Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years • Hacker News Board

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#461

Post by runako » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 10:57 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #460

runako wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're reading a lot into that policy which is not stated. This looks a lot like "opportunistic" hiring as it is described. In any case, this looks like more of an announcement and less of a policy document describing how to handle the edge cases on which you base your hypotheticals. In particular, did Dropbox hit its headcount target and need to use this "opportunistic" bucket? If so, how did it handle that…

> In particular, did Dropbox hit its headcount target and need to use this "opportunistic" bucket? If so, how did it handle that case? Judging management decisions in the abstract is folly. This is explicitly spelled out in the policies I sent you: the opportunistic hiring bucket is exclusive for women and URM. If you want to use the opportunistic hiring bucket, the candidate has to be either a woman or URM. What is…

> What is hard to understand here?

What I said:

> how did it handle that case?

You haven't said a) whether this hypothetical actually happened or b) how it was handled. That leaves all this in the realm of rage-bait hypotheticals.

> Representation relative to the workforce is what's relevant.

You're defining "workforce" narrowly to exclude people who do not currently work in the "field." This is unnecessarily narrow because e.g. there are people who work in tech who do not work at pure-play tech companies in Silicon Valley (this is where the policy pulls its stats). So setting a low bar and barely clearing it.

There's also likely the possibility that they are conflating "engineering" and "tech" roles. Female CS majors are indeed ~19% in the US, but "tech" jobs often include lots of people on product teams who are not engineers: QA, UX, etc. I don't know whether Dropbox counts a UX person as "tech" or not tech. I also don't have good stats on e.g. gender balance in UX, but I would wager that it is not the same as for CS grads.

Incidentally, Dropbox non-tech is only managing 43% women. This includes roles like marketing, sales, finance, HR, etc. where the excuse of the college pipeline is not operant. (For example -- women are the majority of accountants in the US.)

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#462

Post by cauch » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 11:24 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #457

cauch wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, this does not track. It could also be that some fields in STEM are more people oriented than others. 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 int…

First of all, most women studying mathematics in undergrad are actually studying to become math teachers. This is a much more people-oriented job. This is why there's a big drop between the share of women undergraduate math majors, and women math PhDs. The latter is 25%, roughly on par with computer science. Lots of women exit academima and start teaching after a master's or a bachelor's degree, thus depressing the r…

Women don't study math to become teachers: if they want to become teachers, they can study literature, language, history, chemistry, ... If they study math is because they like math.

I strongly suspect that the large majority starts in math with not specific plan.

Then, yes, they move away from academia. But it is an error to jump on the conclusion that it is because they wanted to do teaching and not because they saw how academia is for women in math and realized it's not worth the effort.

If indeed the fact that you can do teaching after math studies makes math a people-oriented job, then every studies are people-oriented, because you can always teach any field.

But that's not even the point. I'm not saying math is not people-oriented, I'm saying math is AS people-oriented AS computer science: if you want a people-oriented job, you can have one by doing math or by doing computer science, if you want a non-people-oriented job, you can have one by doing math or by doing computer science.

You are pretending that software developer is intrinsically not-people-oriented. This is incorrect: you need to work in team, both with other software engineers and other totally different teams, you need to build tools FOR other people, listen to them to know what they need and listen to them when they have complains or difficulties. The whole job is "how can I solve OTHER PEOPLE'S PROBLEMS by being the proxy between them and the computer machine instructions". How is that not people-oriented?

Again, there is this very very strange conception that software developer is somehow an extra-terrestrial activity. It feels like software developers have no idea of what other people do. Do you really think that an accountant that spend their whole career working for a specific internal department will meet and interact with more people than what a software developer can potentially? Or the people working in policy? Or the people working in operation and just managing the logistic? What about the cleaners? Is that a people-oriented job? I'm sure they create a lot of interesting relationship when they clean the office when everyone has left. What about a lab technician? What about a restaurant cook? Or an Amazon warehouse worker? (please, don't react to one of these examples, if you don't like one of them, feel free to just swap it to one of the thousand other examples where the employee will have less opportunity to interact with other humans than a software developer)

Sure, not every accountant job does not involve the same level of people interaction, and similarly, there are software development jobs where the dev can go away with not interacting much.

And sure, some developers, who are not people-oriented, find ways to make it work with them avoiding the people-aspect of their work. They usually need a manager to do this aspect of their job for them, and then complain that their manager is useless.

