Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

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 willingness to apply. And it probably will help, but that amount of experience is unlikely to change someone's basic perception of their ability to succeed in a high-stakes one-chance prove-yourself situation.

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

#7

Post by jnbiche » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

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, these companies, with their legendarily difficult and arduous application processes, are selecting for mediocre developers:

1) We all know that the Dunning-Kruger effect is real: there's an abundance of quantified and repeatable psychological research that demonstrates that the least skilled individuals are on average the most likely to estimate their skill to be above average. Likewise, the most skilled individuals are the most cautious in estimating their skill level.

So who applies for more of these types of jobs? Well, based on what I've heard, Google, Fog Creek, and many other top employers receive a huge number of grossly unqualified applicants. And while I'm sure they'd like to think they're getting the majority of their desired candidate pool to apply, research on Dunning-Kruger, as well as anecdotes like the one on the article, all suggest that's probably not the case.

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". (btw, I love watching these kinds of interactions)

2) The most qualified developers can make a nice consultant salary without ever having to go through the headache of a demeaning 5-day interview process that often treats developers like disposable commodities. Why would you want to subject yourself to that kind of process if you're making $100,000-200,000 a year as a contract software dev (which is the range my colleagues working contract tend to make, depending on their hours and expertise)? So whenever I get an email from employers like Facebook, I say thanks but no thanks.

This is not to say that these employers never get highly-skilled employees. That's obviously not the case. But they get a very specific type of highly-skilled applicant: from top CS departments, coming right out of college. They're much less likely to get a highly-skilled dev to apply who has taken an alternate route to the top of his or her profession.

So what happens on average? "Top" employers like Google, Facebook, and smaller "desirable" employers like Fog Creek, effectively scare off a large number of the devs they want the most, both male and female. And they simultaneously attract a large number of unqualified applicants.

Yet again I ask: maybe the software developer interview process is completely broken? Are employers in enough pain yet that they're willing to revisit their hiring process? Or does it need to get worse?

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

#8

Post by ManFromUranus » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:37 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,…

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 discrimination in their favour. I think that people find ways to do the things they want to do, and women don't want to be in tech, so they aren't.

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

#9

Post by tghw » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:38 PM UTC

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…

It doesn't draw the connection directly, but part of the training program deals with technical interviews and getting the fellows more practice, and hopefully more comfort, with them. My guess is that once people have been through some mock interviews, the intimidation factor goes down quite a bit.

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

#10

Post by geebee » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:39 PM UTC

Several people have already mentioned it here, but I'm also very pleased to read this line:

"Hall asked a simple question: Why didn't Chipps, a brilliant engineer, ever apply to work at Fog Creek? Chipps said she didn't think she would make it through their rigorous testing process."

I do think that the grueling and intimidating software interview process is a very serious problem in our field. This one sentence hints at the extent of the harm.