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Why do these discussions always devolve into talks about punching people or getting punched? I can't get through a day without somebody suggesting violence is t
by JSONwebtoken 9y ago
Why do these discussions always devolve into talks about punching people or getting punched? I can't get through a day without somebody suggesting violence is the only response to get somebody to think like them.
If you don't want these "programs" to exist at the professional level, you have to go all the back to college and high school. You can only continue to treat symptoms through affirmative action, because that is the cycle we're stuck in. That is the disease you are identifying. People who are propped up by outside assistance will naturally continue to depend on those props and leech resources at a disproportionate rate.
When these props are removed, the whole thing comes crashing down and we'll be forced to face the reality that these issues can't be fixed from a top down approach. Hiring more women or minorities into tech won't trickle down into incentivizing more women/minorities to major in Computer Science. Accepting more women/minorities into CS programs won't encourage more women/minorities to become interested in nerdy stuff in high school.
The real disease is third party intervention. Thinking all the world's problems can be solved as long as it looks like somebody's doing something for a long enough period of time. All that does is allow under-qualified individuals to shit the pool for the demographic that they represent and reinforce negative perspectives until people who pay for productive work can't turn a blind eye and then get punched in the face I suppose.
- SomeCallMeTim 9y agoNo, you're missing the part where women leave tech in droves because of the treatment they experience. Sure, we need to get more women into the pipeline. But we also need to not be pushing them out of the industry because they don't want to be groped, ignored, or otherwise disrespected. In my experience, every woman I've worked with in tech has been above average or excellent. It's the men I've worked with who are much more variable in skill. I heard a woman on this phenomenon in a podcast, saying that we'll know we actually reach gender parity when there are women working in tech who are below average in skill. And we're not there yet; women in tech tend to the exceptional. Women who stay are the ones who couldn't imagine doing something else because they're so good at tech.