5 ms·

I look for existing diversity, and of underrepresented minorities not just gender diversity (IME this is often a better signal.) Especially in upper levels: th

by bethly 9y ago

I look for existing diversity, and of underrepresented minorities not just gender diversity (IME this is often a better signal.) Especially in upper levels: the % of Software Engineer 1s matters a lot less than the % of architects and tech leads. Second (and I kind of hate to give this one away), I ask "what do you sacrifice when recruiting to ensure diversity?" The answer should be either "it takes us longer to recruit, because we ensure a balanced pool" or "we have changed our process to allow many types of candidates to shine". If the answer is just "we spend lots of money on sending people to Grace Hopper!" it means they aren't willing to inconvenience or piss off overrepresented engineers. You can't fix culture problems by spending money, and when "diversity" is seen as separate from "recruiting" in general it's a clear sign of a problem. I also use the Internet: I look on LinkedIn for people who have left the company, see how long women stayed and reach out to find out why they left if they did. Backchannel mailing lists are great ways to find a vouch. I check the social media profiles of their prominent engineers and search with keywords like "feminism", "women" and "she". See how they talk about women in the field, whether they follow women on Twitter, whether they posted angry anti-Hillary memes. I've found that a lot more effective than relying on direct questioning, because there are companies out there that will say whatever they think will let them add you as a shield against the accusations of sexism they are facing. Especially my boss: if my boss is going to be a white dude, he had better have publicly condemned sexism in a way that feels constructive and genuine to me. One other internet trick is to look at where the women you respect are working and apply there. At the very least, you would get to work with technical mentors you admire and can learn from. You can find good spots here. Seriously, though, trust your instincts, don't be afraid to walk away and don't be afraid to take an "unsexy" job at an old-school company with an HR department.

