Not to mention, if the other companies also wish to hit their diversity goals, they will be forced to take on weaker hires, since the (already small) pool of adequate hires has been exhausted. In my opinion, diversity hiring is an anti-pattern. Hiring should instead ignore demographics information rather than use it to try and achieve some optimal representational balance. If demographics information are completely ignored in the hiring process (which is impossible if you do on-site hiring), then no one can accuse you of favoring a particular group of people.
It will always make the most sense to source the best people without regard to anything but job skill. If the best people aren't diverse, then chasing diversity requires you to look outside the set of best people, by construction. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
What I have seen in my experience is not a lowering of the bar for more diverse hires, but a lowering of the bar when a company wants to drastically increase its number of engineers. Yet the lowered bar does not increase the percentage of diverse hires, quite the opposite. I've seen lowering the bar for white men, but no other group.
I say this as a white man who doesn't want to work with poor quality engineers who are uncoachable. It infuriates my sense of logic when they cry about not wanting to lower the bar while doing exactly that.
https://www.tsowell.com/spquestc.html
Definitely worth a look, even if you don't think it applies here.
Having no CS degree myself and excelling in a top 10 company I agree with this sentiment, especially seeing the epidemic of “over leveling” the small pool of CS graduates occurring. I’d rather work with correctly leveled non-CS graduates than over-leveled CS graduates
Internal training, ok, but are you going to only provide internal training to women? Is this even legal?
Basecamp training, ok, but are you going to only provide basecamp training to women? Is this even legal?
Special talents (dropouts etc.), ok, but are you going to only hire special talents who are women? Is this even legal?
Non-traditional education, ok, but are you going to only hire non-traditional education candidates who are women? Is this even legal?
The whole idea that there is a social engineering way to make programmers 50% male/female is not based on any facts as we know in a free society. On the contrary, there is evidence that the more gender equal society, the fewer women choose STEM. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
The obsession of 50% is not only anti-science, it is also demeaning to other great contributions women provide to society. Yes, nurses and teachers make less money than programmers, but it does not mean nurses and teachers are less important than programmers. It is because personal caring kind of job is less scalable than STEM jobs, so a team of 10 programmers can provide services to far more people than 10 nurses.
Oh, are you going to disagree that caring for people is more a part of female nature than male nature? Are you going to say this is actually a result of society oppressed women and tricked them to care more about others? Because female psychology is exactly the same as male psychology? So maybe we should expect a gender equal society there are 50% male/female in murders and rapists?
Unless it is about starting a business and making money via ads.... Then they're willing to devote thousand of hours of their life thinking creatively about how to solve problems to "change the world".
In contrast nobody has changed the gender ratio in tech without discriminating against men: a zero sum game that definitely does not increase wealth for everyone.
As for your dismissal of people's 83 reasons, why not show us how it's done and address them?
It certainly doesn't increase the wealth of people who are persuaded to buy stuff that really isn't worthwhile for them.
Just because I cannot extract monetary value by buying another MIDI controller for my hobby doesn't mean it isn't a worthwhile purchase. If you derived enjoyment from a purchase, it increased your [non-material] wealth and added value.
The same way, Gmail and FB make money by selling ads, but if they didn't exist without ads, it is easily arguable that people would have missed out on a lot of wealth and benefits that comes with those things. I use Gmail, because I extract value from using it. And I pay for it by letting Google personalize my ads and sell them. For me, that exchange is absolutely worth it. If it wasn't, I wouldn't have been using it.
They do support initiatives to help but realize it is essentially generational at this point.
Good luck with that. People who profit exploiting "gender gap" like bootcamps, hr firms, speaker agencies, will never be happy.
I'm a middle-aged white male who's been working with software development for 25+ years. I don't like being around the typical dev shop - the culture isn't usually much of a fit (whether 'bro' or 'sci-fi' or 'gamer' oriented), often a focus on 'free beer!' and similar 'perks' - so much so that I stay way clear of most typical software/dev jobs. I can pass in those environments (and have), and it's still uncomfortable for me - it must be 10x worse for people who are that much more 'other'. :/
Is it just me? Does anyone find that their workplace is even 50% brogrammer?
I would LOVE to create a large curriculum in house that aims to teach non degree holding individuals these skill sets because it would have tremendous return on investment. Be we are a small company (<100) with limited resources that can not afford to have a six month on boarding process to Do it properly (and I am not a professor).
It is an unrealistic burden to any small or medium org to do what is required by your comment.
Having a CS degree perhaps helps a little for general background, but not every CS major has taken a db class and even then, they won't have learned many useful practical skills, like analyzing and fixing a slow production query. And conversely the folks who have been through bootcamps (that we have hired!) are all very self-directed and highly motivated to learn. So I'm not sure that the difference is quite as clear cut as you make it out to be.
