I'm waiting with great anticipation for the politically correct outcry to solve the problem of not enough women being represented in the mining, construction, sanitation, logging, or deep sea fishing industries, or for there be a popular movement to get more men into teaching or nursing where they're also dramatically underrepresented there.
Let's see if there's any intellectual honesty here, or maybe there's something else behind this politically correct movement?
Gee, I wonder why certain people are trying to pu$h this so hard? You can ea$ily gue$$ what thi$ expan$ion of the labor $upply i$ really about if you think long and hard about it.
When you have an argument that's A) deeper then a copy/paste soundbite, B) doesn't contain an informal fallacy ("how dare you try to fix this one instance of a problem until you've fixed every other instance of it first, and I'll use this no matter which instance you go after first"), and C) doesn't require you to look like a 1990s $la$hdot u$er talking about Micro$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$oft, maybe we could have a constructive conversation. But the tone of your comment suggests you're not really interested in it, y'know?
As to B, I would say the biggest problem tech faces is the education specifically daycare and elementary school do not have equal gender representation or qualified, enthusiastic STEM instructors. We need to fix that and not only demonstrate in classrooms professionals working together regardless of sex and make STEM something to dream with instead of being dreaded.
Until we fix the classroom that forms early childhood loves and hates, nothing is really going to work with software developers. We will get mostly outsiders that found their love outside of the system.
Also, why would you want your daughters to go into a career that exhibits all the ageism of being an actress?
It's part of the problem, but not all of the problem.
There are plenty of women who want to be in STEM fields, and have pushed for that in spite of everything. It's hard to actually get into a STEM job as a woman, regardless of education or experience, because of various biases in hiring. Once in, there are so many ways that the workplace is hostile to women, and the industry even more so. That leads to a high rate of just giving up, and changing career. There's only so much bullshit you can take before just deciding that, even though you love the work, it just isn't worth your sanity.
Working in a technical role in a non-tech company is often orders of magnitude better. Just like it is in many other respects, because tech companies are just horrifically broken in so many ways.
> It's hard to actually get into a STEM job as a woman, regardless of education or experience, because of various biases in hiring.
Absolutely false. They even have their own hiring fairs and events that men aren't invited to. I'll give you the rest of the points in your comment but getting an entry level job is very easy for men and even easier for equally qualified women.
> They even have their own hiring fairs and events that men aren't invited to.
That's a non sequitur; just because there are things to ease the process for them does not mean that it is easier. The job fairs would mean that it's easier, in a vacuum. It's not in a vacuum. There are other effects that the job fairs can only chip away at.
Throwaway accounts allow people to express views that aren't politically correct. If all your views are politically correct this may seem like a bad thing, but for people with views that aren't politically correct throw away accounts allow participation.
But, if everyone uses throwaway accounts to say what they really want to say, then it just helps perpetuate the same political correctness that they dislike.
I don't understand what you are trying to say - political correctness is all about preventing people from saying things that aren't "politically" correct. It is a tool for preventing discussion about topics which might offend people, and for silencing opposing views. If everyone is allowed to speak freely without the shame of not being "politically" correct than people can say what they believe. You weigh the cost of offending people against the freedom to speak out against the prevailing "politically" correct beliefs.
Because without throwaway accounts people can't express views that aren't politically correct? Look through my history, I express such views all the time. I just don't think virtual points are so important that I need to make sure they're always going up.
I looked through your history but couldn't find a comment where you were being not politically correct, but I didn't try all that hard. Regardless there are certain sentiments that you can't express even though they may be true, to me that is what "politically" correct means. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers. You can't even bring up the possibility that women are different than men as a reason there aren't more women in STEM fields without being persecuted, instead you get articles somehow twisting data to make it look like technical interviews are the main thing holding women back from tech jobs - this may be a small contributing factor, but it isn't a primary cause.
Um.... "persecuted"? HN accounts have full support for anonymity. Why do you care if an anonymous account on some board gets "persecuted"? Where "persecuted" means you might get a -4.
