8 ms·

How one tech company ditched its brogrammers

32 points by mayava 9y ago

genkimind 9y ago
I see that tech companies are trying to get more diverse, and diverse is good without a doubt. Isn't it likely that males are just more interested in technology than woman? For example trying to diversify a ballet team.. I find it unlikely that any significant percentage of males can be reached. Is tech different than ballet?
- catenthusiast 9y ago
  > Isn't it likely that males are just more interested in technology than woman? Why would that be likely?
  - 08-15 9y ago
    Because if you give children a set of toys that includes both cars and dolls, the girls tend to play with dolls and the boys tend to play with cars. Many boys play with both---they use the cars to run over the dolls. And that happens even in African tribes where most people have never seen a car in their lifes, which pretty much falsifies the modern theory that all differences are due to boys wearing blue and girls wearing pink.
    - collyw 9y ago
      It happens in monkeys as well. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
  - tzs 9y ago
    I have a guess on that. I've not been able to find any research on whether it is correct or not. (Clarification: it is whether or not the age difference in brain development could affect interests in technology, not the existence of the difference, that I have not found any research on). One of the things that happens when a human brain matures from a child's brain to an adult's brain is that it undergoes significant reorganization. It prunes a lot of old connections and starts focusing on more important adult things. In girls this reorganization starts at age 10-12. In boys it starts at 15-20. My guess is that it is easier for a brain that is still in child mode to develop and maintain an interest in technology. But it isn't until high school that you start to get the education that lets you really move beyond just an interest in tech as a user to a serious interest in going into tech as a career. I think it may be that getting that high school education while you still have a mostly child's brain greatly increases the chances you'll go into technology. In the US you typically start high school at 14 or 15. That means that in high school most girls will already be well on their way to adult brains, but a lot of boys will still have child brains or be early in the transition to their adult brains. That could greatly skew things toward boys going into technology.
    - SamReidHughes 9y ago
      I don't buy this because among my friends, all sorts of boys did technical stuff or had technical interests. In elementary school the only kids that checked out books on machines or science stuff from the library were boys. And this was starting in 2nd grade, the books were about construction equipment or feats of bridge building. It was in at least two cases, me and one friend, obviously self-generated interest. Also in 2nd grade, we had a teacher who was a bit crazy and decided to turn the classroom into a set of autodidactic learning paths that students could take on their own volition, with little oversight. I remember one kid being super-excited about getting through the math stuff and learning exponents. Of course it was a boy. Many of the girls spent the time writing acrostics about each other. Though I had a similar theory at one point that math ability was affected by how much you thought about math before puberty. The relative abilities of my classmates went through a reshuffling in that period.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  > I find it unlikely that any significant percentage of males can be reached. But is it actually so? The proportion of the population involved in ballet at all is vanishingly small so it seems likely to me that the supply of both male and female candidates must be greater than the demand. Or at least would be if men and boys were not given the impression that ballet is somehow unmanly. > Is tech different than ballet? In this respect, no. Both suffer from sex related prejudice.
  - metaphorm 9y ago
    > In this respect, no. Both suffer from sex related prejudice. that is misunderstanding or mischaracterizing the point made by OP, who as asking about differences in job preference. is it because of prejudice that there are many fewer male ballet dancers than female ballet dancers? I don't know much about ballet but I suspect that the major contributor to the difference is that there are many many many more women interested in ballet dancing than there are men interested in ballet dancing. if we expected a 50/50 split in ballet dancer gender representation we would have a problematic expectation for obvious reasons. is programming similar? seems like it might be.
joaodlf 9y ago
Ah yes, a company that doesn't meet the modern % criteria for diversity and inclusion is obviously just a pack of "brogrammers".
08-15 9y ago
> blah... diversity... blah... brogrammers... blah The usual drivel, but there is one interesting question hidden in there: This company ditched the whiteboard and replaced it with "job talks". Does that work? Apparently it does, but only(?) if you measure success in terms of duhversity.