I do completely agree with you that this is important, and that it's very hard to get companies to devote resources to it. Taking 6-8 hours a week out of a senior engineer's time to prepare and teach an effective class is a big ask; I had a lot of support from management to do this but I think that might be a rare luxury at other companies.
It's just sad that the tech industry doesn't invest more in high-quality structured teaching, when it could so clearly deliver benefits in terms of growing skills for engineers from both CS and non CS backgrounds. Assuming that they'll somehow learn everything they need without structure or direction might work in a few cases, but in general it's a poor long term strategy for both companies and the industry as a whole.
I used to be very degree-centric in my recruiting. But some time ago I started hiring from boothcamps, particularly for frontend jobs. The fact I saw is that as part of the development needs of the companies I have been at, there is a good amount of work that can be done by developers of these skill levels. Once my team was able to organize the work, we were able to make jr people productive.
This not only made us capable of hiring jr devs. It actually made more Sr devs happy because they did not have to do that work and made mid levels happy because they own the growth of the jr devs .
Depends on what you classify as serious work, I guess?
From years of reading similar comments and my own experience, I was under the impression most “software developer” jobs only lightly touch on anything complex - most of us aren’t designing databases and complex low-level stuff day-to-day, but we do need to know enough to not do something terribly inefficient and stupid in basic plumbing code.
I think what you really need are smart people, and people who are willing to put in the work to get past the first few years of stumbling and not knowing what anything means. Likewise, young developers need good mentors and patient senior developers to lean on and who they can pick this stuff up from.
Not sure what your company is doing, but if what you say is true, maybe you are one of the rarer groups actually doing the hard stuff.
I totally agree with you, but that doesn't solve the issue, there are not that many of those people out there struggling to get jobs, because employers already know about this trick. That's why a bunch of quant and other top-tier finance shops are full of math and physics grads who had almost zero knowledge of finance before getting hired for those jobs.
The value of a degree is less the information it teaches, and more as a filter for people who are unusually smart and/or self-motivated. Those people coming with the requisite CS theory is merely a bonus.
You don’t need much to be productive. There’s plenty of great guardrails like code reviews, pair programming and shadowing that can make someone surprisingly productive.
The value of a degree is social signaling that you are the “type” of person to be able get that degree, socioeconomically and temperamentally. Plenty of people out there for whom the economics of a degree didn’t make any sense, or they had bigger needs that had to be filled immediately so didn’t have the ability to sacrifice for the long term.
I took the intended sentiment to be that of finding talent among non-degree holders that won't necessarily present itself in a typical CS interview scenario. Thus we need a way to identify future CS talent that is merely in need of training and mentoring. And so the problem reduces to, in my opinion, to finding people who are smart and unusually self-motivated. But there is just no good way of doing this.
What do I mean by personal questions? My favorite interview so far left all the academic quizzing aside and asked me to talk in-depth about a particular real-world project I worked on. What patterns did I use? How did it interact with the database? How did I model the problem? This was not something that would be easily googled and it let me convey how I think about software on my own terms. Then it was up to the interviewer if my approach to software would be useful to them.
Counterpoint: the overwhelming majority of software companies out there do not work on problems and develop products that warrant deep computer science expertise.
I mean, if you're doing cutting edge and/or highly technical stuff, great, go nuts, recruit only those with CS degrees. But most software out there is your run-of-the-mill line of business software, mostly CRUD with a bit of specialized functionality. And the bar for working on that is way lower.
Sometimes you go ahead and walk the fine line of the no true scotsman argument - a degree without this basic math isn't CS. And any "reputable" CS degree - and by "reputable" I don't mean top 10 or even top 50, I just mean a fine university with a proper curriculum - will absolutely have this requirement.
It might depend on how the degree is taught I guess, mine had very little actual programming.
Where did you get your info from? Because I just checked the Stanford CS curriculum requirements for Bachelors degree, and it clearly has "Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy" requirement, along with a senior project requirement (that would, I assume, includes writing), as well as 3-5 credit units from the list of approved "Technology in Society" courses.[0]
0. https://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/schoolofengineering/comp...
My engineering program required an upper-division course from the philosophy department on the development of rigorously ethical systems of thought.
Additionally, if you meant specifically without CS degrees, I think a lot of companies accept unrelated degrees + experience.
> I am one of them
You, yourself, are a large pool? Or you, yourself are one instance of a fairly small pool (like OP suggests).
> Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints?
The post suggests searching and hiring outside of the traditional pipeline, which is something that is within control. The comment is then topped off with a strawman argument:
> If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.
50% is clearly a goal that is a long way away but it doesn't mean we cannot work towards it. Yes, it's probably unrealistic to expect anyone to bring 50% representation to a significant sized workforce within an average tenure. It doesn't mean that the pursuit of gender parity is delusional or that meaningful and achievable targets cannot be set.