This is about throwaway accounts (people creating accounts on the spot to say shitty things, while having their other account for non-shitty things, so they never lose points), not anonymity.
A lot of people's HN accounts, at least for the people who post a lot, are not anonymous. Alternatively if you post a lot it is possible to reconstruct who you are. If comments were being down voted you wouldn't see them at the top of threads - people use throw aways for anonymity not to prevent loss of points.
A lot of people's HN accounts, at least for the people who post a lot, are not anonymous.
So they choose not to take advantage of a feature. Doesn't mean one-time throwaways are a good thing.
If comments were being down voted you wouldn't see them at the top of threads.
This is irrelevant. It's about what kind of votes they expect to receive.
people use throw aways for anonymity not to prevent loss of points
I call complete BS on that. The most common reason given for posting with a throwaway (when a reason is given) is, "using a throwaway because I know I'll get downvoted for this".
Alternatively if you post a lot it is possible to reconstruct who you are.
Your only good point. Throwaways are the worst solution (of many) for this. Look at 4chan. Do we want to be 4chan?
Personally I'm happy to make an argument that given a lack of evidence that gender plays a negative roll, we have a moral imperative to eliminate unfair and discriminatory barriers to entry because its the right thing to do.
But lets say that isn't a compelling argument for you. Our industry has a disastrous success rate. Something is wrong. Most software is not getting written correctly, on time, or on budget. On top of this, it is nearly impossible to fill positions with qualified applicants.
Given that, there is a pretty strong argument that we should change the way we hire software developers and an obvious way to change it is to be more inclusive. If the current population isn't getting the job done, lets open the population up to others.
> Something is wrong. Most software is not getting written correctly, on time, or on budget. On top of this, it is nearly impossible to fill positions with qualified applicants.
True.
> Given that, there is a pretty strong argument that we should change the way we hire software developers and an obvious way to change it is to be more inclusive.
What is this 'strong argument'? Your conclusion "be more inclusive" is based on nothing more than an assumption that change will be good. There are any number of changes that could be made. You need to expand on your reasons for asserting that 'being more inclusive' will fix the problem. It could just as easily make it worse.
You could possibly argue that increasing the pool of candidates by not excluding people based on irrelevant factors (such as gender, race, or age) will mean that we have a better chance of finding qualified candidates. The danger here is if we confuse increased diversity in the hiring process (opportunity) with increased diversity amongst employees (outcome). The first fits your assumption. The second doesn't and could lead to worse outcomes (from a business perspective).
The argument is we could hardly be worse. I'm not convinced we know what qualified even looks like. We certainly can't tell in any objective way.
Given that a purely random inclusion of more applicants is likely to improve the situation. Thats before arguing for the merits of a diverse work force or relying on moral imperatives.
"Diversity" and "inclusiveness" isn't about adding more randomness to a selection, it's about introducing an explicit and deliberate bias. Special outreach programs favor candidates with lower _distribution_ in the available populace. Not only is it discrimination by itself, against the current majority, but it's self-defeating measure, in that every diversity hire skews the remaining pool of candidates more towards the biased majority it's trying to eliminate. This is usually combined with a concerted effort to ignore the actual sources of skew in the first place, because the implications go against ideas of blank-slatism and politically correct thought.
If you want to bring moral imperatives into it, one would think a basic commitment to truth and statistical literacy would be included, but it very rarely is. You'd also imagine diversity of thought would be included as a point of intellectual honesty, but in practice, it is the exact opposite.
As for software projects routinely failing, that has numerous possible explanations. One is that it's one of the most abstract forms of engineering around, in the sense that the material we manipulate and the arrangements we construct cannot be seen or touched, and hence are invisible to outsiders. It must rely entirely on explicit and deliberate communication, unlike more practical fields. The onus is entirely on the engineer to make himself understandable, and it is rare to find people gifted both in abstraction and verbal thinking.
