With such politically charged issues, it's always a problem of people wanting to believe something is possible (and mandatory to pursue) banging their heads against what is true and actually possible.
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.
> 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.
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.
IIUC, I think the distinction between sourcing and assessing is not relevant here. Assuming the females in the pool of viable candidates have already been exhausted, then sourcing only females is suboptimal, as they are less likely to pass assessment because (by construction) they are not in the set of viable candidates.
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.
If you've not seen it, Thomas Sowell incisively comments on the wish for the impossible in The Quest for Cosmic Justice. There's a full book, but the original speech gives the main point:
The whole point of the article is that restricting your hiring pool to only CS graduates is a bad pattern and you should consider other qualities instead so saying only 18% of CS graduates are female misses the point.
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
The problem is how you gonna find a different hiring pattern to force 50%?
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?
Always interesting that on Hacker News, people are always so ready to throw in the towel and call something impossible and list the 83 reasons why.
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".
Lots of people have started businesses and made money via ads, in ways that increased wealth for everyone. Of course people think about how to do that.
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?
If buying things didn't provide value to people, they wouldn't have bought it.
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.
I agree, 50% is probably an unreasonable goal, I could maybe even see arguing that any percent based goal is a bad goal. The goal should be “enough so those who are feeling disenfranchised don’t anymore” but that might be too squishy :)
That’s a laudable goal, and to that end I imagine it would do a world of good to stop the constant exaggeration of how disenfranchised those groups are (NOTE that I’m not saying these groups are fully enfranchised, only that the disenfranchisement is exaggerated). At some point, advertising tech as a bunch of rapey, Nazi frat bros is probably more offputting than whatever discrimination actually exists. Let’s ditch the boogeyman and see what happens.
> Like that the world of computer engineering is currently full of Brogrammers that females know it is best to stay way clear of
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'. :/
I’ve worked at a couple of mid-late stage startups and currently at a FAANG and I’ve observed very few engineers that I would put in the “bro” category. I don’t know how this became the stereotype when nerd is still the dominant character class by far.
Is it just me? Does anyone find that their workplace is even 50% brogrammer?
I've worked in a couple of small-mid size companies, and in those cases, while the engineering team themselves wasn't really 'bro'-ish... the management kept trying to introduce that sort of culture, I think as a way to try to get us to ... work more? better? attract newer/younger/cheaper devs?
I’m a drop out too and have made my way to manager where I find myself training juniors many of which also do not have degrees. Unfortunately it is night and day between the ones who do have degrees and those that don’t. At this point I am now strongly recommending cs degrees to anyone seeking a career in programming because the theories do come up in any serious work, particularly full stack engineers who must have strong understandings of databases, type theory, statistical analysis, etc.
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.
I'm currently teaching a class on databases to 10 junior engineers at a medium size org (~130 engineers). It's a huge amount of work but wonderfully fun and rewarding. The class is an even mix of CS grads and engineers from nontraditional backgrounds (mostly bootcamps). I myself trained in applied math and am a self-taught engineer who had a few good mentors along the way.
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.
My experience is somewhat the opposite: I have a BSc in Software Engineering and MSc and PhD in Computer Science. I've been in the Software Industry for about 10 years now and have held a Eng Director/VP level positions at some start ups.
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 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.
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.
In my experience as somebody without a degree and employed for >15 years now, you don't need a degree to get enough understanding of type theory and statistics, even for things at senior level. It will obviously depend on the specific project, but self-learning is very much a viable option in this industry. Conversely, I've seen many candidates with a CS degree who couldn't handle trivial coding challenges (and I mean trivial, not puzzles).
Yes, but the issue is how likely is an arbitrary person interested in being a programmer but lacking a degree going to be able to self-teach the vast amounts of information needed to be productive as a modern developer? I wager it is very unlikely. Those who do follow the self-taught route are 1) unusually smart and/or self-motivated or 2) got into the field when there were fewer moving parts and so self-teaching had a much smaller learning curve, then they simply matured with the field. After all the field circa 2000 looks vastly different than it does circa 2019.
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.
> Yes, but the issue is how likely is an arbitrary person interested in being a programmer but lacking a degree going to be able to self-teach the vast amounts of information needed to be productive as a modern developer?
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.
That's what the interviews are for, no? The point of the article is that if you are using degrees as a filter, you're passing on a lot of otherwise qualified candidates.
I agree, but I don't think there is a substantial number of software shops that use relevant degrees as a hard filter, nor is there a significant number of non-degree holders bursting with realized CS talent that the field is somehow blind to.
