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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#61

Post by gfodor »

tptacek wrote: post #59
gfodor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounded to me like you took pg's quote to mean he felt was blind to the factor opportunity takes towards gaining affinity for a subject. If this were true (and his next sentence seems to invalidate this) it would mean he felt that women were less capable, inherently, of appreciating computers and programming. At the risk of splitting hairs, this would be a misogynistic viewpoint. This is the narrative these clowns…

It's easier at this point to just say what I do and don't actually think. I don't think Paul Graham believes women are intrinsically less capable than men. I do think he has a blind spot regarding privilege and specifically the way his reputational energy reinforces privilege, and another related blind spot about how that fortified privilege impedes the progress of women in our field. Another way to put it would be,…

fair point and well put.

Re: Girls Who Code

#62

Post by andrewljohnson »

tptacek wrote: post #43
gfodor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Culture fit" is a vague enough term to not really be able to say much about it. Are there companies who use it as a way to hide behind discrimination? Sure, almost certainly. But in my past experience the amount of times we rejected a candidate due to "no culture fit" was quite low and was for reasons that were of the flavor: "this person sounds like they totally caused drama in their old workplace" or "this person…

This speaks to how deranged mainstream software hiring practices are. To wit: take a bunch of practitioners more or less at random and arrange to have them serially interview candidates. Apply virtually no structure to the interviews themselves; most of those practitioners will be free to generate their own questions, and if any guidance is given at all, it will usually take the form of "assess the candidate's abilit…

How does Matasno's hiring process work? I don't think I've heard you comment on hiring except to say everyone does it wrong.

In my company, we've hired everyone based on remote/part-time work, and paid tryouts. This seems to work well, but I don't feel like I can hire people who currently have full time jobs this way. I'm not sure how best to judge candidates who I can't observe working, besides a standard battery of technical interviewing and a lunch with the team.

Re: Girls Who Code

#63

Post by wissler »

gfodor wrote: post #17

I have to thank Valleywag for doing me the favor of helping me prune people who lack reading comprehension from twitter. I'm still kind of amazed how so many people un-ironically cited valleywag in their tweets. It's pretty obvious what pg was saying in this particular "smoking gun" quote: that figuring out a way to get more girls interested in programming at 13 is an incredibly important and hard problem. The willin…

I always cringe when someone famous gets attacked by the political correctness Nazis -- usually the reaction by them is appeasement, which only makes the general cultural situation worse.

Re: Girls Who Code

#64

Post by crassus »

philwelch wrote: post #49
sbt wrote: post #9

I hope PG doesn't get too frightened by the press from this and stops being his usual honest plainspoken self. We need more people like him trying to portray an accurate map of the territory, rather than being afraid of how quotes may be spun by cheap journalists.

If he takes his own advice[1], he'd be hard pressed to say anything at all. When people furiously accuse you of misogyny for not repeating the party line, there's no good faith discussion possible. [1] http://paulgraham.com/say.html

"Party line" is an interesting choice of words. There's definitely some unhealthy groupthink going on that's gaining in power. It's never been easier to have something said taken out of context and have your reputation dragged through the mud by people who are professional social justice warriors and not much else (I doubt Nitasha Tiku could program "hello world")

Maybe it's due to the rise of twitter and the ease of taking things out of context. It seems to fuel tabloid "journalists" like Sam Biddle who sit around on twitter all day, looking for tweets that he can read X-ism into.

The sad thing is that if Paul Graham were an employee of a tech company, he'd probably be fired by now[1]. The room for thought and discussion is much smaller than it used to be, even though we have more tools for self-expression than ever before.

Moldbug saw this happening and he decided that "America is a Communist Country". I think that's a bit strong, but I agree that at least the progressive half of the country is converging on a narrow, extreme Social Justice ideology.

First they came for the dongle jokers, and I did not speak, because I was not a dongle joker...

[1] http://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badg...

Re: Girls Who Code

#65

Post by tptacek »

baddox wrote: post #45
tptacek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not helpful that "nursing" is an explicitly gendered term. And despite that, the fraction of nurses who are male is climbing steadily.

In what way is "nursing" explicitly gendered? Obviously one of its definitions necessarily refers specifically to women, e.g. "wet nurse," but that's the only one, and that's simply an issue of mammary glands. I was under the impression that the word comes from a contraction of the word "nourish" and doesn't have any explicit gender association.

"The first instance in English of nurse occurred in the early thirteenth century as the Anglo-Norman nurice, derived from the fifth-century post-Classical Latin nutrice, a wet-nurse."