Another is the recurring observation that schools are particularly bad at teaching the practical skills required to deliver software projects, being taught by people with little to no industry experience. It goes beyond basic project and code management skills and goes into product design and usability: people learn to build code when they should be learning to craft tools. But just because currently applications focus more on theory than practice, doesn't mean we'd get better results by turning to people who lack the theory entirely.
>What we do know is that current hiring practices aren't inclusive & they aren't successful.
We don't know either of those things, they are baseless claims. Software gets made, it gets shipped, it kinda works. Given the overwhelmingly horrifying incompetence of the vast majority of programmers, I would suggest we're actually going very well at interviewing and finding the rare competent candidates.
>No idea, but I'm more willing to try inclusion than I am riddles for finding my next candidates.
And I am more willing to put thought into it rather than do something likely to produce the opposite effect and justify it with a terrible strawman.
"After drawing on data from thousands of technical interviews, it’s become clear to us that technical interviewing is a process whose results are nondeterministic and often arbitrary. We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… because they haven’t had the chance to internalize just how much of technical interviewing is a numbers game"
I have not read the entire article, but claiming that the process is nondeterministic is not the same as claiming that the process is discriminating unfairly by gender.
If everyone plays the lottery, then some people will win randomly. Certainly if a hiring causes people to "win randomly", then it's not a good hiring process -- but neither is it a process that discriminates on gender. The article goes on to explain that, although people's interview performance is subject to variance from interview to interview, it does seem that interview performance is clustered around a person's average.
> Most software is not getting written correctly, on time, or on budget.
Oh, sure it is. It's just that the business-people and/or clients driving the projects want "fast and crap" rather than "slow and well-made", because "fast and crap" still makes money.
Engineers (as in, people who have an engineering mindset, in any profession) will naturally fight back against this, which is where the time and budget creep comes from: theoretically, all software could be made "on time" and "on budget" and would be exactly as half-baked as the business-people were expecting it to be (and they would still be able to sell it, believe me.) But instead, engineers want to make something good, despite only having the time- and money-budget to make crap. Thus late nights and burn-out; thus unmaintainable hacks to get features "working for real"; etc.
The problem is fundamental to the collision between these mindsets. Remove either, and the problem goes away. Software can be made using "pure engineering" (see NASA) and succeed. Software can be made using "pure business concern" (see bottom-dollar outsourcing shops) and 'succeed' (at least in the sense it's measured by.) But there is no long-term healthy place on the spectrum existing between these two points.
What about midwifery? With only 0.3% male [1]!! When are we going to see the PC brigade push for 50/50 hiring quotas there? You would think they would be outraged with the diversity being so poor. Far, far worse than in tech. Surely it's rampant discrimination!
> Let's see if there's any intellectual honesty here
Have you tried looking, before just assuming that such things don't already exist?
I mean, a simple Google search will find plenty of industry groups, in multiple countries, dedicated to supporting women in all of those industries. They encourage women to pursue careers in those industries, do advocacy and education, and work with the industry to try to fix the problems that cause the lack of women in those industries. This is true for pretty much every industry that was traditionally male-dominated.
Same goes for men in traditionally female-dominated industries.
None of these efforts are as high profile as business or tech. Doesn't mean they don't exist.
Sure, but if those efforts are directed towards a goal of 50/50 equality of outcome then they are doomed to fail barring a totalitarian takeover of our society. A cursory perusal of western countries reveals that the more egalitarian a society is -- with Scandinavia at the top -- the more lopsided the gender differences are across many industries.
Look, I'm not saying that many industries don't feature heavy discrimination against minority populations. We definitely do need to address that in a variety of ways. I just don't think it can be accomplished by fiat. Forcing people to do things against their will does not make them more tolerant; if anything, it makes them bitterly resentful.
Even if they are initiatives to have inclusiveness into other fields, I think the throwaway account has a point about how in computers it's a bit more about money but more importantly also about influence.
The software we create can be used by millions of people. If all that is dominated by white men, then there are limitations to that. I would advocate that a diverse workforce allows for that more than anything else.