If anything this top comment is a prime example of the prevailing biased and unwilling attutide to improve representation in the industry, that has been placed on a pedestal.
Do you believe if the world was completely fair we would have 50/50 in every industry or is there (shock and horror) perhaps an uncomfortable biological difference driving our interests.
And this also just illustrates how difficult it is to debate on similar ground with a random person in a well-defined scope on these kinds of issues.
I speak concretely of the things companies are able to achieve within the constraints and resources they're given. You speak of hopes and dreams. But more importantly (and worse), I think you seek to turn your hopes and dreams into unworkable policies that penalize people for not achieving your hopes and dreams.
To hit 50% when the hiring pool is less than 50% women would require women to get accepted at a higher rate than men.
Because it spells out a view that the majority agrees with.
The post suggests searching and hiring outside of the traditional pipeline
It suggests the only way to hire more women is to discriminate against the best credentialed candidates.
It doesn't mean that the pursuit of gender parity is delusional
Lots of us believe it's actually, truly delusional.
How long have women been encouraged to go into engineering? Decades. My entire life. The numbers studying it don't shift. Diversity initiatives have long ago passed the King Canute stage and turned into full blown reality denial based on a big pile of nasty conspiracy theories about men. Aline Lerner is one of the better "women in tech" out there but even she goes there:
hostile university culture in male-dominated CS programs, biased hiring practices, and ultimately non-inclusive work environments that force women and people of color to leave tech
Ugh. Women would prefer teaching children to software? It must be that men are hostile, biased and "force" women to leave!
What about the fact that most childcare workers are women? Is it due to rampant bias, hostility and discrimination by women that "force" men to leave? Where are the hundreds of millions spent on fixing that? At least with teaching there's some slightly plausible argument about why gender diversity might be useful, whereas in engineering there is none.
These beliefs are insulting, demeaning, condescending and ultimately false. The vast, vast majority of men I've encountered in the tech world bend over backwards to give women anything they want if they even so much as express an interest in tech. Sometimes they push them to the front even if they don't. The idea that women's lack of interest in tech is all the nasty male's fault is absurd and is the inverse of the reality: namely, women routinely campaign hard to exclude men from opportunities. All in the name of "equality".
Similar situation is when my non-minority friends are surprised that racism still exists in <area>. "I know racism exits, but that kind of thing cannot happen <here>!" Well, my friend, you wouldn't feel that way if you looked like me.
Mine, too, and I'm in my 40's now.
Companies used to train internally - watch an older TV show (or even something like Better Call Saul) and see how many characters "worked their way up from the mail room". The death of company loyalty goes both ways but I'm sure it can be mended with some effort. Where I work one of the better programmers I knew was an immigrant from south east Asia who started in the warehouse and had an interest in programming. I don't know whether or not he had a degree, but the point was he worked hard to prove himself, and they took a chance to give him a go.
So I guess my point is, graduate statistics isn't the end of the story.
Please no. Japan is that way. Japan pays programmers $20k to start, no better than working fast food. Their salaries go up to $60k at the top end at most big Japanese companies and they have the attitude that anyone over 35 is too old to code. I feel the fact they hire grads with zero experience is one of the reasons. Why pay someone $$$ if they can't actually do the job yet? Conversely interns at Google make $70k-$100k yearly equivalent. The two might not be connected but I feel they are and so AFAIK the "pay for experience" is better than "pay with free training" for employees.
It also seems better for the employer. Japan still has a culture of lifetime employment so the employer invests the equivalent of a college education into the employee and gets a lifetime commitment. That would never work in the west. People would take the free education and then leave for greener pastures the first chance they got.
CEO : « We should train our workers. »
CFO : « It will be expensive and what do we do if we train them and they leave ? »
CEO : « What do we do if we don't and they stay ? »
Finally I think the parable is initially french, as it's harder to fire people just for lack of training here.
When I was younger, my mother worked as a freight forwarder. After she'd been there for awhile, the company paid to send her for training and certification to work with hazardous materials. If I recall correctly, she signed a contract agreeing to repay the costs of the courses if she left the company before a certain period of time had passed.
Essentially, rather than hiring externally a freight forwarder who is already certified to handle dangerous goods, they identified their strongest existing employee without that certification and paid for them to learn what they needed for a more advanced position, with conditions to assure they recoup their investment. The way I read it, I thought the person you replied to was suggesting identifying existing employees with potential and paying to expand their skillsets for a different role, e.g. with bootcamps or MOOCs, not hiring fresh graduates for low pay.
I had a similar clause in my first contract. Since the team I was hired into was a Perl shop and I hadn't done any Perl before starting there, they sent me on a week-long Perl training early on. The contract said that if I quit within the first year, I would have to reimburse them for the cost of the training (going down progressively by 1/12th of the price per month that I'm staying with the company).