Re: Girls Who Code

#66

Post by leahculver »

crassus wrote: post #42
lkrubner wrote: post #11

One fascinating aspect of this is how bad the post 1990 startup culture has been for women. There was something about those big, boring corporations of the 1970s and 1980s that actually gave female hackers more acceptance than what startups have offered. You can see female interest in programming change in the charts on these pages: http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-comput... Note that those graph…

FWIW, the startup I was at seemed to have a soft affirmative action for females. They would reject males that didn't do much outside of college work, but would be willing to consider females with the same resume because "it would be nice to have more female coders". Culture fit was about a modicum of friendliness. You could get rejected for culture fit by, say, looking away from your interviewer and mumbling to yours…

Nope. IBM was >30% women engineers when I interned there in 2004/2005. About half the interns were women and there was plenty of racial diversity as well. My boss was a woman, my mentor was a woman, and frankly it was the most diverse place I have ever worked.

Re: Girls Who Code

#67

Post by WalterBright »

tptacek wrote: post #43
gfodor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Culture fit" is a vague enough term to not really be able to say much about it. Are there companies who use it as a way to hide behind discrimination? Sure, almost certainly. But in my past experience the amount of times we rejected a candidate due to "no culture fit" was quite low and was for reasons that were of the flavor: "this person sounds like they totally caused drama in their old workplace" or "this person…

This speaks to how deranged mainstream software hiring practices are. To wit: take a bunch of practitioners more or less at random and arrange to have them serially interview candidates. Apply virtually no structure to the interviews themselves; most of those practitioners will be free to generate their own questions, and if any guidance is given at all, it will usually take the form of "assess the candidate's abilit…

All decision making processes with a human in the loop are going to be random, arbitrary, capricious, etc. But inhumane? about a job? It actually seems very humane. After all, only a human can look past the rules and see that a candidate is someone special that would be great for the company despite not matching the criteria.

Would you rather be selected for a job by a computer that follows inflexible rules embedded in software? That would be inhumane.

Re: Girls Who Code

#68

Post by philwelch »

gfodor wrote: post #47
tptacek wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This speaks to how deranged mainstream software hiring practices are. To wit: take a bunch of practitioners more or less at random and arrange to have them serially interview candidates. Apply virtually no structure to the interviews themselves; most of those practitioners will be free to generate their own questions, and if any guidance is given at all, it will usually take the form of "assess the candidate's abilit…

Is it the case that you do not screen candidates based upon any other criteria than skills-based assessment in other fields? That assumes people are robots. I don't care what field you are talking about, people are always going to screen for "culture fit", since it can be defined to mean anything you want. It's "can I work with this person", "does this person seem trustworthy and honest", etc. The only difference is…

"Culture fit" is a terrible word for it. What you do is you explicitly lay out the principles you expect people to follow and conduct behavioral interviews to find times they've followed those principles in the past.

Here's an example: let's say you're a typical startup, and you need to move fast. You need to think fast and you need to act fast. Let's say you've made the decision to hire people around that principle. You can ask someone about how they've coped with short deadlines, or to tell you about a time they had to get a lot done in a short period of time, and you judge them based on their responses to your questions.

Generally there will be a number of different principles, and there are also ways you can overdo them, but you want to decide on the right balance and the right mix and then conduct behavioral interviews to measure candidates against that.

The wrong way to do it is to make subjective judgments like, "I want to work with this person" or "I can really have a conversation with this person".

Re: Girls Who Code

#69

Post by crassus »

leahculver wrote: post #66
crassus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the startup I was at seemed to have a soft affirmative action for females. They would reject males that didn't do much outside of college work, but would be willing to consider females with the same resume because "it would be nice to have more female coders". Culture fit was about a modicum of friendliness. You could get rejected for culture fit by, say, looking away from your interviewer and mumbling to yours…

Nope. IBM was >30% women engineers when I interned there in 2004/2005. About half the interns were women and there was plenty of racial diversity as well. My boss was a woman, my mentor was a woman, and frankly it was the most diverse place I have ever worked.

Google is reportedly over 30% women, too. I wonder if it is just something about startups - higher risk, lower guaranteed reward, worse training programs, higher pressure. The startup world compares well to the original California gold rush - a risk for a small shot at a high reward - and that was mostly male, too.

Also, keep in mind that it's a zero-sum game. If Google and IBM each hire 1,000 female engineers from top schools, that means that startups get less diverse.

Re: Girls Who Code

#70

Post by overgard »

When I hear about this being a cultural thing, an important aspect people leave out is that men aren't exactly encouraged to be coders either. Writing code has pretty much no social cred until you're out of school, and pretty much automatically gets you tagged as a nerd. No coder I know started coding because it was cool, they just sort of enjoyed it and accepted the social consequences.

I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Same goes for elementary school teachers. Why is that?

Just because there's a gender imbalance doesn't necessarily mean anyone is keeping anyone out. And if a few insensitive comments can keep you from doing what you want to do in life, maybe that's something you have to deal with -- there's always going to be haters no matter what you want to do.

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