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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

#501

Post by shiroiushi »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #484
shiroiushi wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loosen them how? By importing poor, uneducated people and putting them to work as software engineers? Japan is already stupidly easy to immigrate to if you're an experienced software engineer, probably easier than any country in the world. The main obstacle is the language barrier, but there are a fair number of companies recruiting foreign engineers and offering workplaces that use English, because there's a huge sh…

> if you're an experienced software engineer I am in a discussion about tech, but I was talking more in a general sense. They basically only let highly skilled personnel in and there's still quite a few stipulations with their Visa program.

Like what exactly? And what's wrong with focusing on skilled workers?

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#502

Post by shiroiushi »

randomdata wrote: post #481
shiroiushi wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? Why hire him when you can just as easily hire someone else with all the same skills and a more suitable personality?

You don't know someone else has the same skills and can perform. Lots of new hires don't work out (for technical skill reasons) even after passing the interviews; they're always a gamble.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#503

Post by cutemonster »

klyrs wrote: post #282
RIMR wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Counterpoint: a cynical take posted deep in a comment thread in a random corner of the internet may not accurately reflect the values of an entire industry.

Yes, GP is exaggerating or a bit clueless about humans

> > That there are no altruistic actions by a business [...] This is 100% true

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#504

Post by cutemonster »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #125
netdevnet wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so that prices for labor will go down. I don't think that's the reason (it is a side effect though). What makes you think that?

because most of these companies are (run by?) sociopaths - as soon as low interest rates dried up DEI initiatives got slashed even though these companies are still making record profits.

Also depends on who's perspective you have in mind: the Girls in Tech founder's, or (most of) the (big) donors'

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#505

Post by johnnyanmac »

shiroiushi wrote: post #501
johnnyanmac wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you're an experienced software engineer I am in a discussion about tech, but I was talking more in a general sense. They basically only let highly skilled personnel in and there's still quite a few stipulations with their Visa program.

Like what exactly? And what's wrong with focusing on skilled workers?

>Like what exactly

Most stipulations basically requiring to be highly educated and experienced already. If you don't have those, you need to have some Japanese proficiency.

If you are in one of those categories, the work visa is relatively lax if we're comparing to the process to immigrate into the US or UK. Only real issue is their economy isn't doing great right now, so you'll find it harder than normal to find roles hiring unless you're extremely specialized (so, no different from the US right now).

> And what's wrong with focusing on skilled workers?

Same thing that's happening in tech as we speak. You only look for Purple Squirrels and you may as well not have a job ad. Meanwhile, most squirrels aren't moving abroad to a country to take a huge pay cut unless they are very satisfied with their savings/stock.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#506

Post by maeil »

shiroiushi wrote: post #500
maeil wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has that shortage actually been driving up salaries? From what I know, Japan has the worst "SWE Salary:Cost of living" ratio anywhere in the developed world.

Citation needed. My salary here is great by local standards. If you're comparing to the US, don't. Salaries in the US for SWE are much higher than anywhere else.

I was intentional when I said "the developed world", so including Western-Europe, South Korea and so on, not just the US. The fact you're on HN speaking perfect English already means you're likely to be very much above the median, salary-wise.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#507

Post by redeeman »

rty32 wrote: post #424
redeeman wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it will probably be downvoted to hell, but it seems like there isnt many that argue the field of plumbing needs more women, more women laying down sewage pipes etc. I tried reaching out to some feminist organisations to make some campaigns for this, and they were 100% not interested. it seems the "increase female %" only covers jobs that are super cleanly in office spaces

I understand your sentiment. In theory there is no difference between a plumber or construction worker vs a CEO when it comes to DEI. However, in the real world, a female CEO or President is much more likely to inspire girls to work towards those roles, compared to a model female plumber. They call it "glass ceiling" not "glass floor" for a reason. Those feminist organizations are definitely hypocritical, no question…

if broadening female involvement in the upper levels is good, it makes no sense that it isnt also in the "lower levels" (though I would say its not proper to describe plumbing as a lowlevel job).