I personally value stability and would prefer to stay in one place if it were more feasible. Training can be at all career stages, not just the beginning.
Japan, yeah, I don't want that. It's a unique beast with a lot of dysfunctions, both anecdotally from friends and all the stories online. I'd say the things you listed are outcomes from lingering cultural problems rather than causes.
What stuck me as ridiculous was some owner who said something about having invested 30 years in these guys. He hadn't invested shit as far as I could see. He has a handfull of employees that had invested in their own skills. If he had invested in his employees he have a new generation ready or almost ready to step up as one retired.
Senior devs have to come from somewhere.
yeah, other companies that invested in them but tried not to give them market raises.
You’d be better off being diverse in major. When I think of the smartest developers or IT people I know, one was a sociologist who learned programming as a labor department statistician, another had an MFA in Piano, and the other was in pharmacy school and dropped out after an injury.
Oddly enough, I've never met a single one that was female, though that's only anecdotal of course. The only female devs I know have CS degrees.
The focus on CS is important. Developers who don't have it are generally not educated in how to write good code. Many people do get into the field without the degree, but many of them are very bad at programming. I've had to rewrite O(n!) algorithms written by some of them, and they really didn't even understand why the algorithm was bad even when I broke it down to them.
My CS education absolutely gave me many of the tools I need for a career in software engineering. It didn't give me everything to be sure -- there's a lot of learning that still goes on in the job, but having a solid foundation is crucial to being a good engineer.
Anecdote is not data, and it's only my individual anecdote, but it's my experience that breaking through into the industry to be incredibly hard. Since then I've made up for lost time and advanced faster than a college grad would expect (junior dev in a shitty agency to enterprise lead dev in about four years), and I attribute that to spending so incredibly long as essentially a junior dev freelancer and just being older.
So it can be done, certainly, but I strongly suspect there are several filters working against self-taught developer women making that transition into the industry, and one of them is definitely gender discrimination. And no, aside from sending out resumes with a man's name on them, I don't know how to fix it.
I keep hearing about gender discrimination, and maybe this is a market segment thing, but everywhere I've worked is actively recruiting female devs. Also the places I've worked as a dev typically require a CS degree though for what that's worth. Many of them even require an MSCS -- I've actually been turned down for one job because even though I have an MS it wasn't an MSCS (gov contracts get very specific).
I am absolutely willing to believe it's a market segment thing. I live in a smaller city full of colleges, so the handful of large companies hiring want all of their jr devs to be right out of college, and that's straight from the recruiter's mouths. I was forced to apply to all the small companies.
And, for what it's worth, my current job and the two before it "required" a degree. From what I can tell, that requirement is to filter people on the low end of years of experience. Old age and treachery counts for a lot more than you may think.
Definitely? As in, you have actual proof? Or even some evidence? Because if you do, that’s illegal, and ought to be reported to the DOL.
If you can demonstrate evidence of this, you absolutely should, because that would be a particularly surprising finding considering how many organizations state upfront that they have preferential hiring for women. I’ve hired software developers for decades, and the resumes are dominated by Indian-sounding names: I don’t know about you, but I usually can’t tell whether those names are masculine or feminine. I’m shocked on the rare occasion I come across a resume with an American sounding name like Jim or Mary.
If you have a background in any science, or even a good analysis ability in a liberal arts field, you can be trained pretty quickly to be a functional developer. I'm surprised this doesn't happen more given the absurd salaries people are getting paid these days!
A CS degree is supposed to educate you in how to think, not train you to write software. Being able to properly decompose a problem and use the right data structures and algorithms to solve it is more than just training. You need education in the fundamentals to do that effectively.
I don't believe that it is impossible for someone without a CS degree to be a developer -- far from it -- but in my experience most of the really good ones have CS or CE or EE degrees. YMMV of course.
I think women in tech is a very similar situation. The article states that women graduate from bootcamps at a rate twice that of traditional CS courses. I'd say this is because there's less friction to join, so anything pushing them away is more easily overcome.
Sorry for the harsh formulation, but the point is, we really don't actually know what is going on. It is not legitimate to just assume women are being pushed away from traditional career paths in IT.
As for Military, I think the idea to become a Software Developer is by now a very common one, you don't have to come from a specific demographic to have heard of that option. Women come from the same backgrounds as men, the odds to have a baby girl or a baby boy are the same at all levels of society.
Women willingly choose different education paths because of different interests.
https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bia...
It is: less than 900 students and less than 13%. They can have whatever gender ratio they want, more or less, with essentially no effort. I'm not sure they have cleverly solved "insidious bias", more than they are simply selecting for the gender ratio they want as they send out acceptance letters. It would be nice if a much larger school with a much higher acceptance rate adopted identical curriculum, so we could have real data on the idea. But until that happens I would be somewhat cautious about declaring success here.