I too await in anticipation for the politically naive to solve the problem of men being under represented in houses looking after their kids full-time, working at home and holding a job or find one.
I'm all in for as many people to do the job as possible regardless of race, creed, sex or colour.
It's not just political correctness. The socially optimal future is one in which anyone, regardless of race and gender, can become a software engineer. Someday, we're going to put in effort to move from our current world to this better future. Software engineering is a highly-desirable, well-paying, forward-looking job and it's still early days. Why not give it a shot?
There are of course many PC-police types who can't give a clear reason why we should pay attention to diversity, but there are good reasons nonetheless.
Sometimes I wonder if software engineers are half as smart as they think they are. I can't think of any precedent or similar situation: a corps of highly skilled workers pro-actively sabotaging themselves in order to share the fate of their country's dying middle class: longer hours, shrinking salaries and cut-throat competition for employment.
I am glad that I have some fuck-you money now. Because the prospects as software engineer seem, frankly, rather poor now.
The first step is to stop thinking that this industry - somehow - matters more than any other or that herein lies the future of humanity. Half of that is marketing garbage and the other results from free kool-aid parties that were held after a few of us either built successful companies or made good exit deals with bigger ones. There is an alarming amount of people who are not only drunk, but blind too.
I might be the bearer of bad news, but hear me out: this industry is just like any other. In other words, you are subject to the same dynamics that fuel workers - shareholders dualism everywhere. Basic game theory: you are going to get screwed and that's not funny.
I agree on the surface of your argument though it's not as bleak as we fear.
While I don't think it's intentionally malicious, the current "cult" dev culture disempowers developers. I think there's two competing movements; the attempt to make programming more like engineering, and the belief that programming is an art.
For the software engineer camp, programming is quantified and implicitly egalitarian. The mantra is "the work speaks for itself" for these folks.
For the creative camp, programming isn't so easily measured and turned on or off.
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. The first step to solving a problem is being able to talk about it. Many people of all genders and races are interested in being developers. They just don't want to give up their lives to do so.
Imagine being in an interview and being asked about golf balls and school busses. On the other side of the table is a suitcase with $100k. Is it really reasonable to ask them to shake things up when their livelihood is on the line?
The good news is that for all the warts software has, there are no barriers other than personal determination. Anyone can be a developer so long as they're interested.
There is a reason why the software industry and many others try hard to keep a young 'fresh' workforce even tho it contributes to more inexperienced and costly labor force.
After a few years the stars in the eyes ware off. You realise that all the idealism and hype is simply marketing a dream that will get you in the door. Your a cog in the wheel of a rather boring pedestrian industry and replaceable.
At that point you might start to realise that all that overtime is just wasting your life away not work that is going to change the world. All the free food and drink you get at work is just making you fat and you don't have a social life anymore, etc, etc.
We are all like that to one degree or another in the beginning. But the level of sugar coated frothy idealism laid on the SJW's at university now is going to cause serious mental problems for these kids when the sugar high starts to ware off after a few years in the real world.
A) because the evidence of institutionalized discrimination in the field is scanty at best.
B) because the techniques suggested for "giving it a shot" frequently involve cruel social manipulation, elimination of meritocracy, and accusing innocent people of sexism or even sexual assault.
C) because "giving it a shot" also suspiciously often involves handing over money and power to sociopaths who spend their time agitating and attacking others, not writing software.
Look -- the bad guys have poisoned the well, here. If you genuinely and sincerely think the industry needs to change, the first people you're going to have to go through to make it happen are the ones who claim they're on your side.
He did say "in the field". Further, I remain skeptical toward sociology departments until they bump their reproducibility up a bit above 50% or bring their ideological homogeneity down below 90%. And I don't trust gender studies departments at all ("glaciers are sexist" and whatnot).
And in before someone starts ranting about "institutional racism/sexism". No, it doesn't exist in our industry anymore than the rest of the western world, and that's very little; SPECIALLY in a widely left-leaning world such as academia.
