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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

#401

Post by johnnyanmac »

jrockway wrote: post #191
randomdata wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why else would a buyer invest heavily in increasing the supply?

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.

c. 2000's, the reason was much more insidious. It wasn;t about making all the money, it was also about making sure no one else becomes the next facebook to their myspace. Only thing better than 2x engineers making more than 2x dollars, is depriving market value of competition by over 70%. The anti-poaching lawsuits of the early 2010's more or less confirms this intent.

c. 2010's, there's many reasons but the relevant one here is the DEI initaitves. You get tax breaks for diversity, you will hire the right people even if they just sit there. very dishonest, but at least they compensate well. Same logic, if 2x engineers only operate at 0.8x capacity but you save almost half your revenue from not paying taxes, the decision is obvious.

But as you said, we're in the 20's, market is captured, and free money is gone. That era of hoarding technical talent like trading cards is over

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#402

Post by johnnyanmac »

RIMR wrote: post #174
randomdata wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why else would a buyer invest heavily in increasing the supply?

I like that we're not beating around the bush and admitting that businesses only donate money to causes they think will financially benefit them. That there are no altruistic actions by a business entity, everything is either an operational expense or an investment. This is 100% true in practice, so you're absolutely correct here. I just hope that we're in agreement that this is a bad state of affairs if businesses h…

>I just hope that we're in agreement that this is a bad state of affairs if businesses have completely written off doing the right thing in favor of profit 100% of the time.

Maybe 99% of the time. But sure, the altruistic businesses are usually the first to shutter. Reality is cruel and very few entrepreneurs are so well off they can bleed money for their cause. Those kinds of people lobby policy instead of being customer facing.

>As a community of entrepreneurs, we should aim higher. If this is the only reason that tech companies invest in gender equality, then we need to find better advocates,

best of luck. The mix of having the massive funds for scale, incentive and/or empathy for interest, and altruism to keep the company honest for such an initiative seems to be a unicorn these days.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#404

Post by badgersnake »

jimbokun wrote: post #292
strikelaserclaw wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

once interests rate went up all DEI initiatives dried up - these companies don't really have integrity or beliefs beyond doing what is politically correct at the current time.

Almost as if they are organizations formed around the goal of optimizing profits, and not the general benefit of society.

Not even optimising profits, growth hacking to optimise share price.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#405

Post by Ferret7446 »

digging wrote: post #314
Jensson wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think affirmative action has anything to do with that? Affirmative action means you and everyone else there knows you had to pass a lower bar, of course that makes impostor syndrome worse.

Calling it a lower bar is a completely disingenuous interpretation, when the reason for such policies in the first place is that the bar for entry is much higher for minority groups to be hired.

It's not though? Discriminating based on minority status is illegal, and affirmative action is an explicit exception to allow discrimination (at least in education; in the private sector it should in theory still be illegal but it's not/rarely enforced).

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#406

Post by cauch »

Manuel_D wrote: post #373
cauch wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is as human-oriented as other science fields that are typically considered as more people-oriented and these fields attract a bigger proportion of women. Also, one of my point is that the "non human oriented" is also part of the image, but not of the reality. I see more and more successful developers that explains that "sit down and write or debug the code" on your own is not a fundamentally big part of the jo…

> But it is as human-oriented as other science fields that are typically considered as more people-oriented and these fields attract a bigger proportion of women. Bigger, sure, but not by much. STEM (presumably what you mean by "science fields") are bigger in aggregate ~25% women. Some of these are smaller (~10% of electrical engineers are men). Some are bigger, biology IIRC is about 50/50. Computer science is about…

I agree with that.

My comment here is about the idea that the disparity can be explained because "computer science is more thing-oriented and women are more interested in people-oriented activities".

If it was true, we would not see different numbers in different STEM fields.

Personally, I think that the cultural image of the field, rather than it being intrinsically thing- or people-oriented, has a bigger impact. In practice, biology and computer science are both activities where you work on your algorithm. And in practice, I would argue that computer scientists need to have more people skills than biologists, as computer scientists need to interact more between each others and with non-dev people (managers, internal teams that need to have internal tools built, external users giving feedbacks, ...). But biology has an image of "nature and animals" that is associated with women and computer science has an image of "nerd coding alone in his mancave" that is associated with men.

The thing is that these images are cultural, not intrinsic to the activity in itself.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#407

Post by cauch »

_05hb wrote: post #384
tptacek wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more human oriented than writing math proofs! Why is the gap between those two fields double digit percentage points?

Math proofs only need to convince other people. Programs need to convince a compiler. If compilers were people and you talked to them for the first time, the only reasonable response would be to call them assholes and find new friends. The field of mathematics doesn’t have an equivalent of the “Norway Problem.” Here’s my theory. Learning how to write code causes damage to the mind, particularly in the area of how you…

> Math proofs only need to convince other people

Wait, what? A math proof does not need to convince anyone: the proof exists or does not exist. If I prove X, then I don't need to convince other people that X is proven, they just have to read the proof.

So, in practice, math is even worst than computer science. In computer science, you have to convince the compiler. In math, you need to convince math. You need to build an algorithm that compiles under the tons of math logic rules.

> if we could figure out how to allow learners to skip the “coal face” of spending long hours into the night talking to a compiler

But learning math and trying to build math proofs is even more "coal face-y". There is no pre-build debugger and you need to check things yourself, by hand, and when it fails it may be because you mess up the algorithm part or the compiler part.

> Learning how to write code causes damage to the mind, particularly in the area of how you relate to other people. When we’re learning to code, men and women both notice this happening, but men care less.

All of that is cultural. The developer mentality cultivates this idea that being burnout and being socially rude is a sign of success and is a manly thing to do.

There is no reason why writing code causes damage, because it does not happen to plenty of other activities that are as grinding. Again, developers are not special, what they do and what they live is similar to a lot of other things.

It feels more like a rationalization: the reason men get worse at relating to other people and become weirdos is because these men are failing at social life because of their mentality.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#408

Post by krageon »

micah94 wrote: post #184
IncreasePosts wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would rising interest rates affect what is considered politically correct?

Borrowing money becomes more expensive so companies will focus on their own needs (or surviving) rather than giving or outreach programs. Unlike Apple or NVIDIA most companies need to borrow money to stay in business.

> most companies need to borrow money to stay in business.

With respect, this is entirely untrue. Most companies don't need to borrow money. It's the functional cancer of the VC-funded silicon valley meta that needs to borrow money to do anything useful. Most corporations run based on what they earn. This is the only reasonable thing too, or every country would have the egregious debt load that the US has.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#409

Post by krageon »

nothercastle wrote: post #40
asah wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this is normal, because running a non-profit is hard enough that suitable candidates command high salaries. I was on an NPO board with a similar ratio and we couldn't get it down.

300k isn’t crazy especially in SF that s not going up get you far

This is an absolutely insane amount of money, and that's not changed if you choose to live somewhere where that amount is easy to spend. The answer to that is simple: live somewhere else. I struggle to think of a region on earth that wouldn't define 300k as an incredibly high salary.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#410

Post by AlchemistCamp »

mikepurvis wrote: post #85
gramie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, we consider a marriage successful if it ends in the death of one of the partners.

There are lots of possible definitions for success— making it until death parts you is the obvious one, but "success" can also be producing fruit in terms of community, family, or even career. And there are of course marriages that make it until death, but the partners and everyone around them spend the whole time miserable; that's hardly a success either.

There are definitely multiple failure modes, for sure.

That said, if you take vows to spend the rest of your life with someone and then don't do so, then at least the marriage itself failed, though the years you spent with your spouse may not have been a total failure.

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