Born for it – How the image of software developers came about

I understand that people of Asian descent are overrepresented by a factor of 5.3x at Google and that people of European descent are underrepresented by a factor of 0.87x at Google, but I think the author goes too far by attributing this to malice on behalf of the Asians. Clearly asians could be doing more for the rest of us, but I don't follow the authors subtle undertone that this is their fault. What do you guys think?

I'm not sure that there is an undertone that it's their fault. At best, it's because Asians value school and mathematics more and Google prefers high GPA and ability to solve mathematical and algorithmic problems. I suspect there are also a lot of Asians in the world and Google will pull talent from other countries.

To continue your analogy:

"I'm not Asian, so I'm not good at math, but perhaps if I were Asian I could be. Those guys do math all the time and they love it; its impossible for a Caucasian guy like me to be any good at it. I spent 10 hours on my calculus work and Li did it in 30 minutes and got a higher grade. I'm just not Asian."

> I understand that people of Asian descent are overrepresented by a factor of 5.3x at Google and that people of European descent are underrepresented by a factor of 0.87x at Google, but I think the author goes too far by attributing this to malice on behalf of the Asians.

The linked article [1] literally does not even contain the word "Asian". Am I missing something here?

[1] http://martinfowler.com/articles/born-for-it.html

Google doesn't really select for high GPA.

Reading articles like this is so strange for me because I have such a hard time understanding the perspective.

To give some background, I started in the late 80's and early 90's in Canada. There were very few womon in my CS program (I recall it was 5 our of 140 in the graduating class), but even still in my early career, I was never on a team without women. I would say that between 10-20% of the programmers I worked with were women of various cultural backgrounds. That's not a huge percentage, but compared to the numbers graduating it was quite high.

In the first 15 years I worked as a programmer I can only think of a single female programmer that wasn't particularly competant. Everybody else was excellent. I often had conversations with them about why they got into programming and the vast majority of women I worked with said the same thing: programming was the best way to get into management. They felt that every other avenue was blocked by the old boys club and that as a programmer there was no ceiling. As such, these programmer often came with other skills that those of use who were just looking for the new technical hotness (myself included) did not have. I think eveybody I worked with highly valued that diversity.

This is not to say that there weren't women who were just in it for the programming. I met several women in the course of my early career who had very similar interests and abilities to myself. It's just that in the companies I worked in 80-90% of the men would be obsessive-compulsive technophiles and 80-90% of the women would be level-headed get-the-job-done types. Those women usually did very well and were promoted quickly (and the technically-minded ones struggled to get into management, just like the technically-minded men).

Fast forward a couple of decades and I find the landscape seems different. At my present position we have yet to hire a single female programmer. The thing is that nobody applies. When we do get female applicants they often look excellent and I think we have given job offers to every women we have interviewed. Usually they are good enough that we try to stretch our budget to get them. We have been overbid (by a substantial margin) with every single female candidate. So while it seems like the available female candidates are still of high quality, they are in much higher demand than 20 or 30 years ago.

On the other hand, I have noticed a dramatic shift in the types of male applicants we get. Like I said, 20-30 years ago male programmers were often fit the stereotypical mold (in my experience -- YMMV). These days I would say that more than half of the applicants we interview have very little interest in programming outside of it being a high paying job. So you get some cultural mismatches. You end up with the old guard saying things like, "You're not a real programmer" when they are talking to someone who is cutting and pasting stuff from stack overflow. Of course, we used to say the same thing to the guys who were cutting and pasting from MSDN or passing off GNU software as their own. It's just that having the alpha dog barking at the pups to get them in line was the normal way of working.

I wonder if in the midst of this cultural change, women are getting a bit lost. On the one hand you are getting a lot more men coming into the field who are not technical primadonnas. So it is easy for a lot of women who get interested in programming late in life to identify with those men the most. However, I think along with that cultural change we get a lot of baggage. The old boys club gets sucked in along with it. Where I used to hear women tell me how great the computer industry is because there was no ceiling, now they tell me that they are actively and often blatantly discriminated against. At the same time, they see the technical alpha dogs barking up a storm and think, "I don't want to get anywhere near that person".

I suppose at the end of this long (and I guess pointless) rant, it's just one more perspective. I really wish more women would get into the field because I miss working with women. There seems to be huge demand too. I hope we can get over this cultural speed bump and make it happen.