The overwhelming majority of the engineering world is welcoming to women and non-whites (I can personally attest to the latter) just like it is of the much reviled "white man", even more at times. As a society we're quick to shame any hint of racism and sexism; anyone who could deny that with a straight face is living in another world.
However, equal opportunity does not directly lead to diversity. It's possible, even likely, that genders are biased towards certain careers even when there is no discrimination at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask, a social documentary by Norwegian comedian and sociologist Harald Eia, has a rather interesting segment on this exact issue.
To be clear, there is no moral imperative to maximize diversity, only equality. We have no business pressuring 'diverse' people into careers they don't want to be in.
Both nursing and teaching have been wrestling with how to get more men into those professions for well over a decade, and the number of men in nursing has been rising for the past three decades.
I would have to see proof of this statement in teaching. Daycare is openly hostile towards men particularly where insurance is concerned and it doesn't look like the stats in elementary school are changing.
> Both nursing and teaching have been wrestling with how to get more men into those professions for well over a decade
Where is this wrestling?
Surely the disparity in gender is the result of Misandy at every level of the Nursing industry and these evil Woman should be held to account for there tyrannical Matriarchy.
Where are the media stories about institutionalized Gender bias in Nursing.
Where is the Diversity industry setting up organisations to promote 50/50 Male Female Nursing gender ratio?
Where is the call to lower or scrap Nursing standards to accommodate under skilled Men because its the right thing to do?
> mining, construction, sanitation, logging, or deep sea fishing industries
Given that we're talking about "tech", I think your argument would be stronger if you used examples where physical strength is seldom an important factor in job-performance.
Physical strength tends to be an extremely important part of being a nurse. There's no shortage of women being represented there.
As for the above: my garbage "man" is a woman, so it has nothing to do with physical strength. The truck picks up the can and has for at least 5 years in even the most Podunk town.
One of the things currently being tangled with, in nursing (because contrary to the usual assertion, the profession does worry about this) is the tendency for male nurses to get assigned to difficult patients who need restraint, and what that means for their occupational health.
It shouldn't be though, that's kind of the point. Directing people to a profession to make the representation equal is both counter-productive and IMO HURTS us as a whole because you end up with people pursuing a career they potentially hate because someone gave them a scholarship or promised them more money for doing so.
If more women than men want to be nurses, awesome, let them. If men are intentionally NOT being hired to be nurses that WANT to be nurses simply because they are men, THAT is a problem we need to fix. In the same token, if more men want to be programmers than women, awesome, let them. If companies are intentionally not hiring women for being women, FIX IT!
But PLEASE stop creating problems where they don't exist. I have no desire to take care of other people and the though of being a nurse is about the worst possible day job I could imagine. I'm willing to bet most nurses would rather stab themselves in the face than sit at a computer all day writing code too. Are we as a society really going to sit there and tell them they're wrong? They're just confused and would really love to program if they just are forced into it?
None of those requires a lot of physical strength anymore, machines do most of the heavy lifting. Not that any of them required a level of strength unattainable by women anyway.
There are efforts to try to get more men into teaching and nursing. Unfortunately, teaching pays shit and requires a four year degree and student teaching to get a teaching certificate, so it's not the most attractive option.
Those other blue-collar traditionally masculine jobs have a hard dependency on brute strength that most women can't satisfy. Physiology is almost as cruel a mistress as physics.
a large part of construction is now entirely machine based. how much strength does it take to drive a dump truck? or operate a crane? or drive a bulldozer?
the answer is that it is the same amount as driving an every day car: almost none.
I don't know enough about the other industries to comment.
How about when things break down, and you're out there in the mud turning wrenches and pounding on things to tear the machine apart, fix it, and put it back together? It's not an infrequent occurrence.
