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.