No one seems to talk about where these girls are being pulled from, as if labor shifts don't have two sides. What often seems to happen in initiatives like this is that all the sectors which decide they need higher female participation end up fighting over the same pool of "high-achieving" (high IQ, upper class, family connections) individuals. "We need to shift women from MBA programs into comp sci master's programs" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
Girls Who Code
71–80 of 397 posts
Re: Girls Who Code
#72Earlier 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…
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…
I'll try to condense it as much as possible, and add the caveat that our process is imperfect:
1. Build outreach programs that are open-enrollment and broadly targeted (for instance, the crypto challenges aren't targeted at security industry events).
2. Explicitly overcommunicate the whole hiring process to candidates up front and sell the job, before attempting to screen. Actively try to correct for the adversarial nature of the process.
3. Drastically reduce the impact of phone screen interviews.
4. Administer standardized work-sample tests to all candidates regardless of previous experience; those tests have quantifiable outcomes (which we record).
5. Administer standardized on-site interviews with quantifiable outcomes (right now, they're "exercises", but their form might change over the long term).
The only point in our process where interviewers have a lot of flexibility in terms of what they do is the phone screens. We use the phone screens to generate predictions for how candidates will do on the rest of the interview, but we don't screen with them. (We would if the phone screen revealed a candidate to be a crazy person or a jerk, but I don't think that has ever happened).
So far, the things that have been most noticeably successful for us:
* Standardized, quantifiable results that allow us to generate a model of what a successful candidate actually does, rather than a gut feeling based on how well they answer questions, or how "confident" they are, or how "well spoken", or how impressive their resume.
* Outreach to the industry as a whole, not just to the small sectors of the industry we believed a-priori would generate the best candidates. Some of our best people have come essentially "out of nowhere", and recognizing that fact I'm especially interested in optimizing for that.
It is thrilling --- best word I have for it --- to find someone who's had no relevant job experience, hire them because they do unexpectedly well on a series of quantifiable metrics, and then see 6-9 months later that they are, say, showing us how to use BKZ lattice reduction and fourier transforms to exploit elliptic curve nonce biases.
Re: Girls Who Code
#73Earlier 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.
I think he was referring to a different time frame (1960s-1980s). But he didn't provide evidence so your objection may still be valid.
Re: Girls Who Code
#74No one seems to talk about where these girls are being pulled from , as if labor shifts don't have two sides. What often seems to happen in initiatives like this is that all the sectors which decide they need higher female participation end up fighting over the same pool of "high-achieving" (high IQ, upper class, family connections) individuals. "We need to shift women from MBA programs into comp sci master's program…
Keep in mind, too, that female unemployment is lower than male unemployment. Your average female in the labor force has more options than your average male.
Re: Girls Who Code
#75Earlier 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…
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…
I am telling you that after watching the Nth person go through an on-site interview process that we had already actively tried to program as positive and encouraging, and seeing them physically shaking in the conference room, and then thinking back on the last time I had needed to endure a job interview and how I felt, that yes, the process is inhumane. It demands of candidates that they endure a deeply uncomfortable process of being judged in 45 minute snapshots by strangers who often by all appearances seem to have rejection as an overt goal.
Your last question presents a false dichotomy and so I won't answer it.
I am, incidentally, a fan of your comments on HN. I'm just not interested in an argument where we're both going to be talking past each other.
Re: Girls Who Code
#76This is interesting: Of the 100 top academic authors in computer science today, per Microsoft, 96 are male: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=2... The owner of this site appears to be a woman. Again, 20 males: http://www.bestcomputersciencedegrees.com/author/2admin/ And there is a preponderance of white males in the annals of computer history: http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm…
> Is this really YC's problem to solve?
I think it's up to everyone to do their part. This problem, like all big problems, is made up of lots of little problems.
Re: Girls Who Code
#77One 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…
But IBM, and many of the big corporations in the USA, followed very liberal policies that promoted diversity in the work place.
A meritocracy based on raw intelligence and skill (measured by standardized testing) is not exactly what people mean today when they discuss "promoting diversity". In fact, nowadays people typically criticize such practices as inhibiting diversity [1].
As for culture fit, it's a complicated thing. There are some culture issues that can be a real problem - for example, my company really can't deal with people who don't believe in "let data make the decision". Similarly, there are companies out there which highly value civility and team spirit over correctness - my "this is broken, here is why" style would not work for them.
A lot of culture fit is just "do I think these guys are cool" silliness, but don't let that overshadow the fact that culture matters.
[1] http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-th... http://flosspols.org/deliverables/D16HTML/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gend...
Re: Girls Who Code
#78I am a man. These initiatives will simply not work. Imagine "Men Nurse." Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code. Most of us were not exposed to the science as kids, hence step 1 is to make Programming mandatory. Note I say programming and not C.S.. I am an amateur programmer and I can say wit confidence that this is as fundamental as basic arithmetic. Full stop. I frankly wish they shu…
> Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code.
Well, yes, I suppose this is true. If you pick a random woman who cannot code, that is probably the reason.
What about the women who have been driven out of coding simply because they happen to be female? It's something I have personally witnessed, both in the education system, and in commercial settings. There are real problems here, problems that you through your good fortune are not adversely affected by and in fact could go through your whole life without even knowing that they exist.
> Instead we can put our efforts into teaching everyone to code: "We Code."
If that's something you want to exist, then go make it - no one is stopping you, and the existence of "Girls Who Code" is in no way an impediment to your goals. I find it a little distasteful to ever say someone should give up on their personal project just because you think they should be doing it differently. Go do it then, if you're so sure you have the answers!
Re: Girls Who Code
#79When 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…
> 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.
Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unaware of it.
Definitely it is well known that there is a shortage of men in nursing as well as in clinical psychology for example, and many in those industries think their industries would be better off with more men, and make efforts to change things. Some random links:
https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?p...
I have a background in psychology, so I know less about the nursing situation, but in psychology it's definitely a topic that comes up. Which is not surprising, the gender disparity is very large: When I was an undergrad, I was in a small minority, somewhere in 10-20%, and it can be an odd feeling.
Re: Girls Who Code
#80One 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…
I think we need to be very clear that the programming jobs of that era are not todays programing jobs. It was 1980, general society wasn't very progressive, why would computer programming be the magic beacon of equality? And, of course, it wasn't, it was considered menial work fit for females.