I find it extremely ironic that those opposing discrimination and racism are now the ones to view people as just statistics. The whole reason why racism and sexism is bad is because it doesn't look at people as individuals. Behind every person who goes to an interview there's whole life, and every interviewer has so much more information about that person than just her being a female or black. Pretending that by know…
> the defining feature is envy. envy for people who succeeded.
Unfortunately, that describes human nature in general.
To me the question is not why this statistic looks a certain way, but what is the actual experience of women in software engineering. And if you ask women, the problem doesn’t usually seem to be getting hired. It’s the work environment that is alienating.
So if you want a number to target, it’s not a proportion of female employees, it’s the retention rate. And that’s not affected by pipeline problems.
There's also history to consider. Computing was a woman-dominated field until relatively recently in history, which strongly suggests that the root causes of the shift in male/female ratios in technical fields isn't biological (unless there was a massive biological upheaval in the human species in the past 50 years).
the root causes of the shift in male/female ratios in technical fields isn't biological I agree with this, but I'd just note that the shift isn't as dramatic as you are making out. Computing was a woman-dominated field until relatively recently in history The field of computing started in the 1950s (generously). Worker proportions are difficult to estimate, but the maximum proportion of female computer science degree…
Going by computer science degrees is the wrong metric because computer science as a unique discipline only arose as late as the '50s. Before that, the field's predecessor was the human computer, a field dominated by women for quite some time.
This is also unlikely to be due to some inherent biological differences and instead reverse prejudices; women were assumed to be more patient and reliable and were favored in both human computation and telegraph / switchboard work.
Several of the best developers I know have no degree at all. I know one guy who did a boot camp 2-3 years ago and since then has self taught himself so much that he's one of the most knowledgeable people I've been around. He was recently told in an interview that he otherwise passed with flying colors that, "someone with a boot camp education couldn't be seriously considered." It's mind blowing to me that anyone in c…
You're going to find any stupid choices in a wide enough pool. That's not representative: I know boot camp grads at FAANGs. At smaller companies -- like mine -- it's not that we won't hire out of boot camps. We do, and have. But we're very conscious of search and training costs. Search costs can be somewhat fixed with money by using internal recruiters; training costs are horrific. Bootcamp grads are nearly useless i…
I’ve had to change my thinking about this to adapt to modern times. I used to think like this about internal recruiting however there is a bias — to avoid anything they do not know. There are recent grads and outsider devs that are really good actually. Top engineers are not immune to saying somebody is bad and lying about it because what they believe is good only means “never question tribal judgement”. They aren’t immune to creating networks across various companies to take hiring managers for the proverbial ride either. Dig deeper because what you may believe is hand-holding is an unwillingness by the team to disclose basic info to get the job done. It happens way more than we want to admit but people are still just people despite the fancy job titles.
Inexperience doesn't equal unintelligence. Making sure that your intro class structure supports people with varying experience levels means you're more likely to engage people with the right interest and capabilities, not less so.
I've never experienced or witnessed a scenario in which trying to support varying levels of experience didn't result in lowering of standards. People with the right interest and capabilities will strive to clear the bar and will not expect the bar to be lowered for them.
You may not know this because Harvey Mudd College is a small school, but it is extremely rigorous (not quite MIT/Caltech, but pretty damn close). Their middle 50% of the admitted students' math SAT range is 770-800[0]
I would be extremely surprised if HMC had any bar-lowered classes.
Just because you offer both a linear algebra course and a course on groups and rings doesn't mean the linear algebra class is some kind of mickey mouse credit--it's just for people who haven't seen that material before.
I think it's pretty bold to post something like this. As a person of color, I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting...however as someone who majored in CS it's undeniable that we have far less women and minorities going through these programs. After I graduated, my university managed to get the number closer to 60/40 of men vs. women but when I graduated there was just one woman in our graduating…
Don't you think it is racist to actually care about the race of the interviewer? Would you even think about that if there wasn't a non-stop conversation about racial differences? Maybe the nonsense diversity discussion is only making it worse by creating anxieties that wouldn't even be there?
With such politically charged issues, it's always a problem of people wanting to believe something is possible (and mandatory to pursue) banging their heads against what is true and actually possible. If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for the available candidate population) is 18% (Google for the facts and stats), how is every company to hit an idealistic goal of 50% representa…
Does anyone have a goal of 50% female developers? Can we see some citations for that? Most companies I've worked at claimed to be trying for 20%, and they were failing abysmally at it.
Yes, my company has a goal of "at least 50% females in IT in all positions and at all levels". I have absolutely no idea how they calculated 50% as a good target for the business and why "at least 50%", but these targets have a lot of emotional loads and zero real world value, so I don't try anymore to understand.
This stood out to me, and aligns with my observations in the (limited) female representation in the workplace: > In India, for instance, about 35% of developers are women; in the U.S., it’s 16% Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to? What is India doing so well in this space to have over double the percentage of female software developers as the U.S.?
> > In India, for instance, about 35% of developers are women; in the U.S., it’s 16%
> Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to?
The gender equality paradox details many of these sorts of inconsistencies. For instance, why does Iran have gender parity in compsci while virtually all progressive cultures struggle to crack 20% in compsci?
the root causes of the shift in male/female ratios in technical fields isn't biological I agree with this, but I'd just note that the shift isn't as dramatic as you are making out. Computing was a woman-dominated field until relatively recently in history The field of computing started in the 1950s (generously). Worker proportions are difficult to estimate, but the maximum proportion of female computer science degree…
Going by computer science degrees is the wrong metric because computer science as a unique discipline only arose as late as the '50s. Before that, the field's predecessor was the human computer, a field dominated by women for quite some time. This is also unlikely to be due to some inherent biological differences and instead reverse prejudices; women were assumed to be more patient and reliable and were favored in bo…
Before that, the field's predecessor was the human computer, a field dominated by women for quite some time.
Sure, this is true. But it's a pretty different job to programming.
This is also unlikely to be due to some inherent biological differences and instead reverse prejudices; women were assumed to be more patient and reliable and were favored in both human computation and telegraph / switchboard work.
Also typing pools, which is another job that has disappeared.
For anyone who didn't read the linked article (it's short), it suggests that a key element is careful design of intro courses. Students with computer science experience get a more advanced course that is explicitly designed not to make them more competitive in second-year courses (instead, it starts on material that will re-appear in third-year courses). Students with no computer science experience get their own intr…
It's an interesting insight. When applying to colleges I never considered applying for CS as I (female) had no programming experience whatsoever, and seemed to be surrounded by people (male) who'd been working on computers for years, ( I'll leave speculation on that for another day ) It was only because they forced EE majors to take programming courses that I ended up in the field. I wrote my first "hello world" as a…
Male here. CS courses were _not accessible_ to those without prior experience, male or female, full stop. That issue was compounded by having to use the IDEs and tooling available to us 10+ years ago. It wasn't until the last year of my business degree I was exposed to the simplicity of .NET/Visual Basic that made programming interesting, fun, and accessible to someone without experience. If only I had that exposure 4 years sooner, I'd have a CS degree today. C'est la vie.