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Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

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431–440 of 510 posts

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#431

Wow. So in the name of getting women women into tech, we need to abandon * Code reviews, design documents, and anything else that might provide a forum for "chest thumping" * Opportunities to express one's love of traditionally geeky things * Organic conversation during happy hour * Meritocracy (since diversity pushes end up being affirmative action in practice) Maybe women in tech are less common than men in tech no…

Maybe women in tech are less common than men in tech not because of some fundamental unfairness, but because fewer women want to be in tech. A bit of advice to any of you youngsters blowing it off as "maybe women just don't want to be in tech": I worked with plenty of women in this field in the 80s. Not so many now. And of those women in the field currently, they're a different breed than those I worked with 30 years…

> I don't buy the "maybe women don't want to do tech" excuse

You don't buy it, but you don't apparently have reason to reject it either. Seems you only have an observation without explanation?

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#432
post #318

Most of this is good input for managers but the first answer from Adele complaining about "getting disorganized braindumps or single line descriptions from stakeholders rather than the thoughtful, detailed specs they’ve promised" seems misguided and counterproductive. It's simply unrealistic to expect customers and customer proxies (product owners / business analysts) to supply detailed specs. Their minds don't work…

in my experience, the "disorganized brain dump" is all too often considered to be a valid spec by the people who delivered it. then you code it. and then they change their minds.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not "obviously" something wrong. Would you say there is obviously something wrong with the plumbing industry that keeps women away? Or is it just that the smell of shit is too unpleasant? Likewise, some aspects of tech could simply be unpleasant to women, and there are reasons why men are more likely to put up with unpleasant work (like the need to feed a family). I have personally experienced a lot of unple…

Women are just as interested in STEM fields until about the middle school/high school level. What changes around that age? All sorts of external peer pressures. I work with a lot of women. They're not anything near a majority, but the org I'm in is big enough that there are plenty to speak with. They almost universally have many bad experiences and stories to tell that are specifically due to their gender. By no mean…

> What changes around that age?

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with women being pursued by men at that age and generally having better things to do than sit in front of a computer screen throughout their teenage years.

Then, by the time they have to pick a university program, they feel so far behind the computer nerds that they don't feel they can compete or succeed in tech. That and they don't want to be lumped in with the socially awkward nerds that they associate with tech by that point.

Just my hypothesis, of course.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#434
post #385

As a female engineer, I haven't actually experienced any sexism or gender related issues in any company I've worked in. I've worked in a good number from small startups to large companies. I've always felt really comfortable - but I am a really straightforward person and know how to decline offers after a company interview if the culture fit doesn't feel right. What do I look for that's related to gender? Usually a c…

Thanks. I've only worked at companies where the median age is well over 30, and when I read horror stories it often sounds like the problem mostly stems from overall immaturity, in both age and management experience. I'm sure age is no magic cure for all the assholery in this world, but the correlation between "family dad" and "decent, professional coworker" seems to fare nicely. Since this is the only advice to wome…

> "family dad" and "decent, professional coworker" seems to fare nicely

I'm not a woman but I've had girlfriends who've complained about being sexually harassed at work and it's always been a "creepy, old married guy".

Of course, maybe they personally didn't perceive similar attention from younger guys as harassment, I don't know.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said Meyer ran Yahoo into the ground; I pointed out Yahoo was already on a downward trajectory, and I said she didn't do anything to help that. I said Carly Fiorina ran HP into the ground. And she did. No, HP was not "falling apart* before she got there. She's the one who had the dumb idea of merging with Compaq, a huge and costly merger that didn't benefit HP at all, and turned it from a company making extre…

yeh well my friend is the CEO of a company and its evaluated at millions of dollars but shes salaried less than an entry level engineer and has a tight budget. She had student loans and $300 in her bank account when she started her company. Her dad was a carpenter in Brooklyn and her mom a school teacher. She gave up her personal paycheck for 2 months to keep from laying off her best employees when she was in between…

>yeh well my friend is the CEO of a company and its evaluated at millions of dollars but shes salaried less than an entry level engineer and has a tight budget.