That wouldn't fly in the workplace. I'm surprised it's acceptable under Title IX.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/03/1...
What if there are way more males applying to Harvey Mudd, thus, assuming equal ability levels of people in both groups, resulting in a higher women admission rate?
What if the women applying to Harvey Mudd are, on average, more competent than males applying for whatever reason? E.g., women being less confident about applying to schools like MIT, so a bunch of them would apply to Harvey Mudd instead, while all MIT-capable males wouldn't apply to Harvey Mudd.
I am not claiming whether that specific situation they have at Harvey Mudd is acceptable or not under Title IX, but the numbers your bring up should not be problematic on its own under Title IX imo, it is how those numbers were arrived at and other numbers in the context that make all the difference.
There are more than enough women interested in computing to make up 50% of a tiny school's program. There aren't nearly enough women interested in computing to make up 50% of the market.
Well, probably because the environment in all parts of the tech pipeline, is often times toxic the entire way through, and women don't want to deal with that.
So part of solving the pipeline problem means trying to solve it in many different parts of the pipeline, and recognizing that even if a previous part failed, you can still do stuff to fix it, later on.
At a certain point you are clearly dealing with bad actors and the default assumption stops being any attempt to accomidate them and starts being to tell them to fuck off.
Because basically every women in tech has many many many stories of their bad experiences, all the way through the pipeline.
If you want to talk about universities, the problem with them is often the culture. Women are second guessed, every step of the way, and are often told that they don't belong there, and they have their abilities questions much more often than men.
This very common toxic culture of universities, often drives women out of the industry, because they feel like they don't belong, and aren't as good as their peers, even though they might actually be getting better grades than their peers.
If you speak to almost any woman in tech, they will be able to tell you this, and they will be able to give you many examples of the horrible experiences that they had to go through, every step of the way, through the pipeline.
It might not be all women that have these experiences. But it is most of them. Polling and data collection supports this conclusion.
That latter thing might be the biggest issue. The basic assumptions seems to be that things always come easy for men and they are always welcome.
And yes I know many women in tech, as I studied with them and worked with them.
I have also seen many articles by women in tech who say they didn't have issues. But somehow they don't count and are quickly forgotten, because they go against the narrative.
And there are many that do have issues. See, thats the thing about this stuff. Some women not having bad experiences, does not overrule the bad experiences of other women.
For what it's worth, many of the accounts of "bad experiences" didn't really convince me, either. It is too easy to attribute all of one's issues to sexism. For example the common complaint of being passed over in promotions, or of having one's opinions not being appreciated. That happens to men all the time, too, they just don't get to claim it is because of sexism.
Confirmation bias may play a huge role in those personal accounts, too.
As I said - usually the comparison to actual experiences of men is missing. There are many, many more men who have been passed over for promotion than women who have been passed over, in the tech industry, for example.
Another thing that is missing is an account of the advantages women have, like men being eager to help, extra funding only for women, hiring quotas, and so on.
Because I am not overruling those womens experiences! So if you were to claim that some women have no problems, thats fine. I am sure there are some. But there still exists bad exeriences for many women, and thats still bad and we should try and solve those bad experiences!
See the difference? I am not saying that good experiences don't exist. I am saying that even if some good experiences exist, we should still try and solve the bad experiences, which definitely do exist.
You, on the other hand, seem to be trying to minimize the real life problems that other women definitely do have. (Whereas I am not denying that some women have no problems. Just that even if this is the case, we should still work to solve the bad experiences)
I guess you meant to say unmarried, not that they were all cheating on their partners.
I'm not saying a company should throw up its hands and do nothing. But why are we looking to assign to companies the solving of a 50% problem (if that's the goal), when they can only ever achieve 15% within their reasonable powers?
There's a pipeline problem if you are only taking a specific output and society is not producing it. As an individual company then you can either broaden what you accept (and I don't think this will lower quality, but it will make hiring harder), or take charge and extend the pipeline in your own backyard through training or probationary periods to trial someone.
FTA: > As you can see, broadening your pipeline isn’t a magic pill, and as long as demand for software engineers continues to grow, it’s still going to be really hard, systemic changes to our society notwithstanding. If we do make these changes, however, the tech industry as a whole can accelerate its path toward gender parity and potentially get there within a decade.
There's probably a feedback loop here where if they can broaden their intake, it will help accelerate societal change. The largest companies will have the most trouble, because they have the most seats to fill, but they also have the resources to try something different to fix this if they really want to.
On your last point, I think having a hard target like 50% can be damaging since it is demoralising to look at the gap and it might all feel like too much to deal with. I'd personally prefer to work towards 'a bit better than last year' with some achievable (non-startup) growth rates.
