Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

#81

Post by nlawalker » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

tie_ wrote: post #66

api wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And it may be that it intimidates more women than men." I've been looking around for a developer recently, and in looking at the profiles of women vs. men at places like AngelList I noticed a few key differences in how they described themselves. We're talking about people with very similar academic backgrounds here with similar levels of experience. Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while…

> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X. I find this a very interesting fact, but I see a number of other possible explanations for "I do X": - It is simply shorter. Men being used to more compact communication? - It is also more boastful - perhaps men being used to market themselves more aggressively than women?…

I (male, for the record, but gender-specific behavior isn't my point here) used to write/say that I was "part of a team" that did X or "worked on a team" that did Y, but I stopped doing it for a couple reasons, the most prominent being that "worked on a team that..." is usually obvious given the context of the conversation and the scale of the work discussed. In those cases, explicitly mentioning it feels like you're going out of the way to distance yourself from the work and describe yourself as a bystander - someone who just happened to be on the team that did this great work.

Re: Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

#82

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #32

ManFromUranus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the lack of gender diversity in tech an obvious problem? Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there. You might say something about discrimination or sexism or some such thing, however I am highly skeptical of that. I have been a programmer for 10+ years and never saw any kind of negative discrimination against women. I have seen many examples of positive…

> Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there. This is so far from the lived reality of women in tech or any of the data on hiring that you should be embarrassed to open your mouth. On HN most people get that before opining on the merits of functional programming, they should have tried it. Or at the very least spent a fair bit of time reading about what people…

I'm not certain how you can structure your argument such that it does not also imply that professions that are majority female discriminate against men.

Your introduction of that graph appears to be an attempt at making an improper inference based on conditional probabilities. You can't just flip-flop between probability of woman, given job, and probability of job, given woman. There's math involved, based on additional data not necessarily obvious from the visualization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_probability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_of_the_inverse

To make an inference about what women want, you have to remove the men from the data. It doesn't matter one little bit what the female numbers are in proportion to the male numbers. And what the female numbers show is that around 1985, women generally stopped wanting to earn CS degrees, preferring medicine, law, or physical sciences. The graph does not say why. It just suggests that women very abruptly reversed the previous trend and started choosing other careers. It also happened before the vast majority of people now working in the field had graduated from elementary school, which suggests that it is an institutional bias, and not a personal one.

It's easy to guess at the reason why, but those guesses would not be supported by anything short of surveying actual women with college educations, asking them "why not computer science?"

My hypothesis is that for those answers that cite the composition of the CS classes and faculty as a contributing factor, it wasn't because they were full of men, but because they were full of nerds. For a variety of reasons revolving around the capricious cruelty of adolescents, females are less likely to be in the nerd social caste, and possibly also strongly conditioned to avoid it.

That social dynamic fuels a lot of nastiness later in life. Sex balance in the workplace may be just another symptom of it.

But really, it's all useless speculation until someone actually goes out and asks some people about their reasons for doing things, in a manner that avoids known biases.

Re: Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

#83

Post by ssenko » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:50 PM UTC

There is no diversity problem in tech.

Re: Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

#84

Post by jerf » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:54 PM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #69

jerf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I do think that the grueling and intimidating software interview process is a very serious problem in our field." 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 suspe…

> my interview attitude is that I'm there to find out what you can do, not to find out what you can't, Have you ever considered trying to find out and confirm what the candidate has done in the past, instead of the almost impossible task of finding out what they "can do" in a few short hours? Barring some major new life issue, a developer's past performance is highly predictive of their future performance. Edit: Remo…

If I can, yes. But many interviewees are not prepared for that, and I've had to adapt to that.

If you are interviewing, please by all means bring samples of your work and be ready to discuss them, if you possibly can. But some people come from places where they can't talk about what they did (like, literally, Federal law in some cases), or for some other good reason can't really substantiate what they did.

You also have to account for the fact that a lot of the ways of finding out what they did in the past are somewhat unreliable. Many past employers have their own reasons for not being forthcoming or entirely truthful. The interviewee is incentivized to exaggerate their claims. In this context it's hard to get very much solid information of the type you're asking for.

My preference is to see past accomplishments, then use the interview to substantiate that they are indeed your accomplishments and you were not just generally in the area of accomplishments that happened to be occurring. But alas, that's not always an option.