bethly 9y ago
Oh, the other thing is that what you are looking for will change over the course of your career. Early on, you need to work with people who can effectively mentor you. Your direct boss and the technical leaders on your team will matter, but the rest of the company can be kind of terrible and it will probably be fine. Once you start moving into technical leadership or architect roles, the additional work you probably need to do to have an impact in dysfunctional, sexist organization will be a much bigger drag on your productivity and moral. On the up side, by that point you will have the skills and resume to pick and choose better organizations. I believe that noticing when that transition happens and swapping companies is key to persisting in the industry.
- bethly 9y ago
  Relatedly, the strategies I've used also change over time. At this point in my career, I rely more on preemptive screening by employers. I list my talks about Cyborg Feminism and Feminist Software Development on my resume, along with my talk at Lesbians Who Tech on why imposter syndrome is a rational reaction to a lack of reliable feedback. I posted a blog post about how the decline of women in computer science is related to the rise of Internet culture and the disparate treatment experienced there. I regularly tweet about racism and sexism in tech. In my personal statement last time I was looking I said explicitly I was looking for an "intersectionally-feminist team". This isn't a technique I would have used when I was starting out and needed Any Job. Now that I have a skill set in high demand, though, when people who don't want me around rule themselves out it just saves both of us time. And on the flip side, when a founder is excited that I name-drop Donna Haraway, it's always at least going to be a fun conversation.
minkzilla 9y ago
"Second (and I kind of hate to give this one away), I ask 'what do you sacrifice when recruiting to ensure diversity?'" I find it disturbing that you think hiring diversity entails a sacrifice.
- bethly 9y ago
  All of life is tradeoffs. It doesn't matter if people "value" diversity in some abstract sense; it matters how they will value it when it comes into conflict with something else they value. If they can't think of anything they are willing to prioritise below diversity, they are almost certainly going to end up with a homogeneous team. Also, I want to know that they are willing to tell people who only accept universally-applied, context-blind systems to take a hike. It is impossible to fix a cultural problem of disparate experiences with anything pretending to "objectivity".
- sergiotapia 9y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/6f8u2s/githubs_electronconf_postponed_because_all_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/6f8u2s/githubs_...
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  > I find it disturbing that you think hiring diversity entails a sacrifice. Of course it's a sacrifice. Under-represented groups are under-represented in standard recruiting channels. That's tautological. If you want a set of recruiting channels that represents all available talent, you can't use the standard set of channels. You need to go catalog all of the available sources of talent, including obscure sources. That takes effort. That's a sacrifice. In addition, under-represented strengths don't show up in standard assessment techniques. Again, that's tautological. Standard assessment only measures over-repesented strengths. If you want to measure under-represented strengths then you need to use custom assessment techniques which, again, takes additional effort, which is a sacrifice. These conclusions just fall naturally from the word "under-represented" and a presumption that there is room for improvement in recruiting channels and assessment. If there is no such room, the additional effort will fail to change the hiring demographics. Which will be evidence that your recruiting channels are representative and your assessments accurate, and you can ease up on recruiting pipeline optimization. What's disturbing to you about any of this?
vacri 9y ago
> Especially my boss: if my boss is going to be a white dude, he had better have publicly condemned sexism in a way that feels constructive and genuine to me. This is such a weird statement to me. If it works for you, fine, but I think it's bad advice: to demand that not only your boss be active on social media, but to actively pursue your preferred topics on same.
- bethly 9y ago
  As David Morrison said, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. "How to signal you are on the side of non-sexists instead of the sexists" is probably a different thread, though: the original poster wanted to know what strategies marginalized developers had found effective and I shared mine. It is unsurprising to me that effective strategies end up rubbing people the wrong way. The reason social media posts work as a filter is because they are a minorly-costly signals to send, and the suggestion that people be expected to do extra work to appear trustworthy, rather than being assumed to be trustworthy even though probability isn't on their side, is going to feel threatening. Privileged men feel entitled to the benefit of the doubt, even when it is women who bear the costs when they fail to live up to it. This isn't just "my preferred topic": this is my life. This is whether I have a fair shot at promotion. It's whether I have to be 150% sure with a giant pile of citations by dudes before I say anything, or people trust my technical judgement. It's whether I can be most productive at my job, or I have to waste a bunch of time managing the anxieties and insecurities of the dudes I work with instead. It's about whether I have to spend time and energy sending Comey-like memos every week to document the sexual harassment against my female coworkers until they all quit or are fired anyway. It's about whether my coworkers will refuse to speak to me for six months because I made work "not fun" by not wanting to hear about his pick up artistry, and still get promoted. After that last one, now I only work places that don't prioritize catering to sexist developers over catering to me. There are plenty of options out there; there is no reason to settle for anything less than an actively anti-sexist workplace. Many men treat this like an intellectual exercise: it's not. These days, I only work for the ones who already understand that.
  - csorrell 9y ago
ramblerman 9y ago
> Especially my boss: if my boss is going to be a white dude, he had better have publicly condemned sexism in a way that feels constructive and genuine to me. Wtf. How is this not just becoming reverse racism. Guilty until proven innocent. It's not what you said Bill, it's what you didn't say.
bethly 9y ago
You can tell my strategies are possibly effective because of all the sexist men in these comments who are apparently deeply concerned that I will never work for them, or perhaps that they might accidentally end up in an organization that isn't sexist. Le horror! Note that these attempts to drive our discussions and opinions from Hacker's News and deprive us of the opportunity to express our preferences all help maintain discrimination and the economic power a limited workforce provides. Men are so scared that they might have to compete on a level playing field, or possibly even be held accountable for their actions, that they externalize that fear onto women trying to get by in an actively-hostile world. Dear men who are offended when people acknowledge the reality of sexism: I guarantee you, I have spent more time thinking about this than you. I had to, a fact of which I am already resentful, thanks everso. Consider before you comment that I know what I'm talking about, and that way you've assumed I don't? It is a manifestation of the very problem we are discussing. Every time you express your uninformed opinions that start from the assumption that the world is fair, you are proving that you are unprepared to contribute to this discussion. I don't want to work in an implicitly or explicitly sexist environment. You want to somehow get to participate in the patriarchal norms, not face any criticism for that, and then still somehow have me want to work with you. As The Man In Black says, get used to disappointment. Your desired outcome isn't one of the options. Instead of attempting reassuring your existing cultural cognition (http://www.culturalcognition.net/ http://www.culturalcognition.net/), try listening to the generous gifts of experience the women and marginalized people have offered in response to the question that was asked. You might learn that there is more to the world than you had known. That will make you a better developer, as well as someone I might someday be willing to work with.
- z_shell 9y ago
  i've been loving all of your comments. +1 to you! #rolemodelsmatter

by bethly 9y ago

bethly 9y ago

Oh, the other thing is that what you are looking for will change over the course of your career. Early on, you need to work with people who can effectively mentor you. Your direct boss and the technical leaders on your team will matter, but the rest of the company can be kind of terrible and it will probably be fine. Once you start moving into technical leadership or architect roles, the additional work you probably need to do to have an impact in dysfunctional, sexist organization will be a much bigger drag on your productivity and moral. On the up side, by that point you will have the skills and resume to pick and choose better organizations. I believe that noticing when that transition happens and swapping companies is key to persisting in the industry.

bethly 9y ago
Relatedly, the strategies I've used also change over time. At this point in my career, I rely more on preemptive screening by employers. I list my talks about Cyborg Feminism and Feminist Software Development on my resume, along with my talk at Lesbians Who Tech on why imposter syndrome is a rational reaction to a lack of reliable feedback. I posted a blog post about how the decline of women in computer science is related to the rise of Internet culture and the disparate treatment experienced there. I regularly tweet about racism and sexism in tech. In my personal statement last time I was looking I said explicitly I was looking for an "intersectionally-feminist team". This isn't a technique I would have used when I was starting out and needed Any Job. Now that I have a skill set in high demand, though, when people who don't want me around rule themselves out it just saves both of us time. And on the flip side, when a founder is excited that I name-drop Donna Haraway, it's always at least going to be a fun conversation.

minkzilla 9y ago

"Second (and I kind of hate to give this one away), I ask 'what do you sacrifice when recruiting to ensure diversity?'" I find it disturbing that you think hiring diversity entails a sacrifice.