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.
My opinion: applying one-size-fits-all formulaic interviewing to your candidates excludes unconventional talent. Asking personal questions and following through on them unearths the smart and self-motivated talent. As an unconventional CS talent myself, I've had the most success with this approach on both sides of the interview process.
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.
You're absolutely right. A degree is not needed but a structured university program does seem to succeed in putting the majority of its students through that study, while those doing self-study are more likely to miss such concepts for other things considered more "practical"
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.
As a person without a CS education but with 30 years of industry experience, including several of The Bigs, I urge young people to get an education in anything but CS. The number of CS degree holders, even the masters and doctors, who struggle with statistics, linear algebra, or even thermodynamics and basic accounting is pretty dispiriting. Get an education and learn to program computers. Two separate things in my humble opinion.
I'm stunned to hear that. Well, not the part about basic accounting, or maybe thermodynamics, that I believe. But stats and linear algebra? I've worked at or attended several UC schools, and they all require calculus through linear algebra, vector calc, basic differential equations, and probability theory as part of the CS major. I myself was a math major and a grad student in Industrial Engineering, but we were all in the same core math sequence together.
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.
Do you think other degrees, outside of maths or physics maybe, makes you better at the things you listed?
It seems unlikely to me, and the fact people struggle with this is more representative of the general population than of the degree itself I would say.
It might depend on how the degree is taught I guess, mine had very little actual programming.
I'll never have personal first-hand experience with another kind of degree program, but my engineering program taught thermodynamics, accounting, technical writing, and ethics. I am looking right now at the Stanford CS undergraduate catalog and there are no requirements for technical writing, ethics, etc in here at all. Even the senior year writing requirement can be satisfied by working for Facebook for six months, which is disturbing and, frankly, explains a lot about why these kids can't write.
Your comment seemed really strange to me, because I remember that even back at Georgia Tech, we had both technical writing and ethics requirement for anyone in the CS program, so I decided to doublecheck the facts you listed about the Stanford CS program.
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]
The senior project is the one I mentioned that can be fulfilled by CS210, working at “our industry partners” in lieu of actual university coursework. The “tech & society” catalog is a joke. Look at the courses. Archeology? Fine as an elective.
My engineering program required an upper-division course from the philosophy department on the development of rigorously ethical systems of thought.
That assumes that those mediocore "fizzbuzz test failers" tiers would do better in the domain with another degree. The problem may be in their capabilities predegree.
A pool of statistical outliers is not a "big pool" that the parent comment was referring too. There are quite a few brilliant software engineers I got a chance to work with who had no college education whatsoever, but they are very clearly outliers among very few. I strongly doubt there is some big untapped pool of engineers without degrees who are just being completely overlooked simply for not having a degree.
One of the most disgusting things I have seen in my career was when my manager up-leveled a male candidate just to offer a salary the candidate might agree to, but he did not do the same for a female candidate who received similar feedback in the interview process. I mainly remember this because it happened around the same time for the same role we were trying to fill. Neither candidate accepted an offer.
How is this the top rated comment? It swats down the post based on points that the post has already addressed:
> 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.
The article is based on how we have failed to achieve 50/50 parity and why that is bad. You yourself have reiterated it as a good goal to chase. But is it? That is what OP is objecting to.
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.
You sound like a shining example of someone who believes that representation in a selected-for-some-attribute population should match the general population. That is a fallacy from the beginning, and I would encourage you to carefully justify to yourself why you believe that to be true.
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.
The alternative sources in the post still aren’t at gender parity, though they do show a higher percentage of women. If you can hire equal amounts of men and women from those sources then you’ll move your metric up, but you won’t get to 50%.
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".
Please don't take HN threads into gender war. Most comments in this thread managed to stay thoughtful and substantive. You crossed the line and you made it worse downthread. Please don't post like that here. It's against the site rules and it evokes worse from others.
Except every single one of the dozen+ female engineers I personally at FAANGM+ has a first-hand account of something vile that a male collegue did. In one case an internship mentor asked someone to come to their house, stating the wife and kids aren't home at night. Maybe you're a great man, and you only know other great men . But you can't dismiss a whole group just because you don't experience what they do. Just because it's not happening to you, doesn't mean it's not happening.
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.
I generally agree with you, but such smart and resourceful companies could do something about it. They are not powerless.
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.
