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"And it may be that it intimidates more women than men." I've been looking around for a developer recently, and in looking at the profiles of women vs. men at

by api 12y ago

"And it may be that it intimidates more women than men." I've been looking around for a developer recently, and in looking at the profiles of women vs. men at places like AngelList I noticed a few key differences in how they described themselves. We're talking about people with very similar academic backgrounds here with similar levels of experience. Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X." Women would highlight the cooperative nature of their work, while men would give the impression that they did it all themselves. In my experience the former is typically more honest, especially if you actually were working on a team or on a team-oriented college project. Women also tend to highlight team-oriented and non-technical skills more than men in general, which to techie-minded hacker types gives the impression that they are not strong on the technical end. I also noted my reaction to these differences. Introspecting, I noticed that I tended to assume that "being on a team" meant riding the coattails of the other team members. If I noted this bias in myself, it's probably pretty common. I decided to try to de-program myself of this bias by thinking of all the counter-examples I've seen. I do believe in the "10X programmer" -- for the simple reason that there are 10X everything elses. There are 10X athletes, 10X businesspeople/salespeople, 10X artists, 10X anythings. When we look for employees or contractors we are looking for that 10X standout, or at least someone who's going to grow into one. But being really good at something is not mutually exclusive with working on a team or highlighting non-technical skills, and the inverse is also not correlated. I've met plenty of monomaniacal "closet programmers" who really aren't any good. They sit alone stewing in their huge egos and churn out crap. (But then again I've met some who are. There does not seem to be a strong correlation.) There's probably quite a few really talented female programmers out there who are being passed over because they don't conform to the "whip it out and let me measure it" customs of technical recruitment. I also suspect that this does drive women from the field.