- pottersbasilisk 9y ago
  No, my current company comcast has a bunch of diversity initiatives but for core developer jobs you will be whiteboarded, qa not so much.
- th4dv 9y ago
  > Does that work It does because it allows to apply very vague criteria when selecting candidates. 'Culture fit' bullshit at it's finest.
- dang 9y ago
  You're breaking the site rules in two ways. First, "drivel" and "duhversity" break the injunction against calling names in arguments (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Please don't do that; it triggers low-quality discussion. Second, your account has been using HN primarily to comment on political and ideological controversies. We don't allow this because it turns the site into a political battlefield. If users who use HN as intended—that is, for intellectual curiosity—post occasionally on political topics, that's fine. But accounts that use HN primarily for politics or ideology are not fine. We eventually ban those, so please don't use HN this way.
  - 08-15 9y ago
    > your account has been using HN primarily to comment on political and ideological controversies There is no need to comment if I agree, is there? But it's your site, I'm not going to tell you how to run it.
bigbetsbigmoney 9y ago
SPECIFIC THOUGHTS: the last sentence of the first paragraph is hilarious... "We'll explain in a moment how this unsexy company has been able to outperform Google, Facebook, and Uber....................when it comes to hiring women software engineers." I totally forgot that the main concern of a business was to push "diversity" at all costs and not to provide a service/product of value and make money. My bad. furthermore, in an era where millions of dollars are thrown around by VC's and founders at startups (that provide no real value to customers in many cases) at wildly overinflated valuations, it seems that people have forgotten the key purpose of running a business. TO MAKE MONEY. The goal isn't to make sure everyone is represented or to make everyone feel good. No one cares. This article is complete spin. The real goal of this company is to get engineers at a discounted price under the guise of, "oh you've been overlooked by these other companies, we're super female friendly, we're soooo diverse. we can't pay you as much, but we're just one big family here so it's worth it." IN GENERAL: diversity of thought is good. diversity of skin color, ethnicity, gender, etc just to tick a box saying 'yup, we support diversity!' is nonsensical. there seems to be a large disconnect in logical thinking when these two things are advertised as the same thing. hire the best candidates, regardless of the meaningless BS (like gender or race). ok, you think the hiring process skews against some candidates (I don't know if this is really true or not), then change the interview process to support that. saying that female candidates don't do well with whiteboarding exercises, so you're changing the process to something they are better at is so silly (and quite frankly insulting to those women who ARE prepared for the whiteboarding exercises). you're optimizing for female employees, not for building your business and providing value.
- bigbetsbigmoney 9y ago
  also, i'd just like to point out that only 1 of 14 people on their leadership page is female. majority being white male (of the ones who have photos; some don't have headshots so not completely sure). https://www.zymergen.com/leadership/ https://www.zymergen.com/leadership/
- n4r9 9y ago
  The point is that focusing more on female (and older) engineers may be a way to pick up talent that is traditionally missed by bigger companies. I agree though that no real measure of the success of this is provided in the article.
GoToRO 9y ago
Women work harder, collaborate better, do not have an ego problem, do not shy away from boring tasks. Just a few things I noticed in my previous company.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  that's a very broad brush you're painting with. Women can be all of those things, none of those things, or anywhere in between. So can men.
  - GoToRO 9y ago
    I don't paint. I observe.
    - beaconstudios 9y ago
      so you relay anecdotes as if they were generally true? That's what seems to be happening.
      - GoToRO 9y ago
        If the company is a huge one, with offices on all continents except Antarctica is it still an anecdote?
- metaphorm 9y ago
  I would suggest rephrasing your post to "the women I worked with at my last company..." instead of just "Women..."
  - GoToRO 9y ago
    That is already clear from my post ;)
auvrw 9y ago
> Zymergen decided to eliminate the whiteboard interviews that are a standard part of the hiring process for software engineers and developers can solve a range of issues perhaps gender diversity is just one facet of this "Brogrammer" thing where collaborating to ship clean code and deliver business value breaks down due to certain social and behavioral patterns lack of gender diversity in industry is definitely among the most obvious indicators, but it doesn't even capture the entire brokenness. are these things unique to software development, or does pretty much every industry have analogous issues?
