I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

You can't find my anecdotal experiences to be untrue because you haven't experienced my anecdotal experience. This is physically impossible.

What you can claim is that my anecdotal experiences do not apply to women in engineering corporations in general. However, this is not a claim that I made as I caveated my point with the fact that what I'm saying is based off of my own anecdotal evidence.

> I don't have an equivalent story for women because I work with significantly less women.

Evidence is the only way to make sense of the reality we live in and there are two basic types: Anecdotal and Statistical. You claim here that you have no anecdotal evidence. That means statistical evidence is your only option (a stronger option btw) so where is it?

>Let's try focusing on the apparent and obvious biases against women before we start keeping score on how men are so disenfranchised.

Why should I focus on your claim that has no evidence? If men are indeed disenfranchised shouldn't that deserve focus? Are womens' rights superior to mens rights? Are you implying men can't be treated unfairly?

Why can't we focus on the rights of both genders?

> This is not an economic move for the company.

I'm not at all sure I agree with you on this. I've worked for quite a few years as a software engineer in banking. At one of the companies where I worked, we had an intentional policy of taking people from non-technical roles (such as "telephone support") and giving them opportunities to move within the company to technical roles... sometimes QA, sometimes development roles.

It is certainly true that these people were less productive for the first year or so than if we had hired a new graduate. And these people rarely (I can't think of any examples) became our algorithm experts who led the way in optimizing the scaling of large systems.

But in my opinion, it was a HUGELY successful program. I mean, it was nice that the people who went through this program had a strong company loyalty. And it sure didn't hurt the morale in roles like telephone support to see some of their former colleagues entering a programming career. But what I really mean is that these people made some of our best developers.

Because you need a mix of different skills as a developer. Sometimes you need someone who knows the latest algorithms or tools for optimizing performance or choosing the best new language to build in. But far more frequently, what you really need is someone who knows the business problem and can communicate about it clearly in the customer's own language. A project nudged into right direction to meet poorly expressed but still important business needs is easily worth thousands of developer-hours of work. And understanding of the business is what these people had, in spades.

So, perhaps Ms. Lustig brings important skills that complement her developer role. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps she knows a LOT more about UI design than the average developer. She may also know a lot about the company and its needs. And these are VERY valuable things for a developer to know.

(The flagged comment ALSO contained some completely unwarranted -- and unsubstantiated -- sexist assumptions which I think are better ignored than disputed.)

Three years later I was making more $$ as an IC with none of the stress and nuisance of management.

Five years later I was making 2x my old salary and significantly happier w my day to day work.

To each their own...

What makes you say this? An entry level SWE is lateral to a director who is presumably multiple rungs up on the org chart?