4 ms·

You can't just sit around and wait for candidates to apply, you have to actively source them.

rvo 9y ago
Exactly. This is very troubling : "But we are not going to recruit someone just because they are a woman." How else do you expect to get gender parity? It should be important to specifically source and hire women.
- darawk 9y ago
  I legitimately can't tell if this is sarcastic or not.
- ben509 9y ago
  "How else do you expect to get gender parity?" If women aren't interested in the job, you've already got gender parity. Women are moral agents and can make decisions too, you know. This is also why no one is complaining about the lack of gender parity in sanitation services.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Be careful, if you suggest all women don't naturally aspire to be Silicon Valley software engineers, you might be mistaken for James Damore. ;) I personally don't see why software engineering seems to be constantly placed as the hallmark of jobs to work at, to the extent that if people don't want to do it, it's a problem. A lot of software engineering jobs are grueling, long-hour (or all-hour) jobs with questionable benefit to society. 'Hey, we made the ad company's ad tracking code 10% more pervasive! Wooo!' So you get a poor work-life balance in exchange for some slight premium on the pay you could make in a half a dozen related fields. Meanwhile, the UI designer or business manager probably gets to go home at 5 PM, and nurses and teachers get to directly see and interact with people whose lives they are making noticeably better. Maybe the fact that more women don't want to be software engineers, is because women are running at a higher level than those of us who sign ourselves up for this stuff. Which is to say, I don't see a problem with someone who wants to do a job doing it, but I don't see any reason we need to push people to do it.
- wooshy 9y ago
  So you want to lower your standards based on someone's gender alone just to check a box? Seems like a bad idea to me.
- Y_Y 9y ago
  Why would you want parity? And your have to force women into fields they don't want in order to get it, just so you can balance your little scale. Whether or not someone is female isn't a particularly interesting aspect of their personality of software development skill. If your company has way below or above the industry average then there's pribably some unfair bias going on, but having women (or any other categorisation du jour) just to tick a box is absurd.
- daxorid 9y ago
  > It should be important to specifically source and hire women. I read this that you believe that an applicant's genitals or gender identity ought to be a positive qualification for employment. Am I reading you correctly/charitably?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ohf 9y ago
Yet, "looking for qualified female developers" sounds patronizing at best, and brusque at worst. We need more girls in the field by cultivating different career ambitions.
- rvo 9y ago
  Why is it patronizing? In media and film, such requests are frequently made.
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    In media and film, the gender of the employee makes a much bigger difference to the product. As an example, I'm sure female models are more effective at selling bras than male models.
- gowld 9y ago
  Calling women "girls" is more patronizing than looking for qualified candidates.
  - jazoom 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure ohf was talking about cultivating career ambitions in school girls. Yes, they are girls.
  - rifung 9y ago
    Is it patronizing even if we also call men boys? And can you explain why?
  - gregknicholson 9y ago
    I think they did actually mean “girls” — we need more kids tinkering with tech and wanting a career in it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
sincerely 9y ago
What this company is doing, trying to change attitudes early in life, seems like it has a much bigger net positive impact than going out of their way to hire female devs.
tibbon 9y ago
Correct. You can't just sit back and hope for better results without actively doing a lot to fix it. My current company (not speaking as an official representative of them of course) is actively working to hire women, non-binary people and poc, especially to the devteam. We aren't there yet at 50% non-men; but we're actively trying. We're sponsoring conferences, having people speak and doing a lot of active outreach. We also have great benefits and work is pretty flexible and understanding of family needs.
- darawk 9y ago
  Why? The problem is clearly not lack of hiring of female devs. It's lack of existence of female devs.
  - tibbon 9y ago
    Use the "5 whys" method to dig into this a little more. Yes, one major problem is lack of women developers, but why is that the case? Keep asking questions and you'll see that there's some terribly broken and problematic answers to be found. Creating a significantly higher demand for women developers is one way to help mitigate those causes and create more opportunity.
    - darawk 9y ago
      > Use the "5 whys" method to dig into this a little more. Yes, one major problem is lack of women developers, but why is that the case? Keep asking questions and you'll see that there's some terribly broken and problematic answers to be found. Is that actually true, though? And if you think it is, how do you know? Here's what I know: The percentage of women that take the AP computer science exam in high school is about the same as the percentage of female software engineers. This means that whatever is keeping women out is happening before this point in the funnel.
driverdan 9y ago
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. If there are no women in your hiring pipeline then you're either not reaching women candidates or not an appealing place for them to work. You need to change something about your hiring process to get those candidates to apply. That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the other end of this as well, getting more women / girls into coding. Both are important.
- alexandercrohde 9y ago
  I'm not a downvoter on that, but I'd imagine it's the tone that's getting dismissed out-of-hand, it sounds like it's implying there's some obligation. You don't have to do anything (nor do you have to feel bad for using a normal hiring pipeline). You can choose to try to "fix" the gender-balance in tech thing [if you believe it's a problem], or not. There are millions of problems in the world, and it's up to you to pick and choose which ones you want to go out of your way to be proactive on.
colordrops 9y ago
That is true, but that doesn't address the issue that women as a group don't appear to be interested in programming jobs. If the pool is 15% women (made up number, the actual number may differ), then it seems a reasonable expectation to have about 15% women devs on a team. But if the team is very small, we have to realize that the world is not perfectly homogenous, and some teams will have more than 15% and some less. I'm all for making sure that groups aren't discriminated against in hiring, and if the overall hiring stats don't match the applicant pool, then that's a problem. But this constant pretending that women and men are not different is stupid. Men and women are deeply different biologically and that will reflect in social and cultural ways, which reflect in interests, and we can't force it to happen otherwise. We should remove all barriers to fairness, encourage underprivileged groups, and educate, but we shouldn't try to force an equivalence that doesn't exist.

