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I generally agree with you, but such smart and resourceful companies could do something about it. They are not powerless. Companies used to train internally -

• supernova87a 7y ago
  Sure, but the scope of what most companies are concerned with is their hiring goals for the next 1-2 years (let's be generous and say 5 years). What you're talking about clearly falls into the pipeline problem and just further supports the premise -- something like a 20 year timescale issue. Which goes to the truth of this article -- this problem is far beyond the power (or responsibility) of any company. I'm not saying a company should throw up its hands and do nothing. But why are we looking to assign to companies the solving of a 50% problem (if that's the goal), when they can only ever achieve 15% within their reasonable powers?
  • hnick 7y ago
    The article says to not rely on proxies like college degrees, so I was aiming more along those lines. As far as I can tell (I admit I skimmed it) they advocate hiring for skills over pedigree. There's a pipeline problem if you are only taking a specific output and society is not producing it. As an individual company then you can either broaden what you accept (and I don't think this will lower quality, but it will make hiring harder), or take charge and extend the pipeline in your own backyard through training or probationary periods to trial someone. FTA: > As you can see, broadening your pipeline isn’t a magic pill, and as long as demand for software engineers continues to grow, it’s still going to be really hard, systemic changes to our society notwithstanding. If we do make these changes, however, the tech industry as a whole can accelerate its path toward gender parity and potentially get there within a decade. There's probably a feedback loop here where if they can broaden their intake, it will help accelerate societal change. The largest companies will have the most trouble, because they have the most seats to fill, but they also have the resources to try something different to fix this if they really want to. On your last point, I think having a hard target like 50% can be damaging since it is demoralising to look at the gap and it might all feel like too much to deal with. I'd personally prefer to work towards 'a bit better than last year' with some achievable (non-startup) growth rates.
  • mixmastamyk 7y ago
    I believe hnick is not talking about twenty years, but taking a good employee, enrolling them in bootcamp, then training them for a number of months.
    • hnick 7y ago
      Yes that's one way. Many roles in some companies are relatively light on tech and rely a lot more on domain specific knowledge, so those are ideal stepping stones too.
• pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
  But why would you expect women to be more like to choose the approach of not graduating than men, though? Women have the same options to attend university as men. It seems more likely to me that the proportions of applicants without a degree are similar to the ones with degrees.
  • hnick 7y ago
    Options don't exist in a vacuum. I had the option of signing up to the military, but my upbringing, preferences, and economic/social status made it almost certain I wouldn't. I had free will to make the choice but the outcome was almost foregone. I think women in tech is a very similar situation. The article states that women graduate from bootcamps at a rate twice that of traditional CS courses. I'd say this is because there's less friction to join, so anything pushing them away is more easily overcome.
    • pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
      I'd like to have more data on the women graduating from bootcamps. Maybe it is a desperate move of aging single moms who find they can't make a living with their degree in English Literature? While most men who are interested took traditional degrees to begin with, so they have less need for bootcamps. Sorry for the harsh formulation, but the point is, we really don't actually know what is going on. It is not legitimate to just assume women are being pushed away from traditional career paths in IT. As for Military, I think the idea to become a Software Developer is by now a very common one, you don't have to come from a specific demographic to have heard of that option. Women come from the same backgrounds as men, the odds to have a baby girl or a baby boy are the same at all levels of society.
  • Spooky23 7y ago
    The focus on Computer Science is a female filter. I’ve rarely run into a colleague who claimed their education truly prepared them anyway. You’d be better off being diverse in major. When I think of the smartest developers or IT people I know, one was a sociologist who learned programming as a labor department statistician, another had an MFA in Piano, and the other was in pharmacy school and dropped out after an injury.
• deleted 7y ago
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• throwaway894345 7y ago
  Pretty sure this constitutes illegal discrimination under US law?
  • hnick 7y ago
    What does? Australia BTW.
    • BigJono 7y ago
      Not sure what GP meant, but I'd guess promotions are much more susceptible to discrimination cases than hires, since there's something much more concrete to compare against. If you hire only one gender with narrowly targetted job advertisements, the"wronged party is a pool of thousands (or more) of engineers that didn't even know the job existed. If you promote only one gender from the mail room, the wronged party is a small cohort of peers that can visibly see exactly who is promoted above them. Those are much more dangerous waters to tread.
