I don't see where the author's reasoning is weak. A female tech lead / founder tried the standard way to get better representation of women at Google: try to hire more women, and found out there weren't enough highly qualified candidates to significantly move the numbers in the desired direction. Then as a founder herself, she tried to hire a higher percentage of women, and found there weren't enough candidates. She compared two approaches to fixing that: lowering standards (with negative effects she outlined), and generating more candidates from colleges. She recommends the later approach. The argument isn't novel, but it's also not made in a vacuum or from an ivory tower as she tried the "try harder" approach down in the trenches more than once, and so suggests "try different" instead.
Again: everyone knows the candidate pool is overwhelmingly comprised of men. There's no real dispute anywhere about this fact. It's not part of the debate; there is no debate about it. Nobody can reasonably believe it's realistic to expect parity in hiring in the immediacy, and all the available evidence suggests --- like you'd expect! --- that Google doesn't expect that either.
That makes that part of the argument in her post a kind of straw man.
> Nobody can reasonably believe it's realistic to expect parity in hiring in the immediacy, and all the available evidence suggests --- like you'd expect! --- that Google doesn't expect that either.
You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10 yrs, including those internally and externally at Google. You're correct that expecting employer demographics to immediately exactly reflect US population demographics is stupid. You're wildly incorrect that it's uncommon.
As just one example of the top of my head, Google released their diversity a couple of years ago and coverage was almost universally: "Google has a serious diversity problem", "Google needs to do a lot better".
The actual gender numbers? Non technical employees were split down the middle and technical employees almost exactly reflected percent of CS degrees by gender.
Something isn't a straw man if it's an argument that's constantly made and carries a lot of influence.
> You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10
tptacek is, uh, not someone those words apply to. He's been involved in these discussions for the last half decade on HN, one of the key industry forums. He's run part of hiring programs at a previous employer, and founded a startup oriented on improving engineering hiring.
Politely, sir, take a deep breath. You might disagree with him, but you might want to be careful with your assumptions there.
I wasn't saying this just as a throwaway insult. It's just that calling something a strawman (as he does downthread) depends on confidently asserting that nobody could ever _possibly_ support such a ridiculous claim. That very much doesn't fit with the experience of many of the people here,including those of us who have worked for Google now or in the past.
> Politely, sir, take a deep breath.
Haha, thanks, but I'm not sure where the assumption that I'm worked up about this comes from. The only thing in my comment that approaches impoliteness is assuming that he's not familiar enough with the conversations around tech hiring at big companies, which seemed like the only plausible explanation for thinking that no one could possibly be making the argument he calls a "strawman".
I'm honestly still not sure what an alternative explanation would be.
No, you're relying on a false dichotomy here. The logic in your post suggests that if I believe it's unreasonable to expect gender parity at Google, I must also believe that the current gender distribution at Google is OK. That doesn't follow logically.
The downvotes here indicate logic doesn't always follow where there exists polarity in a belief of "truths". While you may be correct in your assertions, you will still lose the argument because it's not what people want to hear. My own downvotes aside (within 30 seconds, no less) is the point is that some topics become "logically lodged" in a jam and cannot be freed by open discourse.
> But I was working with a candidate pool composed of 90% men. Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there.
If men changed jobs more often than women [1], or sent more applications to other companies (as a means of getting a raise at their current company), could that anecdotally make it seem like the ratio is more skewed than it really is?
I mean, if men are more often "candidates" for moving between jobs, then it would, right?
If that were true, then an employer wanting a more loyal or longer term employee might seek out more women.
My understanding was that was what she was seeing in the candidate pools for jobs when she was a hiring manager, not the overall percentage of women in computing.
My personal anecdote filtering candidates for three years in the 1990's for a video game studio was 100's of male candidates submitted their resume for programming positions versus three females at that stage. We interviewed two of the women (the third took a job in another industry before we had the chance to interview her) and made offers to the other two of them.
Doesn't that kind of point to an alternate solution, that the entire interview by interrogation coding process is the problem (if the input pool is 98% men of course they are going to get 98% men out) and they should be doing the mentor approach/internship for all junior programmers instead of the rigid pass/fail requirement. One of the problems with their current approach is similar to the college hazing ritual, all the upperclassmen went through it, so they're going to make everyone else suffer through it as well.
It's some of undeterminate without data on longevity because on the other hand we could hypothesize that even with equal gender representation initially maybe men would stay longer because women want to spend time raising children and that would skew things. Also, there might be some self filtering as you described in the last sentence where I could speculate that maybe the average man is used to being rejected a lot so they apply more to places that are hailed as hard to get into, though with the 30% figure female representation in CS touted elsewhere in this thread, it leaves the question where are these 30% women going to in CS?
The are great advantages to individuals and society to paying less than the value of goods and services. If my daughter is ill, and a simple shot of antibiotics will cure her, should I pay $20 for that, or should I pay what saving her life is actually worth to me? I've enjoyed ever faster internet connection speed at my home (coming in two weeks -- gigabit!) I assure you I'm not paying the full value of what that speed is worth to me. The same for food, clothes, transportation, everything. If I really did have to pay the full value to me for each of those I would, by definition, be indifferent to buying any of them.
Market economics has some serious downsides, but it has vastly increased the welfare of humanity. More people have been coming out of poverty in China in the past few decades that ever before in human history.
