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Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
321–330 of 464 posts
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just hire based on skill / experience and don't not hire someone because they are a minority. Basic fair hiring goes a long way. If you want more diverse candidates advertise in more diverse places. To go through some cringe-inducing ordeal is not helpful. People want to be judged based on their skills not skin / gender.
Ideally, yes. But the problem is that our implicit biases affect how we view potential candidates. Certain groups need the chance to prove themselves. If certain groups aren't fairly represented, then it does pay to prefer to hire from those groups when everything else is roughly equal. I do find it hard to believe that "the best" candidate is more often than not a straight white man.
> I do find it hard to believe that "the best" candidate is more often than not a straight white man.
So do I, which is why I find this diversity hire exercise entirely pointless.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#323Very much not challenging the experiences in this post but I will say: “I believe everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn.” was most likely speaking to her youth than her femininity. Source: Myself as someone who has given advice to a lot of different interns/new grads along the same exact lines.
I almost stopped reading there. That sentence, no matter how I try to interpret it, seems like very common and genuine advice to a new graduate starter.
I had the exact same thought. I skimmed through the rest of the article. The author's frustrations seem to center around the fact that she is a diversity hire, which is made even more evident by the discussion in the comments. The excuse is that they are "raising awareness" but this is something we are all painfully aware of so it comes across as "my personal anecdote about {buzzword}".
Some of the best and worst co-workers I've had in my relatively short career have been women. In my experience, women are much more sociable than men and bring a certain positive energy to a team, but are less competitive with the other men on the team. Men will always compete AGAINST other men FOR women. They want to be the alpha, which fundamentally means that they get the most women.
This means that women won't bother to compete with men and vice versa. Hiring a woman to work on a team of all men is probably exactly like hiring a man on a team of all women. It will bring undue, subversive, and potentially aggressive behavior between team members of the opposite sex because of the fundamentally sexual, subconscious forces we are subject to as human beings.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#324This SV clip says it for me. In the words of Guilfoyle "... we should hire the best person for the job. Period." [1]
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#325I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerqu…
'The Case For Color Blindness' by Coleman Hughes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hRr5J9UUc I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.
Most of us were raised that way. This phenomenon of everything being about what color you are is relatively new and orders of magnitude more controversial than its pushers like to admit.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's Coleman Hughes in an abbreviated version: https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/1305959575930142723?lang... This is the first time I've heard of this push-back. I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." was a good approach?
Not to advocate for either approach, but surely MLK was describing an end goal, not a means for getting there, no?
I'd say he was articulating a principle and a virtue. With something like that, the journey is the destination.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#327Number 4 struck me as pretty toxic behavior that I wouldn't want on my team.
A female coworker shared a disagreeable opinion, which the author takes it as a personal attack, bottles up their response, deems the co-worker a sexist, and judges their parenting skills to boot.
Ironically, they then go on to call the event they were attending a wasted educational opportunity.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#328Firing someone for a "lack of chemistry" and refusing to give details is a Grade A dick move.
Assuming that a firing for "lack of chemistry" (which is a very real and valid concern, btw: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-wor... ) is, without evidence, veiled discrimination, is also a Grade A dick move, by being a "default victimization mindset". Anecdotal firings of minority hires are insubstantial proof of discrimination; in fact it may be the opposite, if there's a diversity retention…
If you consult an experienced HR specialist they will walk you through this difficult situation.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hiring more black people It's not like there's a large, untapped pool of talented black software engineers. I'm at a large tech company. There was a team I worked with for a big with some really talented people, the sort of team where really smart domain experts go. There was a black guy on it who asked questions showing he wasn't an obviously talented domain expert. I found out he was recruited for coming from an…
On the other hand, California is 37% white. The University of California freshman class for 2019 was 22% white. So why are tech companies so strikingly white? It makes no sense unless you admit there is a racial bias in the hiring process for knowledge workers.
Far more than 3% of my white tech colleagues have been Jewish, despite making up only 3% of the US and California populations. Would you claim this implies a pro-Jewish, anti-Gentile tech hiring bias?
I would disagree with you, and suggest that your kind of logic leads to very dark places.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
'The Case For Color Blindness' by Coleman Hughes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hRr5J9UUc I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.
Let's say your company has a workforce where the minorities are only 5% but they are let's say 30% of the population. Would that be fair to assume that Color-blindness has failed? Or perhaps there is some kind of biais that was missed and the policies were not as color blind as they pretended to be? In that case, in order to address it, would you rather entirely ignore the issue of race (and fail again) or perhaps ha…
It would be fair to propose that color blindness has failed, and test that hypothesis.
If there is some other bias present, the solution is to rectify that bias, not force diversity hire. Forcing diversity hire is a lazy solution, a way to *not" actually fix the cause of the problem.