Ah, so you're doing the silly thing called "equivocation". I never said all business owners were horrible people; it should be pretty obvious that I'm railing against mega-millionaire/billionaire CEOs of large and highly valued companies. It's just like complaining about politicians; most of the ones in Washington can be assumed to be evil sociopaths, with a few notable exceptions, but that doesn't mean that every local mayor or city councilman across the nation is a bad person (quite likely the opposite). Power corrupts absolutely, and the more power people have, generally the worse those people are. I've known plenty of small-business owners who were very decent people; I'm not complaining about them at all. These people are nothing like Carly Fiorina or Travis Kalanick.

>not all multilmillion dollar companies mean the ceos are millionaries

I'm quite aware of this. A $1M company is not even remotely a big company. One engineer can easily cost $150-250k in fully-loaded costs, more in SV. So of course a CEO isn't going to be ultra-rich here, in fact such a company is likely to not even have a "CEO", but rather simply an "owner". It's the companies valued in tens of billions of dollars and up where you have the horrible CEOs with $200M golden parachutes. This is elementary economics. Giant companies have far higher revenues and profits which their executives can skim.

>I understand you have observations but the top 5 CEOs advertised on tech crunch everyday are not neessarily reflective of the literally hundreds of thousands of CEOs in this country.

I apologize that I over-generalized and didn't cite a valuation or something, but I thought it was pretty obvious that I'm not complaining about business owners across the board, just the richest, most powerful ones. They're the ones I see with the worst behavior. Of course, with their greater size comes greater visibility, but you'd think that as a class maybe they'd take this into account and act better, but apparently not.

>I think your idea that all CEOs are sociopaths who run companies into the ground

I think at the upper end, and in American companies in particular, this is very often the case. No, I don't believe it to necessarily be the case for some person with a little $1M company with a handful of employees; that's a totally different situation. Now there are some real jerks even at that level, but there's jerks everywhere, but at least the small company execs/owners can't hurt that many people with their actions the way someone like Carly can with massive layoffs and totally ruining the culture of a formerly-great company (ask any old-time HP engineer what they think of her), or worse getting involved in politics or influencing politicians to pass bad laws and policies which favor his billionaire buddies and screw the lower classes.

>I think CEOs are the easy bad guys. Everyone needs someone to point to and say hey its all your fault.

CEOs (again, the very rich ones, not some small businessperson), combined with their politician cronies, are at the top of our socioeconomic hierarchy. They basically run our society, they write the laws, the control the enforcers, and they have all the power, and benefit the most from their positions in society. So yes, it really IS all their fault. In any hierarchal organization, the failure of the organization is always the fault of the leaders and those who control all the power.

>and criticise everyone in leadership positions.

Why shouldn't we? Again, they have all the power. The people at the bottom have nearly none.

As for why women are lacking in this profession, that's another discussion from our little argument here but personally I think it comes down to culture: American culture does not assign much prestige to STEM workers (like it does for doctors and lawyers and executives), parents and society steer young girls away from it ("math is hard!"), and recently it's gotten a rotten reputation for poor treatment of women (thank CEO Kalanick and his cronies for part of this, plus plenty of other tech companies). Smart young women in college have a lot of options available to them these days, such as in medicine, so perhaps they're steering clear. Has anyone tried interviewing a bunch of college women who are in other "hard" majors/career tracks, and asking them if they ever considered STEM/tech and why they didn't go that route, and instead chose medicine/law/finance/etc.? I've worked with a fair number of female engineers, and one thing I'll point out is that in my experience, most of them were not white American women, they were Asians of some sort (some East Asian, some Indian/Bangladesh/Pakistani). So why is it that those Asian cultures seem to have more women interested in these jobs than the supposedly "more liberal" American and European cultures? I'm not a sociologist, but I think it's definitely a cultural problem, and that's not something you're going to fix by encouraging girls to major in CS; by that age, you're already too late.

>female CEOs DO objectively (google analytics man) get it worse than men and gets far more personal jabs about their bodies and sexual comments I've never seen male CEOs publicly endure.

