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>Is it friendly to women? An engineering team with no women is a huge red flag of bad management and culture, for teams of more than about 5 people. For smaller

>Is it friendly to women? An engineering team with no women is a huge red flag of bad management and culture, for teams of more than about 5 people. For smaller teams, is there a sense that hiring women is important? Personally, I'd rather a team that hires based on meritocracy than gender.

falsedan 10y ago
Me too, yet I'm surrounded by middling young white men who went to top tier US colleges.
hendler 10y ago
In case you aren't just trolling: A lack of meritocracy causing of a lack of female engineers is ignorant. There are plenty of meritorious but under-represented populations; especially female engineers. A culture without enough women or without a plan to hire women is a red flag. Surrounding yourself with people that support [your] unsubstantiated biases increases the likelihood that the culture is unhealthy.
- chmln 10y ago
  What about other men-dominated (thus sexist), well-paying industries? Are you also concerned about the lack of female plumbers? Construction workers? Miners, perhaps?
  - falsedan 10y ago
    I don't interact with those industries regularly, so neither am I confronted with their gross gender inequality nor can I encourage their employers to do better at attracting female applicants. For dev jobs, both the problem visibility and remedial actions are obvious to me. To answer your question: yes
  - citizenkeen 10y ago
    I don't plan on being one of those, so it's rather abstract.
  - ecthiender 10y ago
    Construction work, plumbing and mining (for workers) are not well paying industry when compared to software. Also, these industries are male dominated because they require hard labour and working conditions, which is often biologically unsuitable for women. Even then, in South Asian countries you can find even ratio females to males in construction work. They do the same hard labour as men, and as the use of machinery and automation is rarer (in these regions), it's even more manual hard labour.
- hueving 10y ago
  A culture without enough [any underrepresented group] or without a plan to hire [underrepresented group] is a red flag. Do you evaluate potential workplaces based on the number of hispanics, blacks, Australians, Irish, Jews and Muslims as well?
ajepst 10y ago
I don't believe the parent is saying to hire on gender rather than meritocracy; I believe they are pointing out that 1) Women ARE a certain portion of good devs, so a true meritocracy would have some women (beyond an org of a certain size, of course) If a company of sufficient size has NO women devs, then something is likely off, whether in discouraging applicants, turning good applicants away, or causing people to leave. 2) Even the concept of meritocracy is complex, and success of the team, not just the individual, is worth something. For instance, at a consultancy(actually this probably holds true to some amount everywhere), there's a lot more to having a successful project than just how fast or accurately you code the algorithm (though of course, you have to be able to do that as a baseline). How well you present, how well you listen, how well you understand the client's needs, how well you can explain things, or mentor your fellow developers, or see around corners... Having a diverse team can contribute least a little value in these sort of non-code things that lead a project to overall success, rather than executing wonderfully right off a cliff. It's a factor to consider, among many, when hiring.
- chmln 10y ago
  This. A large company without females at all would be quite suspicious, to say the least.
lostcolony 10y ago
So are you saying that there are so few good women in tech as to be < 20% of the pool out there? And that's across all the people you'd need to staff a team of 5 (so could include things like QA and UX). Because on the one hand I agree with the sentiment, but I also agree with the original statement that having a decent sized team without women is a red flag. Every place I've worked, even if in development there were few women (due to, yes, it being hard to find them), there were plenty as product owners, as QA, or as UX. Whereas the one place I can think of that I worked that only had one at the time I joined (the marketing person, for a small startup of 20 people), it was quite toxic and unwelcoming when they later added a female UX.

falsedan 10y ago

Me too, yet I'm surrounded by middling young white men who went to top tier US colleges.

hendler 10y ago

In case you aren't just trolling: A lack of meritocracy causing of a lack of female engineers is ignorant. There are plenty of meritorious but under-represented populations; especially female engineers. A culture without enough women or without a plan to hire women is a red flag. Surrounding yourself with people that support [your] unsubstantiated biases increases the likelihood that the culture is unhealthy.

chmln 10y ago
What about other men-dominated (thus sexist), well-paying industries? Are you also concerned about the lack of female plumbers? Construction workers? Miners, perhaps?
- falsedan 10y ago
  I don't interact with those industries regularly, so neither am I confronted with their gross gender inequality nor can I encourage their employers to do better at attracting female applicants. For dev jobs, both the problem visibility and remedial actions are obvious to me. To answer your question: yes
- citizenkeen 10y ago
  I don't plan on being one of those, so it's rather abstract.
- ecthiender 10y ago
  Construction work, plumbing and mining (for workers) are not well paying industry when compared to software. Also, these industries are male dominated because they require hard labour and working conditions, which is often biologically unsuitable for women. Even then, in South Asian countries you can find even ratio females to males in construction work. They do the same hard labour as men, and as the use of machinery and automation is rarer (in these regions), it's even more manual hard labour.
hueving 10y ago
A culture without enough [any underrepresented group] or without a plan to hire [underrepresented group] is a red flag. Do you evaluate potential workplaces based on the number of hispanics, blacks, Australians, Irish, Jews and Muslims as well?

ajepst 10y ago

I don't believe the parent is saying to hire on gender rather than meritocracy; I believe they are pointing out that 1) Women ARE a certain portion of good devs, so a true meritocracy would have some women (beyond an org of a certain size, of course) If a company of sufficient size has NO women devs, then something is likely off, whether in discouraging applicants, turning good applicants away, or causing people to leave. 2) Even the concept of meritocracy is complex, and success of the team, not just the individual, is worth something. For instance, at a consultancy(actually this probably holds true to some amount everywhere), there's a lot more to having a successful project than just how fast or accurately you code the algorithm (though of course, you have to be able to do that as a baseline). How well you present, how well you listen, how well you understand the client's needs, how well you can explain things, or mentor your fellow developers, or see around corners... Having a diverse team can contribute least a little value in these sort of non-code things that lead a project to overall success, rather than executing wonderfully right off a cliff. It's a factor to consider, among many, when hiring.

chmln 10y ago
This. A large company without females at all would be quite suspicious, to say the least.

lostcolony 10y ago

So are you saying that there are so few good women in tech as to be < 20% of the pool out there? And that's across all the people you'd need to staff a team of 5 (so could include things like QA and UX). Because on the one hand I agree with the sentiment, but I also agree with the original statement that having a decent sized team without women is a red flag. Every place I've worked, even if in development there were few women (due to, yes, it being hard to find them), there were plenty as product owners, as QA, or as UX. Whereas the one place I can think of that I worked that only had one at the time I joined (the marketing person, for a small startup of 20 people), it was quite toxic and unwelcoming when they later added a female UX.