441–450 of 520 posts
Tech industry is imploding, there is no need whatsoever to push women (or men) into a career in tech that has very limited opportunities at the moment.
It sure feels like it, yeah. But is there an objective time series measure somewhere?
Doors into tech are (and has always been) open to women.
If there is no real problem to solve — how did anyone expect an organization to last long?
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Your job as the top executive isn’t to get labor, it is to run a company (which sometimes involves getting labor). In order to do that you must manage your expenses. If you overspend on your salary such that you put the company in a position where the company is begging for 4 months of your salary as runway, you have failed at your job and you demonstrably were irresponsible, reckless in your spending and unable to m…
That's not necessarily true at all. Sometimes organizations simply wind up in impossible positions. Funding dries up for macroeconomic reasons that you have no control over, demand patterns change, etc. There are plenty of failed orgs that would have failed even if they'd had true business geniuses leading them. You could just as easily assert that paying someone $285K got the expertise that kept the organization goi…
The reasons for closing haven't really been elaborated on, just commented on as sad and devastating; I haven't managed to glean anything more from the rest of the article. However, it's incredible to me to keep an organization like this going for 17 years. The landscape is constantly shifting and looking back at the world and technology from 2007, and even 2014, they've survived a lot. Going down now just shows how b…
> However, it's incredible to me to keep an organization like this going for 17 years. Exactly. Say what you want about the state-of-affairs today, imagine what the women in tech landscape looked like almost 20 years ago! I'm sure they accomplished a lot, and that's awesome.
the next generation of female diversification initiatives will be more specialized aka more diversified for age, race, geography, and industry. This is good all around. Edit: And could be carried as a side hustle by existing institutions.
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Reading your description of the policy, it looks like what it does is say a team can hire from the "Opportunistic" bucket for "free," but does not freeze out anybody else. Is that a correct read? > 20 heads were reserved I have not studied Dropbox extensively. In 2019, was 20 hires roughly equivalent to the total overall number of new hires? Or are we talking about a small percentage of overall new staffers? If the l…
It's explicit denial of employment on the basis of race and gender. It's illegal no matter what proportion of the headcount this is. If I have 100 headcount and I say "20 of our headcount is off limits to white and Asian men" is that ok? If I have 80 headcount and I create 20 "opportunistic" headcount exclusive to women and URM is that acceptable? You're smart enough to understand that these are identical policies.
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Nobody can manage anything with this little information. A KPI set at a particular value cannot tell why the KPI has that value. Thus without more information, your hypothetical is not productive. An illustration by way of example. In a field where other firms have a range of net profit margins of 35% - 45%, one firm sets their net profit target at 10%. Is that because they are not competitive? Another illustration b…
> Nobody can manage anything with this little information. I can! Unless you have some reason to believe that one gender is superior at the job than the other, it should match the representation of the field. > In a field where other firms have a range of net profit margins of 35% - 45%, one firm sets their net profit target at 10%. Is that because they are not competitive? Net profit margin is not a protected class.…
Why? You have not supported this at all. If the field is staffed by wildly bigoted hiring managers, why does your assertion follow?
Separately, why would this be obviously best for the company? Does matching parity with the field somehow ensure the best quality or cost/performance? Does this still hold at firms that are smaller than the largest (say: under 5k engineers)? Why?
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It's explicit denial of employment on the basis of race and gender. It's illegal no matter what proportion of the headcount this is. If I have 100 headcount and I say "20 of our headcount is off limits to white and Asian men" is that ok? If I have 80 headcount and I create 20 "opportunistic" headcount exclusive to women and URM is that acceptable? You're smart enough to understand that these are identical policies.
I'm not reading anywhere in there where it says anybody is denied a job under any scenario. Perhaps if Dropbox had fixed hiring numbers like your hypothetical, but that was not data you submitted.
If a company institutes a hiring policy that amounts to saying, "99% of our headcount is off-limits to Asians" is it correct to say "no Asians are denied a job, under any scenario"? It's technically correct in that Asian applicants could vie for the 1% of headcount that's available to Asians. But how many Asians would have been hired absent this headcount restriction? Probably more than 1%!
Okay, what if it wasn't 99% restricted to Asian, but just 50%? Can a company just say "half of our headcount is off limits to Asians"? Does that lower percentage make it okay?
No, of course not. It's not okay if it's 99%, 50%, 1%, or 0.01%. It's denial of employment to wall-off any proportion of headcount on the basis of protected class.
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In case you need an explicit scenario laid out to see how candidates are denied employment because of Dropbox's "opportunistic hiring" policy, here it is:
The company has already exhausted its non-restricted headcount. An Asian male applied. He gets rejected automatically because the only remaining headcount is restricted to women and URM. A woman applies. She's allowed to interview because the company still has that "opportunistic" headcount, and unlike our Asian male applicant her gender makes her eligible for this set-aside headcount.
If all headcount (including that "opportunistic headcount") were available to all races and genders, our Asian male would have been able to get hired.
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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…
If you do not think writing and debugging code is an important part of software development requiring specific skills, talents, and experience, I don’t want you anywhere near any software development team I’m working on. Paul Graham has made multiple fortunes based on the premise that good programmers can learn the soft skills for business much easier than the average business person can learn to code. Mountains of m…
A good developer is someone who is talented at writing code, and talented at some "people skills" to be able to use their coding talent usefully.
And, yes, a good programmer can learn soft skills for business more easily than the average business person can learn code, because code is very very hard and learning soft skills for business is "just" very hard. There are plenty of people very good at programming that are just useless because they are good at generating code that does not align with what is needed.
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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…
> 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. No, this does not track. It could also be that some fields in STEM are more people oriented than others. Psychology is over 2/3rd female. If anything, that in…
And I'm saying that I have taken that into account and I cannot see, in practice, how mathematicians, statisticians or biologists, in their day-to-day job life, are interacting more with people. Some of them are only interacting with their like-minded same-field team member, while software developers need to interact with the company business team, the finance team, the user experience team, the research team, ... plenty of teams that are not talking the same language and have different and sometimes opposite interests.
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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…
Biology is because it’s a prerequisite for medical fields increasingly dominated by women.