rvo 9y ago

Exactly. This is very troubling : "But we are not going to recruit someone just because they are a woman." How else do you expect to get gender parity? It should be important to specifically source and hire women.

darawk 9y ago
I legitimately can't tell if this is sarcastic or not.
ben509 9y ago
"How else do you expect to get gender parity?" If women aren't interested in the job, you've already got gender parity. Women are moral agents and can make decisions too, you know. This is also why no one is complaining about the lack of gender parity in sanitation services.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Be careful, if you suggest all women don't naturally aspire to be Silicon Valley software engineers, you might be mistaken for James Damore. ;) I personally don't see why software engineering seems to be constantly placed as the hallmark of jobs to work at, to the extent that if people don't want to do it, it's a problem. A lot of software engineering jobs are grueling, long-hour (or all-hour) jobs with questionable benefit to society. 'Hey, we made the ad company's ad tracking code 10% more pervasive! Wooo!' So you get a poor work-life balance in exchange for some slight premium on the pay you could make in a half a dozen related fields. Meanwhile, the UI designer or business manager probably gets to go home at 5 PM, and nurses and teachers get to directly see and interact with people whose lives they are making noticeably better. Maybe the fact that more women don't want to be software engineers, is because women are running at a higher level than those of us who sign ourselves up for this stuff. Which is to say, I don't see a problem with someone who wants to do a job doing it, but I don't see any reason we need to push people to do it.
wooshy 9y ago
So you want to lower your standards based on someone's gender alone just to check a box? Seems like a bad idea to me.
Y_Y 9y ago
Why would you want parity? And your have to force women into fields they don't want in order to get it, just so you can balance your little scale. Whether or not someone is female isn't a particularly interesting aspect of their personality of software development skill. If your company has way below or above the industry average then there's pribably some unfair bias going on, but having women (or any other categorisation du jour) just to tick a box is absurd.
daxorid 9y ago
> It should be important to specifically source and hire women. I read this that you believe that an applicant's genitals or gender identity ought to be a positive qualification for employment. Am I reading you correctly/charitably?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

ohf 9y ago

Yet, "looking for qualified female developers" sounds patronizing at best, and brusque at worst. We need more girls in the field by cultivating different career ambitions.

rvo 9y ago
Why is it patronizing? In media and film, such requests are frequently made.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  In media and film, the gender of the employee makes a much bigger difference to the product. As an example, I'm sure female models are more effective at selling bras than male models.
gowld 9y ago
Calling women "girls" is more patronizing than looking for qualified candidates.
- jazoom 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure ohf was talking about cultivating career ambitions in school girls. Yes, they are girls.
- rifung 9y ago
  Is it patronizing even if we also call men boys? And can you explain why?
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  I think they did actually mean “girls” — we need more kids tinkering with tech and wanting a career in it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

sincerely 9y ago

What this company is doing, trying to change attitudes early in life, seems like it has a much bigger net positive impact than going out of their way to hire female devs.

tibbon 9y ago

Correct. You can't just sit back and hope for better results without actively doing a lot to fix it. My current company (not speaking as an official representative of them of course) is actively working to hire women, non-binary people and poc, especially to the devteam. We aren't there yet at 50% non-men; but we're actively trying. We're sponsoring conferences, having people speak and doing a lot of active outreach. We also have great benefits and work is pretty flexible and understanding of family needs.

darawk 9y ago
Why? The problem is clearly not lack of hiring of female devs. It's lack of existence of female devs.
- tibbon 9y ago
  Use the "5 whys" method to dig into this a little more. Yes, one major problem is lack of women developers, but why is that the case? Keep asking questions and you'll see that there's some terribly broken and problematic answers to be found. Creating a significantly higher demand for women developers is one way to help mitigate those causes and create more opportunity.
  - darawk 9y ago
    > Use the "5 whys" method to dig into this a little more. Yes, one major problem is lack of women developers, but why is that the case? Keep asking questions and you'll see that there's some terribly broken and problematic answers to be found. Is that actually true, though? And if you think it is, how do you know? Here's what I know: The percentage of women that take the AP computer science exam in high school is about the same as the percentage of female software engineers. This means that whatever is keeping women out is happening before this point in the funnel.

driverdan 9y ago

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. If there are no women in your hiring pipeline then you're either not reaching women candidates or not an appealing place for them to work. You need to change something about your hiring process to get those candidates to apply. That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the other end of this as well, getting more women / girls into coding. Both are important.

alexandercrohde 9y ago
I'm not a downvoter on that, but I'd imagine it's the tone that's getting dismissed out-of-hand, it sounds like it's implying there's some obligation. You don't have to do anything (nor do you have to feel bad for using a normal hiring pipeline). You can choose to try to "fix" the gender-balance in tech thing [if you believe it's a problem], or not. There are millions of problems in the world, and it's up to you to pick and choose which ones you want to go out of your way to be proactive on.

colordrops 9y ago

That is true, but that doesn't address the issue that women as a group don't appear to be interested in programming jobs. If the pool is 15% women (made up number, the actual number may differ), then it seems a reasonable expectation to have about 15% women devs on a team. But if the team is very small, we have to realize that the world is not perfectly homogenous, and some teams will have more than 15% and some less. I'm all for making sure that groups aren't discriminated against in hiring, and if the overall hiring stats don't match the applicant pool, then that's a problem. But this constant pretending that women and men are not different is stupid. Men and women are deeply different biologically and that will reflect in social and cultural ways, which reflect in interests, and we can't force it to happen otherwise. We should remove all barriers to fairness, encourage underprivileged groups, and educate, but we shouldn't try to force an equivalence that doesn't exist.