Why Software Maker Fog Creek Is Helping Its Competitors Hire Women

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 who have tried it see as the pluses and minuses. But somehow we get to questions of discrimination in tech, an article can't be up for 10 minutes before somebody feels free to opine based on no knowledge whatsoever.

I find it maddening. Partly because so many of these people seem to think it's somebody else's job to argue them into an understanding. (Rather than, say, their responsibility to do a Google search and read for a whole hour.) And partly because it traps these discussions at a level of "let's explain Discrimination 101" over and over and over.

But to answer your direct point: your hypothesis that "people do what they want to do" is obviously worthless when you look at actual data on what people do. Consider this graph, for example:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

By your interpretation, in 1965, women wanted to be lawyers at 1/10th the rate that men did. But 40 years later women suddenly wanted to be lawyers a lot more. Why? Well, who can know what people want? They just want things. Or they don't. But it definitely, positively, absolutely couldn't have anything to do with the millennia of structural oppression of women or the dramatic changes over the last century in the status and legal rights of women. Nope! Not a thing.

It's ridiculous. Which you would know if you had bothered to put forth any effort. Now ask yourself: why didn't you?

On the other hand, it can be a negative for somebody working for a company that discourages or forbids open sourcing their work. Or people who don't have free time to spend on FOSS projects.

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 a regular basis. It's disheartening to hear her talk about it because I realize I'm guilty of many of the same behaviours.

I guess I could try to protect my ego and claim it's not sexism, but that's not who I want to be. I don't want to be the guy denying something I know to be true.

I went into an interview a couple of years ago and realized I was about 20 years older than everybody in the company. I don't have a comb over and I don't wear socks with sandals, but it was pretty obvious I was too old to work there. That's the day I realized my job opportunities are becoming limited. I should have seen it coming.

Hmm, maybe it's possible women don't want to be in tech because of the sexism they face.

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 men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X." Women would highlight the cooperative nature of their work, while men would give the impression that they did it all themselves. In my experience the former is typically more honest, especially if you actually were working on a team or on a team-oriented college project.

Women also tend to highlight team-oriented and non-technical skills more than men in general, which to techie-minded hacker types gives the impression that they are not strong on the technical end.

I also noted my reaction to these differences. Introspecting, I noticed that I tended to assume that "being on a team" meant riding the coattails of the other team members. If I noted this bias in myself, it's probably pretty common.

I decided to try to de-program myself of this bias by thinking of all the counter-examples I've seen.

I do believe in the "10X programmer" -- for the simple reason that there are 10X everything elses. There are 10X athletes, 10X businesspeople/salespeople, 10X artists, 10X anythings. When we look for employees or contractors we are looking for that 10X standout, or at least someone who's going to grow into one. But being really good at something is not mutually exclusive with working on a team or highlighting non-technical skills, and the inverse is also not correlated. I've met plenty of monomaniacal "closet programmers" who really aren't any good. They sit alone stewing in their huge egos and churn out crap. (But then again I've met some who are. There does not seem to be a strong correlation.)

There's probably quite a few really talented female programmers out there who are being passed over because they don't conform to the "whip it out and let me measure it" customs of technical recruitment. I also suspect that this does drive women from the field.

Not at all! You're being too binary with it. Dunning-Kruger is about the relationship between discernment and capability. In particular, it's saying discernment drives capability. A great way of applying it is this Ira Glass quote:

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to-...

Basically, the way I apply it is to say that if I can tell that my work isn't as good as I want it to be, that's ok: I have to use that as fuel to improve. And if I'm dealing with something where my work looks perfect to me, it's time to up my discernment.

In hiring, the way I apply it is to avoid listening much to self-assessment and related measures of competence (e.g., confidence). Instead, I go for demonstrations of competence, like short essay answers instead of cover letters, or pair programming interviews [1] over "tell me about a time when" discussions.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-programming-intervie...