4 ms·
How about a guide to hiring the best person for the job? Given that's what actually matters and not the gender of the person. If your workplace culture is gett
by mackem 14y ago
How about a guide to hiring the best person for the job? Given that's what actually matters and not the gender of the person.
If your workplace culture is getting in the way of hiring the best person for the job, then that's a problem that transcends gender. By the logic that women won't be comfortable taking a job where there aren't other women, then businesses should make sure to have someone of every race, gender, religion and age so they don't put off any potential applicants.
I'd love to see any empirical evidence whatsoever to support the myriad assumptions made in this article.
Don't say that "we only hire the top 1% of candidates" because women aren't confident enough to apply to those jobs? Female tech workers don't know/like what the word "hacker/hack" means?
This quote in particular seems to sum up a bizarre focus on gender above all issues:
"If you can’t find potential female candidates, you’re just being lazy."
An employer being lazy about hiring people? We live in a society where there are often hundreds or even thousands of applications for a single position because of a massive labor surplus.
The vastly disproportionate effort that's being recommended towards hiring women smacks of rank tokenism.
It's hard to see how the women that Cristina Cordova envisions inhabit the tech industry have the necessary metacognitive skills to be an effective/assertive member of any workforce. If they're so insecure as to be put off from a good position by the term "hacker", or so intimidated by groups who don't look like them, how can they be expected to handle other tasks that require confidence, assertiveness, and ability to deal with people different from yourself?
Thankfully all the women I've met in the tech industry seem to be a far cry from this stereotype. They've all been perfectly capable and confident, and the only effort I needed to extend to them is the same I'd extend to any colleague; respectful professionalism, aka not being an asshole and not letting other people down.
- lwf 14y ago> We live in a society where there are often hundreds or even thousands of applications for a single position because of a massive labor surplus. You must be new here. At least that's entirely inconsistent with my experience in technology; there are a huge number of companies looking for talented developers and very few developers to fill those positions.
- aeonsky 14y agoNo joke. Been looking for a mid Java dev for a year. 4 C#/C++/Python/Ruby applicants later, we promoted from within.
- pnathan 14y agoDo you live in a major tech center?
- bearmf 14y agoWhat I see from your comment is: 1) There was no immediate need to hire 2) You turned down 4 candidates. C#/C++ experience is quite transferrable to Java except at very advanced levels 3) Finally, you promoted the guy who was there all along and could have been doing the job for the whole year already Basically, there is a shortage of software engineers, but they must possess very specific skills and have lots of experience. All the others are not considered suitable candidates for most positions.
- bearmf 14y ago"talented", "huge number" and "very few" are all very subjective descriptions. For example, try posting a regular senior software developer position in Java or C# on monster.com: you will get at least 100 resumes. If you are looking for "superstars" or "ninjas", you might be unimpressed, but many of these people are perfectly able to do the job.
- mjmahone17 14y agoYour post reeks of mansplaining: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/11/a-cultural-history-of-mansplaining/264380/ http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/11/a-cultural-... You are saying that "I have female co-workers who aren't put off by this culture! See, because I know them and they work in this culture, it's not sexist!" Which is a far cry from reality. At the very least, it's a far cry from Cristina's experience.
- natrius 14y agoNot only is "mansplaining" the type of destructive insult that has no place in reasoned discourse, it's also pretty sexist in itself. Your comment would be much better without that first line.
- krichman 14y ago"Mansplaining". But if we had a specific term to tell women their opinions were invalid simply because they were women, that would be sexist. I want to agree with your comment but the misandry makes me feel angry instead.
- natrius 14y ago"The vastly disproportionate effort that's being recommended towards hiring women smacks of rank tokenism." There are very important distinctions between tokenism and disproportionate effort. In my view, tokenism is choosing someone for superficial characteristics that have no bearing on their performance. Disproportionate effort gets you a wider pool of applicants from underrepresented groups, which raises the probability of the best applicant being a minority.