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Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

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Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#321

Post by johnnyanmac »

anal_reactor wrote: post #250
burutthrow1234 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a change in the past 10 years but I would say women are still systemically under-compensated, under-levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc. The perception that women are better at "soft skills" means that we get pushed out of technical tracks into coordinating work, managing people, and sometimes just straight up babysitting male devs. Those career paths lead…

As a student I have personally experienced "sorry, you cannot join the event, you're a boy we're looking for a girl" and instead of me they picked a girl whose only job was to stand, smile, and tick the box "yes I'm a girl, this makes the team diverse". Having such an experience makes my brain heavily biased against all actions supporting gender equality. Which are many. And they're almost always about improving the…

It's not visible on the outside in western societies because outright saying "you're a boy and we're looking for a girl" is outright illegal (in 99% of roles). They need to be a bit more subtle than that. e.g. make a "women only/highly encouraged" event that happens to have a job fair.

I guess in Asia there is no such barrier. So the results and backlash are equally more explicit.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#322

Post by ivan_gammel »

autoexec wrote: post #280
spookie wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I know you know best (talking plural here), but make sure that your wife feels accomplished in her own line of work and/or getting her dream job. Raising kids is great, but as age goes by, she might feel sad about not accomplishing other things. This is coming from someone with a dysfunctional family, I don't have much context about your life nor do I want to sound as if I'm assuming things. I'm just trying to w…

> make sure that your wife feels accomplished in her own line of work "make sure that your wife feels accomplished" sounds very strange to me. Ultimately it should be his wife's responsibility to make sure that she feels accomplished right? I get that it's not a bad idea to talk with your spouse about what the two of you want in life and to consider other options from time to time though. > Raising kids is great, but…

> Ultimately it should be his wife's responsibility to make sure that she feels accomplished right?

No. In a healthy relationship partners care about each other. This means also enabling them to pursue their dreams. It’s not just talking, it’s also doing something, e.g. taking parental leave or sacrificing your own opportunities so that your wife could use hers. Without this kind of support she won’t have much choice.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#323

Post by jrockway »

randomdata wrote: post #202
jrockway wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that companies think they can make $X with 10 engineers, but > $2X with 20 engineers. Thus, allowing more people to be comfortable as a software engineer increases the amount of money they can make. Right now, with 6% interest rates? Nobody wants to make money that badly. But it won't be that way forever.

That is a fair thought, but, of course, depends on a constant (approximately) per-unit labour cost. After all, businesses could poach those 10 additional engineers from the company beside them with a $2Y compensation offer, without the need for any more engineers. But if you need to pay 2x more for each labourer to achieve $2X gross return then the appeal is quickly lost. However, if you can create 10 new engineers t…

Everyone wants to lower the cost of labor, but you can only get so much blood from a stone. People will do something else if software engineering isn't profitable. That's how things are going in the post-0% interest rates world. Software engineers aren't individually getting paid less, but less speculative software is being written. In 2021, everyone thought that the way to get rich was by throwing 200 software engineers at a shopping cart app. In 2024, the way is to have 10 people making a shopping cart, 10 people making a database, 10 people running HR reports, ... I don't think this makes the size of the industry smaller, but makes "I am sure I will find something interesting to do at this super company" less likely. There are no super companies anymore. (Except Nvidia.)

Anyway, the way we increase efficiency is by automating more things. 50 years ago, you had to have a person come to your house to collect letters from you, then they would be mailed across the country, and another person would deliver it to the recipient. Now we have email, and you can just send someone a letter with no other humans in the loop. That's the efficiency increase that engineering brings, and even if we can't envision what we're going to do tomorrow, it will continue. What that means is that we will always need more engineers, and the scope of our role will increase faster than we make more humans to be engineers.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#324

Post by johnnyanmac »

thatsnotreally wrote: post #234
burutthrow1234 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a change in the past 10 years but I would say women are still systemically under-compensated, under-levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc. The perception that women are better at "soft skills" means that we get pushed out of technical tracks into coordinating work, managing people, and sometimes just straight up babysitting male devs. Those career paths lead…

Engineers viewing design as a 'less prestigious' role is laughable. The compensation for these tracks is pretty much equal. I would love to hear you spell out why exactly you perceive design as less prestigious.