Re: Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

#85

Post by pebblehawk » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #59

wpietri wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there. This is so far from the lived reality of women in tech or any of the data on hiring that you should be embarrassed to open your mouth. On HN most people get that before opining on the merits of functional programming, they should have tried it. Or at the very least spent a fair bit of time reading about what people…

This raises an interesting question: Do we think that discrimination in technology is worse (or more entrenched?) than discrimination in law, medicine, or finance? These other fields were almost entirely male within living memory (my mother was one of two women in her law school class) and are now approaching gender parity (at least at most levels, I'm sure that senior partners are still mostly men). Why has there be…

Just a thought: Adolescents can start self-learning programming far earlier then you would start learning formal law or medicine. So if there is a gender divide among the adolescents self-learning programming/engineering skills, then I'd expect to see that trend exacerbated into adulthood. That dynamic doesn't happen with law or medicine.

Re: Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

#86

Post by kyllo » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #7

I agree that lack of gender diversity in tech is an obvious problem, and I laud Fog Creek for trying to address this problem. However, I'd like to strongly emphasis the fact that one of the main problems Fog Creek identified as hindering the most talented female developers from applying to Fog Creek, is also a huge problem that prevents many of the most talented male developers from applying to Fog Creek. Ironically,…

This isn't the first time I've read about a top employer asking a highly-desired employee why they'd never applied in the past, and receiving as an answer, "oh, I didn't think I'd make it through your interview process"

Exactly. And to someone who is already gainfully employed elsewhere, the opportunity cost of going through an interview gauntlet--which often consists of one or more full days of intense testing, and many more days of practice to prepare for that testing--is very real and daunting. So they will naturally tend to attract fresh college graduates who have nothing to lose and can afford to make such a huge time investment in the interview process for a particular prospective employer.

Re: Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

#87

Post by throwawayaway » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 6:01 PM UTC

trose wrote: post #45

throwawayaway wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't they want to be there though? 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 t…

Anyone that doesn't think there is a problem should try asking a female dev about her experiences in her career. Besides typical societal problems like calling 35 year old women "girls" and forcing them to choose between having a family or a successful career, they face all sorts of discrimination and sexism that men don't even realize they're doing. My SO on multiple occasions has been told things like "You're the b…

I am in complete and total agreement with what you are saying. I once heard an undergraduate female dev be fed the "companies always want female devs" and a female colleague my junior having self doubt over getting promoted. The whole thing stinks.

To be honest I'm sure I've transgressed a few times myself! Like many things you just have to be vigilant.

Re: Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

#88

Post by ManFromUranus » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 6:01 PM UTC

terrywilcox wrote: post #36

ManFromUranus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the lack of gender diversity in tech an obvious problem? Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there. You might say something about discrimination or sexism or some such thing, however I am highly skeptical of that. I have been a programmer for 10+ years and never saw any kind of negative discrimination against women. I have seen many examples of positive…

I've been a programmer for 20+ years. For the longest time I didn't see any discrimination in tech, probably because everybody I worked with was also a young white guy. Except those over the hill freaks with their comb overs and sandals with socks. Fortunately their skill sets were rapidly obsolete, so we got rid of them. On the other hand, my wife (a senior Oracle DBA with close to 20 years of experience) sees it on…

I think that's the easy answer.

"but it was pretty obvious I was too old to work there"

Who said that? Did they say that to you? If they did that was definitely wrong. However it sounds more like you imposed that criteria on yourself, and then attribute the blame to them.

If gender diversity in tech is a good thing, why not age diversity? Sounds like they needed you there.

Re: Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

#89

Post by Kronopath » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #69

jerf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I do think that the grueling and intimidating software interview process is a very serious problem in our field." 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 suspe…

> my interview attitude is that I'm there to find out what you can do, not to find out what you can't, Have you ever considered trying to find out and confirm what the candidate has done in the past, instead of the almost impossible task of finding out what they "can do" in a few short hours? Barring some major new life issue, a developer's past performance is highly predictive of their future performance. Edit: Remo…

What about developers with little experience, that come right out of school, or are applying for an internship position? Are you going to cut them out of the process? If so, are you okay with the fact that you'll often be missing out on getting an early lead on good junior developers? Good developers rarely kick around on the job market, and so it's often much more difficult to hire them when they've become more senior. Joel Spolsky's take:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...

Re: Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

#90

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 6:06 PM UTC

pebblehawk wrote: post #85

ForHackernews wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This raises an interesting question: Do we think that discrimination in technology is worse (or more entrenched?) than discrimination in law, medicine, or finance? These other fields were almost entirely male within living memory (my mother was one of two women in her law school class) and are now approaching gender parity (at least at most levels, I'm sure that senior partners are still mostly men). Why has there be…

Just a thought: Adolescents can start self-learning programming far earlier then you would start learning formal law or medicine. So if there is a gender divide among the adolescents self-learning programming/engineering skills, then I'd expect to see that trend exacerbated into adulthood. That dynamic doesn't happen with law or medicine.

Certainly with law (perhaps less so with medicine), early self-learning is quite possible. (As, for that matter, is early organized learning targeted to adolescents, such as middle/high school mock trial programs.)