This isn't characteristic of U.S. factories; the costs associated with workplace injury are so high that employers are obsessed with near misses (i.e., non-injuries) and ergonomics (lever too high? We'll lower it. Reaching across your chest? We'll change your work station. Standing on concrete too long? We'll install ergonomic floor mats.). These companies employ men through their 60s. Women certainly can (and do!) work in these environments. They just don't do it in proportion to men.
That's kind of moving the goal-posts; we were discussing construction, which, at least in my experience, has a lot less OSHA oversight. Probably it is different in more unionized sectors as well; my experience is decidedly not - smaller logging, construction and power generation companies, where you often don't have the equipment to really do things correctly, for whatever reason, but it has to get done, and so brute strength and ignorance are resorted to.
> Those other blue-collar traditionally masculine jobs have a hard dependency on brute strength that most women can't satisfy.
We were discussing construction in the broader context of blue-collar, masculine jobs. But it doesn't matter really, because if these physically-permissive jobs are still disproportionately male, then there is no reason to believe that the physical demands of construction are what keep women away.
If certain activities have a huge effect on how the world operates, which is kind of the premise of Y Combinator (software is eating the world, etc.) then it's important that the people who call the shots are representative of the people who are affected. This has to happen from the bottom up, since for obvious reasons you can't parachute in "untrained diversity" at a management/strategy level.
What about e.g. social apps where some communities face a much higher risk of receiving abuse?
Looking more broadly, it wasn't that long ago that you could easily find American software developers treating internationalisation as a frill or
people talking about accessibility as a niche concern. (Now a growing percentage of people recognize that in addition to being the right thing to do, it also benefits more people than they thought due to temporary limits due to environment - ever see how many people use subtitles on the subway/bus?, illness/injury, distraction, etc.)
The key point for me is seeing this as a larger goal of encouraging as many people as possible to participate in building the technology right increasingly shapes our world. One key thing is that people aren't limited to certain types of contribution: there's probably no uniquely feminine contribution to C++ but how well the standards community works or how the language is designed will charge based on who's involved. If it's mostly very smart MIT grads, someone else might contribute not because of their race, gender, etc. but because their life experience has been different, and that's usually important for moving something out of the core guru community into broader usage.
Remember all of the guys who decried GUIs as unnecessary crutches when Real Men(tm) used a CLI? The problem wasn't that they were (generally) white men but simply that they had a very narrow view of what people wanted to do and how much training was reasonable to accept just to be able to check your email or edit a file. That's laughable now but it wasn't hard to find examples just a generation back.
> Looking more broadly, it wasn't that long ago that you could easily find American software developers treating internationalisation as a frill or people talking about accessibility as a niche concern. (Now a growing percentage of people recognize that in addition to being the right thing to do, it also benefits more people than they thought due to temporary limits due to environment - ever see how many people use subtitles on the subway/bus?, illness/injury, distraction, etc.)
Is there any evidence that better support for internationalization and accessibility was driven by a more diverse workforce? It seems more likely that these were driven by market forces (increased demand as well as lower costs as i8n/accessibility tools/practices evolved).
> how well the standards community works or how the language is designed will charge based on who's involved.
There's even some evidence that some diversity helps groups make better decisions, but there's no reason to believe that the effect is large nor that the optimal diversity is above the current level. In other words, there's no reason to believe that more diversity will be beneficial.
Exactly this, if you don't have that level of representation it leads to social problems down the line. The bloodshed in Iran and Iraq are shining examples of the extremes of what can happen. Democracy only works as much as it can provide an outlet for friction from different groups by allowing them an equal share of the system.
The representation you should be worried about is ideological representation. That's where true diversity -diversity of thought and worldview- resides.
The vilification of Peter Thiel solely for supporting a candidate that 40+ percent of the country supports should open some eyes to the problem but I doubt it will.
Let's see if there's any intellectual honesty here, or maybe there's something else behind this politically correct movement?
Gee, I wonder why certain people are trying to pu$h this so hard? You can ea$ily gue$$ what thi$ expan$ion of the labor $upply i$ really about if you think long and hard about it.