picks_at_nits 12y ago
> " Women would highlight the cooperative nature of their work, while men would highlight that they did it all themselves. In my experience the latter is typically more honest, especially if you actually were working on a team or on a team-oriented college project. Did you mean to say the former was more honest, i.e. that saying “we did X” is more honest than “I did X?"
- api 12y ago
  Yes. Edited. It depends on the context of course. If it was your project alone, then you did it. If others contributed non-trivial amounts, it was a team effort. I noted that the males tended to bury that, while the females tended to highlight it.
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    I really want to hear what the individual contributed, though, and actually couldn't care less what their team did as a whole. I've heard way too many "we"s that were actually "they"s, while the subject was present, but not actually contributing that much. It's really easy for a bad developer to hide in a large team. EDIT: and it's also easy for a good developer to get quagmired in a bad team! Just because the project as a whole didn't do much doesn't mean the individual is bad. So I still really only want to hear about the individual efforts.
    - api 12y ago
      You're missing one final problem: it's easy for a bad developer to talk themselves up.
      - moron4hire 12y ago
        This would be why I spend almost no effort on the interview process. I put people to work right away to force them to prove whether or not they can do the job. Well, I suppose they could be subcontracting it out, but at that point, I don't care. The work is getting done and at a price I can manage.
  - mahyarm 12y ago
    Well I think the more honest part is I myself worked on part X and we the team created product Y made out these multiple parts. How big of a part you had does matter. For example, I made the iOS UI part of this text chat app, and my team members created data models and networking code that I used to make the UI part. Another team member made the android part using the cross platform code and a bunch of others made the server part and so on. Together we made a text chat app pair.
tie_ 12y ago
> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X. I find this a very interesting fact, but I see a number of other possible explanations for "I do X": - It is simply shorter. Men being used to more compact communication? - It is also more boastful - perhaps men being used to market themselves more aggressively than women? Or, put in another words, having and/or presenting bigger egos in their CVs? - Women being insecure about their personal contribution in X? Maybe the coattail-riding assumption is not always wrong. In any case, I would withhold judgement before an interview.
- api 12y ago
  There's lots of possibilities. It's really hard to tell whether any of these things are cultural or come from actual gender dimorphism (to use the technical biological term). Ultimately it doesn't matter if they are irrelevant to ability. What I'm saying is that when we are evaluating peoples' abilities, we should take care to evaluate actual ability rather than unreliable proxies for ability. The latter are prejudices, basically, and they blind us to a lot of talent that might not fit those lazy filters. I'm neither a "PC liberal" nor a conservative/reactionary on this issue. Liberals pretend differences in ability don't exist, while conservatives like to defend the accuracy of our "gut" prejudices and argue there's nothing wrong. IMHO equality of opportunity comes when people make an effort to look at actual ability as objectively as possible. It's in your best interest as an employer to do this. Good people are very hard to find, and if you're running some kind of dumb ape-brain filter that excludes ~50% of the population from consideration you are handicapping your recruitment efforts pretty badly. Think like a human being.
- nlawalker 12y ago
  I (male, for the record, but gender-specific behavior isn't my point here) used to write/say that I was "part of a team" that did X or "worked on a team" that did Y, but I stopped doing it for a couple reasons, the most prominent being that "worked on a team that..." is usually obvious given the context of the conversation and the scale of the work discussed. In those cases, explicitly mentioning it feels like you're going out of the way to distance yourself from the work and describe yourself as a bystander - someone who just happened to be on the team that did this great work.
tenpoundhammer 12y ago
I worked with a 10x developer once, he was awful and I couldn't stand to work with him. Although he could produce an insane amount of code and functionality his presence was like throwing a grenade into the middle of the dev team everyday. He left to take a job at google and the overall team productivity went up significantly. He basically did 10X individually,but took 11x away from the team. So team work is pretty darn important.
- api 12y ago
  Those exist too. It's possible to be really good at something but to be so awful at everything else that the net effect is zero to negative. But not all "10X developers" are assholes.
- yurymik 12y ago
  Here's my favorite quote by @bmdhacks that reflects my experience dealing with such people: How to be a 10x engineer: Incur technical debt fast enough to appear 10x as productive as the ten engineers tasked with cleaning it up. https://twitter.com/bmdhacks/status/560949130999365633 https://twitter.com/bmdhacks/status/560949130999365633
  - dayone 12y ago
    Spot on! > How to be a 10x engineer: Incur technical debt fast enough to appear 10x as productive as the ten engineers tasked with cleaning it up. We have a guy in our onsite team that keeps making our user facing application suck with his changes one day and then fix those every other day. So lots of git commits but limited productivity in the team, and a very tough maintainence task for every developer in the team.
- erikwiffin 12y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding what "10x developer" is supposed to mean. The impression I've gotten is that they are considered to be 10 times as productive because of the work they don't do. They write code that has less bugs, is more scalable, requires less refactoring, is easier for other developers to understand, etc. You'd never see it in LOC or sprint points completed, but there'd be a noticeable difference of pace between a project of 10x devs and a project with 1x devs.
thaumasiotes 12y ago
I read a book about the development of writing in mesopotamia (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674049683 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674049683 , but I can't really recommend it as a general-interest book); it mentioned that a particular king had seen his city flourish under his rule and boasted accordingly, in the records we have, of how irrigation canals were dug and roads were built and generally a lot of great stuff happened on his watch. In a parenthetical, it also noted that, as is typical for the records of the time, they actually attributed all these works to the king personally ("I dug canals in XX regions").
krschultz 12y ago
That may be a men/women thing, but I actually screen for that when I'm interviewing and significantly prefer to hire people that say "we did X" rather than "I did X". It's my job as an interviewer to figure out which person on that team you were, but if you describe your work as I I I I I and never We We We We, it is pretty telling. It also goes for managing. If my team fucked something up, I say "I fucked up Y", even if it was a report of mine. If my team did something great, it's a "We did Z" even if I did it alone. When you put it out that plainly, it sounds hokey and stupid. But trust me, over the long run those tiny things are the difference between a good company culture and a bad company culture.
sporkenfang 12y ago
It's interesting that you say your bias is toward perceiving someone self-reporting as working on a team as "everyone on the team did the work but me". Does this result from primarily working alone, or have you just been granted license to be more autonomous than most coders I know? A lot of shops both employ pair programming and have a series of pairs working on one project, or have a t the very least a bunch of people working on different aspects of the project. Of course this could be spun as "I did y for my project, x" but I'm curious as to why "As part of the team working on x project, I did y" sounds less like accomplishing something technical to you. Say I had a project out of which I'm submitting 3-4 conference papers to various conferences for publication, working with my advisor and another student. Would it be better to say I did it all, or to be honest and say the other student did 1/3, I did 2/3, and my advisor helped shape our vision?
- api 12y ago
  I have often worked alone, but not always. I've never worked in a pair programming shop, and I would probably find it distracting for anything but debugging or syncing up. The trouble is that complex programming tasks usually have the nature where communicating the ideas takes longer than simply coding them. You'd spend all your time syncing state between you and the other person. But I don't think this explains the bias. I'm not really sure where it comes from but I found it interesting.
- nemothekid 12y ago
  I felt the same as 'api' when he explained that and to me, it came from my bad experiences working on teams, in high school, where 1 or 2 people did all the work and the rest rode the coattails to an easy A. Of course my experiences in high school shouldn't factor into my judgement of reading judging peoples capabilities (because chances are everyone worked on a team that did X). Something like that might just be a hidden cultural bias - I'm sure everyone has an experience where they forced to worked with others who didn't feel like pulling their weight - and its those negative experiences that shape our notions of what it means to work on a team, rather than the multitude of positive experiences we may have had.
Dewie 12y ago
> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X." Depending on what X is, and on context, it can be obvious that "worked on X" simply means that they worked on X, but that doesn't mean that others did not also work on it, with them. Especially if "X" is too big and complex for one person to do on ones own. In particular, researchers in CS (maybe coincidentally majority of men) tend to say that they "work on" or "are interested in" X, Y, Z - but that doesn't really mean that they don't collaborate or work with other people on those things. It's not exclusionary at all. But this interpretation doesn't fit with the usual men-are-egotistical-narcissists-compared-to-women. So pay this comment no mind.
- api 12y ago
  "But this interpretation doesn't fit with the usual men-are-egotistical-narcissists-compared-to-women. So pay this comment no mind." I'm just reporting the patterns I saw. That's all. I wouldn't say "egotistical narcissist," just that the culture probably holds out different behavioral expectations for men and women and that gives rise to differences in how people present themselves.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    > I'm just reporting the patterns I saw. That's all. Well let's not kid ourselves. :) If a pattern you happened to observe reflected poorly on women - like if you observed that many more of them were incompetent than men[1] - you wouldn't report on it here. Or else you would just get downvoted or ignored. Can you honestly object to that? Casually reporting on something which shows women as a group (or subgroup, like in tech) is viewed at best as being in poor taste, or at worst as sexism or misogyny. And there are good arguments for calling it that. But do the same for men and it's just innocuous "observations". [1] For the sake of the argument: totally hypothetical.
nulltype 12y ago
I'm not an athlete, but I'll run a mile against anyone who claims to be 10X faster than me.
bootload 12y ago
"Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X." Women would highlight the cooperative nature of their work, while men would give the impression that they did it all themselves." Cannot emphasise this quote enough. It is the difference between, "We" and "I", the basis of any community where you put yourself second. It is also the essence of good leadership. If you want a lone wolf programmer as a new-hire in a small startup, maybe this type isn't for you. As your company grows, the type of programmer described by @api above, the one who works in teams where your livelyhood and codebase is on the line, is the person I'd want to work with and for.
morgante 12y ago
> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X." While this anecdote seems to match traditional gender narratives, I'm interested in how you knew the men "obviously did the same kind of work." You observed that women were more likely than men to emphasize teamwork and not their individual contributions. It seems that there are two hypotheses which result from that: 1. Women are more likely to emphasize team aspects and de-emphasize their contribution (less narcissistic) 2. Women are less likely to individual contribute and more likely to rely on teams for projects (less independent) How did you differentiate between those two?
- api 12y ago
  I think programming challenges are the only recruitment tool we have that can cut through this and many other similar questions.