danieltillett 9y ago
Just to play the devil's advocate here what is so bad about a lack of diversity in a private companies employees?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- LeeHwang 9y ago
  I'd assume nothing as long as there are making money in a purely capitalistic view. It seems a vocal percentage on hackernews want companies to have diversity as part of their "social contract". This is probably a filter bubble. I'm not sure what the average american thinks though, I'm inclined to think they don't care by looking at all the democrats losses in the last 8 years.
whack 9y ago
"The company replaced the whiteboard exercise with job talks, a practice that’s common in academic settings. Candidates now talk at length about about specific projects from a previous gig. The change has had a few benefits—interviewers now have a chance to query candidates about how they collaborated in other jobs. It also turns out that coding tests aren’t as objective as they sound, says Joelle Emerson, founder and C.E.O. of Paradigm, a consulting firm that works with tech companies on diversity. By putting candidates in situations that are outside the way they normally work, Emerson says, whiteboard interviews increase the likelihood of “stereotype threat,” an anxiety among non-traditional candidates that they’ll confirm negative stereotypes about their group." So let me understand this. Whiteboard interviews don't reflect a standard engineering work flow, but giving a series of presentations to strangers does? Writing code on a whiteboard can cause "stereotype threat", but a extremely subjective "tell me about yourself" interview wouldn't? Let's be honest here, zymergen hasn't stumbled upon any great insights. They just decided that they wanted to hire a lot of women, and people with experience, and then they did just that. They got rid of any objective interview style that might get in the way, and they instead used a very subjective interview style where candidates performance can be reinterpreted to fit the results they want to see. Hiring is an extremely tricky thing, and I commend these guys for actively recruiting a neglected demographic. From a moneyball perspective, it's a smart strategy. But in terms of interviewing insights, there's nothing new to see here.
- drewrv 9y ago
  The idea that a whiteboard interview is "objective" while discussing ones experience on previous projects is not is absurd.
metaphorm 9y ago
I find the term "brogrammer" to be a derogatory term of abuse that ought not to be uttered in polite company. it is equally as offensive a term as something like, e.g. "feminazi". that's not to say that there aren't some male programmers that have the culture and mindset of dickhead frat boys. those people do exist. what I'm saying is that when a journalist uses the term "brogrammer" they generally aren't being subtle or nuanced about it and are firing a broadside against men in general.
- koverstreet 9y ago
  I don't view it as men. I and my (male programmer) friends use the term quite freely and derisively, because frankly we're all dismayed at what's happened to this industry over the past 20 years. "Brogrammers" is a term that sums it up pretty well - there's far too many huge egos in this industry today who seem to just be in it for the fame/money/ego stroking. For those of us who just want to write good code and fix shit and make the world of software better, it's disgusting and demoralizing and tiring. If improving workplace diversity helps even a tiny bit with that problem (and I can't see how it wouldn't), then I am 1000% for it.
  - metaphorm 9y ago
    except the article being discussed is focusing on a change in interview process led to hiring more women engineers. it isn't about how a company fixed a cultural problem (such as the one Uber has), it's just about gender diversity in the workforce as it relates to interviewing process. the implication of the article title is that "brogrammer" just means "male programmer" but that's not what it means. you and I know that it means "dickhead chauvinist programmer" but the title of the article uses it to refer to any male programmer.
    - koverstreet 9y ago
      The article wasn't just about diversity, it was very much about how the hiring process affects the type of personalities you attract. And I don't see where the article implied that brogrammers meant male programmers in general. Besides, is it so hard to believe that lack of diversity is one of the enabling factors for a brogrammer dominated culture? Because I 100% believe it.
wamsachel 9y ago
Yes. Moron.
- GoToRO 9y ago
  I suppose that last word is your signature :)
  - wamsachel 9y ago
    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA omg so fucking funny
    - sctb 9y ago
      Please stop violating the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - wamsachel 9y ago
        What'd I violate?