bethly 9y ago
All of life is tradeoffs. It doesn't matter if people "value" diversity in some abstract sense; it matters how they will value it when it comes into conflict with something else they value. If they can't think of anything they are willing to prioritise below diversity, they are almost certainly going to end up with a homogeneous team. Also, I want to know that they are willing to tell people who only accept universally-applied, context-blind systems to take a hike. It is impossible to fix a cultural problem of disparate experiences with anything pretending to "objectivity".
sergiotapia 9y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/6f8u2s/githubs_electronconf_postponed_because_all_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/6f8u2s/githubs_...
erikpukinskis 9y ago
> I find it disturbing that you think hiring diversity entails a sacrifice. Of course it's a sacrifice. Under-represented groups are under-represented in standard recruiting channels. That's tautological. If you want a set of recruiting channels that represents all available talent, you can't use the standard set of channels. You need to go catalog all of the available sources of talent, including obscure sources. That takes effort. That's a sacrifice. In addition, under-represented strengths don't show up in standard assessment techniques. Again, that's tautological. Standard assessment only measures over-repesented strengths. If you want to measure under-represented strengths then you need to use custom assessment techniques which, again, takes additional effort, which is a sacrifice. These conclusions just fall naturally from the word "under-represented" and a presumption that there is room for improvement in recruiting channels and assessment. If there is no such room, the additional effort will fail to change the hiring demographics. Which will be evidence that your recruiting channels are representative and your assessments accurate, and you can ease up on recruiting pipeline optimization. What's disturbing to you about any of this?

vacri 9y ago

> Especially my boss: if my boss is going to be a white dude, he had better have publicly condemned sexism in a way that feels constructive and genuine to me. This is such a weird statement to me. If it works for you, fine, but I think it's bad advice: to demand that not only your boss be active on social media, but to actively pursue your preferred topics on same.

bethly 9y ago
As David Morrison said, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. "How to signal you are on the side of non-sexists instead of the sexists" is probably a different thread, though: the original poster wanted to know what strategies marginalized developers had found effective and I shared mine. It is unsurprising to me that effective strategies end up rubbing people the wrong way. The reason social media posts work as a filter is because they are a minorly-costly signals to send, and the suggestion that people be expected to do extra work to appear trustworthy, rather than being assumed to be trustworthy even though probability isn't on their side, is going to feel threatening. Privileged men feel entitled to the benefit of the doubt, even when it is women who bear the costs when they fail to live up to it. This isn't just "my preferred topic": this is my life. This is whether I have a fair shot at promotion. It's whether I have to be 150% sure with a giant pile of citations by dudes before I say anything, or people trust my technical judgement. It's whether I can be most productive at my job, or I have to waste a bunch of time managing the anxieties and insecurities of the dudes I work with instead. It's about whether I have to spend time and energy sending Comey-like memos every week to document the sexual harassment against my female coworkers until they all quit or are fired anyway. It's about whether my coworkers will refuse to speak to me for six months because I made work "not fun" by not wanting to hear about his pick up artistry, and still get promoted. After that last one, now I only work places that don't prioritize catering to sexist developers over catering to me. There are plenty of options out there; there is no reason to settle for anything less than an actively anti-sexist workplace. Many men treat this like an intellectual exercise: it's not. These days, I only work for the ones who already understand that.
- csorrell 9y ago

ramblerman 9y ago

> Especially my boss: if my boss is going to be a white dude, he had better have publicly condemned sexism in a way that feels constructive and genuine to me. Wtf. How is this not just becoming reverse racism. Guilty until proven innocent. It's not what you said Bill, it's what you didn't say.

bethly 9y ago

You can tell my strategies are possibly effective because of all the sexist men in these comments who are apparently deeply concerned that I will never work for them, or perhaps that they might accidentally end up in an organization that isn't sexist. Le horror! Note that these attempts to drive our discussions and opinions from Hacker's News and deprive us of the opportunity to express our preferences all help maintain discrimination and the economic power a limited workforce provides. Men are so scared that they might have to compete on a level playing field, or possibly even be held accountable for their actions, that they externalize that fear onto women trying to get by in an actively-hostile world. Dear men who are offended when people acknowledge the reality of sexism: I guarantee you, I have spent more time thinking about this than you. I had to, a fact of which I am already resentful, thanks everso. Consider before you comment that I know what I'm talking about, and that way you've assumed I don't? It is a manifestation of the very problem we are discussing. Every time you express your uninformed opinions that start from the assumption that the world is fair, you are proving that you are unprepared to contribute to this discussion. I don't want to work in an implicitly or explicitly sexist environment. You want to somehow get to participate in the patriarchal norms, not face any criticism for that, and then still somehow have me want to work with you. As The Man In Black says, get used to disappointment. Your desired outcome isn't one of the options. Instead of attempting reassuring your existing cultural cognition (http://www.culturalcognition.net/ http://www.culturalcognition.net/), try listening to the generous gifts of experience the women and marginalized people have offered in response to the question that was asked. You might learn that there is more to the world than you had known. That will make you a better developer, as well as someone I might someday be willing to work with.

z_shell 9y ago
i've been loving all of your comments. +1 to you! #rolemodelsmatter