But again, it is not intrinsic to the work of software development. Software development is not a not-people-oriented job. Some people want it to be, they are somehow proud to be not-people-oriented (they are so not-people-oriented that it is very important for them to socially boast about how they are not-people-oriented), and they have big difficulties to admit that their job is not intrinsically not-people-oriented, and because of that, it is a fake image and a distorted reputation (with all the problem it causes: developers that keep moaning when they need to do people oriented tasks as if they are special and should not do it while it totally makes sense that it is part of their role).

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#463

Post by cm2012 » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 1:37 AM UTC

ivan_gammel wrote: post #318

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…

> My wife spends around an hour a day in the kitchen. I don’t want to jump to conclusions about your life, but cooking meals for the whole family usually takes more than an hour a day if you are not just putting frozen pizza in the oven. I often spend twice as much. Maybe she’s very efficient. Maybe you don’t really know her. > As it is now, I make more than enough for her to take care of the kids full time and still…

Lol at assuming you know this guy's life better than he does from a couple comments.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#464

Post by Manuel_D » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 4:08 AM UTC

cauch wrote: post #462

Manuel_D wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, most women studying mathematics in undergrad are actually studying to become math teachers. This is a much more people-oriented job. This is why there's a big drop between the share of women undergraduate math majors, and women math PhDs. The latter is 25%, roughly on par with computer science. Lots of women exit academima and start teaching after a master's or a bachelor's degree, thus depressing the r…

Women don't study math to become teachers: if they want to become teachers, they can study literature, language, history, chemistry, ... If they study math is because they like math. I strongly suspect that the large majority starts in math with not specific plan. Then, yes, they move away from academia. But it is an error to jump on the conclusion that it is because they wanted to do teaching and not because they sa…

> The whole job is "how can I solve OTHER PEOPLE'S PROBLEMS by being the proxy between them and the computer machine instructions". How is that not people-oriented?

It is people oriented, to a degree. But it's less people oriented than solving other people's problems by engaging them directly, without being a proxy between the user and a machine. To say that software development is less people oriented than being a math teacher isn't saying the former has zero personal interaction or nothing about it is people oriented. It's just less people oriented than most other jobs.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#465

Post by Manuel_D » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 4:24 AM UTC

runako wrote: post #461

Manuel_D wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In particular, did Dropbox hit its headcount target and need to use this "opportunistic" bucket? If so, how did it handle that case? Judging management decisions in the abstract is folly. This is explicitly spelled out in the policies I sent you: the opportunistic hiring bucket is exclusive for women and URM. If you want to use the opportunistic hiring bucket, the candidate has to be either a woman or URM. What is…

> What is hard to understand here? What I said: > how did it handle that case? You haven't said a) whether this hypothetical actually happened or b) how it was handled. That leaves all this in the realm of rage-bait hypotheticals. > Representation relative to the workforce is what's relevant. You're defining "workforce" narrowly to exclude people who do not currently work in the "field." This is unnecessarily narrow…

It absolutely did result in people being hired under discrimination. If I have 80 headcount for men and 20 headcount exclusive to women, and 90 people were hired total then 10 hires were made with the deliberate exclusion of men, explicitly on the basis of gender. Creating situations like these is fundamentally how "opportunistic hiring" would shift company demographics. The only way it doesn't have an effect is if nobody ever taps into the "opportunistic" pool. And yes, there were teams who hired above their allocated headcount. And yes it was pretty awkward for the women and URM hired to realize that aspect of how they landed at the company.

> There's also likely the possibility that they are conflating "engineering" and "tech" roles. Female CS majors are indeed ~19% in the US, but "tech" jobs often include lots of people on product teams who are not engineers: QA, UX, etc.

It's for engineers.

> You're defining "workforce" narrowly to exclude people who do not currently work in the "field." This is unnecessarily narrow because e.g. there are people who work in tech who do not work at pure-play tech companies in Silicon Valley (this is where the policy pulls its stats). So setting a low bar and barely clearing it.

The figure of 20% comes from the number of people who put "software developer" on their tax returns: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm it's not just counting the "pure play tech companies" whatever that's supposed to mean.

If you put up a job for a software developer, count the number of men and women who would potentially be interested in the job the former is going to be about 4 times bigger than the latter. If you have a different way of measuring this proportion, you can make that argument.