Except it is, because of course it is.
Who is responsible for fixing the gender imbalance in tech, if not the leaders in tech?
(Of course the housing thing may just be a cynical calculation that it’s cheaper than the toxic public relations of doing nothing. But maybe that should be the case for the gender thing too.)
An imbalance doesn't inherently need to be fixed. If the imbalance is because women are simply less interested- an imbalance is desirable.
Equality in opportunity will not neccessarily lead to equality in outcome. Any argument on this topic that is rooted in outcomes can be immediately dismissed. Attempt to measure the actual source of the problem- which is opportunity.
In a particular well-known American tech company with a large office in Tokyo, our recruiters were in part responsible for the pipeline of new recruits from abroad. I began to notice the recruiters feeding the pipeline with people that were essentially cookie-cutter templates of themselves.
I would say 90% of the interviewees had the same background: 30s-40s white male with a Japanese girlfriend/wife that wanted to move to Tokyo for family reasons. At one point, it just became a cliche.
I have no opinion on whether this was a good or bad thing, but it definitely overfitted for that particular persona and shifted the company's internal culture and diversity.
So while the source of the pipeline is definitely skewed, I would argue that whoever is doing the recruiting and subsequent hiring need also be evaluated regarding their criteria for employee selection.
We still have very little understanding of the human brain- but we understand enough to know that women and men are different.
The theory of evolution also provides strong support for this idea. Women and men have had different selection criteria, and therefore have evolved differences.
Australia BTW.
If you hire only one gender with narrowly targetted job advertisements, the"wronged party is a pool of thousands (or more) of engineers that didn't even know the job existed. If you promote only one gender from the mail room, the wronged party is a small cohort of peers that can visibly see exactly who is promoted above them. Those are much more dangerous waters to tread.
I really thought it was the accepted fact and a starting point of all the discussions on this subject, that the issue is the pool of candidate.
Myself I recently tried to hire a developer and that’s a reality that there is nearly no female candidates. And I‘m not restricting it to CS degree.
I don’t understand how it’s not obvious that what can be done at the hiring process is completely marginal. There is no politics here.
The politics is how much we try to aim for 50% candidates (education, training...)
73.9% of H1B visas are given to Indians, 79.2% of those Indians are males.
The solution is to require at least 50% of all H1B recipients, from all countries, to be female.
High levels of Indian and Chinese migration also produce secondary effects, as families from those communities still carry out sex-selective abortion even into the 2nd and 3rd generations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6133054/
I don't see why one would assume that gender distribution of CS degree holders is a strong proxy for the gender distribution of available candidates suitable for software development positions. Its true that many big firms (and even a large number of small firms) have a well-known strong bias for CS degree holders (and for CS degree holders from particular elite institutions), but the statistics of the field as a whole, and of CS degree holders, show that that is a bias inconsistent with the real qualifications for the field which cannot avoid exaggerating the gender gap in the field.
> A while back, I did rough envelope calculations that if one of the major FAANG companies hit their diversity goal, there would be none left for any of the rest of them.
That only makes sense if you assume that none of the meeting the target was done by bringing people into the field that otherwise would not be in it, despite the fact that that is typically a focus of such efforts by large firms.
You've made a counter-intuitive point and claimed that it's confirmed by statistics and yet haven't included any...
Some people presume that billionaire multinationals could spend some of their cash fixing the pipeline problem by convincing a few thousand women to take up coding.
More precisely: while technical proclivity and skill are obviously not uniformly distributed across the population, some people believe they "should" be more uniformly distributed than they currently are (because those things can correlate with wealth/power), and that whoever has the power to fix a gender imbalance in wealth/power-probability has the responsibility to do so.
Aside: Interesting how people push for these demographics at software companies but not at elementary/middle/high schools. Maybe if we solve that problem (which is literally just a matter of salaries) then there would be more openings in the tech industry for women and other under-represented groups.
Because we all know how well people react to being told "Hey, you should learn to code!"
Perhaps employers can expand the search to those with degrees in statistics, mathematics, physics, econometrics?
What I've seen time and time again is that when people dont want to hire, they come up with excuse after excuse. When they really want to hire [a VP's brother-in-low, or whatever], even the flimsiest of cases suddenly get made for the hire.
I'd say, we should look think bigger.
Just to be clear, I am not saying there is anything wrong with looking for candidates from those areas, companies should, and already did source candidates from more than CS degrees. But the company should do that because those candidates were qualified, not because they have to hire to sastify a demographic composition requirements for the company
I thought the tech industry had pioneered the idea that a degree shouldn’t be the yard stick that all potential hires are judged against. And yet every time there’s a discussion about diversity in tech it’s the first excuse brought up. Suddenly a CS degree is a necessity.
