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Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

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

#181

Post by wpietri »

throwawayaway wrote: post #175
wpietri wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about how one strives to improve. Have you read the original paper? http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/... Incompetent people think they're doing fine because they can't tell the difference between good and bad work. Highly competent people, readily seeing their own flaws, think they don't do as well as they are doing. (At least until you have them grade a bunch of other work, at which p…

haven't read it thanks. are you saying the paper is about how one strives to improve? - because it's not titled that. the title is pretty clear. so is the abstract. i think we agree that self assessments aren't worth much. i think our disagreement stems from me applying it from a neutral ability perspective and you applying it to your own self assessment, where you don't question your basic competency.

> haven't read it thanks. are you saying the paper is about how one strives to improve? - because it's not titled that. the title is pretty clear. so is the abstract.

I am not. You didn't see how one could usefully apply their work. I'm explaining how I have applied it. You asked "Why in the first instance do you give your negative assessment credence, and have doubts about your positive assessment in the second?" When I say, "It's about how one strives to improve," I am answering your question.

> i think our disagreement stems from me applying it from a neutral ability perspective and you applying it to your own self assessment, where you don't question your basic competency.

Not at all. If for X I am a person of low ability, then I am likely to perceive myself as doing pretty well at X because I cannot see the flaws in my work. So if I'm at a state where my work looks good to me, the thing to do is, as I said, to improve my discernment until I can see flaws in my work. Then I can work to improve, increasing my competency.

This strategy works no matter what you relative competence is. And note that relative competence is distinct from absolute competence. Even people in the top quartile of a given sample can keep improving, and I believe Glass's quote helps explain why: their taste is still ahead of their skill, which if they keep practicing yields increased absolute competence.

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

#182

Post by wpietri »

Kalium wrote: post #173
wpietri wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your presumption that I couldn't possibly have thought of this before. As well as your ridiculous assumed superiority in ordering me not to "attempt" to answer. Gosh golly, anon, please point out more of what's truly significant. Without you I would be lost. I think any opinion is welcome in honest dialog between people who are pursuing sincere understanding and are acting with sufficient empathy toward all pa…

I was being charitable and attempting to offer food for thought. I now understand that both were in error. I happen to entertain the fringe belief that call-out culture is unhealthy and serves to further the problems it purports to address. I can see that you do not share this belief. Good day to you.

Oh, please. We both believe in using words to discourage expression of certain beliefs and limit particular behaviors. Which is why you're talking to me in the first place. Saying that you don't believe in "call-out culture" while calling me out for calling somebody out just means that you object to it being done by people who you disagree with politically. "Call-out culture" is only novel to the extent to which previously marginalized people can collaborate and talk to people in dominant group as peers.

Also, your claim that you were being "charitable" is obviously disingenuous. How kind of you, so rich in thought, to donate your pearls of wisdom to the impoverished thinkers with regrettably different politics than yours. I only hope you have more time in the future to condescend to me while ignoring my actual points.

If you were all that serious about addressing the problems that you see "call-out culture" as attempting but failing to solve, I expect you'd be doing something about it besides tsk-tsking and making tone arguments. Otherwise, though, the simple explanation is that this is garden-variety concern trolling on your part. So yes, feel free to good-day yourself right on out of my replies.

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

#183

Post by morgante »

api wrote: post #38
skywhopper wrote: post #6

I'm glad the "rigorous testing process" was mentioned. The facade of "we only hire superninja-kickass-hyperexperts and we will verify that you are such a programmer before we hire you" attracts a certain type of person, and intimidates another. And it may be that it intimidates more women than men. But the article seems to glide past that and presents the idea that five years of experience might change someone's will…

"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."

While this anecdote seems to match traditional gender narratives, I'm interested in how you knew the men "obviously did the same kind of work."

You observed that women were more likely than men to emphasize teamwork and not their individual contributions. It seems that there are two hypotheses which result from that:

1. Women are more likely to emphasize team aspects and de-emphasize their contribution (less narcissistic)

2. Women are less likely to individual contribute and more likely to rely on teams for projects (less independent)

How did you differentiate between those two?

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

#184

Post by dayone »

yurymik wrote: post #105
tenpoundhammer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with a 10x developer once, he was awful and I couldn't stand to work with him. Although he could produce an insane amount of code and functionality his presence was like throwing a grenade into the middle of the dev team everyday. He left to take a job at google and the overall team productivity went up significantly. He basically did 10X individually,but took 11x away from the team. So team work is pretty d…

Here's my favorite quote by @bmdhacks that reflects my experience dealing with such people: How to be a 10x engineer: Incur technical debt fast enough to appear 10x as productive as the ten engineers tasked with cleaning it up. https://twitter.com/bmdhacks/status/560949130999365633

Spot on!

> How to be a 10x engineer: Incur technical debt fast enough to appear 10x as productive as the ten engineers tasked with cleaning it up.

We have a guy in our onsite team that keeps making our user facing application suck with his changes one day and then fix those every other day. So lots of git commits but limited productivity in the team, and a very tough maintainence task for every developer in the team.

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

#185

Post by gaius »

thedufer wrote: post #178
gaius wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what that is, or anyone who uses it.

Oh. Well, in my defense that was pretty unlikely. Hacker news search shows that it's been mentioned in the title of 475 stories, at least 25 of which hit the front page. Well, we've still got Stack Exchange. Surely you've heard of that?

Atwood is clearly the brains behind that.

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

#186

Post by throwawayaway »

wpietri wrote: post #181
throwawayaway wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

haven't read it thanks. are you saying the paper is about how one strives to improve? - because it's not titled that. the title is pretty clear. so is the abstract. i think we agree that self assessments aren't worth much. i think our disagreement stems from me applying it from a neutral ability perspective and you applying it to your own self assessment, where you don't question your basic competency.