I won't speak on engineering vs design. but compensation doesn't necessarily correlate perfectly with prestige. Teaching is the easiest example in the opposite way.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#325

Post by johnnyanmac »

Aeolun wrote: post #216
Melomololotolo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I look around my peers, not a lot has changed in the last 10 years for woman in tech

The only place I see/hear a lot of female devs is in India. In Japan the ratio might as well be zero.

>In Japan the ratio might as well be zero.

may change in the coming decade or 2. Late 2010's had Japan's version of the US 70's where women entered the workforce in droves. But COVID may or may not have stalled that phenomenon. I imagine they will bring in more women before they loosen their immigration policies.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#326

Post by jrflowers »

grobbyy wrote: post #51

At the risk of posting a reflexive comment, what should we be doing here? It seems like everything has unintended consequences (not on a cost-benefit basis): - Minority affinity groups pull people from majority groups and decrease integration. - Anti-discrimination/sexism/etc. movements often add social barriers to interactions (e.g. things I do within my identity group would be misperceived if done across) - Affirma…

> Anti-discrimination/sexism/etc. movements often add social barriers to interactions (e.g. things I do within my identity group would be misperceived if done across)

Can you give a specific example of a thing you do in your identity group that could be misperceived if done across your identity group

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#327

Post by simonsarris »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #317
pas wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... sure, on the other hand way less competition, and smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire promising juniors and do on the job training.

>hire promising juniors and do on the job training. I chuckled. I yearn for these days, but this isn't the experience I had (late millenial/early Gen Z). No one trains, you get maybe a week to adjust, expected to go full steam ahead, and leave or are laid off 2-3 years later.

We train juniors for years (we accept interns as young as junior year of high school) and its been pretty great. I really don't understand why more companies don't do it.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#329

Post by Ekaros »

Neonlicht wrote: post #328

The idea of spending all day with tech bros was enough to make me suicidal so I went into the healthcare industry. I am from a culture were people don't just work for money or status.

I thought there would be lot more in healthcare that are in it for money or status? Or is that just doctors?

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#330

Post by ndriscoll »

spookie wrote: post #209
ndriscoll wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife spends around an hour a day in the kitchen. I spend close to eight chained to my computer. If one of us is a slave, it's not her. She's not attending daily stand-ups to report how teaching our daughter the alphabet is going; she chooses how to spend each day with no external pressures at all. Her work taking care of the kids is still more exhausting than mine, but it's also obviously more fulfilling and engag…

Hey, I know you know best (talking plural here), but make sure that your wife feels accomplished in her own line of work and/or getting her dream job. Raising kids is great, but as age goes by, she might feel sad about not accomplishing other things. This is coming from someone with a dysfunctional family, I don't have much context about your life nor do I want to sound as if I'm assuming things. I'm just trying to w…

She does accomplish other things/have hobbies. Her squat is in the "exceptional" tier on Symmetric Strength. She's good at cooking a variety of meals. We've gotten compliments from neighbors that live a couple streets away about our yard. She generally takes credit for transforming me from a video game nerd into a weightlifting Chad, and I don't disagree. She majored in math and did a couple programming courses in college, but by the end she had had enough of those things.

By contrast, I know for a fact that about 2 years of my work were for nothing (building products that ultimately failed), and another 3 or so had a large amount of unnecessary work from way overly complex designs that I didn't have the political capital to prevent, which added a lot of stress to my life as I still cared enough to try. There's been times where I've presented management with an analysis showing that some project they want me to lead is going to have negative ROI, but the reality I've encountered is a lot of "engineering" in software runs on vibes and doing what's currently cool/sounds impressive, so the conclusion may already be foregone. Knowing you did your due diligence to present that analysis and then did a good job executing on the delivery is fine I guess, and you'll get your raises and promotions for doing it, but it's still somewhat hollow.

If someone is really internally motivated by ambitions of career ladder climbing, then they should go for it. If economics make it a necessary practical choice, then do it (though if they are on a path to a STEM career, chances are they are in a social circle that enables them to find a high-quality spouse on the same path so that only one of them has to do it). But in general I'd advise young people who don't yet know what they want that they should have their prior be that their family and personal accomplishments (or lack thereof) will be more important to them than their career accomplishments.

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