• pcarolan 7y ago
  This is a good point. EDS during the 80s and 90s used to hire smart people with no college degree and send them to Texas to learn how to code for several months. They built their workforce this way because the demand was higher than the global supply. It would cost a blip on the balance sheet of FAANG co.’s to do the same. Interestingly there was a high number of married people that coupled up during that time. Sounded like a pretty intense but fun experience. Source: I interned there in the late 90s and heard a lot of stories from the then middle aged cohorts that went through it.
  • blub 7y ago
    "Interestingly there was a high number of married people that coupled up during that time." I guess you meant to say unmarried, not that they were all cheating on their partners.
    • pcarolan 7y ago
      ha, yeah my wording was confusing - they married as a result of their time there
• AgentOrange1234 7y ago
  So much this. I work at a FAANG company which has terrible diversity numbers in hardware development. Upper management is frequently asked about this by employees at big q&a sessions. The answer is always to blame the pipeline, as if we do not have billions of dollars that we could direct at solving it ourselves...
  • trophycase 7y ago
    Except it isn't their responsibility. Clearly they don't have trouble making profit so why would they spend billions of dollars trying to urge people who may or may not even want the job to try and do it?
    • AgentOrange1234 7y ago
      Billions are being spent on housing in the bay area by these ultra rich companies even though it is arguably not at all their responsibility. Except it is, because of course it is. Who is responsible for fixing the gender imbalance in tech, if not the leaders in tech? (Of course the housing thing may just be a cynical calculation that it’s cheaper than the toxic public relations of doing nothing. But maybe that should be the case for the gender thing too.)
      • trophycase 7y ago
        They are? Hilarious since it seemingly has no impact at all.
      • jonfw 7y ago
        > fixing the gender imbalance An imbalance doesn't inherently need to be fixed. If the imbalance is because women are simply less interested- an imbalance is desirable. Equality in opportunity will not neccessarily lead to equality in outcome. Any argument on this topic that is rooted in outcomes can be immediately dismissed. Attempt to measure the actual source of the problem- which is opportunity.
        • 7y ago
• greggman2 7y ago
  > Companies used to train internally Please no. Japan is that way. Japan pays programmers $20k to start, no better than working fast food. Their salaries go up to $60k at the top end at most big Japanese companies and they have the attitude that anyone over 35 is too old to code. I feel the fact they hire grads with zero experience is one of the reasons. Why pay someone $$$ if they can't actually do the job yet? Conversely interns at Google make $70k-$100k yearly equivalent. The two might not be connected but I feel they are and so AFAIK the "pay for experience" is better than "pay with free training" for employees. It also seems better for the employer. Japan still has a culture of lifetime employment so the employer invests the equivalent of a college education into the employee and gets a lifetime commitment. That would never work in the west. People would take the free education and then leave for greener pastures the first chance they got.
  • hnick 7y ago
    How can you say it would never work in the west when it did for many years? It certainly wasn't the workers who stopped it working. I personally value stability and would prefer to stay in one place if it were more feasible. Training can be at all career stages, not just the beginning. Japan, yeah, I don't want that. It's a unique beast with a lot of dysfunctions, both anecdotally from friends and all the stories online. I'd say the things you listed are outcomes from lingering cultural problems rather than causes.
    • unholythree 7y ago
      There was a piece on PBS Newshour recently about older workers (largely skilled blue collar) staying on longer with verious incentive because employers couldn't find skilled replacements. What stuck me as ridiculous was some owner who said something about having invested 30 years in these guys. He hadn't invested shit as far as I could see. He has a handfull of employees that had invested in their own skills. If he had invested in his employees he have a new generation ready or almost ready to step up as one retired.
  • cforrester 7y ago
    I'm wondering if they don't have a different idea of training internally than you do... When I was younger, my mother worked as a freight forwarder. After she'd been there for awhile, the company paid to send her for training and certification to work with hazardous materials. If I recall correctly, she signed a contract agreeing to repay the costs of the courses if she left the company before a certain period of time had passed. Essentially, rather than hiring externally a freight forwarder who is already certified to handle dangerous goods, they identified their strongest existing employee without that certification and paid for them to learn what they needed for a more advanced position, with conditions to assure they recoup their investment. The way I read it, I thought the person you replied to was suggesting identifying existing employees with potential and paying to expand their skillsets for a different role, e.g. with bootcamps or MOOCs, not hiring fresh graduates for low pay.