by api 12y ago

picks_at_nits 12y ago

> " Women would highlight the cooperative nature of their work, while men would highlight that they did it all themselves. In my experience the latter is typically more honest, especially if you actually were working on a team or on a team-oriented college project. Did you mean to say the former was more honest, i.e. that saying “we did X” is more honest than “I did X?"

api 12y ago
Yes. Edited. It depends on the context of course. If it was your project alone, then you did it. If others contributed non-trivial amounts, it was a team effort. I noted that the males tended to bury that, while the females tended to highlight it.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  I really want to hear what the individual contributed, though, and actually couldn't care less what their team did as a whole. I've heard way too many "we"s that were actually "they"s, while the subject was present, but not actually contributing that much. It's really easy for a bad developer to hide in a large team. EDIT: and it's also easy for a good developer to get quagmired in a bad team! Just because the project as a whole didn't do much doesn't mean the individual is bad. So I still really only want to hear about the individual efforts.
  - api 12y ago
    You're missing one final problem: it's easy for a bad developer to talk themselves up.
    - moron4hire 12y ago
      This would be why I spend almost no effort on the interview process. I put people to work right away to force them to prove whether or not they can do the job. Well, I suppose they could be subcontracting it out, but at that point, I don't care. The work is getting done and at a price I can manage.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  Well I think the more honest part is I myself worked on part X and we the team created product Y made out these multiple parts. How big of a part you had does matter. For example, I made the iOS UI part of this text chat app, and my team members created data models and networking code that I used to make the UI part. Another team member made the android part using the cross platform code and a bunch of others made the server part and so on. Together we made a text chat app pair.