I question whether training internally for any role will ever make a big comeback given current labor markets, but even if it did in the US, the labor market here is nothing like in Japan for a whole bunch of reasons. I think programmer salaries are bad there because have you seen the software that comes out of corporate Japan? There may be smart programmers but its clear companies see software as an afterthought at best, not a competitive area like in the US. In some ways I kind of respect the basic approach of not leveraging data and AI to the max to be disruptive like the current US tech market, but I wouldn’t try to go be a programmer there.
I'm wondering if they don't have a different idea of training internally than you do...
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.
> 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.
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’ve wanted to work at flex port for awhile and always wondered if they offered this...freight has so many things to learn in terms of law, economics, and supply chain....not to mention dealing with things at sea..
How can you say it would never work in the west when it did for many years? It certainly wasn't the workers who stopped it working.
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.
There was a piece on PBS Newshour recently about older workers (largely skilled blue collar) staying on longer with verious incentive because employers couldn't find skilled replacements.
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.
But why would you expect women to be more like to choose the approach of not graduating than men, though? Women have the same options to attend university as men. It seems more likely to me that the proportions of applicants without a degree are similar to the ones with degrees.
The focus on Computer Science is a female filter. I’ve rarely run into a colleague who claimed their education truly prepared them anyway.
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.
There are certainly people like this. What you generally find about them though is that they are highly motivated and deeply interested in the concepts of computing. They don't grow on trees -- they're quite rare.
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.
Hello! Now you've met a female dev with no CS degree. There may be a reason we're thin on the ground, too. My "training" as a software dev consisted of 10 years of self-employment as a freelance web developer, and when I decided to transition to working for a company, I faced massive hiring discrimination. I couldn't pay someone to interview me! And I did demonstrate that it was discrimination, too. My resume was getting something like a 2% response rate with my name on it, but I put a man's name on it and sent out a bunch, and suddenly I was getting a response to more than 80% of them.
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 suspect you'd have had far easier success with a BSCS on your resume. I can't imagine trying to get into this field without having had a degree -- it is a hard industry to get into.
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).
Oh you're almost certainly right, it would have been easier with the degree. I don't have any degree, and programming is a second career for me, so in a world where 26 year old senior developers are a thing, it's just one more thing putting me on my back foot. My biggest regret is not starting down this path 10 or 15 years earlier, honestly.
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.
Requirements can certainly be waived -- a good candidate who can "network in" can often bypass gates like that if they're a known quantity to someone in the company. Personal recommendations do make a huge difference -- I've networked my way to nearly every job I've gotten in some way.
The only evidence I have is response rates, and about 12 companies that responded to a man's-name resume that did not respond to an identical resume with a woman's name. I have consulted with a labor lawyer, who told me that this might be actionable if I can get enough women together to also perform this experiment and gather together in a class-action lawsuit. I don't live in a particularly large city, and I believe it's almost impossible without astroturfing.
> responded to a man's-name resume that did not respond to an identical resume with a woman's name
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.
I don't think that a computer science degree is bad, just that it's a poor filter. I have one, and while the math background is critical for many things, honestly the skills learned there are pretty limited in terms of what I've do.
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!
Lots of people can be "trained" to be functional developers. That doesn't make them good software engineers.
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.
Options don't exist in a vacuum. I had the option of signing up to the military, but my upbringing, preferences, and economic/social status made it almost certain I wouldn't. I had free will to make the choice but the outcome was almost foregone.
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.
I'd like to have more data on the women graduating from bootcamps. Maybe it is a desperate move of aging single moms who find they can't make a living with their degree in English Literature? While most men who are interested took traditional degrees to begin with, so they have less need for bootcamps.
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.
That's not true. Harvey Mudd made changes to their CS program to remove bias and now more than half of its computer science majors are women. There is some very insidious bias in the pipeline that isn't explained away with "but different interests".
A bit of "wait a minute, something else is going on here" comes with the mention that Physics has a even higher % women, yet there's no mention of curriculum changes for that major. This wouldn't happen to be a very small school with a very low acceptance rate, would it?
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.
23% of the women who apply to Harvey Mudd are admitted. 10% of the men who apply to Harvey Mudd are admitted. It sounds like they have one admissions process for women, and a different one for me. That's one way to get 50/50 I suppose.
That wouldn't fly in the workplace. I'm surprised it's acceptable under Title IX.
There could be plenty of non-malicious natural explanations for this.
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.
Obviously with proper marketing you can target the niche.
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.
Basically everyone at Harvey Mudd is in STEM -- the article says this. Their results are not really useful in the discussion, as their female student population is already heavily self-selected in favor of the hard sciences.