32 points by mayava 9y ago

I see that tech companies are trying to get more diverse, and diverse is good without a doubt. Isn't it likely that males are just more interested in technology than woman? For example trying to diversify a ballet team.. I find it unlikely that any significant percentage of males can be reached. Is tech different than ballet?

catenthusiast 9y ago
> Isn't it likely that males are just more interested in technology than woman? Why would that be likely?
- 08-15 9y ago
  Because if you give children a set of toys that includes both cars and dolls, the girls tend to play with dolls and the boys tend to play with cars. Many boys play with both---they use the cars to run over the dolls. And that happens even in African tribes where most people have never seen a car in their lifes, which pretty much falsifies the modern theory that all differences are due to boys wearing blue and girls wearing pink.
  - collyw 9y ago
    It happens in monkeys as well. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
- tzs 9y ago
  I have a guess on that. I've not been able to find any research on whether it is correct or not. (Clarification: it is whether or not the age difference in brain development could affect interests in technology, not the existence of the difference, that I have not found any research on). One of the things that happens when a human brain matures from a child's brain to an adult's brain is that it undergoes significant reorganization. It prunes a lot of old connections and starts focusing on more important adult things. In girls this reorganization starts at age 10-12. In boys it starts at 15-20. My guess is that it is easier for a brain that is still in child mode to develop and maintain an interest in technology. But it isn't until high school that you start to get the education that lets you really move beyond just an interest in tech as a user to a serious interest in going into tech as a career. I think it may be that getting that high school education while you still have a mostly child's brain greatly increases the chances you'll go into technology. In the US you typically start high school at 14 or 15. That means that in high school most girls will already be well on their way to adult brains, but a lot of boys will still have child brains or be early in the transition to their adult brains. That could greatly skew things toward boys going into technology.
  - SamReidHughes 9y ago
    I don't buy this because among my friends, all sorts of boys did technical stuff or had technical interests. In elementary school the only kids that checked out books on machines or science stuff from the library were boys. And this was starting in 2nd grade, the books were about construction equipment or feats of bridge building. It was in at least two cases, me and one friend, obviously self-generated interest. Also in 2nd grade, we had a teacher who was a bit crazy and decided to turn the classroom into a set of autodidactic learning paths that students could take on their own volition, with little oversight. I remember one kid being super-excited about getting through the math stuff and learning exponents. Of course it was a boy. Many of the girls spent the time writing acrostics about each other. Though I had a similar theory at one point that math ability was affected by how much you thought about math before puberty. The relative abilities of my classmates went through a reshuffling in that period.
kwhitefoot 9y ago
> I find it unlikely that any significant percentage of males can be reached. But is it actually so? The proportion of the population involved in ballet at all is vanishingly small so it seems likely to me that the supply of both male and female candidates must be greater than the demand. Or at least would be if men and boys were not given the impression that ballet is somehow unmanly. > Is tech different than ballet? In this respect, no. Both suffer from sex related prejudice.
- metaphorm 9y ago
  > In this respect, no. Both suffer from sex related prejudice. that is misunderstanding or mischaracterizing the point made by OP, who as asking about differences in job preference. is it because of prejudice that there are many fewer male ballet dancers than female ballet dancers? I don't know much about ballet but I suspect that the major contributor to the difference is that there are many many many more women interested in ballet dancing than there are men interested in ballet dancing. if we expected a 50/50 split in ballet dancer gender representation we would have a problematic expectation for obvious reasons. is programming similar? seems like it might be.

joaodlf 9y ago

Ah yes, a company that doesn't meet the modern % criteria for diversity and inclusion is obviously just a pack of "brogrammers".