tie_ 12y ago

> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X. I find this a very interesting fact, but I see a number of other possible explanations for "I do X": - It is simply shorter. Men being used to more compact communication? - It is also more boastful - perhaps men being used to market themselves more aggressively than women? Or, put in another words, having and/or presenting bigger egos in their CVs? - Women being insecure about their personal contribution in X? Maybe the coattail-riding assumption is not always wrong. In any case, I would withhold judgement before an interview.

api 12y ago
There's lots of possibilities. It's really hard to tell whether any of these things are cultural or come from actual gender dimorphism (to use the technical biological term). Ultimately it doesn't matter if they are irrelevant to ability. What I'm saying is that when we are evaluating peoples' abilities, we should take care to evaluate actual ability rather than unreliable proxies for ability. The latter are prejudices, basically, and they blind us to a lot of talent that might not fit those lazy filters. I'm neither a "PC liberal" nor a conservative/reactionary on this issue. Liberals pretend differences in ability don't exist, while conservatives like to defend the accuracy of our "gut" prejudices and argue there's nothing wrong. IMHO equality of opportunity comes when people make an effort to look at actual ability as objectively as possible. It's in your best interest as an employer to do this. Good people are very hard to find, and if you're running some kind of dumb ape-brain filter that excludes ~50% of the population from consideration you are handicapping your recruitment efforts pretty badly. Think like a human being.
nlawalker 12y ago
I (male, for the record, but gender-specific behavior isn't my point here) used to write/say that I was "part of a team" that did X or "worked on a team" that did Y, but I stopped doing it for a couple reasons, the most prominent being that "worked on a team that..." is usually obvious given the context of the conversation and the scale of the work discussed. In those cases, explicitly mentioning it feels like you're going out of the way to distance yourself from the work and describe yourself as a bystander - someone who just happened to be on the team that did this great work.

tenpoundhammer 12y ago

I worked with a 10x developer once, he was awful and I couldn't stand to work with him. Although he could produce an insane amount of code and functionality his presence was like throwing a grenade into the middle of the dev team everyday. He left to take a job at google and the overall team productivity went up significantly. He basically did 10X individually,but took 11x away from the team. So team work is pretty darn important.

api 12y ago
Those exist too. It's possible to be really good at something but to be so awful at everything else that the net effect is zero to negative. But not all "10X developers" are assholes.
yurymik 12y ago
Here's my favorite quote by @bmdhacks that reflects my experience dealing with such people: How to be a 10x engineer: Incur technical debt fast enough to appear 10x as productive as the ten engineers tasked with cleaning it up. https://twitter.com/bmdhacks/status/560949130999365633 https://twitter.com/bmdhacks/status/560949130999365633
- dayone 12y ago
  Spot on! > How to be a 10x engineer: Incur technical debt fast enough to appear 10x as productive as the ten engineers tasked with cleaning it up. We have a guy in our onsite team that keeps making our user facing application suck with his changes one day and then fix those every other day. So lots of git commits but limited productivity in the team, and a very tough maintainence task for every developer in the team.
erikwiffin 12y ago
I think you're misunderstanding what "10x developer" is supposed to mean. The impression I've gotten is that they are considered to be 10 times as productive because of the work they don't do. They write code that has less bugs, is more scalable, requires less refactoring, is easier for other developers to understand, etc. You'd never see it in LOC or sprint points completed, but there'd be a noticeable difference of pace between a project of 10x devs and a project with 1x devs.

thaumasiotes 12y ago

I read a book about the development of writing in mesopotamia (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674049683 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674049683 , but I can't really recommend it as a general-interest book); it mentioned that a particular king had seen his city flourish under his rule and boasted accordingly, in the records we have, of how irrigation canals were dug and roads were built and generally a lot of great stuff happened on his watch. In a parenthetical, it also noted that, as is typical for the records of the time, they actually attributed all these works to the king personally ("I dug canals in XX regions").

krschultz 12y ago

That may be a men/women thing, but I actually screen for that when I'm interviewing and significantly prefer to hire people that say "we did X" rather than "I did X". It's my job as an interviewer to figure out which person on that team you were, but if you describe your work as I I I I I and never We We We We, it is pretty telling. It also goes for managing. If my team fucked something up, I say "I fucked up Y", even if it was a report of mine. If my team did something great, it's a "We did Z" even if I did it alone. When you put it out that plainly, it sounds hokey and stupid. But trust me, over the long run those tiny things are the difference between a good company culture and a bad company culture.