> haven't read it thanks. are you saying the paper is about how one strives to improve? - because it's not titled that. the title is pretty clear. so is the abstract. I am not. You didn't see how one could usefully apply their work. I'm explaining how I have applied it. You asked "Why in the first instance do you give your negative assessment credence, and have doubts about your positive assessment in the second?" Wh…

I initially stated that you are just doing self improvement and dunning kruger isn't informing it.

you haven't said anything that disagrees with what i said, neither does the paper. at best you are applying half of it, the positive side. cherry picking?

if you're competent and you assess your work and it appears to be bad, then dunning-kruger says that it is not as bad as you think.

if you're incompetent and you assess your work and it appears to be good, then dunning-kruger says you don't have the competence to make that assessment and it's probably not good work.

if you had somebody competent in to assess your work instead of you, then that would probably be a more accurate application of it.

sure self improvement works, but self assessment doesn't really and that's the main take away.

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

#187

Post by brudgers »

gaius wrote: post #185
thedufer wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh. Well, in my defense that was pretty unlikely. Hacker news search shows that it's been mentioned in the title of 475 stories, at least 25 of which hit the front page. Well, we've still got Stack Exchange. Surely you've heard of that?

Atwood is clearly the brains behind that.

Having listened to nearly all the StackOverflow/StackExchange podcasts, there's as much Spolsky as Atwood in StackExchange. Spolsky was the grisled veteran when it came to building products and companies. Atwood more the tech hotshot.

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

#188

Post by jpindar »

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…

That's what interviews for hardware engineers are like. I'm an embedded systems engineer, and as such about half my work is programming. I've only worked for companies that are primarily electronics manufacturers. I've hesitated to apply to companies that are more software focused largely because of my perception of their interview process.

Interviews for electronic engineers consist mostly of talking about projects the candidate has worked on (for young people these might be college and hobby projects). The interviewer's questions are things like "what did you consider the most difficult part of that project?" or "What tools did you use for that?" or "why did you do it that way and not this other way?" No one has ever asked me to design something on a whiteboard, nor would they dream of asking me to rattle off the pinout of some random microprocessor.

The software company interviews I hear about sound more like someone being tested to prove they aren't lying about their qualifications than like adults discussing a business deal.

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

#189

Post by logfromblammo »

nicolethenerd wrote: post #123
logfromblammo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I applied at Fog Creek, I asked about diversity in the workplace and got what I considered to be a hasty, defensive, almost-canned response. Prior to their jarring, incongruous answer, I was worried I was not good enough at software development to get the job. Afterward, I suspected it was just another "cultural fit" thing. They did use videoconferencing in the interview process, if I recall correctly. I thought…

How about "Your software skills were great, but so-and-so's were better"? Of course, not knowing you and not working at Fog Creek, there's no way to know if that was the actual reason or not - but I would think it would be an acceptable reason. Something I've realized since ending up on the hiring side of things is that there's a bit of a mismatch between how candidates and companies see the hiring process. As a cand…

I have heard that before, actually. It doesn't help if they won't tell you who they hired, and why they were better. The fact that they picked someone "better" is obvious if they picked someone at all, and it wasn't you.

Also, when I hear that particular line, I follow up with "I'm glad you were able to find someone you like. Will you keep me in mind the next time you're hiring?" If I get a response at all, it is something noncommittal, like "We keep all applications for a minimum of six months."

Perhaps companies should not focus so narrowly on the current position. I have applied multiple times to the same companies for different positions, provided my experience with them remains positive.

But if, for instance, a company like SAIC schedules an interview with me on a military base, sends an escort to the gate to bring me to the work site, and only then tells me that no one is available to interview me that day, because the supervisors are all halfway across the country, that company lands itself on my blacklist. Later experiences with employees of that company moved them to my permanent, public blacklist. Not only will I not apply for any of their positions, but if they appeared on my doorstep with an offer letter in hand, I'd order them off the property. And I would recommend that everyone else do the same, for both SAIC and for spinoff spawn Leidos. They are the sole reason why I ask "Who's the prime contractor?" whenever I interview with a contracting company.

When you create an energy potential by posting an opening, candidate-anticandidate pairs don't pop into existence to interview with you and then self-annihilate after you reject them. Actual, persistent people stick around, remember how you treated them, and talk to each other about their experiences. They stay in the industry, and may one day be customers or competitors.

As it happens, Fog Creek is not on my blacklist, either temporarily or permanently. But I do feel like their interview process would be a waste of my time if I had to endure it again from the beginning, and I don't expect them to ever pick me up again from where we left off. So I ignore their job postings now. It won't hurt them any, because they get plenty of candidates anyway.

But it doesn't surprise me at all that anyone who doesn't believe that they are good enough to top the 99 other people all applying for the same position wouldn't bother investing all that energy to compete, especially when that won't help them in their search if they fail. With no feedback, no referrals, and no helpful suggestions, it really is a lot of effort for a high probability of no reward whatsoever.

There may be something embedded in our tribal caveman brains that makes high-risk behaviors more attractive to men than to women. If so, Fog Creek might be able to attract more female applicants just by guaranteeing something of value at the end of the interview process, regardless of whether the candidate is selected for the next round.

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

#190

Post by api »

morgante wrote: post #183
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." While this anecdote seems to match traditional gender narratives, I'm interested in how you knew the men "obviously did the same kind of work." You observed that women were more likely than men to emphasize teamwork and not their individual contributions. It seems that the…

I think programming challenges are the only recruitment tool we have that can cut through this and many other similar questions.
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