> Incidentally, Dropbox non-tech is only managing 43% women. This includes roles like marketing, sales, finance, HR, etc. where the excuse of the college pipeline is not operant. (For example -- women are the majority of accountants in the US.

HR is 70-75% women according to Google. So if a company is hiring 70-75 women in HR it's not evidence of any discrimination. Same with all the other roles you listed. We'd have to inspect each role one by one, and comparing Dropbox's representation. Furthermore, the discriminatory policies were specific to engineering. So I'm not sure why these other roles are relevant. Did Dropbox discriminate against female accountants? I have no idea. But how does discrimination against male coders somehow make up for potential discrimination in other fields?

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#466

Post by shiroiushi » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 6:44 AM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #422

shiroiushi wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How bad could he have been? According to the parent, his software is used daily by that company. At the very least, they could have just hired him full-time and then stuck him in a remote cubicle by himself, reporting to one manager who just keeps tabs on him, and told him to basically just keep working on that, and if he has spare time, think of other convenient projects to work on that customers might like.

Perhaps they could have, but why? What would be gained in hiring him to sit there and do nothing just because in the past he wrote some code that a company happened to find useful?

I thought the consensus was that he was extremely skilled, and he's obviously proven himself at making very useful tools for that system. Why not hire such talent and put it to some use? Not all positions need to have a lot of team interaction.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#467

Post by newsbinator » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 7:33 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #12

newsbinator wrote: post #2

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

" Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. " (This comment is all 3, and in fact is the ultimate cliché of this topic, and has been for many years. We're trying to avoid repetition here, and especially ultrarepetition and indignirepetition.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I accept the removal of my comment. Perhaps it is highly repetitive, and worthy of removal even on those grounds alone.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#468

Post by dangus » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 8:01 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #288

dangus wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are your peers and where do they work? What I’m getting at here is, maybe they're at stagnant companies that aren’t making a positive change. What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one. I started my career working with all men in a toxic echo chamber, and now I’m on a team that is almost completely balanced. It’s also on me to not join te…

> Statistically there should be at least one or two. Of course not. Women make up a minority of people working in tech, and are highly recruited by the large companies able to pay the highest compensation. So it's very difficult for other companies to find women willing to work at the lower salaries they can offer. So there likely is a problem with hiring. They don't have enough money to afford hiring more women.

When I say that statistically there should be one or two women on the team, that is already taking account the fact that women are the minority in tech.

Women are about 23% of software engineers. So if you have a team of 10 with zero women, that is somewhat suspicious to me as an applicant.

Is my prospective future team hiring the best talent or are they letting their biases creep in to their hiring process?

Source: https://www.celential.ai/blog/percentage-of-female-software-...

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#469

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 8:02 AM UTC

scottyah wrote: post #263

dangus wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are your peers and where do they work? What I’m getting at here is, maybe they're at stagnant companies that aren’t making a positive change. What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one. I started my career working with all men in a toxic echo chamber, and now I’m on a team that is almost completely balanced. It’s also on me to not join te…

I've heard a lot of women say they won't join a team with only men. Not exactly the most productive feedback loop.

[deleted]

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#470

Post by dangus » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 8:07 AM UTC

bookaway wrote: post #287

dangus wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are your peers and where do they work? What I’m getting at here is, maybe they're at stagnant companies that aren’t making a positive change. What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one. I started my career working with all men in a toxic echo chamber, and now I’m on a team that is almost completely balanced. It’s also on me to not join te…

>Statistically there should be at least one or two. Well, if the statistics takes into consideration the notion that a lot of women don't even apply to certain jobs thinking they're under-qualified should we be surprised if there are less than we initially expect? I appreciate the point of being proactive, since the point above can be somewhat mitigated by HR reaching out to prospects instead of relying on the existi…

The statistics say that 23% of software engineers in the US are women.

That’s what I’m referring to. If there are no women on a team of 10 I start questioning whether the team is hiring for their biases or if they’re doing a good job of setting them aside.

I’m not really sure what you’re getting at with your last paragraph. Do you believe that women being hired on a software team causes delays and negative effects? Because I do not and that has never happened in my experience. I would hope you wouldn’t similarly falsely claim that male teachers and nurses are less qualified than their female peers.