sporkenfang 12y ago

It's interesting that you say your bias is toward perceiving someone self-reporting as working on a team as "everyone on the team did the work but me". Does this result from primarily working alone, or have you just been granted license to be more autonomous than most coders I know? A lot of shops both employ pair programming and have a series of pairs working on one project, or have a t the very least a bunch of people working on different aspects of the project. Of course this could be spun as "I did y for my project, x" but I'm curious as to why "As part of the team working on x project, I did y" sounds less like accomplishing something technical to you. Say I had a project out of which I'm submitting 3-4 conference papers to various conferences for publication, working with my advisor and another student. Would it be better to say I did it all, or to be honest and say the other student did 1/3, I did 2/3, and my advisor helped shape our vision?

api 12y ago
I have often worked alone, but not always. I've never worked in a pair programming shop, and I would probably find it distracting for anything but debugging or syncing up. The trouble is that complex programming tasks usually have the nature where communicating the ideas takes longer than simply coding them. You'd spend all your time syncing state between you and the other person. But I don't think this explains the bias. I'm not really sure where it comes from but I found it interesting.
nemothekid 12y ago
I felt the same as 'api' when he explained that and to me, it came from my bad experiences working on teams, in high school, where 1 or 2 people did all the work and the rest rode the coattails to an easy A. Of course my experiences in high school shouldn't factor into my judgement of reading judging peoples capabilities (because chances are everyone worked on a team that did X). Something like that might just be a hidden cultural bias - I'm sure everyone has an experience where they forced to worked with others who didn't feel like pulling their weight - and its those negative experiences that shape our notions of what it means to work on a team, rather than the multitude of positive experiences we may have had.

Dewie 12y ago

> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X." Depending on what X is, and on context, it can be obvious that "worked on X" simply means that they worked on X, but that doesn't mean that others did not also work on it, with them. Especially if "X" is too big and complex for one person to do on ones own. In particular, researchers in CS (maybe coincidentally majority of men) tend to say that they "work on" or "are interested in" X, Y, Z - but that doesn't really mean that they don't collaborate or work with other people on those things. It's not exclusionary at all. But this interpretation doesn't fit with the usual men-are-egotistical-narcissists-compared-to-women. So pay this comment no mind.

api 12y ago
"But this interpretation doesn't fit with the usual men-are-egotistical-narcissists-compared-to-women. So pay this comment no mind." I'm just reporting the patterns I saw. That's all. I wouldn't say "egotistical narcissist," just that the culture probably holds out different behavioral expectations for men and women and that gives rise to differences in how people present themselves.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > I'm just reporting the patterns I saw. That's all. Well let's not kid ourselves. :) If a pattern you happened to observe reflected poorly on women - like if you observed that many more of them were incompetent than men[1] - you wouldn't report on it here. Or else you would just get downvoted or ignored. Can you honestly object to that? Casually reporting on something which shows women as a group (or subgroup, like in tech) is viewed at best as being in poor taste, or at worst as sexism or misogyny. And there are good arguments for calling it that. But do the same for men and it's just innocuous "observations". [1] For the sake of the argument: totally hypothetical.

nulltype 12y ago

I'm not an athlete, but I'll run a mile against anyone who claims to be 10X faster than me.

bootload 12y ago

"Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X." Women would highlight the cooperative nature of their work, while men would give the impression that they did it all themselves." Cannot emphasise this quote enough. It is the difference between, "We" and "I", the basis of any community where you put yourself second. It is also the essence of good leadership. If you want a lone wolf programmer as a new-hire in a small startup, maybe this type isn't for you. As your company grows, the type of programmer described by @api above, the one who works in teams where your livelyhood and codebase is on the line, is the person I'd want to work with and for.

morgante 12y ago

> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X." While this anecdote seems to match traditional gender narratives, I'm interested in how you knew the men "obviously did the same kind of work." You observed that women were more likely than men to emphasize teamwork and not their individual contributions. It seems that there are two hypotheses which result from that: 1. Women are more likely to emphasize team aspects and de-emphasize their contribution (less narcissistic) 2. Women are less likely to individual contribute and more likely to rely on teams for projects (less independent) How did you differentiate between those two?

api 12y ago
I think programming challenges are the only recruitment tool we have that can cut through this and many other similar questions.