Adding on to this, Harvey Mudd puts forth significant effort at outreach and recruitment for their student body. Meaning they're pulling from the existing pool of STEM students to a large degree compared to creating new ones. It's very likely that Harvey Mudd's success cannot be reproduced at scale.
> But why would you expect women to be more like to choose the approach of not graduating than men, though?
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.
It's certainly not "toxic all the way through". That's such an insulting assumption. I bet you for example that at engineering university women are more likely to get help than men.
The accusations against tech have been a decades long Kafkatrap essentially for the sin of "not fitting in with their expectations and being successful" as a trial where the conclusion is guilty but they must deliberate over what sins. Look at the oldest accusations which failed to illustrate it best. I believe one howler was that "It would make cultures homogenous."
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.
Have you tried speaking to any women to get their opinion on the matter?
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.
Most "studies" of that are rather distorted, you have to read very carefully. For example they may summarize that many women have experienced discrimination at some point. That can mean in 4 years of study, somebody once made a sexist joke in passing. It doesn't imply they had real issues. And the issues of men are not even studied for comparison.
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.
> I have also seen many articles by women in tech who say they didn't have issues.
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.
Why does it not work the other way round, some women with bad experiences don't overrule the good 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.
> some women with bad experiences don't overrule the good experiences of other women?
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)
This is a good point. EDS during the 80s and 90s used to hire smart people with no college degree and send them to Texas to learn how to code for several months. They built their workforce this way because the demand was higher than the global supply. It would cost a blip on the balance sheet of FAANG co.’s to do the same. Interestingly there was a high number of married people that coupled up during that time. Sounded like a pretty intense but fun experience. Source: I interned there in the late 90s and heard a lot of stories from the then middle aged cohorts that went through it.
Sure, but the scope of what most companies are concerned with is their hiring goals for the next 1-2 years (let's be generous and say 5 years). What you're talking about clearly falls into the pipeline problem and just further supports the premise -- something like a 20 year timescale issue. Which goes to the truth of this article -- this problem is far beyond the power (or responsibility) of any company.
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?
The article says to not rely on proxies like college degrees, so I was aiming more along those lines. As far as I can tell (I admit I skimmed it) they advocate hiring for skills over pedigree.
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.
Yes that's one way. Many roles in some companies are relatively light on tech and rely a lot more on domain specific knowledge, so those are ideal stepping stones too.
So much this. I work at a FAANG company which has terrible diversity numbers in hardware development. Upper management is frequently asked about this by employees at big q&a sessions. The answer is always to blame the pipeline, as if we do not have billions of dollars that we could direct at solving it ourselves...
Except it isn't their responsibility. Clearly they don't have trouble making profit so why would they spend billions of dollars trying to urge people who may or may not even want the job to try and do it?
I like to think that companies run by humans don't solely consider profit as their only metric for success. If you're not solvent you can't do much as a company but it surely helps to actually give a shit about the people you affect both immediately and from a distance in both circumstance and over time.
Billions are being spent on housing in the bay area by these ultra rich companies even though it is arguably not at all their responsibility.
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.
This is anecdotal, but I have noticed this pattern in several large (multinational) companies at which I have worked.
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.
If you could showcase where women are born with DNA that leads them away from software related jobs, I would be very interested. Otherwise, "interested" is incredibly affected by environment and biases, which can be fixed, and should be.
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.
We do know that more egalitarian countries lead to significantly pronounced differences in choices between male and female. That directly suggest that males and females biologically like different things.
Not sure what GP meant, but I'd guess promotions are much more susceptible to discrimination cases than hires, since there's something much more concrete to compare against.
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.
> 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?
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/
> If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for the available candidate population)
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.
"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."
You've made a counter-intuitive point and claimed that it's confirmed by statistics and yet haven't included any...
> Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints?
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.
>> If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for the available candidate population) is 18%
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.
Is the pipeline in other degrees any better? And more importantly, why is it even a suggestions to look for other degrees when searching for candiate just to fill out diversity quota?
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
Wall Street hires people from all kinds of degrees all the time (though not for the purpose of diversity). I’ve worked with fund managers who majored in Japanese history, astrophysics, a lawyer who clerked for SCOTUS, and even a former professional card counter who dropped out of college.
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.
Not many people get degrees in fund management, but aren't actively managed funds being increasingly seen as just dart throwing anyway?
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.