The goal is NOT to "inspire girls", the goal is to make the job sector reflect the population, no?

for feminists it seems like only the nice cushy office jobs needs to reflect the population, not the dirty labour

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#508

Post by randomdata »

shiroiushi wrote: post #502
randomdata wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Why hire him when you can just as easily hire someone else with all the same skills and a more suitable personality?

You don't know someone else has the same skills and can perform. Lots of new hires don't work out (for technical skill reasons) even after passing the interviews; they're always a gamble.

Well, we know that the person in question has a low likelihood of working out. As before, other companies, like Apple, tried but were unable to make it work. As his personality demonstrates, and as the testing at Google concluded, he is unlikely to be a good fit for such organizations.

Sure, there is a slim chance that Google could have found the right fit for him in the end with the right accommodations[1], but why take the risk[2] when there are others lined up that are far less risky?

Of course there are no guarantees in life, but when playing the odds...

[1] That would have to be invented. Now you are also relying on the implementer at Google, which brings great risk on the employer getting things right even if the worker somehow magically came risk-free.

[2] Especially when the tests designed to try and estimate that risk raised red flags.

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#509

Post by [deleted] »

runako wrote: post #480
Manuel_D wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

> It's for engineers. You clearly have a lot of privileged background information you have not shared yet (for which I do not blame you). So it's going to be very difficult to pre-but some of this. For example, the BLS report you linked also shows women "computer system analysts" at close to 40%, and this is a job title often given to programmers. But you know that the appropriate compare is the row that's 19%, presu…

[deleted]

Re: Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

#510

Post by Manuel_D »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #483
Manuel_D wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pro-choice exclusively male crowd It is by no means exclusively male. This is a completely baseless claim on your part. > There’s no plausible theory explaining why there’s no victim. Why is "women enjoy things other than technology" not a plausible theory? The percentage of women working in tech matches the percentage of women who major in it. The percentage of women who major in it matches the percentage of high…

> Why is "women enjoy things other than technology" not a plausible theory? Because it doesn’t explain anything, stopping at that conclusion. It’s just “it is the way it is” sort of argument. When you quote the statistics you are simply looking in the wrong direction. Thanks to anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action problem in recruiting isn’t that big as before. It was the most obvious and the easiest to fi…

It looks like you agree with the notion that it's not discrimination leading to lower representation of women in tech, but rather that women choose not to enter tech fields? If so, then nothing you're writing here contradicts my previous comment.

If you think that some cultural factors are causing women not to choose to enter technology, that's a separate claim from discrimination happening within the tech field. Go ahead and abolish cheerleading if you think that's going to increase women's representation in software above 20%. But until that happens, we're going to see most companies hiring female developers at a rate of about 20%.

> This is what happens with gender inequality. Girls get dolls and join cheerleading teams. Social pressure requires them to learn about makeup and fashion, to socialize and to participate in housekeeping. Popular culture maintains stereotypes, social media define the acceptable behavior and punish those who don’t fit. Same happens to boys, of course. Not everyone who is subject to such pressure can grow as a person able to make a free choice. If we deprive children of the free choice, what is it if not gender discrimination?

(Emphasis mine). It's preferences. Girls get dolls because they play with dolls way more than trucks, and parents buy toys accordingly. Companies do indeed try to build and market trucks and mechanical toys to girls, and dolls to boys but those efforts aren't very fruitful. Social norms are emergent behavior from innate preferences. It's not society pressuring girls to play with dolls. It's girls exerting their own preferences, and society reacting to those preferences. You can't just assume that it's the preferences that are downstream from society and not the other way around.

Furthermore, we can test your hypothesis that it's society creating preferences. If disparities in behavior were not innate, then children raised in carefully-curated environments to avoid any hints of gender roles should produce boys and girls with the same distribution of interests. But experiments to achieve this fail: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/swedish-preschools...

Again: the assumption that any differences in behavior between the genders is due to discrimination or social pressure isn't the antidote to gender-essentialism. It's just a different flavor of gender-essentialism.

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