There's plenty of evidence out there that shows how wrong-headed of an approach "long hours" cultures are, this is not hard information to look up.
This is my impression on why diversity generally works well. Unique perspectives and experiences often generate more original and creative approaches to some problem which in turn is much more valuable. Additionally, and especially for FAANGs, having the organizational awareness of a diverse set of perspectives allows you to create solutions that are broad and can adequately meet the inherent diversity in the world.
People often want to look at software engineering as this super technical line of work, but in practice it really isn't. How, What, and Why to engineer something varies significantly. Everyone will probably have a different approach to solving a problem. More diversity means a greater net to catch which one might be the most optimal.
Plus, you might want to create services or apps that specifically target a need. I would honestly question how well an app for women might be if is made by all men. I would question how well a app for rural living might be if it was made by people who only lived in a city. I would question how well an app designed for use in America might be for use in Africa. There are cultural differences and use differences, needs and wants, infrastructure, etc.
It would be assumed a highly diverse team would be much more suited to trying to solve those problems. And I would also believe that a highly diverse team would be the result of authentic merit based system anyways.
Judging by any Stockholm coffee shop as well we’re all programmers, so the math checks out.
The US and UK (and less so Germany, France, Israel and Japan) produce a sizable majority of software products, especially at an enterprise level. At a per capita level, that gap is even larger with China; and countries like Sweden and Norway become top players.
China’s per capita software production is dragged down by its massive rural population, many of whom have never even owned a computer other than a smartphone. If you don’t account for that, then obviously wealthier/more urbanized countries will have higher per capita production.
However 1 in 5 are 'migrant workers' with no fixed address. I'd guess they are the least educated demographic.
Or you accept that a comparison simply can't be made and don't make the argument in the first place.
Only when quality of end product / developer hapiness is concerned.
Which, lip service aside, are not metrics that managers are usually measured buy.
Do they bring in profit?
They employ a massive amount of undergrad and postgrad students to do their work with a high turnover, complete with living areas right next to the building, since that's cheaper than having people with experience.
>BGI in Shenzhen has a staff of nearly 2700: scientists, lab workers and clerks. The average age is 27, and the atmosphere is university/YWCA/science club. Two-thirds of the employees live in sex-segregated dormitories near the BGI building [...]
>Some geneticists have raised an eyebrow at BGI: noting this army of young and often not formally qualified workers
Source: https://www.smh.com.au/technology/chinese-genome-mappers-bgi...
Somewhat mirrored in the Glassdoor reviews: https://www.glassdoor.com.au/Reviews/BGI-Shenzhen-Reviews-E5...
This is noticeable from the results I've received, as in the quality being all over the shop. Sometimes the results are documented nicely, sometimes there's no documentation. Sometimes a different genome assembler was used, but it's not in the documentation. Sometimes it's really good, sometimes it's complete crap. We've stopped doing business with them as it's simply not reliable.
Sounds like a nightmare.
I agree with this, but just wanted to add how interesting it is that it occurs in a country ostensibly run by a system which is ostensibly about the power of labour.
E.G. shallow perks as ping-pong table, snacks, videogame, beers in the office but totally disfunctional management and work-life balance.
Using the latest shiny tech just because it makes it easier to target these groups and replace the burned out ones.
I see this happening a lot on finance and consulting jobs outside of tech too:
- Offer a reasonable salary for interns/trainees (not reasonable relative to the responsibilities though)
- Promise a huge corporate salary with benefits for the ones that are able to remain more than x years
- Burn all of them out, working overtime, abusing from young inexperienced people
- Promote a couple from dozens of people to serve as an example of successful cases
- Fire or continue abusing the rest
- Rinse and repeat
In the end you acquired a couple of indoctrinated corporate zombies as well as years of cheap hours from the other ones.
Just take a look at every year's trainee program and the mind washing process from banks and corporate consultancies. Do the candidates really believe that the company needs so many trainees each year? The turnover is a feature, not a bug...
Edit: Just noticed my point is not related to your argument, and I actually agree with you.
> Communism is not about the "power of labor." Communism is about taking the individual and beating him into the mud until they are a bloody pulp, unable and unwilling to ever resist again.
Yes, that's why I used the word 'ostensibly'. As in they're not even paying lip service to the supposed goal.
Because it's all so predictable, it's all off topic here. If this is what you want to do, you'll need to do it elsewhere. That's a plural "you", not just you personally.
People aren't arguing each other re 100M vs. 64M mass murders - that's the different sources just for communist uprisings. The same doesn't exist for capitalism because the introduction of capitalism does not coincide with mass murder.
> If this is what you want to do, you'll need to do it elsewhere. That's a plural "you", not just you personally.
Understood. Better yet, can we simply just ban advocates for communism, nazism, genocide, etc?
If you're going to blame the deaths of 100 million people on Communism, you have to attribute to Capitalism the same deaths caused by companies flouting the law, releasing dangerous products, and market based providing of services. Communism isn't to blame when someone dies because they can't afford healthcare.
I thought that the bar to enter the engineering profession overall (except in some areas of software development) is still lower than medical. Wondering what the current situation in China is.
Where it gets murky for me, is that by 30, the majority of brain matter is now grey, which is great if you're dealing with things that don't change quickly, cause grey matter is smoking fast, but not so good for fast moving areas like tech, because it's not as plastic. I could see a slight argument for ageism in tech, for this reason, but I've been doing it so long, that I'm finally starting to see history repeat itself, and it's really easy to see past the hype of most 'new' technologies, given that they're often just repackaging of some idea from a decade ago, and it's a big mistake not to have someone on the team who can recognize these trends.
Personally I really think it's a mistake in general to avoid diversity though. There are so many diverse tasks in software, that you really need people who are happy doing different things. Also getting different viewpoints and concerns can really round out a product, and can make finding bugs easier.
But that might only be problem in the West.
You make it sound like only way to scale is by having a dictatorship and a strong chain of command. Historically the more power the peons had, as long as they didn't completely disregard the chain of command, the stronger the organization was.
Also, despite China having 1 billion people, you don't need 1 billion employees to turn a profit. Even the biggest Chinese companies, outside of state owned ones (which have different, more social, objectives) aren't much bigger than other big companies worldwide.
Especially with software, which is a creative business. Your first hour of a day is probably a lot more productive than your 12th. That last hour might even be counterproductive, when you create bugs and extra complication that needs to be sorted out later.
Can confirm. I(college student) work in small remote product development lab with a guy in his 30s and one in his 70s. The rest of the team is 1,000 miles away in San Diego. It’s beeen one of the best learning experiences I’ve had. And they pay generously on to :)
That would matter if their success was tied to the quality of the work -- not just rushing it to market, promoting it, and so on.
Which is not usually the case, either in China or here...
I know I prefer to hire people with experience because they deliver better work, faster. Part of that comes from managing their work/life balance better, but maturity in general have almost no downsides in the thinking business. Older workers are typically better at analyzing situations and also at telling me truths that they think I don’t want to hear, which is immensely valuable in decision making.
Not that you’ll want only experience. A balanced work force is the best in my opinion. Get your experienced staff to mentor your hires fresh out of school, and they’ll teach each other.
I know ageism is a thing in tech, and probably especially in startups which is mostly people in their twenties, but wasn’t there recently an article on how the most successful startups are actually started by someone aged 35-45?
I wonder if the Chinese ageism is because China is approaching tech as a factory line? Which would be a radically different approach than we have in Scandinavia, where we want our engineers to be well educated and capable of self-management and teamwork.