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Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

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Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#91

Post by wellpast »

21 wrote: post #86
iwangulenko wrote: post #20

As someone running a technical recruitment agency, I can assure you that it is true that someone having built stuff in Clojure is more likely to be considered as a good engineer than someone who did JQuery all the time. Recruiters use an intuitive approach to conditional probability. Given only the info alone (if someone did JQuery or Clojure) exposes you to two bell curves, with the X-axis being "programming ability…

Now apply this logic to men in tech and woman in tech bell curves and see how that works out. Is it still rational?

Your question assumes that the programming talent bell curve for men and women are different, which I wouldn’t expect to be the case.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#92

Post by lifeisstillgood »

oblio wrote: post #88
k__ wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never talked to a recruiter with any technical expertise in my whole 12 year career.

https://i.redd.it/bka1gb843z7z.jpg

Funny, but presumably just selecting for recruiters with deep knowledge of pokemon, not programming languages.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#93

Post by __blockcipher__ »

wellpast wrote: post #91
21 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now apply this logic to men in tech and woman in tech bell curves and see how that works out. Is it still rational?

Your question assumes that the programming talent bell curve for men and women are different, which I wouldn’t expect to be the case.

Seems like an interesting assumption. I’m mot convinced there is a difference, but neither am I confident that there isn’t one.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#94

Post by dokem »

It's really not that complicated. Technical people recognize technical ability. Throwing together a CRUD site in some framework is really not that complicated and can be achieved without really understanding what's going on. When you started learning Clojure you got a little more respect because you were broadening you're horizons. It's not some conspiracy systems programmers have against web-only devs: The web dev learning curve really is not that steep.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#96

Post by throwawaymath »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #50
throwawaymath wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commenter said "statistically speaking" to justify part of their point. I am directly challenging their assertion and requesting evidence that they have 1) actually quantified something in more than a hand wavey manner, and 2) found the (falsifiable) conclusion they stated, based on that analysis. I'm deeply skeptical. People like to throw around percentages and references to statistics to justify their biases, b…

Next time you have a blocked toilet, and the plumber says it's a problem with 'ABC' why don't you just tell him that's not quantifiable! and then tell him you think it's 'XYZ' that's the problem. If someone who interviews thousands of people and finds a correlation between those who have some clojure experience and quality, I believe him. For the simple reason that most programmers don't try very hard and anyone taki…

If the plumber can explain to me in coherent reasoning why the problem is likely with 'ABC', I'm not going to challenge it. Especially if they don't handwave about statistics they almost assuredly don't have and I have no domain experience in plumbing. That analogy doesn't work.

I stand by my point: using words like "statistically" and "correlation" perpetuate biases which may not have a rational basis. In this entire thread no one has explained why Clojure programmers are more likely to be "good" than JavaScript programmers (nor has "good" been defined!). I could just as plausibly state that someone tried to learn Clojure because they perceive it to be a buzzword, just as JavaScript programmers are often accused of playing buzzword bingo with web development frameworks.

Empirically speaking, we haven't ended up anywhere. No matter how sure you are of this phenomenon, unless you try to make its observation more robust, it will continue to be a microcosm of the tech hiring industry. Heuristics often belie subtle biases that do not actually have a foundation in truth.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#97

Post by ChrisCinelli »

For me this is another lesson about biases and ambiguity.

1 - Learn to recognize biases.

2 - Scrutinize your thoughts to limit the influence of your biases.

3 - Work on processes to limit unconscious biases.

4 - Since you cannot eliminate biases, use biases to your advantage.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#98

Post by braythwayt »

bastijn wrote: post #49
MusaTheRedGuard wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna say prejudice is actually not applied Bayesian statistics

and you would be right. Say I have a broken phone which is an Android. A prejudice would be that androids are likely to break. Mathematically we could represent as P(broken|android) =~ P(android|broken) We see from Bayes rule that this is false, since P(android) >> P(broken)

Even worse, what actually happens with prejudice is that if I think that Androids are shitty phones, when I see a broken Android, I add it to my collection of “Shitty Android” data points.

But when my iPhone breaks, I take it into Apple for service and add it to my collection of “Apple gives great service” data points.

Saying that prejudice is just applied statistics completely mischaracterizes prejudice.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#99

Post by erik_seaberg »

dkarl wrote: post #46
SCdF wrote: post #3

> when I told other software people I’m a web developer, I got treated like shit. I was a lower class of coder because I wasn’t “solving cool problems” because making web sites is easy. Of all the stupid arrogant awfulness in tech that has crossed my path this one is definitely high on the list of the most baffling. Web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work I've ever done, by a country mile. (Whether that…

The attitude has changed as people have realized the web isn't going away and isn't qualitatively changing. Fifteen years ago you could ask, "Why on earth would a programmer put up with that incoherent mishmash of shitty technologies? For God's sake, if you have any taste at all, work in a different domain." Now the why is clear, and anyone who had a snobbish attitude (I won't hold my breath while the rest of us out…

I think part of the attitude comes from watching this incoherent mishmash kill the World-Wide Web and wear its skin. There used to be flamewars about abusing non-semantic markup around content, but now it's common for a document to lack any content at all, just a bootloader for a javascript app that never needed to be an app.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#100

Post by Tade0 »

The other day I was (lightheartedly, but still) asked: "what went wrong?" that I had chosen front-end development even though I graduated from university - because apparently these two things are related somehow.

I've found that while I can't change peoples' biases, waving the flag of "I do stuff in Rust in my spare time" is enough to scare off at least the Java folk.

There's an interesting power struggle I've been caught in more than once: Back-end devs describe their work as very hard so that they're left in peace, and the easiest way to strengthen that is to describe someone else's work - front-end developers' in this case - as easy.

This way whenever a change in requirements occurs there's pressure to avoid doing changes on the back-end in favor of changing things on the front-end. At the same time interesting and "hard" things are meant to be done on the back-end even though nowadays it's possible and sometimes easier to do them on the front-end.

The fact that back-end devs are paid approximately 20% more naturally only worsens this.

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