Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

Point 2 is also sort of moot; if people can make it on their own in the contract world, then it doesn't really matter what hyperbolized interview process (5-days? What?) stands between them and employment. I'm in the same boat, I work contract now and don't want to go back. The interview process has nothing to do with it.

I think you're far from concluding that the process is broken, though. Some companies may want to hire top CS grads straight out of college. In fact, a small company could probably fill their ranks through that alone.

I am ultimately looking for a mentoring workplace ( just to start) where I can build my confidence quickly and start producing for the company.

There's gender imbalances in lots of places now between executives, teachers, prison, the military, some of those are positive places to have a gender balance in.

I've seen lots of discrimination against females in the places I have worked, behind their back for the most part. I have also seen examples of positive discrimination in their favour, but not as much.

Personally, I think it's a manufacturing line of institutions that lead to a hireable tech worker - and if you go back each step along the assembly line, the female involvement is higher percentage wise.

So I think the lower representation is a product of women opting out of maths and science based subjects at an early stage, and later choosing the medical profession over engineering.

It would be interesting to get some statistics over the span of a career, do a higher percentage of women change career away from tech once they start?

I'd have to agree. The interview process is irreducibly stressful, but that doesn't mean we have to go out of our way to make it worse. It isn't even good for hiring most men either, after all! It's just a bad idea.

I've personally had fairly good success hiring people who happen to be women, and I suspect a good part of that is that my interview attitude is that I'm there to find out what you can do, not to find out what you can't, which seems to be the unexamined default of a lot of interviewers. You don't start at "perfect" and get marks off for failure... you start at essentially zero and work your way up. "Starting at zero" may sound superficially harsh when I put it into English, but in practice this produces a much friendlier interview environment, I think, because we're discovering positive aspects instead of negative ones.

(Another reason to prefer this is that in practice this also helps avoid the problem of the senior candidate being thrown softballs, or the junior candidate being asked to design a cloud infrastructure. It really doesn't take that long for me to key in on where your most likely "knowledge frontier" is and probe for details there. As opposed to just going through a rote set of questions looking for demerits. It is a harder style of interviewing, though, precisely because you can't just go through a rote set of questions... even the standard question set I use has a lot of ways of approaching them and several "levels of detail" I can get into depending on experience and skill level.)

The end result is still, frankly, stressful. It's a big deal, and the interviewee would have to be outright irrational to forget that. But it helps if you as an interviewer remember that, too, and have some compassion.