08-15 9y ago

> blah... diversity... blah... brogrammers... blah The usual drivel, but there is one interesting question hidden in there: This company ditched the whiteboard and replaced it with "job talks". Does that work? Apparently it does, but only(?) if you measure success in terms of duhversity.

pottersbasilisk 9y ago
No, my current company comcast has a bunch of diversity initiatives but for core developer jobs you will be whiteboarded, qa not so much.
th4dv 9y ago
> Does that work It does because it allows to apply very vague criteria when selecting candidates. 'Culture fit' bullshit at it's finest.
dang 9y ago
You're breaking the site rules in two ways. First, "drivel" and "duhversity" break the injunction against calling names in arguments (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Please don't do that; it triggers low-quality discussion. Second, your account has been using HN primarily to comment on political and ideological controversies. We don't allow this because it turns the site into a political battlefield. If users who use HN as intended—that is, for intellectual curiosity—post occasionally on political topics, that's fine. But accounts that use HN primarily for politics or ideology are not fine. We eventually ban those, so please don't use HN this way.
- 08-15 9y ago
  > your account has been using HN primarily to comment on political and ideological controversies There is no need to comment if I agree, is there? But it's your site, I'm not going to tell you how to run it.

bigbetsbigmoney 9y ago

SPECIFIC THOUGHTS: the last sentence of the first paragraph is hilarious... "We'll explain in a moment how this unsexy company has been able to outperform Google, Facebook, and Uber....................when it comes to hiring women software engineers." I totally forgot that the main concern of a business was to push "diversity" at all costs and not to provide a service/product of value and make money. My bad. furthermore, in an era where millions of dollars are thrown around by VC's and founders at startups (that provide no real value to customers in many cases) at wildly overinflated valuations, it seems that people have forgotten the key purpose of running a business. TO MAKE MONEY. The goal isn't to make sure everyone is represented or to make everyone feel good. No one cares. This article is complete spin. The real goal of this company is to get engineers at a discounted price under the guise of, "oh you've been overlooked by these other companies, we're super female friendly, we're soooo diverse. we can't pay you as much, but we're just one big family here so it's worth it." IN GENERAL: diversity of thought is good. diversity of skin color, ethnicity, gender, etc just to tick a box saying 'yup, we support diversity!' is nonsensical. there seems to be a large disconnect in logical thinking when these two things are advertised as the same thing. hire the best candidates, regardless of the meaningless BS (like gender or race). ok, you think the hiring process skews against some candidates (I don't know if this is really true or not), then change the interview process to support that. saying that female candidates don't do well with whiteboarding exercises, so you're changing the process to something they are better at is so silly (and quite frankly insulting to those women who ARE prepared for the whiteboarding exercises). you're optimizing for female employees, not for building your business and providing value.

bigbetsbigmoney 9y ago
also, i'd just like to point out that only 1 of 14 people on their leadership page is female. majority being white male (of the ones who have photos; some don't have headshots so not completely sure). https://www.zymergen.com/leadership/ https://www.zymergen.com/leadership/
n4r9 9y ago
The point is that focusing more on female (and older) engineers may be a way to pick up talent that is traditionally missed by bigger companies. I agree though that no real measure of the success of this is provided in the article.

GoToRO 9y ago

Women work harder, collaborate better, do not have an ego problem, do not shy away from boring tasks. Just a few things I noticed in my previous company.

beaconstudios 9y ago
that's a very broad brush you're painting with. Women can be all of those things, none of those things, or anywhere in between. So can men.
- GoToRO 9y ago
  I don't paint. I observe.
  - beaconstudios 9y ago
    so you relay anecdotes as if they were generally true? That's what seems to be happening.
    - GoToRO 9y ago
      If the company is a huge one, with offices on all continents except Antarctica is it still an anecdote?
metaphorm 9y ago
I would suggest rephrasing your post to "the women I worked with at my last company..." instead of just "Women..."
- GoToRO 9y ago
  That is already clear from my post ;)

auvrw 9y ago

> Zymergen decided to eliminate the whiteboard interviews that are a standard part of the hiring process for software engineers and developers can solve a range of issues perhaps gender diversity is just one facet of this "Brogrammer" thing where collaborating to ship clean code and deliver business value breaks down due to certain social and behavioral patterns lack of gender diversity in industry is definitely among the most obvious indicators, but it doesn't even capture the entire brokenness. are these things unique to software development, or does pretty much every industry have analogous issues?