If fund managers are on average no more lucky than just following the market then it'd stand to reason it doesn't matter what their degrees are in because they had no real skill to begin with.
My own experience of finance has been that jobs are handed out in ways and for reasons that would seem extremely lax to someone from the tech world.
Why do you assume there won't be a similar (or worse) gender bias in those fields too? And if you expand the search in some way or loosen the requirements, then you can't do it only for women, that wouldn't be legal. That's why there is a real pipeline problem that needs to be addressed by getting more women into STEM.
Not only is there a financial incentive (if you get people new to the field, you can pay them less until they get a new job or sufficient raises, and this is a benefit for both parties due to the lessened educational cost), it also creates loyalty out of almost nothing.
If not university classes or a bootcamp-like setup, apprenticeships would probably work amazingly for the purpose.
b) suggesting that those people should be paid less is immoral
Because 1) there is a feedback loop that does show that having role models at the end of the pipeline does help the entire pipeline. 2) It is easier than restructuring the entire pipeline than admitting that it is a societal problem rather than big bad Google being sexist (I'm not saying Google isn't sexist).
This is kind of a pattern in problems that don't have smoking guns. We like to pretend that things are first order problems (problem causes an effect, directly) when most problems are pretty high order and complex. First order problems are usually easier to solve because they have a clear smoking gun. You take care of the bad person that fired the gun and the problem is solved. I actually suspect that this is an evolutionary problem, being that most of our early problems could be approximated by first or second order and thus increase our survival rate. I'm also pretty convinced that we've solved most of those now, and thus that line of thinking doesn't work for modern problems.
But for part 1), if you have the flu, tissues help. They don't cure the flu, but they help you from preventing the spread and alleviate the symptoms. So if you take my preposition about first order problems, I don't think it is hard to see why people would get stuck at that stage. Essentially "we did something and it had a positive effect. So let's keep doing that thing!" That's not bad logic. You admit that they do have __a little__ control over the constraints, so it isn't surprising that they have __a little__ impact. The failure is not continuing to look for more potential solutions and stagnating. Just need to do some PCA, find the other factors, and push on those (as well as what we've already found to have positive effects). But this is much easier said than done, and I think that is part of the problem. Difficult problems are tautologically difficult, but we as a society like to pretend there are simple solutions (come on, admit it, you do this too).
So why do we do this? Well, how many people do you know break down complex problems into multiple components? I know very few, and even then they don't consistently do it.
> If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.
I'd argue that they would just start cheating. Which I think that there is evidence that this is happening (some being given in this article).
Oh it can be done, it just requires reducing the number of male employees in one way or another. Everyone wants to believe the utopian ideal of perfectly-balanced ratios of employees can be achieved without someone getting the short end of the stick, but reality says otherwise.
The assumption you're making is that everyone who is capable of doing a dev job manages to get one, so if you remove all the hiring biases all those people will continue to get dev jobs and nothing will really change.
That assumption is wrong.
There are thousands of people who can't get dev jobs for reasons other than lacking technical ability. Some hiring managers filter out candidates before the make it to interview for absolutely stupid reasons. Some companies have hiring practices that are plain stupid and select out capable engineers for dumb reasons. If hiring was a multiple choice exam those people would be able to enter the industry and there'd be fewer companies with unfilled positions.
Also, even if you don't think it'd have much of an impact on the numbers across the industry, the numbers at the specific companies that have bad hiring biases obviously would change. That could be useful.
So Google wants to reflect the consumer base, so I guess we can take that to mean ~50% female devs?
It is very politically unacceptable to object to this intellectually lazy reasoning.
Which includes a good portion of extremists of all kinds, illiterates, drug dealers, etc. And of course, half of it is made of people with below average IQ.
You want your company to employ the people that are best at the job, not a cross-section of the population along some randomly chosen axis.
Perhaps if you went back to the days of women's liberation and somebody said "what next, gays?" they'd get dismissed too. That might be right, but it's possible they really saw it as a serious issue before its time.
And if people aiming for diversity don't have 50% as a goal, somehow I have never seen them name another number that they would consider satisfactory.
Also, just because you have a goal to aspire to doesn't mean you can realistically meet it. Suppose if every high achiever in a school wants to be valedictorian, but only one of them will make it. That in itself doesn't mean it's a pointless goal.
How? If I interview a bunch of people for programming positions and pick the 10 best men and 10 best women, which group do you think will be best? Statistically I have considered several times more men than women, so the male group will almost surely be stronger. The only way to avoid this is to intentionally pick bad men, or if I just randomly ignore 83% of their resumes.
It's just looking for people who are better than (some arbitrary skill level).
More men than women could bench press 160 lbs, but if your hiring bar is 'we hire people who can bench 160 lbs', you can trivially find as many people from either gender as you want.