If you feel it is unfair that as a developer you can create millions of dollars in value that you aren't being compensated for, then I recommend you consider ways that you could be compensated for this value. Perhaps instead of being an employee, maybe get involved in a start-up with equity (or found a company.) Having done so, I can assure you it's more nerve wracking than ever I would have expected, and harder to unleash the millions in value than one might expect, but it's still fun, challenging, rewarding, and worth giving a go! :-)
> The are great advantages to individuals and society to paying less than the value of goods and services. If my daughter is ill, and a simple shot of antibiotics will cure her, should I pay $20 for that, or should I pay what saving her life is actually worth to me? I've enjoyed ever faster internet connection speed at my home (coming in two weeks -- gigabit!) I assure you I'm not paying the full value of what that speed is worth to me. The same for food, clothes, transportation, everything. If I really did have to pay the full value to me for each of those I would, by definition, be indifferent to buying any of them.
Okay, so what's the society of my boss getting paid twice as much as me while actively impeding my ability to create value?
Also, antibiotics and internet are poor examples of market economics; both are heavily subsidized and regulated. So it's disingenuous to hold these up and then in your following paragraph claim that market economics is helping humanity.
> Market economics has some serious downsides, but it has vastly increased the welfare of humanity. More people have been coming out of poverty in China in the past few decades that ever before in human history.
How do you justify attributing this to free market economics?
> If you feel it is unfair that as a developer you can create millions of dollars in value that you aren't being compensated for, then I recommend you consider ways that you could be compensated for this value. Perhaps instead of being an employee, maybe get involved in a start-up with equity (or found a company.) Having done so, I can assure you it's more nerve wracking than ever I would have expected, and harder to unleash the millions in value than one might expect, but it's still fun, challenging, rewarding, and worth giving a go! :-)
I do think it's unfair, but I actually don't care, because I'm self-aware enough to realize that the way in which our economy hurts me is nothing compared to how it hurts most people. I'm incredibly lucky to have landed in a career where things are only as unfair as they are, and I'd much rather work toward helping people in worse situations than me than in fixing the minor injustice of getting paid less than management.
Reading the article raised tangential questions for me: How comfortable is it for someone who's not a programmer by temperament or interest to get a computer science degree in college? Or, alternately, what percentage of computer science grads simply aren't programmers? I've never really thought about this but now I'm wondering!
I went to a good school for computing science and I know I graduated with a few people who couldn't program. They had no intention of programming in their career which is good because in 4th year they were producing awful spaghetti code.
To pass any decent CS course you need to at least be able to program, but outside of maybe a few group projects the programs that you write won't be very large so you don't have to be an expert in TDD, version control or any frameworks.
In the UK at least once you get into the 2nd/3rd year of the degree you get to select a larger number of the modules that you study. So it's possible to choose modules with lower programming content which might be focused on theory or on business type subjects.
Most universities here offer a sister degree to CS which is focused on business computing/project management and has substantially less programming.
Having taught university students in "computing studies", I'd venture to guess that it isn't that big of a deal for them to go through the motions of the course and eek out a pass by acing the essay questions. I don't have any statistics, but I'd guess about half of them would have had a hard time putting two lines of code together. Back then (late nineties), it was the ideal major for people who didn't know what to major in. Enrollment in the UK is down since then because the generation that grew up equating computer science with using microsoft office (thanks to Bill Gates lobbying Tony Blair) has come of age, and the educational authorities are trying desperately to repair the curriculum. The last time I applied for a teaching job (two or three years ago) the curriculum I was expected to teach looked like it could have been written in the eighties. The job went to someone with more teaching experience than me.
Edit: I met a former student on the London Underground some years later who wasn't much good at anything in school besides cracking onto his female colleagues, but got serious after that and ended up scoring a decent programming job in finance. Academic performance might not be such a good predictor of later success.
I think it's a small percentage but there are a few for sure. In my last position, I worked with a few comp-sci grads who were "not programmers" (their words) and had really no interest in programming. They just wanted to play with technology and kind of strategize around it.
Amazon.com's business has always been marvelous to use as a consumer, but more puzzling as an investor. Their deferring of making money from operations has been the opposite of Apple's approach. I wonder: will Amazon some day turn on the spigot and decide to start making real money, and, if so, how will their company culture and outlook change if they ever do?
I'm curious whether if the fire is again battery related whether Elon Musk will reiterate his offer to help with the battery technology. Tony Stark (who in the movie version is partly based on Elon) surely would...
I worked alone from a home office for 20 years in my consulting practice until, in the last year, as my company has grown, I've moved to commercial office space for the first time. I found working at home a delight, and enjoyed many years of jokes about my short commute (18 feet.) However, in the end, I found the repeated advice of friends to be correct: I'm more productive with an outside office. The extra focus more than offsets the cost of rent. Being in commercial office space has also made it easier to meet with clients. It's also more social as there are other people at the office that I can talk to (or ignore) as needed.
My commute is still short (I often do it on a Segway), and our company is still virtual (with both staff and contractors working from their own spaces -- which we don't plan to change), but don't underestimate the value of a separate, outside, workspace.
If you can commute on a Segway then we're not talking what other people are experiencing with "commute".
Try spending two hours a day standing on a train.
Commuting simply means travelling between your home and your workplace. The fact that many people impose a painful commute on themselves does not make a less painful commute any less a commute.
I think if you look at the origin of the word commute you will find that it did actually emerge from the trip between suburbs and the city and hence a walk to work in the morning is not in the 'traditional' sense.
Do you by any chance have details on that? I'm genuinely curious but with a brief search all I could find was a reference to Latin commuto which implies a "to change, to transform" meaning, I'm guessing applied to a change of environment or mindset from home to work.
Actually, you're reiterating what the author said about having a designated work space. You're saying it has to be outside, but I would like to hear some evidence or rationale behind the advice. Both you and the author realize that if you mix workspace with home life, you're going to have a tough time.
I'll gladly agree that working from a home office vs. an "office office" can be good or bad depending on the person. I'll also point out the chance for the Hawthorne effect to make changing from one to the other seem more (or less) productive than it really is.