danieltillett 9y ago

Just to play the devil's advocate here what is so bad about a lack of diversity in a private companies employees?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
LeeHwang 9y ago
I'd assume nothing as long as there are making money in a purely capitalistic view. It seems a vocal percentage on hackernews want companies to have diversity as part of their "social contract". This is probably a filter bubble. I'm not sure what the average american thinks though, I'm inclined to think they don't care by looking at all the democrats losses in the last 8 years.

whack 9y ago

"The company replaced the whiteboard exercise with job talks, a practice that’s common in academic settings. Candidates now talk at length about about specific projects from a previous gig. The change has had a few benefits—interviewers now have a chance to query candidates about how they collaborated in other jobs. It also turns out that coding tests aren’t as objective as they sound, says Joelle Emerson, founder and C.E.O. of Paradigm, a consulting firm that works with tech companies on diversity. By putting candidates in situations that are outside the way they normally work, Emerson says, whiteboard interviews increase the likelihood of “stereotype threat,” an anxiety among non-traditional candidates that they’ll confirm negative stereotypes about their group." So let me understand this. Whiteboard interviews don't reflect a standard engineering work flow, but giving a series of presentations to strangers does? Writing code on a whiteboard can cause "stereotype threat", but a extremely subjective "tell me about yourself" interview wouldn't? Let's be honest here, zymergen hasn't stumbled upon any great insights. They just decided that they wanted to hire a lot of women, and people with experience, and then they did just that. They got rid of any objective interview style that might get in the way, and they instead used a very subjective interview style where candidates performance can be reinterpreted to fit the results they want to see. Hiring is an extremely tricky thing, and I commend these guys for actively recruiting a neglected demographic. From a moneyball perspective, it's a smart strategy. But in terms of interviewing insights, there's nothing new to see here.

drewrv 9y ago
The idea that a whiteboard interview is "objective" while discussing ones experience on previous projects is not is absurd.

metaphorm 9y ago

I find the term "brogrammer" to be a derogatory term of abuse that ought not to be uttered in polite company. it is equally as offensive a term as something like, e.g. "feminazi". that's not to say that there aren't some male programmers that have the culture and mindset of dickhead frat boys. those people do exist. what I'm saying is that when a journalist uses the term "brogrammer" they generally aren't being subtle or nuanced about it and are firing a broadside against men in general.

koverstreet 9y ago
I don't view it as men. I and my (male programmer) friends use the term quite freely and derisively, because frankly we're all dismayed at what's happened to this industry over the past 20 years. "Brogrammers" is a term that sums it up pretty well - there's far too many huge egos in this industry today who seem to just be in it for the fame/money/ego stroking. For those of us who just want to write good code and fix shit and make the world of software better, it's disgusting and demoralizing and tiring. If improving workplace diversity helps even a tiny bit with that problem (and I can't see how it wouldn't), then I am 1000% for it.
- metaphorm 9y ago
  except the article being discussed is focusing on a change in interview process led to hiring more women engineers. it isn't about how a company fixed a cultural problem (such as the one Uber has), it's just about gender diversity in the workforce as it relates to interviewing process. the implication of the article title is that "brogrammer" just means "male programmer" but that's not what it means. you and I know that it means "dickhead chauvinist programmer" but the title of the article uses it to refer to any male programmer.
  - koverstreet 9y ago
    The article wasn't just about diversity, it was very much about how the hiring process affects the type of personalities you attract. And I don't see where the article implied that brogrammers meant male programmers in general. Besides, is it so hard to believe that lack of diversity is one of the enabling factors for a brogrammer dominated culture? Because I 100% believe it.

wamsachel 9y ago

Yes. Moron.

GoToRO 9y ago
I suppose that last word is your signature :)
- wamsachel 9y ago
  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA omg so fucking funny
  - sctb 9y ago
    Please stop violating the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - wamsachel 9y ago
      What'd I violate?