>> Perhaps employers can expand the search to those with degrees in statistics, mathematics, physics, econometrics?
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.
Instead of getting economists and statisticians involved, why not just encourage companies to fund the educations of demographics of workers they're trying to recruit?
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.
> Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints?
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).
> 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?
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.
I do agree that there is indeed a pipeline problem; however there is still much scope for improvement at workplaces. Notably, gender balance is not only skewed at the point of hiring; in fact, the skew gets worse and worse as one goes up through the ranks.
Do you think the numbers would change appreciably if the entire hiring process was boiled down to a multiple-choice exam, with no humans besides the applicant involved, which chose who gets hired based on the first applicant to pass it?
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.
Yes, you would get more men and less women than now as men do better on such tests while women do better on tests with more social cues such as interviews or writing resumes.
Does anyone have a goal of 50% female developers? Can we see some citations for that? Most companies I've worked at claimed to be trying for 20%, and they were failing abysmally at it.
Yes, my company has a goal of "at least 50% females in IT in all positions and at all levels". I have absolutely no idea how they calculated 50% as a good target for the business and why "at least 50%", but these targets have a lot of emotional loads and zero real world value, so I don't try anymore to understand.
I've heard from a Googler that yes, they want the workforce to match the outside world. With that in mind read https://diversity.google/annual-report/#!#_what-would-it-tak... and "That’s why in 2019 we challenge ourselves and others to think differently so that we widen pathways to tech. Only then will we reflect our consumer base, and truly elevate our ability to build products for everyone."
So Google wants to reflect the consumer base, so I guess we can take that to mean ~50% female devs?
Most corporate statements of diversity goals I have ever seen take the simplistic position (in some form or another) that <x>, <y>, or <z> statistic "should mirror the representation of the general population." It seems to be an accepted truism that this equals unbiased selection and equity.
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.
When I hear statements like that, I always wonder if they try to hire 2% pedophiles, too. About 2% of people in the real world are supposed to be pedophiles, so if they want to reflect the real world, they should aim to hire them.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
I don't see that as bad faith. Companies have weird diversity goals to do with physical features of their bodies and sexual preferences. Pedophiles are just part of that. They happen to be a marginalized group, but that's the thing about being marginalized, you get pushed to the margins and not advocated for by big companies and popular blogs.
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.
Even so why do diversity weights exist at all? Should it not be based on performance or results? I understand the notion that people can be biased resulting in biased hirings, but why does that insist we must twist the bias in the opposite direction? Both sides of this fight are equally guilty of not hiring on the right principles which is how well can a person do a job.
Every company can't hit 50/50, but it is obviously possible for any one company to hit 50/50, without compromising on their hiring bar. (Until everyone adopts that same mentality, at which point it, of course, becomes impossible.)
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.
> but it is obviously possible for any one company to hit 50/50, without compromising on their hiring bar
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.
No hiring bar in the world is looking for the best 10 people.
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.
Would your point still stand, if the baseline of being able to bench press 160lb was just a starting requirement, with a possibility that requirements can change at any point and you might need people who can be trained to bench press 260lb instead?
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 assumption you're making here is that companies don't influence the pipeline. Don't influence whether people choose do STEM degrees etc.
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.
> If the percentage of female computer science graduates [is] a strong proxy for the available candidate population
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.
This just means another paradox of fake liberal ideology is showing.
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.
it's always a problem of people wanting to believe something is possible (and mandatory to pursue) banging their heads against what is true and actually possible.
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.
It’s ridiculous you were down voted for this. These people don’t want to change their behavior or admit there’s bias. They would rather remain ignorant and pretend that it’s a problem caused by someone else rather than reflect on what might not be working.
I don't like to complain about it, but since you raised it...
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.
Ignorning the fact that many engineering orgs can't hit 10% let along 18%; you've already lost if you've restricted your pipeline to "has a CS degree". Statistically your company isn't actually hiring for jobs that need higher level CS theory. It's not assigning malice, but pure negligence. There's a huge population of competent people with amazing ROI for your business and, especially companies with pockets as deep as FAANG, ignoring them because it's perceived as less risky to hire another (cis/het/white) guy is bad optics at best.
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".
There's a whole host of systematic reasons why women (as a group) might choose not to pursue a CS degree. As a hiring manager I can choose to complain about the ~pipeline~ (which i conveniently can't change nor appreciably effect in the short term) or I can re-examine my existing assumptions (namely whether a CS degree is necessary for filtering).
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.
No, women are not less capable of getting a degree.
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.