Unfortunately I'm sure that's true, but it's not just female execs, it's women everywhere. You just see it a lot with CEOs because they're high-profile. There's a lot of shitty men out there.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#436

It is a continual frustration to me that the male-dominated tech community is so bad with these issues. Predictably, the top comment on this post that tries to move forward on a very real problem that has been empirically established is an appeal to stick with the status quo. I'm sorry, but companies have always focused on making money. Saying that the way to handle this very specific problem is to focus on making mo…

Which was the top comment when you wrote this? Your comment is now self-referencing.

Awkward...

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, tech is a hostile environment with a lot of poor managers. I think the Peter principle applies to a lot of managers in tech. Promoted past their skill set. Just because someone is a good engineer does not mean they will be a good engineering manager. Managing humans with needs, concerns, ideals and life goals is so very different than managing a code-base. Executive leadership needs to consider this when buildi…

I wouldn't scope this down to tech. Incompetence and professional disinterest is by far the norm across all industries. Career meritocracy is, more or less, a myth. In technical fields, there is a merit baseline that has to be cleared, but after that, any further relationship between merit and position evaporates. That is inescapable. People sometimes think they've escaped it and found the promised land of meritocrac…

I agree, this ain't just tech's problem.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please read all the way it does sound pretty blunt, kinda a rant. I'm a guy. Not a very liberal response. I approach this sort of writing with a stern charity. Asking questions is never wrong. And I even entertain discriminatory assertions that have a compelling basis in reality. This is the charity. But you damn well better be right, or at least not obviously wrong. If you have no compelling reason to believe what…

Your whole objection is to his statement, "you [women] shouldn't complain when it is difficult because you [they] are swimming upstream", but you misunderstood what he was saying. "When it is difficult because you are swimming upstream", he is talking about a case...in the case that it is difficult. It may not be difficult for all women. For a stubborn woman who doesn't have the skills, she shouldn't complain. So his…

Then his whole post is off topic nonsensical rambling...?

Parent pretty much doubles down rather than correct me, so I don't think you're correct.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#439
post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please read all the way it does sound pretty blunt, kinda a rant. I'm a guy. Not a very liberal response. I approach this sort of writing with a stern charity. Asking questions is never wrong. And I even entertain discriminatory assertions that have a compelling basis in reality. This is the charity. But you damn well better be right, or at least not obviously wrong. If you have no compelling reason to believe what…

Hello and thank you for your response :) Actually i am quite an average programmer at best but thanks for thinking highly of me for your response. To be quite frank, and ill add another point to this discussion, i got the job i currently have because i believe i just have more personality than most, me and my higher ups get along quite well. I find this friendship to be almost impossible from a woman's point of view.…

So now women don't belong in tech not because they're under qualified, because you can't imagine not wanting to have sex with them?

At least we are all clear on what the actual problem is.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#440
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women are just as interested in STEM fields until about the middle school/high school level. What changes around that age? All sorts of external peer pressures. I work with a lot of women. They're not anything near a majority, but the org I'm in is big enough that there are plenty to speak with. They almost universally have many bad experiences and stories to tell that are specifically due to their gender. By no mean…

> What changes around that age? I'm pretty sure it has something to do with women being pursued by men at that age and generally having better things to do than sit in front of a computer screen throughout their teenage years. Then, by the time they have to pick a university program, they feel so far behind the computer nerds that they don't feel they can compete or succeed in tech. That and they don't want to be lum…

> by the time they have to pick a university program, they feel so far behind the computer nerds that they don't feel they can compete or succeed in tech

At the college level, I think that the social gap gets even worse. Women can get into frat parties where they don't know anyone, though they don't even have to because they are much more likely to be invited in the first place. Bouncers at bars/clubs will let them skip the line and overlook them during ID check.

Women are better paid in the services industry which gives them bank roll to sustain their partying lifestyle, although this isn't even needed because they can get people to pay for their cover/food/drinks.

All these privileges drive them away from looking up buffer overflow errors on Stackoverflow late at night.

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