Also, if you are buying a car with the goal of being able to accelerate from 0-60mph in under 4 seconds, and you have to choose between two cars priced exactly the same, but one can do it in 3.9 seconds and another one in 3.1 seconds, why would you pick the 3.9 car over the 3.1 one, even though the 3.9 one meets your requirements of under 4 seconds just as well (assuming all the other relevant characteristics are equivalent or about the same)?
I think the idea behind diversity targets is an implicit assumption that they do. In subtle ways like how/where they advertise, and in more obvious ways like funding educational programs etc. It's there that diversity programs/targets need to start, not at the hiring stage.
Its entire premise is "there aren't enough women with CS degrees, there is a pipeline problem, here are some things to get around it".
I doubt it is. You’re writing off all the self-taught coders. You’re also writing off all the non-coders.
Most companies seem to think they want a 10:1:1 ratio of engineers:designers:product managers, etc.
I think 3:3:3 would be better, and makes your issue go away.
But we have this worship of “engineering” as some sort of magical thing that happens in a vacuum and requires no cross-discipline input.
Meanwhile every tech company I’ve ever worked for is pathologically rewriting the same code over and over, bashing their heads against the same tech debt over and over, and regularly wasting millions of dollars Building The Wrong Thing.
Heck we should probably have 10:1 masseuses and 10:1 psychotherapists on staff. Productivity would strictly increase.
It's not surprising if the strategies such as diversity quotas are not effective. Because they're not meant to be effective. They're meant to virtue signal. Ergo they are meant to only redirect people's anger towards an ineffective end, not to create an actual improvement.
For another example, take a prevailing narrative in fake feminism that continually tells women they are disempowered victims. This doesn't help bring balance, it only helps disenfranchise women.
Of course, if that were true, why would anyone believe any of these narratives such as diversity quotas? Because they provide the fake victim fake payoff: there's something very compelling about not having to be responsible for your problem but instead being able to blame someone else albeit incorrectly. It's very satisfying and an effective means to redirect anger towards a ineffective but satisfying ends. It's very compelling for people and gets them hooked.
Another place these fake payoffs are used to manipulate people is in terrorist recruitment. You can sublimate raw economic issues and individuals dissatisfaction into blaming and hatred towards another state, you can create armies of willing footsoldiers.
I'd suggest there's a further parallel between armies and the "Twitter armies": legions of ideologues willing to crucify anyone who dares disagrees.
So it's not surprising these so-called strategies do little effective. they're not meant to, they're meant to preserve the status quo. And they do that by the simple psychological mechanism of redirecting people's anger towards something ineffective.
I'm not sure if you realize this, but change always seems impossible until it happens. 10 years ago it seemed completely impossible that Facebook would have 1B users, let alone the ~3B it has now.
The same 10 years ago it seemed impossible to that gay people would be able to marry, and even 4 years ago the idea of a Trump presidency was considered a joke.
Change is and will remain hard. That doesn't mean it isn't desirable nor does it mean that people shouldn't bang their heads against walls to make it happen.
I was shocked by how quickly this was downvoted. It went to -4 in minutes! I didn't even think anything I said there was particularly controversial. I think it's pretty well established that social change is hard.
Ironically, in my experience, the companies who figured this out a decade ago are the major finance companies. Hire anyone with a pulse, put in the effort to train them, be the only company on the block that isn't active treating these populations like shit, the you get retention rates that are unheard of in tech (especially for such comparativly shitty jobs by metric of pay and interesting things to do). Talent is there, tech companies just choose to ignore it and play into the existing biases ( and out right misogynistic streaks) that already exist.
Maybe 50% is a perfect ideal, but, don't let perfect be the enemy of better. We absolutely should be loudly shaming those at the top that "just can't find talent".
#rantsFromAnAngryTransWoman
But, why, though? Are you saying that women as a group are less capable of completing CS degrees than men?
I'm, personally, not really a fan of programs that are trying to shuffle people into a specific degree to improve employment representation rather examining what skills are necessary to do the job in the first place. The university as proxy for job training model, I feel, is perverse and doesn't necessarily serve students nor employers.
Instead, the problem is often that they have such a bad time, in those programs, due to the existence of a toxic culture, that they don't want to put up with that crap, and instead leave to get a job in industry that has a less bad culture (because they have other options).
Unfortunately, toxicity on all stages of the pipeline tends to drive out people who would be good engineers, but instead decide to do something else, because they have alternative options that don't suck so much, for cultural reasons.
If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for the available candidate population) is 18% (Google for the facts and stats), how is every company to hit an idealistic goal of 50% representation?
A while back, I did rough envelope calculations that if one of the major FAANG companies hit their diversity goal, there would be none left for any of the rest of them. Look at these percentages and you can see unsentimentally that this must be true.
Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints? If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.